melting......................

      America, which survived a gory civil war among political and geographical factions, has become so far one of history's few exceptions.  The ultimate rationale of America's unique Constitution led Americans eventually to define themselves by their shared values, not by their inconsequential appearances.  Eventually, most who were willing to give up their prior identities and assume a new American persona were accepted as Americans.  The United States has always cherished its universally applicable melting-pot ethos of e pluribus unum—of blending diverse peoples into one through assimilation, integration, and inter-marriage in the manner that diverse colonies united to become one nation.

-Victor Davis Hanson:  The Dying Citizen

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

Three Dog Night.................Freedom For The Stallion

 

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

 To live through the last two years and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous, isn’t it?

-Morgan Housel, from this "Endless Uncertainty" post

Prerogatives..................

 Fred Siegel pointed out how the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer some seventy years ago could see the future contours of a working class regulated, controlled, and yet ridiculed by a new intellectual and bureaucratic elite.

      "The masses are on the way out," he wrote.  "The [elites] are finally catching up with us.  We can hear the swish of leather as the saddles are heaved on our backs.  The intellectuals, and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us."  Hoffer foresaw the New Class that would try to govern the working people much as the colonial officials governed the natives.  "They are," he wrote, "an army of scribes clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated.

-Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen:  How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

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

..................................Eric Hoffer:

 It's disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals... You take a conventional man of action, and he's satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn't want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there's soul-raping going on.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.

In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists.

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.

The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than of deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.

Please...........................

 So let’s stop the hyperventilation and get back to democracy. Persuade people, if you can. Get them out to vote. Stop demonizing those you disagree with and compromise with them in office, however difficult that may be. What Roe did was kickstart the extreme cultural polarization that has defined and blighted the last few decades of American politics. Maybe the end of Roe can mark the beginning of a return to living together, and negotiating a way to make that bearable.

The center, in other words, is now wide open. Will anyone — anyone — occupy it?

-Andrew Sullivan, from here

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

Life Magazine's   April 14, 1972 isssue

Still true seventy years later.........

 To frame a philosophy capable of coping with men intoxicated with the prospect of almost unlimited power and also with the apathy of the powerless is the most pressing task of our time.

-Bertrand Russell

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

J.J. Cale.....................................Call Me The Breeze

 

Wars.......................

      So wars: what does it mean to win, what does it mean to lose?  And the wars, of course, against yourself.  I certainly am always at war one way or another with myself, and some of them are wars I must fight to try to slay the demons, to kill the dragon, to lay the ghost to rest.  But there are other wars you fight with yourself to be more, to do more that you have it in you really to do or to be.  I think of that wonderful line from one of the poems of my  beloved Gerard Manley Hopkins whare he says, "My own heart let me more have pity on."  My own heart let me more have pity on.  That's a lovely phrase.  Be merciful to yourself, stop fighting yourself quite so much.  Maybe what you are asking of yourself, what you're driving yourself to do or to be, what you put a gun to your own back to make yourself do, is something at this point you needn't have to think about doing.  So, think back at the end of the day to the wars you're involved in.  How are they going?

Frederick Buechner,  The Remarkable Ordinary

hereafter kind...................

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,

Charitable; not live this tormented mind

With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get

By groping round my comfortless, than blind

Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies

Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

An early disbelief in democracy..........

      The word "aristocracy" tends to be used rather loosely.  In the modern world, it is calculated by multiplying wealth by snobbery.  During the early republic, on the other hand, it reflected the division of society into distinct ranks.  Until the Revolution, wrote historian Bernard Bailyn, Americans had assumed "that a healthy society was a hierarchical society in which it was natural for some to be rich and some poor, some honored and some obscure, some powerful and some weak."  Perhaps most important, "it was believed that superiority was unitary, that the attributes of the favored—wealth, wisdom, power—had a natural affinity to each other, and hence that political leadership would naturally rest in the hands of social leaders."  In New York in particular, these natural leaders came from a closed set of families distinguished by an inherited prestige. . . .

     Property requirements for suffrage under New York's constitution of 1777 hardened the culture of rank into law.  Two distinct levels of wealth were required to vote: one for the state assembly, and a second and higher level for the state senators and governor—establishing a "three-tiered scaffolding of society," as Bruegel writes.  In 1790, four of ten adult white men could not cast a ballot of any kind, in some places only one out of four could vote for the assembly, and one out of five for governor.

-T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

Pretty sure this applies........................

..................to more than investing: 

It’s uncomfortable to say “I don’t know” but sometimes when it comes to investing that’s the safest place to be.

-Ben Carlson, from here

Opening paragraphs

 Marriage was once represented as a field of battle rather than a bed of roses, and perhaps there are many who may still support this view; but just as Dr Maturin had made a far more unsuitable match than most, so he set about dealing with the situation in a far more compendious, peaceable and efficacious way than the great majority of husbands.

-Patrick O'Brian, The Ionian Mission

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

 

Some questions never go out of style.  Note the price.

One trait Reagan and Trump..................

.................................shared:  they understood the power of positive psychology and unleashed it.

 If you thought that the economic news was crazy during the first half of 2022, just wait until we get to the second half.  So many of the problems that we are experiencing now are going to continue to intensify, and Americans are becoming more pessimistic about economic conditions with each passing day.  In fact, as you will see below, a whopping 85 percent of us believe that it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that the economy will go through a recession at some point during the next year.  Of course the truth is that if all we have to suffer through is a “recession”, we would be extremely fortunate.  Our leaders have lost control of the economy, and many of us are extremely concerned about what is coming next. 

-from this Zero Hedge post

Incomparable.................

   more fun here

Rising........................

 Think about that for a minute. The worst decade [the 70's] since the Great Depression, one defined by high prices, poor equity and bond returns, and an overall malaise led to the creation of four of the strongest businesses this country has ever seen and the dynamic industry that shaped the American economy over the past four decades.

It’s likely still too early to even be asking this question, but are we going to endure a repeat of the 1970’s? I don’t believe so, but even if we do, there will be opportunities to rise from the fall. There always are.

-Ted Lamade, from this post

Comprehensive.............

 

via

the inward detachment............

 “To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery (the media) that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed”

-Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 2: Perspectives of World History  (1928)

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

Bruce Springsteen.....................................The Rising

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

 ...................of a subdivision:  Episode 22

Faithful readers will recall that we completed developed the 49 lots in Phase 1 of Conor's Pass sub-division late last fall.  This past April we sold all of the lots to D. R. Horton, who is busily constructing houses on those lots.  Horton asked us to start the 64 lot Phase 2 as soon as possible.  While the weather could have been more cooperative, we are making progress.  In a perfect world, we will be done laying the sanitary sewer mains next week.  

The top of the photo shows the houses coming out
of the ground in Phase 1.  Phase 2 work is at the bottom
of the photo

On our active imaginations...........

 The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

-Friedrich August von Hayek

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

........................................Louis L'Amour 

Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential.  One has only so much time in this world, so devote it to the work and the people most important to you, to those you love and things that matter. One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn't really like or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else.

A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

“Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, "This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow.

The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.

Actually, all education is self-education.  A teacher is only a guide to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you an education.  What you receive is like the outlines in a child's coloring book.  You must fill in the colors yourself.

The sunset was spectacular.  The sky streaked itself with rose and the region of the sun became an indescribable glory.  All my life I have used words, and yet I find times when they are totally inadequate.

Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.

The Wilds..................................

Not too long ago, my Sweetie and I took a day off and communed with the wild animals at the Wilds in Cumberland, Ohio.  Occupying more than 10,000 acres of reclaimed coal strip mines, The Wilds is a jewel worth visiting.  Just as a head's up: go after mid-May.  They keep the giraffes indoors until the weather gets into the 60's.

View from our Yurt's porch

Inside of "our" Yurt

Bactrian Camel

Persian Onager

A hillside of Sichuan Takins

Can't tell my rhinos apart

Sichuan Takin

Rhinos

More rhinos

some variety of deer

Simitar-Horned Oryx

Cheetahs

even more cheetahs

Grevy's Zebra

                                                                                             

Elands

African Painted Dogs

When we arrived home, the rookie camera operator shot these guys in the back yard:

Ah, experts.......................

 But there are mistakes that only an expert can make. Errors – often catastrophic – that novices aren’t smart enough to make because they lack the information and experience needed to try to exploit an opportunity that doesn’t exist.

-Morgan Housel, from here

Ah, complexity..............

 Everywhere you look in the universe, you see systems attaining greater complexity as they evolve.  This is true in astrophysics.  It is true of a puddle.  Leave rainwater alone in a low spot and it will grow more complex.  Advanced systems of every variety are complex adaptive systems without an authority in charge.  Every complex system in nature, of which the market economy is the most evident social manifestation, depends upon dispersed capabilities.  Systems that work most effectively under the widest range of conditions depend for their resilience upon spontaneous order that accommodates novel possibilities.  Life itself is such a complex system.  Billions of potential combinations of genes produce a single human individual.  Sorting among them would confound any bureaucracy.

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

Truth telling.........................

 My theory is that money spent on books and music is never wasted.

Some words to live by...............

 He has sniffed out interesting data, but some of it does not smell right to me.

-Arnold Kling, as cut and pasted from here

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

The soundtrack from American Graffiti

 

More fun with the language..........

 The good-intentions industry does seem especially busy these days, there being so much that is wrong with the world, a point on which everyone agrees while thinking to themselves of different wrongs.

-as taken from this essay on the New Language Police

From the always readable Chris Lynch.............

      The slogan for the year 2022 should be "If Ayn Rand and George Orwell had a baby".

      There's roughly 6 billion people in the world. You'd go crazy if you tried to make all their problems your own. Yet that's exactly what we often emotionally do when watching or reading "the news." Do yourself a favor - ignore the news and work on your own problems and issues. And when possible help out your friends, family and those around you. You'll be much happier for the change.

     Local Socrates would be a good name for a band or backhanded insult to the guy at the bar who has an opinion on every subject.

     Would be interesting to see a list of A-list celebrities and billionaires who attended the Kentucky Derby on Saturday and then the F1 race in Miami on Sunday traveling to both by private jet. Then to take that list to see what those people had to say publicly about climate change in the past.

     The word for the day is "Akrasia" - a Greek word translated as a "weakness of will" but in practice means to know what should be done but still not doing it. I like this word.

-more fun here

If I could have after-dinner cigars and drinks........

 .................with ten people I only know from the Intertunnel, Martin Gurri would be on the list.

And, when you think about it, the news media itself is something like an anxiety dream being dreamed by the articulate classes. Nobody should confuse the news with reality. Attention is fixed steadily on the predatory violence of the human animal, the record of war, crime and exploitation: with journalism, we are always a moment away from snapping awake, screaming. Sometime during the Trump years, that mood swallowed the internet. Once the gathering place of a peasant revolt, the web took on the rage, pettiness and mendacity of elite media and has since degenerated into the dictatorship of the rant.

-Martin Gurri, as culled from here

Easy to miss............................

     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 communication 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

A pilgrim on a journey.......................

      A loud, overcrowded, hyperactive life is the antithesis of the listening life. The hyperactive life is so often trying to prove its worth, make its mark, and justify its existence. The listening life waits, quietly and humbly, for God to make his mark on us. 

       John Coltrane, legendary jazz saxophonist, made his mark on the jazz world by improvising at breakneck speed. No one had ever seen a musician who could play and move his fingers so feverishly. Soon he was playing gigs with the superstars of his day and changing the way people understood the genre. Unfortunately, much of the frenzy that marked Coltrane's style was the result of the substances in his system. In 1957, his system ravaged by drugs and alcohol, and his career and life on the brink of collapse, Coltrane went to his mother's house and sought God in the quiet of his room. According to pastor and jazz aficionado Robert Gelinas, "Four days later, he emerged a changed man, for—according to him—God had met him in a most unusual way. It was a sound, a droning resonance, a reverberation, unlike anything he had ever heard." God's presence came to John Coltrane as a sound. 

      Not only did this divine groove change his life, it changed the way he played. The frantic improvisation was replaced by a slow, soulful style, in which Coltrane listened for the God sound to come again and tried to replicate it on his sax. Gelinas explains that "he came to believe that if he could play that sound for others, the they, too, could experience what he had experienced during those four days in his bedroom. For the rest of his life, Coltrane sought to find that music that had healed him, and while he was never able to rediscover it, he recorded one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, A Love Supreme,  during this musical pilgrimage.  The four parts of A Love Supreme follow a pilgrim on his journey toward God.

-Adam S. McHugh, The Listening Life

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

      They came to learn his secrets.  Well before the appointed hour of two o'clock in the afternoon of November 12, 1877, hundreds of spectators pushed into a courtroom in lower Manhattan.  They included friends and relatives of the contestants, of course, as well as leading lawyers who wished to observe the forensic skills of the famous attorneys who would try the case.  But most of the teeming mass of men and women—many fashionably dressed, crowded in until they were packed against the back wall—wanted to hear the details of the life of the richest man the United States had ever seen.  The trial over the will of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the famous, notorious Commodore, was about to begin.

-T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

New Amsterdam.............................

  

  On May 27, 1794, Phebe gave birth to her fourth child.  She underscored the sense of continuity by naming him Cornelius, too, though they called the boy Cornele.  She cooed over him in English.  Phebe had first met her husband in Port Richmond, a heavily Dutch village, where she had been working as a servant in the home of a minister, but she herself came from an old English family in New Jersey.

     In the town of New York this sort of intermarriage surprised no one.  There the Dutch has fallen to less than half the population as early as 1720; now they were less a minority than an interbred strand among its 33,000 residents.  As early as the rule of Petrus Stuyvesant in 1647, the village then named New Amsterdam had grown into a rather cosmopolitan place.  Stuyvesant governed under the authority of the Dutch West India Company, created to mobilize merchant capital to advance Dutch interests in the New World.  Under his administration, the little seaport came to reflect the commercial orientation of the Netherlands, the most industrious nation of seventeenth-century Europe.  As in the mother country, the primacy of trade, foreign trade in particular, had fostered a tolerance of strangers and disparate creeds (at a time when being a Quaker was a hanging offence in Massachusetts), and that tradition persisted.

-T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon:  The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

Cézanne.........................

 

The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Événement”, 1866

 France in Cézanne's time was in a state of turmoil that extended into every sphere of life.  Politically the nation shifted dramatically from republic to dictatorship and back to republic.  In 1851, the elected President of the Second Republic, Louis Napoleon, assumed the title of Emperor.  In many ways he was an enlightened ruler, and his reign was prosperous.  He built up an extensive railroad system, he had Paris redesigned with broad boulevards and spacious plazas, and he arranged international expositions to display the remarkable achievements in science and engineering.  The artistic world flourished, too, under the leadership of such creative personalities as the composers  Offerback and Gounod, the novelists Flaubert, Merimee and George Sand, and painters Delacroix, Ingres, Daumier, Courbet and the revolutionary Manet.

     But Louis Napoleon's reign came to a disastrous end in 1870 when he declared war on Prussia and was humiliated by a swift defeat.  A period of near anarchy followed.  When peace was restored, the new Republican government was forced to contend with political instability and shattering scandals abroad and at home. 

     Though Cézanne lived in this work, he was never a part of it.

-The Time-Life Library, The World of Cezanne: 1839-1906

Harder...................

 The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it is to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

-Nassim Taleb

Money...........................

. . .  I think independence is one of the only ways money can make you happier. The trick is realizing that the only way to maintain independence is if your appetite for stuff – including status – can be satiated. The goalpost has to stop moving; the expectations have to remain in check. Otherwise money has a tendency to be a liability masquerading as an asset, controlling you more than you use it to live a better life.

-Morgan Housel, from this post on the quick disappearance of the once unfathomable wealth of Cornelius Vanderbilt 

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

 ..............of a sub-division:  Episode 21

Having sold all 49 of the lots in Phase 1 of Conor's Pass sub-division, we responded by beginning the 64 lot Phase 2.  The weather has been iffy and wet, but it's April in Ohio, expecting anything different would be silly.  Still progress is being made:

Topsoil stripped and building pads being created

Different soil types needed in different places

A borrow pit, source of compactible soil

this non-compactible topsoil will fill the borrow pit

Next step is to connect to the main sanitary sewer trunk line

The sewer trunk line is near the Licking River.  Need to lose
the water before we can connect.

Getting there

No supply chain issues for the sewer structures this year

Color me confused........................

 Pundits will tell you there is a 40% chance of just about anything occurring at any moment.

The one true bright spot with our current economy is that it's a level playing field—nobody has a clue what is going on.  Ben Carlson offers his take, leading with this quote from the fairly smart and fairly well-read Charlie Munger: "If you’re not a little confused by what’s going on you don’t understand it. We’re in unchartered territory.”

A forever question.............................

 

Never saw it coming.....................

 The Economist – a magazine I admire – publishes a forecast of the year ahead each January. Its January 2020 issue does not mention a single word about Covid. Its January 2022 issue does not mention a single word about Russia invading Ukraine. That’s not a criticism – both events were impossible to know when the magazines were likely planned in November and written in December each year. But that’s the point: The biggest news, the biggest risks, the most consequential events, are always what you don’t see coming.

-Morgan Housel, as culled from here

A question like this.....................

 ......is just one of many reasons to follow Martin Gurri.  In this instance, he is discussing sex and pronouns:

 I mean, can anyone conjure up a romantic vision of Greta Thunberg?

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

 ...............of a sub-division:  Episode 20

Our production builder, D. R. Horton, continues to make great progress in increasing housing availability in Newark and Licking County.  These houses hit the market last week.  Sources say that three are already sold.

A veneer really......................

 Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population.  One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum.

-C. G. Jung, from his 1957 work, The Undiscovered Self