Reprinted............................

 

.......................................by popular demand.

in principle versus in practice..............

 

If nature is placed above man, such that every brook has its transcendent spirit, then, man, women, and child are by necessity placed below nature.  This might mean in principle that the wonders of the environment would become rightly valued.  In practice, however, it all too often means instead that human beings are given no more shrift than weeds or rats.  This inversion of value enables not so much the stewardship of the earth as the exploitation of those deemed no more worthy than the lesser forms of life—exploitation by exactly the sort of people who eternally step forward to abuse such advantage.

-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

Well, yeah ........................

 

     I never loved the taste of morels, but I would eat them for tradition's sake and because I liked the idea of physically absorbing both the essence of the woods and the associated mystery of mushrooms themselves.

     We would soak them in salt water, slice them in half, dredge them in flour, and fry them in butter.  We are Ohioans.  If we could pluck starlight from the sky, we would dredge it in flour and fry it in butter.

-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You

Checking in with de Tocqueville......

 

     I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. . . .

     Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.  That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.  It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: . . .For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the decent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all care of thinking and all the trouble of living? 

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Fourth Book, Chapter VI

stupefies..........................

     After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community.  It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.  The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly constrained from acting.  Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Fourth Book, Chapter VI

 

Just in case you wanted..................

..................to learn some stuff about Klaus Voorman.

In the background...................................

.............................Windham Hill's Shadowfax

 

judging........................

Imagine your future self judging your current life choices.  When making a decision, ask yourself how you'll feel about it when you are old.  What would your future self and family thank you for?  Simple actions now will compound to give them a better life.

-Derek Sivers

 

seek...................

 

To seek elsewhere than in ordinariness for the Highest Divine would have seemed to me now, sitting on a rock in front of the bush, to be a betrayal.

-John Moriarty, Dreamtime

Loving.....................................

 

........................................................Ohio.

The real reason I blog..................

 

Procrastination. The bane of productivity, the thief of time, the reason why you’re currently reading this instead of doing that thing we both know you need to do. . . .

If it makes you feel any better, you’re not alone. Studies estimate that 15% to 25% of adults habitually procrastinate. And according to some very serious researchers who actually did their jobs on time, the average person wastes four hours a day procrastinating at work. Four. That’s not even procrastination anymore; that’s a part-time job.

And I’m no exception either. If procrastination were an Olympic sport, I’d be standing on the podium, wearing the gold medal, humming the national anthem of Avoidistan.

-Eric Barker, from here

Likely true.................................

 

      more fun here

Martin Gurri...............................

 

...............................is always worth reading:

Something new was afoot. In 2016, Trump won an electoral contest. In 2024, he stood at the vanguard of a profound cultural shift that touched on everyday morals and manners, the relations between the sexes, a freer but more fragmented internet—with artificial intelligence hovering in the near foreground—and the first concerted effort in 50 years to reduce the federal government to the dimensions suggested by the Constitution. Trump had become the definitive avatar of the revolt of the American public, and he had been granted much power by the election. The immediate question was whether such a volatile personality, assisted by a gang of eccentrics, could succeed enough to satisfy the public’s hunger for change.

The answer will not be long in coming.

It was a very good day................................

 

when years ago I discovered the music of Windham Hill.

In the background...............................

       

         Roy Orbison...................I Drove All Night

 

Remembering................................

 

...............................the not-so-secret secrets.

Breathe.......................

 

             thanks Chris

meaning.......................

 We don't need to measure our notions of happiness or progress against imagined universal constants for those concepts.  They don't exist.  Even the typical notions of success change with time, context, and fashion.  We do not need to prove that our ideas of identity or purpose are watertight in some objective, evidence-based sense.  That isn't how meaning works.  Meaning is a story, and act of creation and interpretations, and for human beings meaning is at least as important as fact.

-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You

attending..................

 

There are a near-infinite number of ways to categorize—hence, to perceive—a finite number of objects.  We do not and cannot attend with equal devotion to everything occurring always and everywhere around us.  Instead, with a glance, we prioritize the facts.  In doing so, we attend to very little and ignore much.  We do so in keeping with our aim.  We do so to gain what we need and want . . .

-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine

simplifying.....................

 

     We weigh the facts we encounter in accordance with our values.  We elevate some pathways forward, things in the world, and people to a higher place than others, consigning everything deemed lesser to the netherworld of impediment, obstacle, enemy, or foe, or the invisible domain of irrelevance.  Thus we order, simplify, and reduce the world, prior to even encountering it. 

-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God:  Perceptions of the Divine

insufficiently heralded......................

We perceive, therefore, in accordance with our aim.  This is a remarkable and insufficiently heralded realization, implying as it does nothing less than both our misery and our joy depend on our values.

-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine