Granville Turkey Trot.....................

 

My Sweetie has been co-chair of the Granville Turkey Trot for a while now.  The 5k run/trot/walk/waddle event, held Thanksgiving mornings, draws a good crowd.  Despite temperatures hovering around freezing, over 2,000 friendly folk participated this morning.  This is the twentieth year for the event; it has become a family tradition.  The Granville Turkey Trot is also a fund-raiser.  All of the money goes to the Food Pantry Network of Licking County.  Last year the committee wrote them a check for around $130,000.  My Sweetie is hoping they top that this year.

Happy Thanksgiving................

 

A little bit of psychedelia never hurts..............

The Human Beinz............................Nobody But Me

 

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

Sven Zetterberg....................Let's Straighten It Out

 

All that is needed.....................

 

     If the nation is generous, governments take it upon themselves to cure all the ills of humanity.  They will revive commerce, they say; they will bring prosperity to agriculture, develop factories, encourage arts and letters, abolish poverty, etc., etc.  All that is needed is to create some new government functions and pay for some new functionaries.

-Frédéric Bastiat, from his Economic Sophisms, Second Series (1848)

no replays.......................

 

It is often said that history provides us with no action replays.  It is not given to controlled experiments.  We only learn what can go wrong after it has already done so, and by then it is too late to put it right.  In fact, the history of freedom in the modern world can be seen as a testing ground for different conceptions of politics.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

a bad habit...........................

 

 A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

-Thomas Paine, as culled from his pamphlet, Common Sense

the thin fabric...............

 

He had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.

-David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest

choices................

 

Human cooperation under the system of the social division of labor is possible only in the market economy.  Socialism is not a realizable system of society's economic organization because it lacks any method of economic calculation. . . .

Socialism cannot be realized because it is beyond human power to establish it as a social system.  The choice is between capitalism and chaos.  A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death.  A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.  Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

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

D Man.................................Ain't Enough Whiskey

 

I know for certain..................

 

......................................that this is true.

life itsownself.................

 

"The end of being is to know; and if you say the end of knowledge is action—why yes, but the end of that action again, is knowledge."  Self-knowledge and self-cultivation he now sees not as a means to something but as the ends and goals of life itself.

-Robert D Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

the health of the soul.................

 

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when they are young nor weary in the search when they have grown old.  For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.  And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more.

-Epicurus, as cut-and-pasted from this letter

Thankful for the Rules...................

 

...........................................especially #10.

Against utopianism............

Utopianism always begins as an awakening. It ends, if it is allowed to run through its phases, as a tyranny of the pure. There is a slower path. It lacks ecstasy and salvation. It is not rough or revolutionary. It can feel like a letdown, particularly to the young and the impatient. It accepts imperfection as the price of freedom. It chooses a decent polity over a redeemed one. History suggests this is the wiser bet. Its lesson is unromantic and, for that reason, trustworthy: whenever we try to storm heaven, we tend to wake up in a very familiar place, counting the costs and wondering how the rope we thought we could use to pull ourselves up became a noose.

Dustin Sharp, as he concludes this essay

abuse......................

 

     History has shown that we shouldn't rely on governments to protect us financially.  On the contrary, we should expect most governments to abuse their privileged positions as the creators and users of money and credit for the same reasons that you might commit those abuses if you were in their shoes.

-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order

A worthy goal................

 

     My only financial goal is to go to bed every night with a sense of calm, knowing my family is OK and that I can spend the next day doing what I want, when I want, with whom I want, for as long as I want.

-Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money:  Simple Choices for a Richer Life

Never the how, always the why................

 

Spader channeling Reddington......One more time

 

consumable otherness...................

     Chesterton knew that progressivism and capitalism were bedfellows that would produce unnatural offspring.  He was also conscious that the politicization of sex would lead to confusion instead of fulfilling the desire for equality or the happiness of both sexes.  Sexlessness, the refusal to acknowledge the God-ordained design of sexual difference, would be the result of the battle of the sexes.  Once cut off from its spiritual roots, equality would lead not to fairness but to a culture of lies and the popularizing of consumable otherness.  Chesterton was sure that, in the name of equality, standards would be attacked and what Pope Benedict XVI would later name a "dictatorship of relativism" would become the norm. 

-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton

Sixty years ago.............................

Del Shannon....Keep Searchin' (We'll Follow the Sun)

 

never done...................

 

Not sure if this is good or bad................

 

Roughly 66% of US households own real estate, and for the typical American homeowner, that property makes up roughly half of their household’s net worth. . . .

The US housing market alone was worth a hefty sum of $55T as of September 2025. For context, the entire US stock market is worth roughly $62.2T.

-as culled from here

learning.........................

 

The best are always learning.

Read like crazy.
Think alone.
Keep a journal.
Write stuff down the moment you see it.
Review regularly.
Memorize the big ideas to fluency.
Attack your best ideas.
And never get high on your own supply.

You don't have to be gifted. You do have to be deliberate.

-Shane Parrish, from this edition

Why philosophy......................

 

We want to know that the little things are little, and the big things are big, before it is too late; we want to see things now as they will seem forever—"in the light of eternity."  We want to learn to laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smile even at the looming of death.  We want to be whole, to coordinate our energies by criticizing and harmonizing our desires; for coordinated energy is the last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too.  "To be a philosopher," said Thoreau, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."  We may be sure the if we can but find wisdom, all things else will be added unto us.  "Seek ye first the good things of the mind," Bacon admonishes us, "and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt."  Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

act..........................

 

. . . that action is the answer.  Thinking about your problems will never solve them.  Waiting around to feel like doing something means you'll never do it.  It taught me that no one is coming to save you.  You must save yourself from yourself.  You have to force yourself to move make little moves forward, all day, every day, especially when you don't feel like it. . . .

Waiting for the right time.  Waiting to feel ready or a little less afraid.  Waiting for someone to come along and tell you that today is the day to start.  The problem with waiting is no one is coming.  The only permission you need is your own.

-Mel Robbins, The Let Them Theory

Opening paragraphs..........

 

I've always relied on logic to make sense of myself and the world.

     A prescriptionist at heart, I've always looked to reason to find the rhyme, the practical to get to the mystical, the choreography to find the dance, the proof to get to the truth, and reality to get to the dream.  I've always believed that art emulates life, not the other way around.

     I've been finding that tougher to do lately.

-Matthew McConaughey, Poems & Prayers

the whole bundle.................

 

     When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes.  I believe and I doubt.  I hope and get discouraged.  I love and I hate.  I feel bad about feeling good.  I feel guilty about not feeling guilty.  I am trusting and suspicious.  I am honest and I still play games.  Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

     To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark.  In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God's grace means.  As Thomas Merton put it, "A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God."

     The gospel of grace nullifies our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local church heroes.  It obliterates the two-class citizenship theory operative in many American churches.  For grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is a gift.  All that is good is ours, not by right, but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God.

-Brennan Manning,  The Ragamuffin Gospel

a member..........................

 

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.

-Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander