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

      Brunetti had tossed Il Gazzettino into the waste-paper bin before leaving the Questura, but still he took the subject of one of the lead articles home with him.  As he settled on the sofa with Cicero's Against Verres and its denunciation of a corrupt official, Brunetti's thoughts were frequently diverted to the cascade of money opened by the pandemia that had, until recently, so ravaged the country.

     Not even the deaths of more than 125,000 people had put an end to greed - not that Brunetti has thought for a moment that it would - nor had it dulled the ability of organized crime to get its snout in the virtually unguarded trough.  Money had rained down and countless companies had requested compensation from agencies whose task it was to bestow the largesse of a frightened Europe.  He'd cringed at the sight of some of the names he'd read, both in the governmental agencies, as well as among the directors of some of the companies receiving them.  No doubt he and his colleagues in the Guardia di Finanza would become more familiar with those names as time passed.

-Donna Leon, Give Unto Others: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

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

Ryan Tennis...........Pack Light But Bring Everything

unduly optimistic..............................

Braddock marching to Fort Duquesne

Franklin developed a mixed view of Braddock.  "This general was, I think, a brave man, and might probably have made a figure as a good officer in some European war," he said afterward.  "But he had too much self-confidence, too high an opinion of the validity of regular troops, and too mean a one of both Americans and Indians."  Braddock had boasted of the victories he would swiftly win. . . . 

French and Indians not cooperating

     Franklin thought Braddock unduly optimistic.  He tried to point this out.  "To be sure, sir, if you arrive well before Duquesne, with these fine troops, so well provided with artillery, that place, not yet completely fortified, and as we hear with no very strong garrison, can probably make but a short resistance.  The only danger I apprehend of obstruction to your march is from ambuscades of Indians, who, by constant practice, are dexterous in laying and executing them; and the slender line, near four miles long, which your army must make, may expose it to be attacked by surprise in its flanks, and to be cut like a thread into several pieces, which, from their distance, cannot come up in time to support each other."

     Braddock would have none of it.  "He smiled at my ignorance," Franklin recalled, "and replied, 'These savages may, indeed be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the king's regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.'"

     Franklin fell silent.  "I was conscious of an impropriety in my disputing with a military man in matters of his profession, and said no more."

-H. W. Brands, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in The American Revolution

Braddock mortally wounded

their special skill....................

 Looking back over the centuries, or even if looking only at the present, we can clearly observe that many men have made their living, often a very good living, from their special skill in applying weapons of violence, and that these activities have had a very large part in determining what uses were made of scarce resources.

-Frederic C. Lane

Believe............................

 You can’t be a successful investor if you look at the world with ironic detachment. If you are a naysayer. Or a cynic. Skeptical, yes, of course. But fundamentally you have to believe that individuals with tremendous willpower can do things. Great, shocking, inconceivable things.

-Bari Weiss, as extracted from here

Yep.........................

 more fun here

Checking in..............................

.............with Michel de Montaigne:

 The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. 

We should tend our freedom wisely.

To distract myself from tiresome thoughts, I have only to resort to books; they easily draw my mind to themselves and away from other things.

We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we can't be wise with another man's wisdom.

He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

Ease crushes us.

A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing.

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

I quote others only in order the better to express myself

Wait a minute...............................

 ................................is common sense showing up in the unlikeliest of places?

Almost missed it......................

.................... Happy Earth Day 2022

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

Jesse Colin Young.....................................Together

Supply and demand.................

 

The construction business is trying its hardest to catch up to the demand for housing.  In our market, anyway, most of the existing available building lots are either under contract or have recently sold.  Faithful readers may remember we had a whole passel of wondrous, wooded building lots available - seemed like for years.  Thankfully, over the past twelve months, almost all of them have sold.

charts may be found here

Checking in......................

 ...................................with James Clear:

On the importance of....................

 ..............................."self-expansion."

But how does this increase love? It’s due to the criminally underrated concept of emotional contagion. When we feel excited, we associate it with what’s around us, even if that thing is not directly responsible. When we feel partner = fun, we enjoy their presence more. And that lets us be somewhat lazy by letting environments do the work for us. Go to a concert. Get on a roller coaster. You want a fairy tale? Great. Go fight a dragon together.

Some thoughts about....................

 ...........................self-expression.

Meanwhile....................................

 ...........38 million light years distant.  The mind reels.

photo copyright: Mark Hanson and Mike Selby.  Enlargeable photo and explanation of Messier 96 may be found here.

Yacht rock.............................?

 ..........Any Major Dude With Half A Heart offers up his "Not Feeling Guilty Mix, Volume 12."

The retirement planning pyramid.....

 ..................may be found here.

No real secrets.  As the Egyptians knew more than 4,000 years ago, if you want something to last, start with a strong foundation.

Complicated geniuses........................

 ...............Social norms are for normal people.

Winslow Homer........................

Shooting the Rapids    Watercolor on paper.      1902

 

  

The Sun will not rise or set without my notice and thanks. 

unceasing care.............................

 For in every adult there lurks a child - an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education.  That is the part of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole.  But the man of today is far indeed from this wholeness. . . .

     If there is anything that we wish to change in our children, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.  Take our enthusiasm for pedagogics.  It may be the boot is on the other leg.  It may be that we misplace the pedagogical need because it would be an uncomfortable reminder that we ourselves are still children in many respects and still need a vast amount of education.

-C. G. Jung, from his essay, The Development of Personality found here.

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

The Allman Brothers Band...............One Way Out

Wisdom..........................

via

Picasso...........................

Harlequin with Glass                  1905

Portrait of Madame Canals               1905

The Accordionist                     1911

Nude in a Black Chair                1932

 When we think of Picasso we imagine Cubist tours de force like Guernica and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, where horses have their heads turned around backward and young women pose with two eyes on one side of their faces. But the young Pablo used to plant himself in the Louvre before pure representational masterpieces by Rembrandt and Leonardo and copy them stroke for stroke.

-Steven Pressfield, from here

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

     I looked at my friend and saw a man who had robbed me.  Deeply disturbing.  The ultimate in rejection.

-Dick Francis,  High Stakes

Prefering warmth to cold.......................

      A modest understanding of the dynamics of climactic change in past societies could well prove useful in the event that climates continue to fluctuate.  If you know that a drop of one degree Centigrade on average reduces the growing season by three to four weeks and shaves five hundred feet off of the maximum elevation that crops can be grown, then you know something about the boundary conditions that will confine people's actions in the future.  You can use this knowledge to forecast changes in everything from grain prices to land values.  You may even be able to draw informed conclusions about the likely impact of falling temperatures on real income and political stability.  In the past, governments have been overthrown when crop failures over several years raised food prices and shrank disposable incomes.

     For example, it is no coincidence that the seventeenth century, the coldest in the modern period, was also a period of revolution worldwide.  A hidden megapolitical cause of this unhappiness was sharply colder weather.  It was so cold, in fact, that wine froze on the "Sun King's" table at Versailles.  Shortened growing season produced crop failures and undermined real income.  Because of the colder weather, prosperity began to wind down into a long global depression that began around 1620.  It proved drastically destabilizing.  The economic crisis of the seventeenth century led to the world being overwhelmed by rebellions, many clustering in 1648, exactly two hundred years before another and more famous cycle of rebellions.  Between 1640 and 1650, there were rebellions in Ireland, Scotland, England, Portugal, Catalonia, France, Moscow, Naples, Sicily, Brazil, Bohemia, Ukraine, Austria, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Turkey.  Even China and Japan were swept by unrest.

-James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

John Constable.......................

Stonehenge       Watercolor         1835

 The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period.

the best possible time.......................

 The future is disorder.  A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs.  It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

-Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

Feels about right..................

 

via

Feels about right too..............

 Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going.

-Joseph Schumpeter

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

The Main Ingredient........Everybody Plays The Fool

this cacophonous profusion....................

      Corporeal life is indeed difficult.  To identify with the sheer physicality of one's flesh may well seem lunatic.  The body is an imperfect and breakable entity vulnerable to a thousand and one insults—to scars and the scorn of others, to disease, decay, and death.  And the material world that our body inhabits is hardly a gentle place.  The shuddering beauty of this biosphere is bristling with thorns: generosity and abundance often seem scant ingredients compared with prevalence of predation, sudden pain, and racking loss.  Carnally embedded in the depths of this cacophonous profusion of forms, we commonly can't even predict just what's lurking behind the near boulder, let alone get enough distance to fathom and figure out all the workings of this world.  We simply can't get it under our control. . . .Only by welcoming uncertainty from the get-go can we acclimate ourselves to the shattering wonder that enfolds us.  This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos.

-David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

Ten life lessons from George Carlin....

thanks Chris

A healthier trend....................

 Globalization is starting to take shape around the globe in a whole new form.  Reshoring of manufacturing was beginning before COVID but was accelerated by it.  According to the capital managers at BlackRock, the last 30 years of globalization are being proven a mistake.  Fears of overseas turmoil creating domestic economic turmoil makes U.S. production reshoring a national imperative. More and more this mantra will be true:  If you want to sell in the U.S., you must make it in the U.S.

-Rick Platt

the course of history....................

 CHANGES IN THE TECHNIQUE OF WAR HAVE HAD more influence upon the course of history than is supposed by those whose attention is mainly centred upon economic causation. There has been, since the beginning of organized fighting, an oscillation between superiority of the defensive and superiority of the offensive. Broadly speaking, when the defensive is strong civilization makes progress, and when the offensive is strong men revert towards barbarism. Another oscillation has been between the importance of mere numbers and the importance of skill and elaborate equipment. In the Middle Ages, the knight in armour was an expensive unit, and the world was aristocratic; gunpowder abolished chivalry, and led by slow stages to citizen armies and democracy.

-Bertrand Russell, as extracted from this 1936 essay

Checking in........................

 ............................with Cardinal Richelieu on the goings-on in the Ukraine:

You solicited my advice, Spengler, because you cannot bear the self-satisfied moralizing of the well-meaning people who set this tragedy into motion, and you are appalled by men of action who clean up the mess left by practitioners of the politics of virtue. Get a stronger stomach if you want to see under the surface of history – including the history that is unfolding before your squeamish eyes.

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

R.E.M.............................................Everybody Hurts

 

When your day is long
And the night, the night is yours alone
When you're sure you've had enough
Of this life, well hang on

Damn good question...........

 Why have our recent presidents insisted on being “transformative”? Nowhere do I find that Americans crave radical cosmetic surgery every four years—we just expect our leaders to take out the garbage. Yet between election and inauguration, the candidate who appeared to be a humble fellow-citizen on the campaign trail assumes the trappings of a divine emperor, expecting, with the wave of a mighty hand, to transform the world.

-Martin Gurri, as culled from here

Turner.............................

A Storm (Shipwreck)    Watercolor on paper       1823

 It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create.

-Joseph Mallord William Turner

Be hopeful in bad times................

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.

-Howard Zinn, as culled from here

Paul Cezanne...........................

 

The Clockmaker     Oil on Canvass    Circa 1896

"The awareness of our own strength makes us modest."

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

Jim Croce............Tomorow's Gonna Be A Brighter Day

Well, there's something that I've got to tell you
Yes I've got something on my mind
But words come hard
When your lying in my arms
And when I'm looking deep into your eyes
But there's truth and consolation
And what I'm trying to say
Is that nobody ever had a rainbow baby
Until he had the rain

Nevermind..................................

...............Income taxes aren't due until Monday the 18th!  Why you ask?   The answer is simple. The deadline to file federal taxes is on Monday, April 18, this year because the Internal Revenue Service’s District of Columbia offices will be closed on Friday, April 15, in observance of the locally recognized Emancipation Day.  The D.C. public holiday technically falls on Saturday, April 16, but is observed by the government on the closest weekday when it falls on a weekend. 

Walking around the yard............

first dandelions of the year

Good showing by the PJMs this year

Our favorite magnolia tree suffered from a late freeze last year. 
We are hopeful for this year.

Most of the neighbors are friendly

Peonies are getting ready

It has been a good daffodil year

 

Note the pollenator

Checking in..............................

 .........................with Seneca:

Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

If you live in harmony with nature you will never be poor; if you live according what others think, you will never be rich.

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.

Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.

Everyone prefers belief to the exercise of judgement.

What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

Important to remember..................

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

Fleetwood Mac........................................The Ghost

 

Checking in................

.......................with Tim Harford.  Some snippets from The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics: 

Much of what we think of as cultural differences turn out to be differences in income.

It’s a rather beautiful discovery: in a world where so many people seem to hold extreme views with strident certainty, you can deflate somebody’s overconfidence and moderate their politics simply by asking them to explain the details. Next time you’re in a politically heated argument, try asking your interlocutor not to justify herself, but simply to explain the policy in question.

A hammer looks like a useful tool to a carpenter; the nail has a different impression altogether.

Ten rules of thumb are still a lot for anyone to remember, so perhaps I should try to make things simpler. I realize that these suggestions have a common thread—a golden rule, if you like. Be curious.

So the problem is not the algorithms, or the big datasets. The problem is a lack of scrutiny, transparency, and debate.

But we can and should remember to ask who or what might be missing from the data we’re being told about.

trust is easy to throw away and hard to regain.

Neuroscientific studies suggest that the brain responds in much the same anxious way to facts that threaten our preconceptions as it does to wild animals that threaten our lives.

I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.

Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy, too.

The good stories are everywhere. They are not made memorable by their rarity; they are made forgettable by their ubiquity.

Van Gogh...................

Cafe Terrace at Night   Oil on Canvass    1888

 

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.”

-Vincent van Gogh

On being unmoored..............

      It is impossible to be one's own pope.  For some, the moral life becomes an endless, solipistic quest to figure out "what my true self stands for."  Many feel they have to reinvent the moral wheel daily, which is the height of arrogance, not to mention utterly exhausting.  Still others externalize all of the conscience's furies, directing them against the faults of others or those of social and political systems.  Worse, too many simply learn to tune out the conscience's voice, now lowered to a murmur for lack of authoritative supports.

     The think-for-yourself culture celebrates all of these groups for their "free minds."  Yet we know that most people sway, feather-like, to the prevailing winds of news and social media, fashion and fadism, public and "expert" opinion, P.R. and propaganda.  Large corporations, especially, what nothing more than for our minds to be independent—that is, unmoored from absolute, unbendable moral authorities that might challenge corporate agendas.  And how much the better for the powers that be if pliant consumers and docile workers fancy themselves rebels and radicals.

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

What a difference a year makes............

      The ethos, whatever its general benefits was not one that the newly arrived Oscar Wilde found immediately congenital.  At nine he was almost a full year younger than the designated entrance age.  And there was little in his character that suited him to the rough-and-tumble of boarding school life.  Slight, imaginative, independent, and dreamy, he drifted to the edge of things.  He made no firm friends.  Games—the great motor of schoolboy existence—held no interest for him ("I never like to kick or be kicked," he claimed).  Work, too, at first failed to engage his energies.  He distinguished himself mainly by being hopeless in mathematics.

-Matthew Sturgis, Oscar Wilde: A Life

Checking in..................................

 ......................with Oscar Wilde:

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.

It is only intellectually lost who ever argue.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

more  here

On the value of writing............

 Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test.

-Paul Graham, from this essay

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

Neil Young..........................................Heart Of Gold

 

Difficult though.....................

 

Paint the stars................

Starry Night Over the Rhone   Oil on canvass    1888

 When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion, then I go out and paint the stars.

-Vincent van Gogh

The only unbreakable law...................

..............is the law of unintended consequences.  Having said that, rent control is always a bad idea.  Ok, so I'm a real estate investor and may be a tad biased.  Don't take my word for it.  Check out the latest study:

"Thus, to the extent that rent control is intended to transfer wealth from high-income to low-income households, the realized impact of the law was the opposite of its intention."

Still one of the all-time great movies...

In that way, Meatballs is exactly like life, or at least life at a summer camp. There is no script. There is no structured three-act story with a perfect ending. It’s a hot mess of half-remembered snippets, tales that are likely exaggerated, and a whole lot of stupid antics in-between that go nowhere.

       

via

In accord.................

 Modern civilization is all about conquering space: winning territory in geopolitical contests, building ingenious contraptions and monuments to this ingenuity, growing and prospering economically.  It seeks relentlessly to convert time, priced like any other commodity into achievements in space.  But, "the danger begins," Heschel worried, "when gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time."  In that realm, "the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord."

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

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

Johnny Nash.............................I Can See Clearly Now

The day...........................................

 .............................the dinosaurs died.

Ripens..........................

 It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.

-Vincent Van Gogh

On curiosity......................

 Perhaps there is no better skill to have and master than the skill of curiosity. . . . Learning requires you being open, interested, and ready to lean into differences. It requires surrendering being judgmental. It is impossible to be curious and judgmental at the same time. Curiosity is different than just asking a lot of questions. Curiosity is a deeper more soulful interest. People who are genuinely curious ask great questions because it originates from an authentic place. Asking questions without curiosity is just obnoxious.

-Mike Staver, from here

Licking County, Ohio sure makes it easy.........

 ............................to vote early.  No line, no waiting.  Plus, a paper ballot is created!

The hopeful.............................

..................birth of a sub-division:  Episode 19

At the top of the aerial photo is Phase 1.  Completed in early December, the builder (D. R. Horton) recently completed the purchase of all 49 developed lots. If you squint your eyes, you may notice they have about 15 houses under construction.  The bottom portion of the aerial photo shows the early days of the 64 lots in Phase 2.  Progress.

Checking in with Martin Gurri...........

 In a magnificently ironic moment, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, referred to Mount Rushmore with reverence during his address to the U.S. Congress. Every one of the four presidents carved on that mountain has had his statue toppled and his name removed from some elite institution. Few right-thinking U.S. politicians would bring up their names today. Zelensky knows what so many of us have forgotten: That this is a war of systems as well as nations, and that the alternative to American democracy isn’t utopia but Putin and gangsterism. We should internalize this truth before the Ukrainian dead rise from their graves to remind us of it.

-as culled from here

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

Johnny Cash..........................A Thing Called Love

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

      Salmon Portland Chase never liked his name.  In his early twenties, Chase wrote to a college classmate that he was thinking of changing his "awkward, fishy name" to something more impressive, like Spencer Payne Cheyce.  Five years later, he had another idea:  Samuel Paca Chase, taking the names of one of the early justices of the Supreme Court, Samuel Chase, whom Chase believed was a distant relation, and William Paca, another signatory of the Declaration of Independence, apparently simply because his last name started with P.  During the Civil War, when an admirer wrote that he was thinking of naming his son Salmon Portland, Chase replied that he "had the misfortune to be born about a year after my uncle Salmon Chase died at Portland; and to have a sort of monument to his memory made of me by giving me the name of Salmon Portland."  His uncle "was an excellent man and Portland a very respectable city, but somehow I never liked the name derived from them."  Chase urged the father to think of "the feelings of your boy, fifteen years hence or twenty," and to find a better name.

-Walter Stahr, Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival

Wisdom.......................

 21. Practise observing your moods, rather than being them.

-from this list from Nicholas Bate

Two realms.....................

 In the realm of tradition, truth is something that precedes individual human beings, something we inherit and must hand down, in turn.  We can discover truth and reason about it, to be sure, but we can't change it.  In the realm of progress, however, truth is what individuals or groups can articulate or build on their own, through scientific inquiry and their acts in history.  Truth thus becomes an ongoing project, a malleable thing.  In our realm of progress, tradition is viewed as not only antiquated and inefficient, but as an impediment to achievement.

     But what if that confidence of the modern world is an illusion, the product of a determined resolution not to confront the fundamental dilemmas of what it means to be fully human?  Or what if beneath the moderns' complacency lurks a deep soul-soreness?

     Pick your favorite negatively trending social indicator—loneliness, alienation, addiction, polarization, etc.—and the dire message is the same: the realm of progress can't fulfill our soul's yearning or satisfy our urge to put ourselves right with the sacred.

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

About history.......................

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The truth of this has been tested.............

via 

Rolling............................

The Marshall Tucker Band..................24 Hours At A Time