A vacation................................

 ..............We journeyed south to Destin, Florida, with a brief layover in Nashville.  A few observations:  Nashville is an amazing place, but Broadway is a younger person's game.  There is music everywhere.  Next time we go, we will seek out more of the smaller, quieter venues.  The traffic on I-65 from Nashville to the Florida Panhandle is ridiculous this time of year.  Visiting Seaside is a wonderful idea, but during Spring Break the place is overrun with kids, of all ages.  It is really easy to get sunburned in April.  Renting a house for a week in Destin, and having the whole tribe join you, is a fabulous thing to do.

The art...............................

 ..............of reading more than one book at a time.

On freedom..............

 Do not free a camel from the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

against a culture.........................

 How do I transmit to my son the value of permanent ideals against a culture that will tell him that whatever is newest is also best, that everything is negotiable and subject to contract and consent, that there is no purpose to our common life but to fulfill his desires?  How do I reinforce that fragile thread linking my son to a life of humane obligations and responsibilities?  To a life anchored in stable and unchangeable ideals?  To a life, in other words, filled with the goods secured by tradition?

-Sohrab Ahmari,  The Unbroken Tread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos

 

more fun here

Forty-nine years ago...............

Pink Floyd..............................Dark Side Of The Moon

Forecasts.................

 Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.

-attributed to Warren Buffett

Like this would ever happen............

 When everyone thinks central bankers, money managers, corporate managers, politicians or any other group are the smartest guys in the room, you are in a bubble.

-Doug Kass

Blowing bubbles................

 Explanation: Massive stars can blow bubbles. The featured image shows perhaps the most famous of all star-bubbles, NGC 7635, also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 7-light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and some 45-times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula and associated cloud complex lie a mere 7,100 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp, tantalizing view of the cosmic bubble is a reprocessed composite of previously acquired Hubble Space Telescope image data.

-as cut and pasted from APOD

On anxiety, a useless emotion........

 Your first step, if you deal with stress and anxiety? Start reading the Stoics. Then, take two Ibuprophens or Acetaminophens and read some more. Since I deal with anxiety about the future most (I hate lack of control), my favorite quote from this article:

“He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary”

– Seneca

-Rick Georges, from here

Almost like it is a historical cycle or something...

 Good times plant the seeds of their destruction through complacency and leverage, and bad times plant the seeds of their turnaround through opportunity and panic-driven problem-solving.

-Morgan Housel, from here

Inversely.......................

I would say that the quality of our society will be inversely proportion to the level of political energy. One of the toxic effects of social media is to elevate the level of political energy. We would be much better off with people putting energy into their relationships and their work.

-Arnold Kling, from here

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

New Riders of The Purple Sage..........................Panama Red

 

An opinion on the housing market.....

 Some people think it’s a bubble because prices are rising so fast but there are so many other variables at play that I’d label it unhealthy rather than euphoric. . . . "While demand is strong, supply is short and constrained, the ability to actually build and deliver homes has been slowed by the supply chain that is all but broken, by the workforce that is short in supply, and the intense competition for scarce and titled land assets." . . .

Unfortunately, even if we wanted to build more houses right now, it’s basically impossible with all of the supply chain issues and worker shortages.

The supply chain is all but broken and maybe the housing market is too.

-Ben Carlson, from here

The hopeful birth..........................

 ..................of a sub-division:  Episode 18:  

The market may be broken, but we are doing our part to mend it.   

Thirty fully developed building lots sold to D. R. Horton, a production builder.  They are scheduled to buy 19 more next week.  Footers have been poured on about 15 lots, slabs poured on nine lots, framing of houses started on two lots.  In a perfect world, which you all know we live in, there will be thirty new houses, with new homeowners, in this sub-division by early summer.

Footers poured

slab poured

framing started

Unless provoked...................

 In the eighteenth century, the liberal idea aborning was that every person regardless of age or gender of ethnicity or position in the hierarchy should have equal rights.  Such an idea of equality was still to most people shocking.  About gender, for example, it was inconceivable even to the Founding Brothers.  In earlier centuries of agriculture and its accompanying hierarchy, topped by the stationary bandits in charge, a liberal equality was held in fact to be absurd and dangerous.  Justice was a matter of treating a duke as a duke and a plowman as a plowman, with the differing respect owed in justice to each—but certainly not equality.  You bowed low to a duke.  And you did not murder a plowman, unless provoked.

-Deidre Nansen McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works:  How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World For All

local knowledge.....................

 

     I spent ten days on the roof as we flowed through the migration and the migration flowed around us.  It was always amazing to watch Uncle John stop and film in the bush.  Camera crews from the BBC, the Disney Channel, National Geographic, and other networks were fighting for the best position at various crossing points so they could capture the tumult of thousands of wildebeests massing to plunge into croc-infested waters.  Uncle John was nowhere to be seen.  On the advice of some Masai friends, he'd be asleep under his frayed bush hat, half a mile from where the action was about to take place.  Sure enough, at the last moment, a single wildebeest would break rank, run the half-mile down to where Uncle John was parked, causing an avalanche of pounding hooves to follow suit.

     "Buddy, never follow the rules," he'd tell me.  "Stick with the local knowledge and build relationships—that's how you get the shots."  Then he'd offer up his trademark vampire smirk, having just canned to best high-action sequence of the day.  After the first wildebeest jumped, thousands of others likewise took the plunge, and they churned through the water, swimming nose to tail, battling the current.  Crocodiles began slipping off the banks in pursuit.  The water boiled, foaming white as the crocodiles' powerful tails thrashed back and forth.  Their jaws mashed down on wildebeests, pulling them beneath the surface.  The air shrilled with wildebeests' alarm calls as they disappeared from sight.  The ones who made it to the other side, heaving with exhaustion, found lions in wait.  After so many hours of sitting around, I found the scene unbelievably thrilling. 

-Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild: An African Journey Home

Old-fashioned humor...............

      Another week we were reminiscing about how we'd started in vaudeville and had gone to Al Jolson to ask for a job.  Jolie mistakenly thought Gracie was a ventriloquist and I was her dummy.

     "But he's not a dummy," Gracie protested, "he's a real man.  He's George Burns."

     Jolson couldn't believe it.  "Are you trying to tell me that he has blood and muscles, and that he walks and talks and makes love like other men?"

     "No," Gracie explained, "I'm trying to tell you he's George Burns."

     On another show she decided to help Mickey Rooney; she wanted to adopt him because she was certain he hadn't gotten a proper education.  Mickey told her that he had received a degree in geometry and a degree in Latin.

     "Oh, yeah?" Gracie challenged.  "Say something in geometry."

     Mickey thought about that for a second, then stated, "Okay, Pi R square."

     "Ah ha!"  Gracie exclaimed.  "There's proof you haven't had a good education.  Everybody knows pie are round!"

-George Burns,  Gracie: A Love Story

Can I get an Amen...................?

 Normal people just want America to produce more energy. And maybe when it’s all said and done, that’s the most humanitarian thing we could do.

-Arnold Kling, from here

more fun here

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

Robert Cray.........................................Take Your Shoes Off

 

Back in 1918....................

      But as Camus knew, evil and crises do not make all men rise above themselves.  Crises only make them discover themselves.  And some discover a less inspiring humanity.

      As the crest of the wave that broke over Philadelphia began its sweep across the rest of the country, it was accompanied by the same terror that had silenced the streets there.  Most men and women sacrificed and risked their lives only for those they loved most deeply: a child, a wife, a husband.  Others, loving chiefly themselves, fled in terror even from them.

     Still others fomented terror, believing that blaming the enemy—Germany—could help the war effort, or perhaps actually believing that Germany was responsible.  Doane himself charged that "German agents . . . from submarines" brought influenza to the United States.  "The Germans have started epidemics in Europe, and there is no reason why they should be particularly gentle to America."

     Others around the country echoed him.  Starkville, Mississippi, a town of three thousand in the Mississippi hill country, was built around a sawmill, cotton farms—not the rich, lush plantations of the Delta but harsh land—and Mississippi A&M College (now Mississippi State University).  It served as headquarters for Dr. M. G. Persons, the U. S. Public Health Service officer for northeastern Mississippi, who proudly informed Blue that he had succeeded in getting local newspapers to run stories he made up that "aid in forming the proper frame of mind" in the public.  That frame of mind was fear.  Person wanted to create fear, believing it "prepared the public mind to recieve and act on our suggestions."

-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

"facts".....................

      In the crazy early days when the Covid-19 coronavirus went global, Scientific American admonished journalists, 'facts about this epidemic that have lasted a few days are far more reliable than the latest "facts" that have just come out, which may be erroneous or unrepresentative and thus misleading . . . a question that today con be answered only [by] informed belief may perhaps be answered by a fact tomorrow.'  Sound advice, and not just for journalists but for citizens too.  So however much news you choose to read, make sure you spend time looking for longer-term, slower-paced information.  You will notice things - good and bad -  that others ignore.

-Tim Horford, How to Make the World Add Up:  Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

It might even help...........

 

Heart......................

 More says to his arch-enemy Cromwell, “What you have hunted me for is not my actions, but the thoughts of my heart. It is a long road you have opened. For first men will disclaim their hearts and presently they will have no hearts. God help the people whose Statesmen walk your road.”

-as culled from here

Worth resolving.....................

 

moderately........................

 "The man who works so moderately as to be able to work constantly," wrote Adam Smith, "not only preserves his health the longest, but in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work." Yes, doing less is a way to be kinder to yourself, and to be more present to the world around you – but paradoxically, it's also an excellent way to get more done.

-Oliver Burkeman, from here

Sometimes............

 

Laying on my back, watching the stars emerge, I was struck by how they'd been there all along, invisibly lining my day even when I couldn't see them.  Sometimes the darkness reveals, it's ways more mysterious than light's.  Sometimes the darkness gives a gift of stars by which we can navigate our way home.

-Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild

image via

Our old friend inflation is back..........

 Making more money is one of those things no one teaches you how to do but it’s probably your best bet for improving your standard of living over the long haul.

I know putting inflation hedges on your portfolio is the sexier option but you have more control over your personal finances than the markets when it comes to fighting inflation.

-Ben Carlson

 

Pre-ordering....................

 back story here

A pretty good rule..............

 The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.

-Charlie Munger, as culled from here

Smile maker..............

 

Common Sense..................

  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

Simple.......................

 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

partial, imperfect fulfillment.........

         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

Swinging......................

       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

It's noisy out there.....................

      The phrase "still, small voice" comes from the King James Version's rendering of the "sheer silence" in the Elijah story, an interpretation that isn't the best translation of the Hebrew but that does represent well the nature of God's communications with us.  The sovereign King of the universe, to our surprise, does not often trumpet his message to his subjects.  God's volume knob is rarely turned all the way to the right; his voice in our ears is subtle, restrained, even easy to miss.

-Adam S. McHugh, The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in as World of Distraction

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

Michael Hoppe/Tim Wheater........................Dreamer

watching the radio..................

      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

European history is so fascinating......

      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

Hiding today..................

 

As one thing leads to another..........

      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

They did show up in a timely fashion though.........

       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

Courage.........................

  thanks Rob

Fifty years ago...........................

The Rolling Stones.........................Sweet Virginia

 

The beauty of studying history..........

...................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

The hopeful birth..............................

 ......................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.