PERHAPS the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor. 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, from the Introduction to Common Sense
When there are multiple solutions to a problem, choose the simplest one.
The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.” Stick to the good plan. Traditional.
It takes wisdom to know what we don’t know.
So please don't forget that considering the probabilities of future returns only begins the decision-making process. Decisions have consequences. If the consequences of being badly wrong about future returns would imperil your financial future, be conservative.
-John C. Bogle, as excerpted from The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
By contrast, the African-American poet Langston Hughes sang in 1935: "O, let America be America again— / The land that never has been yet— /And yet must be—the land where every man is free." Free to move, to invent, to persuade, to offer a dollar, with no master in charge. The result of liberal democracy's partial, imperfect fulfillment has been a slow but in the end spectacular approach worldwide to flourishing, in which fewer and fewer people are pushed or bossed around without their voluntarily given consent or contract.
-Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce A Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World For All
There is an old expression that says, "No risk, no reward." I say, "No risk, no nothing." All creative people take risks. It is the nature of the process. Daring to think something new or try something new. . . .Wherever your creativity takes you, risk comes along for the ride - it's a natural part of the process - enjoy the thrill of it like you would a roller coaster ride. Fail to hit a baseball two out of three times for 20 years and you'll go to the hall of fame witha .333 batting average.
-Jeffrey Gitomer, Little Red Book of Selling
The only problem was that just as we were becoming stars, vaudeville was dying. No one could pin the rap on us, though. Everybody believes it was the movies that killed vaudeville. That's not true. Movies, vaudeville, burlesque, the local stock companies—all survived together. Then radio came in. For the first time people didn't have to leave their homes to be entertained. The performers came into their house. Gracie and I knew that vaudeville was finished when theaters began advertising that their shows would be halted for fifteen minutes so that the audiences could listen to "Amos 'n' Andy." And when the "Amos 'n' Andy" program came on, the vaudeville would stop, they would bring a radio onstage, and the audience would sit there watching the radio.
It's impossible to explain the impact that radio had on the world to anyone who didn't live through that time. Before radio, people had to wait for the newspaper to learn what was happening in the world. Before radio, the only way to see a performer was to see a performer. And maybe most important, before radio there was no such thing as a commercial.
-George Burns, Gracie: A Love Story
By autumn 1558 when Elizabeth came to the throne, Philip II [Spain] and Henry II [France] had begun their peace negotiations. Military operations had ceased, and both realms were determined to make a lasting peace primarily due to their own financial chaos and religious strife in the Spanish-held Low Countries and France. Besides, Philip had wars of religion he was fighting against the Turks in North Africa and the western Mediterranean, and internally against the Moriscos in Spain. The last thing he could literally afford was to fight a powerful Catholic monarch like the King of France. For Philip, matters of religion always took precedence over temporal matters, and it was essential that Catholic governments unite against the very real expansionist threat of the Turkish Empire and the spread of Calvinism. Elizabeth and Cecil, who both had known Philip well when he had been king consort of England, did not need to listen to the incessant distortions swirling on the winds to know that the greatest danger they faced would be a Catholic League against a Protestant monarchy in England. . . .The potential treat of an invasion from France, or from the French in Scotland, was very real, and the only way Elizabeth saw to forestall this was to pander to Philip's paranoia.
-Susan Ronald, The Pirate Queen: Queen ElizabethI, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire
For the French, helping the American rebels held obvious allure. It presented an opportunity to avenge their defeat in the Seven Years' War. True, the territorial loss of Canada could be exaggerated—Voltaire infamously dismissed Canada as "a few acres of snow." It was also true the economic impact of the defeat could be exaggerated—France retained control over her Caribbean colonies, where enslaved Africans produced the sugar, coffee, and cotton generating the real wealth of the French colonial empire. But statecraft was not all hard economics: pride and prestige were important, too. Since the end of the last war, the French had wallowed in national resentment. Any chance to knock the British down a peg was a chance worth taking. The public certainly seemed enthusiastic. When the rebellion in America broke out, the cause of les insurgents became all the rage in French society.
-Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution
But there were risks. Lord Stormont, British ambassador to France and a seasoned diplomat, made it plain his government considered the conflict an internal affair. The consequences for a foreign power aiding the rebels would be dire. He was confident France would stay out of it, though. Despite the allure of humbling the British, the literal cost of getting involved seemed prohibitive. France's national treasury faced growing budget deficits each year thanks to an archaic tax system exempting anyone who actually possessed real wealth. The French monarchy floundered in dysfunctional debt for most of the eighteenth century and things were only getting worse. It did not seem France's dream of cleaving the British Empire in twain could survive the reality of her annual budget reports. King Louis XVI would be wise to focus on financial reform, not imperial war.
-Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds, The Marqui de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution
...................comes from realizing the world has always and forever been a glorious mess.
The French expansion into the Ohio country put their plans in jeopardy. Not only did the French reject the right of the British crown to grant lands in Ohio to the Ohio Company or anyone else, but a French presence in Ohio would render the region insecure for Anglo-American settlers. The French themselves would be hostile; more threateningly they would turn the Indians of the region hostile. The various tribes there understood the competition between the two European empires, and they played one against the other, to their own benefit. Part of the benefit consisted of trade goods that made the lives of Indians easier—firearms, steel knives and the like; another part entailed military support in the rivalries of the tribes against one another. The sum of the interplay of empires and tribes was a welter of intrigues and conflicts on the frontier: British against French, British against France's Indian allies, Britain's Indian allies against the French and the French Indians, Indians against Indians. There was even competition between Virginians and residents of other British colonies, notably Pennsylvania and New York, who had their own claims to the Ohio country.
-H. W. Brands, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution
......................of a subdivision: Episode 17:
Getting the base coat of asphalt paving down before they closed the asphalt plant for winter was a big deal in my world. Heroic efforts by our contractor, Layton, Inc., got it done. Work has continued at the site since then; just haven't posted anything for a while. Time to catch up.
The Energy Cooperative will be providing natural gas service to the subdivision. They are user friendly. They come when called, and they don't charge the developer for the installation of the gas lines.
Seek distance from coercive people, especially those who long to command you for your good.
The fighting had been vicious in the Carolinas since the start of the war. And it was the more vicious for pitting not American against Briton, nor even American against Hessian, but American against American. John Adams would say that the American Revolution was in the "minds and hearts" of the American people before it produced the armed struggle between the United States and Britain; what Adams neglected to mention was the degree to which those minds and hearts were at odds, one American against another. In every colony, and then every state, were thousands of men and women who wanted nothing to do with independence. They valued the freedom and security they had enjoyed under British rule, and they resented the rebel Patriots for bringing on the war. These Loyalists cast their lot with the mother country; the result was the shattering of trust among neighbors, the rending of families, and the murderous conflict like that convulsing the Carolina backcountry.
-H. W. Brands, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in The American Revolution
. . . the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison; that the quest to define ourselves on our own is a kind of El Dorado, driving to madness the many who seek after it; that for our best, highest selves to soar, other parts of us must be tied down, enclosed, limited, bound.
-Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos
The Fall of Rome was largely a fiscal affair. The low interest rates of the Pax Romana were not sufficient to offset the unhealthy effects of an economy based on conquest rather than commerce.
-William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created
When Gilbert turned seven, Madame Chavaniac hired a young local priest, Abbé Fayon, to serve as a live-in tutor. Fayon taught young Gilbert reading, writing, and math. He introduced classics like The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War, which was the story of the conquest of Lafayette's own homeland. The province of Auvergne derived its name from the Arverni, an ancient Gallic tribe that produced Vercingetorix, the last and greatest leader of the Gallic resistance to the Roman conquest. The Battle of Gergovia, one of Caesar's rare defeats in the war, occurred practically in Lafayette's backyard. The boy thrilled with these tales of daring, adventure, courage, rebellion, and glory. He said later, "I can recall no time in my life when I did not love stories of glorious deeds, or have dreams of traveling the world in search of fame."
-Mike Duncan, Hero Of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution
If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you'd be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled—have you no shame in that?
-Epictetus, from here
The great predicament of our moment in history is the collapse of the public’s trust in democratic institutions. That collapse is long-running, well-established, and catastrophic. Every corner of our fractured political landscape feels compelled to express, vociferously, its anger and repudiation. The default rhetorical posture of the web has become the rant.
-Martin Gurri, from here
“I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.”
-Wendell Berry, from here
In the short-run it’s difficult to see an easy way out of the current geopolitical nightmare.
In the long-run it’s always a bad idea to bet against the power of the human spirit.
-Ben Carlson, from here
A warehouse of experimental evidence now attests to our cognitive shortcomings: our willingness to jump the inferential gun, to be too quick to draw strong conclusions from ambiguous evidence, and to be too slow to change our minds as disconfirming observations trickle in. A balanced apportionment of blame should acknowledge that learning is hard because even seasoned professionals are ill-equipped to cope with the complexity, ambiguity, and dissonance inherent in assessing causation in history. Life throws up a lot of puzzling events that thoughtful observers feel impelled to explain because the policy stakes are so high. However, just because we want an explanation does not mean that one is within reach. To achieve explanatory closure in history, observers must fill in the missing counterfactual comparison scenarios with elaborate stories grounded in their deepest assumptions about how the world works.
.......... understands this to be correct:
The world breaks every decade or so. There are so few exceptions to this it’s astounding. . . .
However crazy the world looks, it can get crazier. History is just a long story of the unthinkable happening, precedents being broken, and people reading the news with bewilderment and denial.
-Morgan Housel, from here
A readiness to adapt oneself to the facts of the real world is often portrayed as a virtue, and in part it is. It is a bad thing to close one's eyes to facts or to fail to admit them because they are unwelcome. But it is also a bad thing to assume that whatever is in the ascendant must be right, that regard for fact demands subservience to evil. Even worse than conscious subservience to evil is the self-deception which denies that it is evil. When I find individual liberty being everywhere lessened by regimentation, I will not on that account pretend that regimentation is a good thing. It may be necessary for a time, but one should not on that account acquiesce to it as part of any society that one can admire.
-Bertrand Russell, from his essay, Hopes: Realized and Disappointed
When Elizabeth Tudor inherited the kingdom from her half sister Mary I, in November 1558, England was on the brink of ruin. The feeling of despair among the nobles can only be imagined: not only had the country been torn between the ultra-Protestant reign of Elizabeth's half brother, Edward V, followed by the fanatically Catholic Mary, but the crown was now proffered to the daughter of the reviled Queen Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth, who had lived her life as an unwelcomed reminder of the union of Henry VIII and her mother, would most assuredly have been burned at the stake by Mary without the intervention of the queen's absentee husband, Philip II of Spain. If there was one thing Elizabeth Tudor understood intuitively, it was life on the edge.
-Susan Ronald, The Pirate Queen: Queen ElizabethI, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire
And people who are comfortable with their investments will, on average, achieve better results than those who are motivated by ever-changing headlines, chatter and promises.
.............................it might be that the veneer of civilization is very thin.
Yet as ancient observers from Thucydides to Aeneas point out, ideological professions were often high-sounding cover for personal agendas—private feuds, concern over debts, petty envies and jealousies—that ignited whenever the social fabric was torn through sieges, which worked like plagues and revolution to strip away the patina of civilization.
-Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
Neither misery nor folly seems to me any part of the inevitable lot of man. And I am convinced that intelligence, patience, and eloquence can, sooner or later, lead the human race out of its self-imposed tortures provided it does not exterminate itself meanwhile.
-Bertrand Russell, as culled from his essay, Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday
In the modern world, if communities are unhappy, it is because they choose to be so. Or, to speak more precisely, because they have ignorances, habits, beliefs, and passions, which are dearer to them than happiness or even life. I find many men in our dangerous age who seem to be in love with misery and death, and who grow angry when hopes are suggested to them. They think that hope is irrational and that, in sitting down to lazy despair, they are merely facing facts. I cannot agree with these men. To preserve hope in our world makes calls upon our intelligence and our energy. In those who despair it is very frequently the energy that is lacking.
-Bertrand Russell, another excerpt from his essay, Reflections On My Eightieth Birthday
Having said on more than one occasion that no really great music has been produced since the break-up of the Beatles, Kurt decided to prove me wrong. I surrender. I was wrong.
The demonologists were responding to an extraordinary situation, though not the one they imagined. From about 1560 onwards, Europe was in the grip not of Satan and his minions, but of the Little Ice Age. Wet springs, cold summers, frequent hailstorms, crop failure and food shortages became the norm. Glaciers advanced down Alpine valleys. Lake Constance froze over in 1563 and again in 1671-3. Baffled and terrified by what they saw as unnatural weather, people sought explanations and a scapegoat in the supposed maleficent practices of witches. It has been shown that phases of particularly bad weather coincided with collective panics leading to persecutions.
-Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790
To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being and does not rise to personality, he has failed to realize his life's meaning. Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature never puts the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one need answer.
-Carl Gustav Jung, from his essay "The Development of Personality"
Last night, My Sweetie and I ventured out to 1922 On The Square for a delightful meal and conversation. We then ambled over to the 31 West venue to share the rest of the evening with bluesy Bettye LaVette and her very talented band. A grand time was had............................
You could say higher spending is the goal. But all new luxuries become necessities in due time as expectations reset. I suspect part of the reason people don’t feel better off is because financial progress is better measured by wealth, not income. And wealth is just the accumulation of income you haven’t spent. So a lot of people are the financial equivalent of the exerciser who burns 500 calories then immediately offsets it with dessert and is frustrated by the lack of progress despite working so hard.
So this is all I ask: Don’t be broken. Like what you like. Dislike what you dislike. BUT keep an eye on reality at all times and watch carefully for signs that you have overreacted. Adjust and move along. We’ll get through this.
82. People who favor a "philosopher-king" assume that person would share their philosophy.
99. Do not feel compelled to finish a mistake merely because you have started it.
148. You could base an entire philosophy of life on what to ignore.
175. Never assume that people dislike a crisis.
388. If you do not have a stack of unread books at home then there is no hope for you.
Each year we learn more about the incredible complexity of our universe. The mind staggers at the intimation of billions of galaxies, each made up of billions of stars, slowly revolving in every direction for unimaginable distances. And inside each grain of matter supercolliders reveal ever-receding constellations of strange particles streaking along mysterious orbits. In the midst of this kind of stupendous forces a human life unfolds in what is less than a split second on the cosmic scale. Yet, as far as we are concerned, it is this, our own short life, filled with its few precious moments, that counts for more than all the galaxies, black holes, and exploding stars put together.
-Mihaly Csikszentmihali, The Evolving Self: A Psychology For The Third Millennium
Yesterday, in the middle of an internal tempest—a raging internal debate about my own capacities—I walked to the coffee shop down the road for a treat. On the way, I noticed that the cool air and warm sun seemed perfectly untroubled by the momentous issues and feelings that were swirling through my body.
Nearing the coffee shop, I looked across the street to the mini-mall that has a head store, a Curves franchise, a beauty salon, and some other shop I can't recall. There, in the window of the salon, was a hand-written sign saying: "Thank you for your devotion."
Now I know there is some logical explanation of why they put that sign in their window that has nothing to do with me. But, in that moment, I knew it was just for me. The universe had decided I needed some direct encouragement to stay the course—to have faith through the turbulence.
I laughed out loud, made a small bow, and got a warm cup of foggy-morning coffee with room for cream.
-David Rynick, This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons
A key to making Love unconditional is the willingness to forgive. With forgiveness, events and people are re-contextualized as simply "limited"—not "bad" or "unlovable." With humility we are willing to relinquish our perception of a past event.
-David Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway Of Surrender
29. For a life that is sound and secure, cultivate a thorough insight into things and discover their essence, matter, and cause; put your whole heart into doing what is just, and speaking what is true; and for the rest, know the joy of life by piling good deed on good deed until no rift or cranny appears between them.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Twelve
Practically speaking, if timesaving devices really saved time, there would be more time available to us now than ever before in history. But, strangely enough, we seem to have less time that even a few years ago.
-Benjamin Hoff, The Tao Of Pooh
It's really great fun to go someplace where there are no timesaving devices because, when you do, you find that you have lots of time. Elsewhere, you're too busy working to pay for machines to save you time so you won't have to work so hard.
The main problem with this great obsession for Saving Time is very simple: you can't save time. You can only spend it. But you can spend it wisely or foolishly.
-Benjamin Hoff, The Tao Of Pooh
In any case, Posidonius would later recall with disapproval that the abundance of Syria in those days made its people "free from the bother of the necessities of life, and so were forever meeting for a continual life of feasting and their gymnasia turned into baths." He wrote of the "drunken ambition" of the local tyrants. Things were good, but good times rarely makes for great people, or great governments.
-Ryan Holiday/Stephen Hanselman, Lives Of The Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius
.........is what makes Chris Lynch so special:
Still would love to see a sitcom about Flo from Progressive dating the Mayhem guy from the All-State commercials. Think that would be fun and also think Flo's crazy girlfriend persona would eventually grind Mayhem to dust.
This disposition to admire, and almost worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are only due wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.
-Adam Smith, The Theory Of Moral Sentiments
On 1 April 1851 Oscar (Claude) Monet entered Le Havre secondary school. "I was born unruly", he admitted later. "I could never bend to any rule, even as a very small child . . . the school always seemed to me like a prison, and I could never resign myself to live there even for the space of four hours a day." In the school records he appears as "a very good-natured boy, who gets on well with his fellow pupils".
She winked and walked away. Trashed the cups and moved over to her workstation. She sat down. All I could see was the back of her head. I moved into my corner and leaned up against the hard bars. I'd been a lonely wanderer for six months. I'd learned something. Like Blanch in that old movie, a wanderer depends on the kindness of strangers. Not for anything specific or material. For morale. I gazed at the back of Roscoe's head and smiled. I liked her.
-Lee Child, from the first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor
The gesture is the incarnation of the verb; that is, an action is a thought made manifest.
A small gesture betrays us, so we must polish everything, think about details, learn the technique in such a way that it becomes intuition. Intuition has nothing to do with routine, but with a state of mind that is beyond technique.
So, after much practicing, we no longer think about the necessary movements; they become part of our own existence. But for this to happen, you must practice and practice.
And if that isn't enough, you must repeat and practice.
-Paulo Coelho, The Archer
For forty years my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.
Her real name was Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen. Gracie Allen. But for those forty years audiences in small-time and big-time vaudeville houses and movie theaters and at home listening to their radios or watching television knew her, and loved her, simply as Gracie. Just Gracie. She was on first name basis with America. Lovable, confused Gracie, whose Uncle Barnum Allen had the water drained from his swimming pool before diving one hundred feet into it because he knew how to dive but didn't know how to swim, and who once claimed to have grown grapefruits that were so big it only took eight to make a dozen. Gracie, who confessed to cheating on her driver's test by copying from the car in front of her, who decided horses must be deaf because she saw so few of them at concerts, who admitted making ice cubes with hot water so she would be prepared in case the water heater broke, and who realized it was much better for a quiz show contestant to know the questions beforehand rather than the answers after because, "The people who know the answers come and go, but the man who asks the questions comes back every week." Just Gracie, who stated with absolute certainty, "I've got so many brains I haven't used some of them yet."
-George Burns, Gracie: A Love Story
“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
-Franklin Pierce Adams, as culled from here
Eating a chocolate bar right now won’t make you unhealthy. Just as not eating it won’t make you healthy. Saving money today won’t make you rich, just as not saving it won’t make you poor. Reading a chapter of a great book today won’t solve your problems just as not reading it won’t make them worse.
Not doing the obvious thing you know you should do — the thing that positions you for future success — rarely hurts you right away. . . .
For your choices to compound, you need to be consistent. Intensity will only carry you in the short term but if you want compounding results you need consistency. In the absence of immediate rewards, we can keep up the intensity for a while but most of us become intermittent.
A lack of consistency keeps ordinary people from extraordinary results. It’s like we’re Sisyphus rolling a boulder halfway up the hill, only to throw our hands in the air and go home. When we show up the next day, we see the boulder at the bottom of the hill. Not only did this undermine our progress but it makes getting started even harder.
Excelling at the small choices that compound over time perpetually leaves you in favorable circumstances. No matter what happens in the world, you’re never in a position where you are forced into a bad decision.
-from this Farnum Street post
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