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

 .........................of a sub-division:

       Episode 25:  Phase Two water line installation.

The blue pipe is the water main.  All that pipe will be in the
ground today, we hope.

One pipe at a time

Making a solid, leak-proof connection between pipes

Beginning the tap for the service lateral

Unrolling the 3/4" copper water service line

setting the shut-off valve

One water lateral installed.  Next......

Meanwhile, back in Phase One:

Phase One from a distance.  Houses sprouting everywhere

All this since February

Your basic new house.  Awaiting the drywallers

"Sold".  My favorite sign

demand...........................

 War has long been a rite of passage, with new generations feeling a need to prove their courage and earn the right to supplant their elders.  Clay's generation grew up on the hero tales of the American Revolution—the stories of boldness in the political arena and valor on the battlefield.  Often implicit in the stories, as in the stories of every generation of elders, was skepticism that the younger generation had what it took to match the elders' feats.  Where was the George Washington of the younger set, the general who could smite the British as Washington had done at Yorktown?  Where were the Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, whose words inspired a nation and brought down an empire?  Where were the James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the framers of a new government for a new nation?

     Henry Clay had heard the stories and felt the skepticism.  He was burdened with no conspicuous personal sense of inferiority, but he reckoned that an ambitious young politician could do worse than demand that the country complete the work commenced by the generation of the founders.

-H. W. Brands,  Heirs of the Founders:  The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster

A paean to..................

........................................ Booker T. Jones.

 

concentrated, coherent, and connected.....

 It is almost a physical law: What is bloated beyond its proportions inevitably collapses. The mind must not wander from goal to goal, or be distracted by success from its sense of purpose and proportion. What is concentrated, coherent, and connected to its past has power. What is dissipated, divided, and distended rots and falls to the ground. The bigger it bloats, the harder it falls.

-Robert Greene, 48 Laws of Power

Mania..............................

      All the major troubles we have had in the last half century have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania.

-Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History

Parenting advice........................

 ...............................from Louis L'Amour:

     From earliest childhood she had been taught to accept responsibility, and to make her own decisions and abide by them.  "Every youngster wants to be grown-up," her father had said, "but the difference between a child and an adult is not years, but rather it's a willingness to accept responsibility, to be responsible for one's own actions.

-as culled from his book, Flint

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

Argent..................................Hold Your Head Up

a resurgent romantic revolution....

      Childhood itself is the quintessential Romanticism, and every child needs to be allowed to live in that state of grace, but wider society also needs the romance of childhood for its very creativity, requiring the reckless rapture of the puer* figure, the eternal child within culture, whose incandescence must be tended and attended to, so that its light can flare in the storyteller or dancer, so that the risk-taking, anarchic and flame-like quality, the eternal return of the great romance of childhood which exists within us all, can flame in a resurgent romantic revolution.  The chill of our utilitarian age needs that fire.

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood

*in case you are wondering about the choice of this word, go here.

simple..................

       But allow me to let you in on a secret:  Life is negotiation.

      The majority of the interactions we have at work and at home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a simple, animalistic urge:  I want.

-Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

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

 .........................with Dan Sullivan:

The only way to make your present better is by making your future bigger.

Personal confidence comes from making progress toward goals that are far bigger than your present capabilities.

Your eyes only see and your ears only hear what your brain is looking at

. . .first to sell yourself on the vision, because you can't sell other people unless you're sold yourself.

If you have enough money to solve a problem, then you don't have a problem.

All progress starts by telling the truth.

Always make your learning greater than your experience.

Who do you want to be a hero to?

The lazy way.................

.........................to an awesome life:

 As Eric Hoffer once said, “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.” Sometimes it’s quite deliberate but more often it’s unconscious. We’re just wired for it. This is what it means when we say humans are a social species. . . .

Peer pressure isn’t good or bad – your peers are. If you moved your troubled teen to a new high school filled with well-behaved students, would you be hoping your child was immune to peer pressure — or very susceptible? . . .

We’re never utterly autonomous. We’re social creatures. Why not leverage our fundamental nature rather than (often futilely) resisting it? Sometimes we’re weak on our own but groups are strong. We need others to help us do the right thing, even with individual goals. The logical conclusion is to be a part of a group where your desired reputation aligns with who you want to be as a person.

-Eric Barker

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

Don McLean...................................American Pie

On philosophers................

 PHILOSOPHY being nothing else but the study of Wisdom and Truth, it may with reason be expected, that those who have spent most Time and Pains in it should enjoy a greater calm and serenity of Mind, a greater clearness and evidence of Knowledge, and be less disturbed with Doubts and Difficulties than other Men. Yet so it is we see the Illiterate Bulk of Mankind that walk the High-ro.ad of plain, common Sense, and are governed by the Dictates of Nature, for the most part easy and undisturbed. To them nothing that's familiar appears unaccountable or difficult to comprehend. They complain not of any want of Evidence in their Senses, and are out of all danger of becoming Sceptics. But no sooner do we depart from Sense and Instinct to follow the Light of a Superior Principle, to reason, meditate, and reflect on the Nature of Things, but a thousand Scruples spring up in our Minds, concerning those Things which before we seemed fully to comprehend. Prejudices and Errors of Sense do from all Parts discover themselves to our view; and endeavouring to correct these by Reason we are insensibly drawn into uncouth Paradoxes, Difficulties, and Inconsistencies, which multiply and grow upon us as we advance in Speculation; till at length, having wander'd through many intricate Mazes, we find our selves just where we were, or, which is worse, sit down in a forlorn Scepticism.

-George Berkeley

Happy 4th of July..............

 

Already has...........................

 

Enjoying the weekend...................

 

via

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

............... Growing up, this was the best form of self-help.  Miss those days.

Maximize........................

      For thousands of years, the primary goal of any ruler was to maximize his own wealth.  The divine right of kings yielded only under the greatest of duress, as occurred at Runnymede in 1215.  Premodern Europe was a maelstrom of constant warfare among small states—"nation" is too good a word to describe all but the largest.  Estimates vary, but in the medieval period, as many as a thousand sovereign principalities were scattered across the continent.  The clever prince or duke learned that if he taxed laborers and merchants too heavily, they were liable to take their business a few miles up the road, where levies lay lighter on the purse.

     Slowly, rulers began to identify their own well-being with that of their subjects and learned not to pluck too many feathers from the goose.  States that neither taxed their subjects too heavily nor seized their property too often found themselves with fuller treasuries and larger armies than states that did.  Nations that could not refrain from plundering their own subjects grew weaker, and, in many cases, disappeared.  Gradually, through this Darwinian process, states with enlightened taxation, rule of law, and secure property rights prospered and prevailed over their less advanced neighbors, and Europe became a good place to get rich.

-William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty: How The Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created

Part of the fabric...............

       Acquisitiveness is a universal phenomenon, among animals as well as human beings, children as well as adults, primitive peoples as well as those culturally advanced.  It is rooted in the instinct of self-preservation, but it also has an important psychological dimension in that it enhances feelings of self-assurance and competence.  Its objects are, in the first place, material goods, but it also has an incorporeal aspect, embracing ideas, artistic creations, inventions, and even the very space that surrounds us.  Claims to exclusive use are especially emphatic in respect to land with which humans are linked by mystic bonds.  The notion of primitive communism has not basis in fact: it is simply the ancient—and, apparently, indestructible—myth of the Golden Age dressed up in modern pseudo-scientific language.  Anthropology has not knowledge of societies ignorant of property rights: in the words of E. A. Hoebel cited above, "property is as ubiquitous as man, a part of the basic fabric of all society."  Which means, to employ Aristotelian terminology, that it is not merely a "legal" or "conventional" but a "natural" institution.  As such it is no more a subject of moralizing (unless it be for its excesses) than mortality or any other aspect of existence over which humans have at best minimal control.

-Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom

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

Climax........................................Precious and Few

Words matter.................

      "The task of a philosopher: we should bring our will into harmony with whatever happens, so that nothing happens against our will and nothing that we wish for fails to happen."

-Epictetus, Discourses, 2.14.7

    A long To-Do list seems intimidating and burdensome—all these things we have to do in the course of a day or week.  But a Get-To-Do list sounds like a privilege—all the things we're excited about the opportunity to experience.  This isn't just semantic playing.  It is a central facet of the philosopher's world view.

-Ryan Holiday, excerpted from today's entry in The Daily Stoic

paralyzed...................

      Philosophy, throughout its history, has consisted of two parts inharmoniously blended: on the one hand a theory as to the nature of the world, on the other an ethical or political doctrine as to the best way of living.  The failure to separate these two with sufficient clarity has been a source of much confused thinking.  Philosophers, from Plato to William James, have allowed their opinions as to the constitution of the universe to be influenced by the desire of edification: knowing, as they supposed, what beliefs would make men virtuous, they have invented arguments, often very sophistical, to prove that these beliefs are true.  For my part I reprobate this kind of bias, both on moral and on intellectual grounds.  Morally, a philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.  And when he assumes, in advance of inquiry, that certain beliefs, whether true or false, are such as to promote good behaviour, he is so limiting the scope of philosophical speculation as to make philosophy trivial; the true philosopher is prepared to examine all preconceptions.  When any limits are placed, consciously or unconsciously, upon the pursuit of truth, philosophy becomes paralyzed by fear, and the ground is prepared for a government censorship punishing those who utter 'dangerous thoughts'—in fact, the philosopher has already placed such a censorship over his own investigations.

-Bertrand Russell,  as culled from his essay The Philosophy of Logical Analysis (1946)

Property...................

Without an integrated formal property system, a modern market economy is inconceivable. Had the advanced nations of the West not integrated all representations into one standardized property system and made it accessible to all, they could not have specialized and divided labor to create the expanded market network and capital that have produced their present wealth. The inefficiencies of non-Western markets have a lot to do with the fragmentation of their property arrangements and the unavailability of standard representations.

-------

Formal property’s contribution to mankind is not the protection of ownership; squatters, housing organizations, mafias, and even primitive tribes manage to protect their assets quite efficiently. Property’s real breakthrough is that it radically improved the flow of communications about assets and their potential.

-Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital:  Why Capitalism Triumphs In The West And Fails Everywhere Else

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

 more fun here

vague and blurred.................

       But it was the intellect that brought Calhoun down.  Or maybe it was the ambition, disguised as intellect.  Calhoun's political strength was his base in South Carolina, yet his strength was also his weakness.  Other states insisted on what they considered their sovereign rights vis-a-vis the national government, but none were so vigilant and quick to take offense as South Carolina.  The founders had left deliberately vague where the boundary lay between state and national authority; similarly blurred was who would determine the boundary and how it would be enforced.  They knew that any explicit answer might wreck their experiment in self-government before it got fairly started; they left to their heirs to find a solution the country could live with.  The task had been the work of Calhoun's—and Clay's—lifetime.

H. W. Brands, Heirs of the Founders:  The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster

On listening...........................

      It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted.  Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there.  By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.

     Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings.  In addition, they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of view, which gets them to the calm and logical place where they can be good Getting to Yes problem solvers.

-Chris Voss, Never Split The Difference:  Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

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

At the Movies..............................Woody Allen and Friends             Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (* But Were Afraid To Ask)

  

Hey, that's Ohio he is talking about................

 Heartland Manufacturing Renaissance | City Journal (city-journal.org)

Joel Kotkin points to good things (from an economic development point of view) happening in Ohio.  The Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority gets a nod:

The Buckeye State, notes Rick Platt, president and CEO of the Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority, “never skipped a beat on funding development.” More than 60 such authorities in Ohio work to attract industry with capital financing, infrastructure investment, land preparation, and speculative building development. Such efforts often tend to be largely expensive money-wasters, but in Ohio they have proved more successful. For the past quarter-century, Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority has transformed the former Newark Air Force Base into a hotbed of more than 20 companies with a total of 1,650 jobs. The companies operate in fields as diverse as aerospace, medical products, automotive and energy-related products, and even the world’s first organic baby food company, located in the industrial city of Heath (population 10,000), one of four plant-based food firms in the area. Licking County’s manufacturing workforce has expanded by 10,000 this decade.

On re-teaching old dogs old tricks...................

     The big question that we all face, as we look towards the second half of the year, is whether the pullback in risk capital is temporary, as it was in 2020, or whether it is more long term, as it was after the dot-com bust in 2000 and the market crisis in 2008. If it is the former, there is hope of not just a recovery, but a strong rebound in risky asset prices, and if it is the latter, stocks may stabilize, but the riskiest assets will see depressed prices for much longer. I don't have a crystal ball or any special macro forecasting abilities, but if I had to guess, it would be that it is the latter. Unlike a virus, where a vaccine may provide at least the semblance of a quick cure (real or imagined), inflation, once unleashed, has no quick fix. Moreover, now that inflation has reared its head, neither central banks nor governments can provide the boosts that they were able to in 2020 and may even have to take actions that make things worse, rather than better, for risk capital. Finally, at the risk of sounding callous, I do think that a return of fear and a longer term pullback in risk capital is healthy for markets and the economy, since risk capital providers, spoiled by a decade or more of easy returns, have become lazy and sloppy in their pricing and trading decisions, and have, in the process, skewed capital allocation in the economy. If a long-term slowdown is in the cards, it is almost certain that the investment strategies that delivered high returns in the last decade will no longer work in this new environment, and that old lessons, dismissed as outdated just a few years go, may need to be relearned. 

-Aswath Damodaran, as culled from here

True this...............................

 If there is one thing we learned from social science over the last century is that we may produce unintended consequences, even the opposite effect of what we desire, if we react simplistically to situations and don’t consider human psychology.

-Steven Novella, as cut-and-pasted from here

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

 ........with our friends at Gaping Void:

Here is a string of words.................

 .........we haven't seen in over a decade:

And housing inventory is increasing quickly.

Lifetime learning................

      By not giving in to your emotions, you were able to delay your reactions and think.  That is important.  We will always have emotions of fear and greed.  From here on in, it's imperative for you to use those emotions to your advantage, and for the long term to not let your emotions control your thinking.  Most people use fear and greed against themselves.  That's the start of ignorance. . . . Learn to use your emotions to think, not think with your emotions.

-Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad

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

........with the always interesting Martin Gurri:

 But the beginning of any human structure is an uncertain affair. The present is always a tangle of contradictory visions and conflicting interests. What appears to be of all-consuming importance today is forgotten tomorrow—and even the supposed clarity of hindsight is mostly an illusion.  We know exactly when and how Rome fell, but why such a backwater of a city became one of history’s greatest empires remains a mystery. . . .

Mir insists that the disappearance of the newspaper must mean the end of journalism. I agree. A model formed to exploit scarcity can’t be expected to function in an era of overabundance. The facts of the world, it turns out, are virtually infinite in number and incoherent in pattern. The digital age resembles the Tower of Babel—an uproar of mutually unintelligible voices. The New York Times and CNN merely contribute to the din. In such an environment, conspiracy theories can become plausible explanations for the behavior of scientists. The more information we absorb, the less we understand.

-two excerpts from his essay, The Fall and Rise of the Mediators

 

Unsettled.......................

 for science . . . commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

-Thomas Huxley

choosing............................

 But somewhere along the way between her epoch and ours, as the world became more and more unsteady, humanity was sold on the expensive dream of living certain rather than bewildered, the dream of choosing — or being chosen for — the islanded certitudes of power over the open horizons of truth. The “dark ocean of space” lost its stardusted luster as we grew more and more unwilling to remain uncertain about the nature of reality and the open-endedness of the future.

-Maria Popova

The mystery.................................

 Knowledge destroys wonder, destroys the capacity to feel awe. It makes you capable of explaining away everything. It takes away all poetry from life. It takes away all meaning from life. The knowledgeable person is never surprised by anything because he can explain everything. But no explanation is true for they don’t explain anything at all. The mystery remains. The mystery is infinite.

The knowledgeable person becomes so burdened by his knowledge that he loses the mirror-like quality of reflecting the beauty, the benediction, the dance, the ecstasy of existence. Knowledge is not going to help as far as life is concerned. The knowledgeable person is almost a dead person; he lives in his grave.

-Osho

On true art.............

 

Claude Monet    oil on canvass   Haystacks     1890

The deepest mystery of all, I think, is the one to which biblical faith points, which is the idea that we are made not only of matter that comes from the earth and stars, but we are made in the image of God.  Whatever that means.  I don't know what it means altogether, but I think it means that we bear his mark upon us.  Deep within us.  The face of Christ is within us, his thumbprint is upon us.  The world adds all sorts of things to that holy self that God made, but it still is there, and though we lose track of it in a million ways, I think it remains, if we are lucky at all, as a source of goodness, of flashes of insight, good dreams, good prayers that somehow pray themselves, of healing.

     I think that this is the place from which all true art comes, and by true art I mean art that doesn't just entertain—perfectly alright to do that—but true art that nourishes the spirit, that illuminates the mind, that deepens understanding, that deepens our humanity.  I think that what true art, and true religion, does at its best is to put each one of us in touch with that holy part of ourselves, with that source from which art and love comes, and from which all good, wise things come, so that we—by virtue of this painting, this poem, this ballet, this piece of music, this Scripture—become finally, truly, human at last.

-Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary

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

Santana.........................Just In Time To See The Sun

 

On fanaticism........................

       All this is to say that we should not ignore the fanaticisms and the appeal of fanaticisms within the West, even in the (so far) victoriously defended Anglo-American sphere.  Some of this fanaticism is little more than a comfortable anti-Americanism or anti-plural society attitude, which it would be overprecise to call adolescent, as with the teenage appeal of posters, beret at a becoming angle, of Che Guevara.  It might be suggested that as one section of the human brain grows, this diverts nutrients from other sections, which are therefore stunted, and perhaps that in adolescence, under a different physiological mechanism, toxins are produced from which recovery is slow and sometimes never takes place.

      In much of the supposed liberal world, there was, and is, alas, a sympathy for such critics of the consensual, manifested at its worst in toleration of student-activist actions that silence free speech, disrupt universities, and so on.  There are examples almost daily, as informed readers know.

      Clearly, one of the mental conditions we can discourage is righteousness.  This may afflict left and right wing alike, as we all know.  It is fair to point out that in some cases it emerges only on a particular issue or two—though in others almost the whole mental approach seems warped that way.  In certain types of public oratory this is more or less acceptable.  But when it is presented as an argument, moderate or mature minds simply switch themselves off.

-Robert Conquest,  The Dragons of Expectations (2005)

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

 ....................of a sub-division:  Episode 24

Oops.......  Not every day is perfect and works exactly the way you want it to.  While preparing to install the laterals from the main sanitary sewer line to the individual building lots, we broke the main line.  The system just won't work with a broken main.  Repairs are in order—now completed.  

I shudder to think.....................

 

arguably the most important battle.......

 .............................in the history of the United States.

On the trajectory....................

 Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: Incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is ever enough.

Morgan Housel, from here

Love is wise, hatred is foolish..............

A message to future generations (1959)/Bertrand Russell

 

Hate it when that happens................

 more fun here

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

The Temptations...............Papa Was A Rolling Stone

this vital interplay between.......

 ..............................freedom and belonging, between nature and human nature

Read more on the existential wanderlust of Rockwell Kent at this Marginalian post.

26 so far. 30 will satisfy...............

 

      via

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

 ..................(the better the crust, the better the pie)

the untold story............

 If we want to understand before we are understood, we must deploy what John Steinbeck referred to as "a good ear."  A good ear is one that hears below the surface.  Every text has a subtext, and it is usually the subliminal messages that have the most power and truth.  It is a rule of human nature that we often say what we do not mean.  We use words that are not true to how we feel.  We distort and hide and obfuscate, usually because we fear presenting the real us and being rejected for it.  Given this, if we want to be deep listeners we must listen between the lines to the silences, the emotions, the doubts, the deep-seated beliefs that influence a person's life, choices and self-image.  We listen for the untold story.

-Adam S. McHugh, The Listening Life

Making a magnificent structure fit for use..........

 Powerful and ingenious minds, taking as postulates that the powers expressly granted to the government of the Union are to be contracted by construction into the narrowest possible compass and that the original powers of the States are retained if any possible construction will retain them may, by a course of well digested but refined and metaphysical reasoning founded on these premises, explain away the Constitution of our country and leave it a magnificent structure indeed to look at, but totally unfit for use. They may so entangle and perplex the understanding as to obscure principles which were before thought quite plain, and induce doubts where, if the mind were to pursue its own course, none would be perceived. In such a case, it is peculiarly necessary to recur to safe and fundamental principles to sustain those principles, and when sustained, to make them the tests of the arguments to be examined.

-Chief Justice John Marshall, as he concludes the majority opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)

We have long thought.................

.............that the psychological component to the economy was both underrated and undervalued.  One lesson taken away from Reagan and Trump is that optimism matters.  Faithful readers may remember that, while mostly fearless, we fear deflation more than inflation.

Ben Carlson weighs in:

There is a lot we still don’t understand about inflation, especially since there is such a huge psychological component to prices and spending by consumers.

Inflation could remain elevated for some time if governments continue to spend money or the energy crisis worsens.

But it also wouldn’t surprise me to see severe disinflation or even deflation if the Fed overplays its hand with interest rate hikes and we go into a recession.

Maybe we’re due for more economic volatility than we’ve had these past 4 decades. Or maybe the pandemic will be an outlier because there was so much economic weirdness going on.

It’s good to keep an open mind about what comes next in regards to both prices and financial markets.

Nope............................

 more fun here

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

 

 more fun here

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

 ..............with Robert Louis Stevenson:

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

A good conscience is eight parts of courage.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits

 Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. 

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

mental factions......................

      There are minds that, having risen beyond primitive, unthinking orthodoxies, often merely turn to a rejection of the traditional.  Whoever has made this apparent advance is convinced that he or she has reached a superior condition.  Minds that have improved their knowledge and remained open to more have indeed progressed.  But we often find those who have achieved a critical attitude to the traditional have also adopted a largely, or wholly, uncritical attitude to untried, or even failed, alternatives whose attraction so verbal rather than real.

     "Special interests" are often, and sometimes rightly, indicted for various social and other offenses.  But, of course, special interests are not necessarily economic.  What may reasonably be called interest groups could equally be emotional or mental factions, that is, insistent minorities in society.  Often, what is more, they themselves feel pressure from their own extremer wings—that is to say, a minority within a minority.  Greed is only one of the deadly sins.

-Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation:  Reality and Delusion in the Course of History

thanks Michael

An easy choice...............

 

via

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

The Doobie Brothers..............the Toulouse Street album

Be careful what you wish for......

 I am radically opposed to technology (it goes without saying), but also against politics and social reform. These oppressive disciplines have been invented by do-gooders, seeking the perfection of the world. They are, characteristically, in league with devils.

-David Warren, from "The beauty of a world in confusion"

Good thing........................

via

Keeping your...................................

 ...........................................balance.

Humility is always a good idea..............

 "I was very puzzled when a year ago so many people were so confident that inflation was transitory," he said. "There was so much we didn’t understand about the post-COVID inflation that humility would have been a good idea."

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Quest...........................

 

What makes this country great, I think, is not what it gives us (which is considerable), but what it allows us to give to others.

When we talk about American enterprise, this is what we mean. When we talk about “building something”, that is what we’re really after. The opportunity to be a net positive on this Earth. A producer of something meaningful and lasting, not just a passive consumer of bread and circuses.

That is the real American Dream. Lest we forget.

-Gaping Void, from here

I miss Doug Fine........................

 

Miracles happen, or fun with numbers........

 There are about eight billion people on this planet. So if an event has a 1-in-a-million chance of occurring every day, it should happen to 8,000 people a day, or 2.9 million times a year, and maybe a quarter of a billion times during your lifetime. Even a 1-in-a-billion event will become the fate of hundreds of thousands of people during your lifetime. And given the media’s desire to promote shocking headlines, you will hear their names and see their faces.

-Morgan Housel, from here

It would have certainly been interesting.........

 Interesting thought experiment - ask yourself how the country would have been different if the Democrats had chose Marianne Williamson instead of Joe Biden in the last election. Kind of a fun exercise. Things couldn't have been worse under Williamson than under Biden. Maybe not even more goofy under Williamson.

-Chris Lynch, from here

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

      The blackest nighttime sky was suddenly shot through with powerful bolts of lightning that brightened the heavens and thundered like a lion making its presence known.  While the violent electrical thunderstorm raged on, displaying the undisputed power and mystery of nature, a young mother labored in a small, one-window room with wood-planked flooring to birth a child who would be called Nikola.  As she shook the bed, writhing in pain and joy, gale-force winds mercilessly battered manmade structures outside, while the midwife beside her was so frightened by the moment that she nervously said, "He'll be the child of the storm."  His mother responded insistently, "No, of light." (History suggests they were both correct, as the life of Nikola Tesla would prove to ride the storm of bipolar disorder while lighting the world both literally and figuratively with his genius.)

-Marko Perko and Stephen M. Stahl, Tesla: His Tremendous and Troubled Life

Always bet on the optimist...........

 more fun here

Talk about valuable real estate...........

 more fun here

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

At the cinema........Liza Minnelli & Joel Grey in Cabaret

 

Chris Lynch...........................

 .................explains himself.  From a March 17, 2004 post, in like his second week of blogging.

Believe it or not........................

 ..................I've never read a book written by James Patterson.  That may change soon:

He insists that parents adopt an iron law: “We read in our house.”

Constantly......................

 via

The risk of undercharging................

 At a time when everyone is wondering about the "cost" of things, it may help to remind yourself that what you get paid is a reflection of what you've done to be WORTH IT! This doesn't mean pulling a price randomly out of thin air. Nor does it mean only charging what "others" charge, either. That's because what YOU DID and what YOU DO to be worth it is YOURS ALONE.

-Matthew Ferrara, the story of how he learned not to undercharge for his services may be found here

expectations.............................

      But this breathtaking increase in the money supply did not, at least immediately, set off inflation.  For while inflation is a monetary phenomenon, it is also a psychological one: when the expectation of inflation becomes widespread, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

     That prophecy was fulfilled in 2021.  With the Biden administration continuing pandemic relief, which discouraged many for seeking work, and restricting oil and gas production, inflation set in.   Supply chain issues also contributed.

     By December 2021, consumer prices were up seven percent on an annual basis, the highest in 40 years, while producer prices were up 9.6 percent, the highest since that statistic has been compiled.  And the expectation of further inflation is now deeply embedded in the economy.

     Regardless of this, the Biden administration is still pushing hard for its "Build Back Better" plan, which would add at least another $5 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.  And President Biden has airily said that "Milton Friedman is no longer in charge."

     But unfortunately for the Biden presidency—and for the American people—Milton Friedman was right.  Create too much money and you get inflation.  We are witnessing the proof of that right now.

-John Steele Gordon, as he concludes this essay

Crashing...................

 ......in slow motion.  In a billion years or so, our quiet little galaxy might be involved in a major collision.  Is it too soon to worry? What do the computer models say?  Back story and enlargeable photo are here:

Us folk involved...................

 ..........in the business of building things will take our blessings wherever we can find them.

 via

Pirate stories.................

 .................are worth reading.  Read, and thoroughly enjoyed, the last two of these.  The first one is on-order.  Might suggest adding this one to the list:

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

 The most critical component of your retirement plan is how you feel about yourself, not the size of your portfolio.

-Tony Isola, from here

surprise and mystery....................

 So much beauty has grown from what at times seemed like impossibly stony ground.

-Trish Harrison Warren via David Kanigan

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

5th Dimension...(Last Night) I Didn't Get to Sleep At All