thoroughly.................

 

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.

-George Bernard Shaw, from here

self-hazards.......................

 

      Investing is hard.  You're forced to deal with the constant uncertainty, volatility, fear, greed, and an endless stream of noise.  Your worst enemy in the markets is not the person on the other side of the trade—it's you.

      Doing more, trying harder, making more trades and paying more attention to your portfolio can be hazardous to your wealth.  The most important work you can do as an investor is proper preparation.  And when it is time to act, it will because your plan tells you to, not because of some scary headlines or talking head on financial television forcing your hand.

-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward

the temperament.....................

 

Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ.  Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

-Warren Buffett

unraveling.................

 

     Our unraveling continues, even accelerates.  Political institutions and geopolitical norms are fracturing.  Far-right and nationalist movements are ascendant.  Democracies around the world look vulnerable; the sturdy-seeming institutional bulwarks that loomed solemnly around them now sag under pressure like rotten wood.  There is no more staggering an indicator of the profound misoperation of American society that its decision in 2024 to return Donald Trump to the office of the presidency.  It is madness to have put him there, and is our madness that keeps us from perceiving—collectively—the absurdity and destructiveness of our choice.   But the world as a whole is sheathed in confusion.  In all likelihood, the postwar era of liberal hegemony is ending, and it is honestly difficult to say why.  In America and around the world, we look at each other bewildered, unable to comprehend the reality that others perceive or to fathom their motivations.

-Ryan Avent, In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies

Somewhere on my journeys through the Intertunnel I found a recommendation for this book, so I bought it.  Enjoyed the first three pages, then came to the above paragraph.  All I can say is that Avent needs to get out more.   A few stray thoughts:  first, one of the problems with our elections is that the choice is binary.  Donald Trump or Kamala Harris was our choice in 2024.  Reasonable people may disagree, but it was certainly not madness, or far-right, to prefer Trump over Harris.  A majority of the country made that choice.  Second, Avent finds it difficult to understand why the "postwar era of liberal hegemony is ending".  Maybe, in good faith, he should take a closer look at the quality and character of those people passing as "elites" in government, media, and in our world-at-large these days.  Open your eyes, Ryan.  Anyway, if the quality of thinking does not improve, I will not be finishing this book.

Religious freedom, or not...............

 

............More stuff I never learned as a history major:

     In 1768, with dissenting religion continuing to grow, the Anglican establishment—both a political and religious entity—resorted to arrests.  Baptists faced the brunt of arrests.  By the time of the American Revolution, more than half the Baptist ministers in Virginia had been jailed for preaching without a license or disturbing the peace. (Some ministers responded that they had a license from "King Jesus" and recognized no other authority over their calling.) . . .

     Facing the most formidable military of the eighteenth century, and with dissenters accounting for 20 to 33 percent or more of Virginia's white population, patriot leaders realized quickly that they needed dissenters' support in the war effort. (Government documents noted, for example, the need for support from those marksmen in the heavily Presbyterian Shenandoah Valley with the extraordinarily accurate long rifles who eventually mad up the core of Daniel Morgan's riflemen at the Battle of Saratoga.)  This recognition led to a remarkable negotiation—support for the war effort being offered by dissenters in return for religious freedom.

     Dissenters' earlier pleas for some limited relief were replaced by demands for equal treatment: an end to the church tax; an end to Anglican control of marriage, orphans, and poor relief; exemption from military service for dissenting ministers.  Religious freedom was tied to the sought-after support for the war.

-John A. Ragosta, from his essay, What Does the American Revolution Mean to Me? in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding

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

 

James Taylor...............Sweet Baby James album

Good luck with that.................

 

If Mamdani wants his affordability agenda to be more than a redistribution of this shrinking pie, he will need to recharge the private-sector engines of upward mobility. He can do that by confronting the occupational licensing and business regulations, land-use restrictions, and cost drivers that have made middle-class life in New York so hard to sustain.

-Michael Dresdale, from this essay

however....................

 

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

-attributed to Winston Churchill

On handling..........................

 

............................................conflict.

Well, today we’re gonna get some help from what may seem like an unlikely source: Carl von Clausewitz.
Yeah, the dead war guy. The 19th-century Prussian strategist who spent his time thinking about armies and violence, which sounds like it has nothing to do with you, a person whose most frequent combat scenarios involve passive-aggressive emails.

Fun............................

 

..............................the science of naming things.

a wildly spasmodic blog.................

 

..........................ponders invisible wounds.

Kurt Harden...............

 

...................................the King of the Playlist.

Rob Firchau.....................

 

.........................wonders about the blogopolooza.

About denying danger..................

 

Given our ability to deny dangers - to stare at a lion and declare "That is not a lion" - the only moment when many matters are crystal clear are when they are being analyzed from inside of the lion's stomach.

-Michael Wade

a virtue....................

 

Patience is a virtue no one has time for anymore.

-Ben Carlson

Letters...................

 

From my infancy I was taught to love humanity and liberty. Enquiry and experience have since confirmed my reverence for the lessons then given me, by convincing me more fully of their truth and excellence. Benevolence toward mankind excites wishes for their welfare, and such wishes endear the means of fulfilling them. These can be found in liberty only, and therefore her sacred cause ought to be espoused by every man, on every occasion, to the utmost of his power. As a charitable but poor person does not withhold his mite because he cannot relieve all the distresses of the miserable, so should not any honest man suppress his sentiments concerning freedom, however small their influence is likely to be. Perhaps he “may touch some wheel” that will have an effect greater than he could reasonably expect.  

-John Dickinson, from his first Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania

Been reading The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding.  More than a few historians are troubled by the contradiction between the sentiments of liberty inherent in the Founding and the reality of enslavement.  250 years and a bloody civil war later, we are still dealing with the echoes of that contradiction.  Reading  Dickinson's first letter, the question arose, "was Dickinson a slave owner?"  Google says yes.  Dickenson College puts it this way: "The founders of Dickinson College believed in the principles of the enlightenment and yet still found ways to rationalize ownership of other human beings."