Life its ownself.........................

      The ethical vision of our nature gives sense to our lives.  But it is demanding.  It asks us to stand up to judgment.  We must be fully human, while breathing the air of angels; natural and supernatural at once.  A community that has survived its gods has three options.  It can find some secular path to the ethical life.  Or it can fake the higher emotions, while living without them.  Or it can give up pretending, and so collapse, as Burke put it, into the 'dust and powder of individuality'.  These are the stark choices that confront us, and the rest of this book defends the first of them—the way of high culture, which teaches us to live as if our lives mattered eternally.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

Everything you wanted to know...........

 ...............but were afraid to ask about Pakistan.

Pakistan was originally imagined as a utopian project alongside other 20th century nationalisms created from the wreckage of European empires, in this case, the British Raj. In its early years, the country did benefit from an esprit de corps that allowed it to consolidate a relatively capable state from a fractious population consisting of refugees andeven managing to outperform India economically for many years. This relative economic success, or at least ability to keep pace, helped feed a brash and confident Pakistani nationalism that defined the country’s identity for decades and was symbolized byiconic institutions like its once-proud national airline and armed forces. . . .

At the root of Pakistan’s many crises is the issue of elite capture of the state and economy. A study in 2021 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) highlighted the level to which Pakistan’s economic system has been turned into a machine for extracting subsidies and other perks for the country’s elite at the expense of the vast majority of its citizens. Unlike many other developing countries, Pakistan is a consumption-based society that spends lavishly on elite consumer goods and pricey defense systems rather than investing its capital in productive industries necessary for future growth. Among the beneficiaries of Pakistan’s kleptocratic economic system are a small handful of corporate and political power brokers, the country’s class of large feudal landowners, and its sprawling military establishment – the latter which serves as the guarantor of Pakistan’s national security while also doubling as its largest corporate conglomerate and real estate developer.

Since it appears that......................

............... there are no initiation fees or membership dues, I'm joining the summer of Scruton club.

Methinks he underestimates their influence . . .

 First, the fiat age has enabled economies large and small, countries near and far, to paper over their problems with cash. . . .

Second, everyone—and I mean everyone—is doing it.  The only systems in existence today that are not expanding their money supply are those that have consciously chosen to forego economic growth in favor of price stability. . . .

But it is China, where monetary expansion is the standard operating procedure for everything, that has truly broken the bank.  Since 2007—the year everyone started talking about the Chinese taking over the planet—the supply of yuan has increased by more than eight hundred percent. . . .The Chinese economy, even by the boasts of the most ultranationalist of Chinese, is still significantly smaller than the American economy, and yet the Chinese money supply has been larger than America's for a decade—often twice as big.  So of course the yuan is a store of value for no one.  Capital flight out of China to the U. S. dollar network regularly tops $1 trillion annually.

     China's financial system, paired with its terminal demographics, condemns it to not being consumption-led, or even export-led, but lending-led.  That makes China vulnerable to any development anywhere in the world that might impinge raw material supply, energy supply, or export routes—developments Beijing cannot influence, much less control.  China has been on this path to destruction for nearly a half century.  This is not the sort of iceberg-on-the-horizon disaster that any tightly controlled, forward-thinking, competently led government should fall prey to.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Profligacy............

 Don't think for a moment that such profligacy in the United States is limited to finance, real estate, and energy.  The last American president to even pretend to care about fiscal prudence was Bill Clinton, a dude not known for . . . prudence.  On his watch, the U. S. government did indeed balance the federal budget.  Then along came George W, Bush, who ran some the  largest deficits since World War II.  His successor, Barack Obama, doubled those deficits.  The next guy, Donald Trump, doubled them again.  At the time of this writing, in early 2022, the next dude in line, Joe Biden, bet his political life on multiple spending plans that if enacted would double those deficits again.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning:  Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Bagehot gets one wrong......................

 In the fall of 1862, he penned this for the Economist:

that the independence of the Southern Confederacy is a certain fact if not a fait accompli; that Jefferson Davis and his coadjutors have made the Confederacy a nation; that there is not the slightest prospect of their subjugation or forcible re-annexation; and that both by the resolution they have shown, the strength of they have put forth, and the victories they have won, they have shown that they can earn, if they have not yet fully earned the right to be admitted into the society of the world as a substantive and sovereign state.

-James Grant, Bagehot, The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

How good friends discuss politics................

This one has really aged well. James Spader and William Shatner calmly discuss presidential politics, all without reloading:

 

a wider horizon...............

      In Ecclesiastes we read, "He hath made every thing beautiful in his time; also he hath set the world in their heart" (3:11).  The Revised Standard Version says, ". . . he has put eternity into man's mind."  These words give us a valuable message in these days of stress and strain, of rush and turmoil, when part of the difficulty is that the horizon seems so near to us.  However, a horizon is only the limit of our sight.  This little phrase from Ecclesiastes is like a  hill which we may climb so that we may see a wider horizon.

-Leslie Weatherhead, Steady in an Unsteady World

The gold in green....................

 The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.

-Joel Kotkin, as cut-and-pasted from here

be careful what you wish for...........

. . . the very government programs that purported to “address” inequality, through higher taxes and constantly expanding regulation have throttled the increases in prosperity . . .

-Michael Munger, from here

learned a new word today.............

 The concept of iatrogenesis, native to medicine, describes misfortunes that would not occur but for one’s interaction with medicine itself. For example, the case of COVID you catch in the doctor’s waiting room or the elective surgery that impinges on a vein, which throws a clot, causing a stroke. Shockingly, medical iatrogenesis is the fifth leading cause of death worldwide.

Journalism’s iatrogenic damage may be less dramatic, but it is surely more pervasive because there is no escape from exposure. Avoid consuming news and you still will be passively subject to the media’s effect on your environment.

-Steve Salerno, as culled from this post

one of the great achievements.........

      During the early years of the automobile industry, the immediate goal of the engineers and inventors was simply reliability—to get a car to go somewhere and come back under its own power.  Many bright automotive ideas ended with a horse, a towline, and laughter.  Although progress was expensive, American motorists cheerfully paid the bills for it.  In their enthusiasm for individual transportation, they bought cars, reliable or unreliable, and thus provided the source of a substantial portion of the risk capital for experiment and production.  Not many industries have been so well favored by their customers.  In twenty years the reliability of the motorcar in relation to the street and road conditions of the time was pretty well established.  Individual mechanized transportation, one of the great achievements in the progress of mankind, was a commonplace fact of life, and everyone could enjoy it.

-Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., My Years With General Motors

Challenges......................

 James Franklin did not behave as most colonial printers did.  When he decided to start his own paper, he was definitely not publishing it by authority.  In fact, the New England Courant began by attacking the Boston establishment, in particular the program of inoculating people for smallpox that was being promoted by the Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and his father.  When the inoculation debate died down, the paper turned to satirizing other subjects of Boston interest, including pretended learning and religious hypocrisy, some of which provoked the Mathers into replies.  Eager to try his own hand at satire, young Benjamin in 1722 submitted some essays to his brother's newspaper under the name of Silence Dogood,  a play on Cotton Mather's Essays to Do Good, the name usually given to the minister's Bonifacius, published in 1710.  For a sixteen-year-old boy to assume the persona of a middle-aged woman was a daunting challenge, and young Franklin took "exquisite Pleasure" in fooling his brother and others into thinking that only "Men of some Character among us for Learning and Ingenuity" could have written the newspaper pieces.

-Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

On the question of questions.....

 The question, “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers.

But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?”

-Morgan Housel, from here

Big Tech is not our friend.............

Why have IT improvements failed to radiate through the broader economy? There are many possible explanations, but the transformation of once-disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies is surely an important one. The monopolization of information technology arises from the nature of the technology itself: so-called network effects make it convenient to have one venue on which to post political comments and cat pictures, one provider of office software that everyone uses, one giant internet retail marketplace, and so forth. But the fact that technological monopolies have their origin in network effects rather than in the nefarious manipulation of mar­kets does not eliminate the potential for abuse. . . .

Twenty-five years ago, America’s tech companies took risks and disrupted established business models. Today, they are the new utili­ties, earning monopoly rents by controlling markets. Microsoft chased its challengers out of personal computer software; Amazon crushed most of its internet retailing rivals; Apple created a duopoly of hardware and services with its rival Samsung; Google destroyed the commercial prospects of competing search engines; and Facebook, through targeted investments and acquisitions, dominates social media. . . .

 By allowing its tech companies to turn into monopolistic, unregulated utilities, it has high stock prices—for a handful of stocks—and low productivity. U.S. tech companies still innovate, but only where it suits them. Their monopolies for the most part arise from the logic of the marketplace, rather than nefarious practices, but still do damage, and not only in terms of economics. Facebook and Google capture 70 percent of all digital advertising revenue, for example, crippling America’s independent media, which can’t compete for ad revenue. This in turn strengthens platforms that are increasingly controlling and limiting political speech.

-David P. Goldman, from this essay

But........................

 

via

So noted........................

 It's worth noting that many systems that claim to be socialist in reality are anything but.  The version that most haunts the American Right, for example is the "socialism" of Venezuela.  In Venezuela, socialism is the brand name used by the elite for political cover while they loot everything up to and including things that are literally nailed down, all for their own personal gain.  We should be afraid of it.  But that's not socialism.  That's kleptocracy.  Definitely not a functional -ism.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

I knew it........................

 That feeling you have in the pit of your stomach that we're all making up finance as we go?  Listen to that feeling.  It is dead-on.

-Peter Zeihan, The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning: Mapping The Collapse Of Globalization

Why women live longer than men.......?

via 

at what cost............................

  I suppose the last straw for me was requiring young children to wear masks all the time, when the science about their efficacy was far from proven, and which has since been proven to be useless. We tear down playground equipment to avoid injuries, which certainly have happened; but, at what cost to our children? So, while we laugh when George Burns tells Carson that his Doctor is dead, it is a fact that some of us live a long time, and some of us don't. Don't neglect to live while worrying about what you eat or how you play.

-Future Lawyer

Growing up......................

............................I heard this often:

  While anything can be argued, certain things are known to provide better outcomes than others. This is as true of societies as of raising children. The answer equally should be “Because we said so.”  A healthy society enjoys a dominant culture that sets limits on behavior, especially regarding sexual expression, manners, crime, and societal obligation—and enforces them. By what authority? “Because we say so.” Everyone then knows the rules and plays by them. 

-Fred Reed, from here

The passing of journalism....................

 In any case, the fantasy of the relentless muckraker has been quietly discarded in the digital age. Journalists are now meek handmaidens to the elites and bland deniers of scandal. Democracy, in their view, demands the public’s permanent genuflection before the ruling class. Any other posture smacks of populism or even fascism. The hero is no longer the investigative reporter but the “fact-checker”—a dull but peevish beast whose task it is to count the lies of Donald Trump and dismiss reports of corruption in high places as “conspiracy theories” and “disinformation.” Such naked prostration before the establishment, it should be noted, has less to do with journalistic principles than with a desperate need to attract a paying audience.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

If only our elites were more elite.................

 A vast apparatus of control—an octopus-like conglomerate of institutions that includes the federal bureaucracy, the news media, and the digital platforms—has been deployed to stop the populist wolf from crashing through the door. The panic evoked by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter betrays an unhappy suspicion that the beast will break in anyway. The system is as nakedly rank-based as Marie Antoinette’s France. Having assumed guardianship over the complexities of twenty-first-century life, the elites must govern because they are who they are.

-Martin Gurri, from here

Here's an idea..........................

 

I confess to being greatly...................

....................................privileged.

but not yet......................

U2..........................................Stories for Boys

 

     Had I been familiar with that quotation attributed to Saint Augustus when addressing the Lord—"Give me chastity and continence, but not yet"—I'd have understood it.  On these trips abroad, Guggi and I shared more than an interest in the scriptures.  We were girl mad and had made ourselves available for French-kissing experimentations by the girlfriends of older boys. Nothing to complain about, but we needed to find our own girlfriends.  In Criccieth my eyes fell on the very not mendacious Mandy, without doubt the most beautiful girl in all of Wales.  It was if she'd been swept up on the beach, dark and gorgeous in a black bikini.  I was thirteen, she was fourteen.  I so wanted to be sixteen and have her never let me go. Which she did quite easily now I think of it.

Bono, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

testimony.......................

 It is a marvelous testimony of the weakness of our judgment that it recommends things for their rarity or novelty, or even for their difficulty, even if they are neither good nor useful.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter54

insatiable...........................

      That boy, as Franklin later recalled in his Autobiography, was "extremely ambitious" to become a "tolerable English Writer."  Although literacy was relatively high in New England at this time—perhaps 75 percent of males in Boston could read and write and the percentage was rapidly growing—books were scarce and valuable, and few people read books the way Franklin did.  He read everything he could get his hands on, including John Bunyan's Pilgram's Progress, Plutarch's Lives, Daniel DeFoe's Essay on Projects, the "do good" essays of the prominent Boston Puritan divine Cotton Mather, and more books of "polemic Divinity" than Franklin wanted to remember.  He even befriended the apprentices of booksellers in order to gain access to more books.  One of those apprentices allowed him secretly to borrow his master's books to read after work. "Often," Franklin recalled, "I sat up in my Room reading the greatest Part of the Night, when the Book was borrow'd in the Evening & to be return'd early in the Morning lest it should be miss'd or wanted.

-Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

Nature's way.................

 

     Nature transcends our tendencies to label and classify, to reduce and limit.  The natural world is unfathomably more rich, interwoven, and complicated than we are taught, and so much more mysterious and beautiful.

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

the important need to clarify..........

The opposite of "true" is not always "false".  Sometimes, the opposite of one kind of truth is truth of a different kind, most clearly seen in the difference between literal and metaphoric truth.  Fairy tales dwell in the latter world; they are true but unreal.  To children, this distinction is important and they need no help in understanding it, although this is a complex idea.

     Many adults know the situation, when they are telling (not reading) a story of the fairy-tale kind and the child interrupts to ask: "Is it true?" (If the adult is reading, it is clear to the child that it is from the story world and they don't ask.)

     Is it true? the adult wonders, thinking about his goblin neighbors, troll boss, and the princess he has been secretly in love with for years, and answers thoughtfully, "Well, yes, it is true, in a way.  In its own way it is true." 

     "But is it true like in real life?" the child persists.

     "No," the adult will say, the distinction clear. "Not like in real life."

     The child's question is not one of disbelief, but rather comes from the important need to clarify what kind of truth it is and therefore what kind of belief to give to it.

 -Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World

Pause.........................

 Detachment is the cost of our wondrous, liberating mobility, the price we pay for living untethered.  Connection to place is replaced by inhabitation of space, bringing to near-culmination what Rosalind Williams describes as "humanity's decision to unbind itself from the soil."  The tempo of travel blurs the landscape, and our vehicles increasingly enfold us in a bubble of remove. "The sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures, and smells of the city and countryside are reduced to a two-dimensional view through the car windscreen, something prefigured by the railway journeys of the nineteenth century," notes John Urry, echoing Nietzche.  The portable soundscape of the Walkman-turned-iPod puts much of life at arm's length, creating a "fragile world of certainty within a contingent world," writes Michael Bull in Sounding Out the City.  We are distancing ourselves from knowledge of our own bodily selves and our earth, as Bill McKibben observes.  We live in an era when "vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach," he writes.  "An unenlightenment."  Pause is increasingly absent in a temporal sense, too.  A culture of constant movement, in part fueled by a love of instant gratification, cannot bear the mystery and unpredictability inherent in the idea of pause.  "For the sake of speed, in the interest of not wasting time, we sacrifice the sensuous richness of the not-yet," writes Noelle Oxenhandler in her essay "The Lost While."  We live in a culture of "becoming" but never arriving.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

intrusive everythings..............

 For most of human history, we lived in a world defined by scarcity: could we accumulate enough resources to survive the day?  But now? We are drowning in an abundance of everything. A tsunami of notifications and distractions and a million intrusive everythings vying for our attention.  When we have access to a near-infinite fountain of entertainment and distractions, the ability to focus and avoid distractions is one hell of a competitive advantage.

-Jack Raines, from here

Sounds fun.......................

   more book humor here

Simply..................

 

We don't have to understand nature to appreciate it.  This is true of all things.  Simply be aware of moments when your breath gets taken away by something of great beauty.

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

things not understood............

 Our appetite is irresolute and uncertain:  it does not know how to keep anything or enjoy anything in the right way.  Man, thinking that it is the fault of these things, fills and feeds himself on other things that he does not know and does not understand, to which he applies his desires and his hopes, and which he holds in honor and reverence; as Caesar says, 'it happens by a common vice of nature that we trust more, and fear more violently, things to us unseen, hidden, and unknown'.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 53

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

  more fun here

submerge.................

 . . . consider submerging yourself in the canon of great works.  Read the finest literature, watch the masterpieces of cinema, get up close to the most influential paintings, visit architectural landmarks.  There's no standard list; no one has the same measures of greatness.  The "canon" is continually changing, across time and space.  Nonetheless, exposure to great art provides an invitation.  It draws us forward, and opens doors of possibility.

     If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that time period you'll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from books than from the media.

     This applies to every choice we make.  Not just with art, but with the friends we choose, the conversations we have, even the thoughts we reflect on.  All of these aspects affect our ability to distinguish good from very good, very good from great.  They help us determine what's worthy of our time and attention.

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

I wonder what.....................

...........Steve Jobs would think of today's "big tech"?

    

 via

Belief.......................

 There’s no need to sign up for the endless uphill battle of marketing against a positive trend. Sell something you believe in, to people who are eager to believe in it as well.

You’ll do your best work on behalf of an audience and a cause that deserves it, appreciates it and applauds it. If it’s just a job, you’ve sacrificed your best energy for a paycheck.

Pick your client, pick your future.

-Seth Godin, from here

We're a strange breed.....................

  Consider the state of social media, where people frequently go in order to find something to be angry about, so that they can express their anger in ways that would typically be forbidden but are permissible in cases only of having been wronged. Had the social media user not sought out an example of someone doing something offensive or outrageous, they wouldn’t have anger to discharge, but it seems to me that acquiring anger and the right to discharge it is precisely the point. (Cable TV also offers you lots of reasons to get pissed off at people and yell at them.)

-Elizabeth Bruenig, from this longish essay on forgiveness

via

dangerously certain....................

      In the National Assembly, in its two and a half years, Robespierre made some five hundred speeches, usually too long to be convincing, and too argumentative to be eloquent; but the masses of Paris, learning of their tenor, loved him for them.  He opposed racial or religious discrimination, proposed emancipation of the blacks, and became, till his final months, the tribune and defender of the people.  He accepting the institution of private property, but wished to universalize small-scale ownership as an economic basis for a sturdy democracy.  He called inequality of wealth "a necessary and incurable evil," rooted in the natural inequality of human ability.  In this period he supported the retention of the monarchy, properly limited; an attempt to overthrow Louis XVI, he thought, would lead to such chaos and bloodshed as would end in a dictatorship more tyrannical than a King.

     Not till near his end did he seem to doubt the full identity of his judgment with the popular will.  His mind was weaker than his will; most of his ideas were borrowed from his reading, or from the catchwords that filled the revolutionary air; he died too young to have acquired sufficient experience of life, or knowledge of history, to check his abstract or copular conceptions with patient perception or impartial prospective.  He suffered severely from our common failing—he could not get his ego out of the way of his eyes.  The passion of his utterance convinced himself; he became dangerously certain and ludicrously vain.  "That man," said Mirabeau, "will go far, he believes all that he says."  He went to the guillotine.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon

the limits of moderation.............

 Mirabeau begged the deputies to retain the King as a bulwark against social disorder and mob rule.  He pictured Louis XVI as a man of good heart and generous intentions, occasionally confused by shortsighted counselors; and he asked, prophetically:

    "Have these men studied, in the history of any people, how revolutions commence and how they are carried out?  Have they observed by what a fatal chain of circumstances the wisest men are driven far beyond the limits of moderation, and by what terrible impulses an enraged people is precipitated into excesses at the very thought of which they would have shuddered."

The delegates followed his advice, for they too felt the groundswells emanating from the sidewalks of Paris.  But instead of meeting a measured loyalty with substantial concessions to the Third Estate, Louis outraged radicals and liberals alike by dismissing Necker a second time, replacing him with the Queen's uncompromising friend Baron de Breteuil, and making the warrior de Broglie minister for war.  The chips were down.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon

She makes it sound like...................

 ...................there is something wrong with "rootedness:"

We struggle now to update our ideas of home and place for a new unbounded era, naturally wishing to shed outdated notions of stasis and rootedness.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Why.......................

Michael Wade offers a quick look at "how" and "what."  Raymond Reddington, providing some of the most amazing TV ever, ignores the question "how", and answers with "WHY."

 

Fifty ways.......................

 .........................the World is getting better.

Oops.................

 Failing to learn from others’ mistakes is one of life’s greatest mysteries. Despite having nearly unlimited access to examples of others making all kinds of mistakes, people repeatedly fail to learn from past generations.

-Ted Lamade, from here

Problems........................

 “The biggest problem in business is ego. Too many CEO’s are on an obsessive ego trip. The second problem is an executive who surrounds himself with yes-men. The third is a variation of the second – the executive who isolates himself. The fourth is the Peter Principle. Watch out for companies in which the mediocre people eventually get to the top – the person who waits the longest becomes the boss.”

-Larry Tisch, as quoted here

Until one day.........................

      We might also eat our meals mindfully, slowly savoring each bite with appreciation.  Take a daily walk in nature, looking at everything entering our field of vision with gratitude and connection.  Take a moment to marvel at the feeling of our heartbeat and the movement of blood through our veins before sleep.

      The purpose of such exercises is not necessarily in the doing, just as the goal of meditation isn't in the meditating.  The purpose is to evolve the way we see the world when we're not engaged in these acts.  We are building the musculature of our psyche to more acutely tune it.  This is no much of what the work is about.

      Awareness needs constant refreshing.  If it becomes a habit, even a good habit, it will need to be reinvented again and again.

      Until one day, you notice that you are always in the practice of awareness, at all times, in all places, living your life in a state of constant openness to receiving.

-Rick Rubin,  The Creative Act:  A Way of Being

consideration....................

 If we sometimes spent a little consideration on ourselves, and employed in probing ourselves the time we put into checking up on others and learning about things that are outside us, we would easily sense how much this fabric of ours is built up of feeble and failing pieces.  It is not singular evidence of our imperfection that we cannot establish our contentment in any one thing, and that even in desire and imagination it is beyond our power to choose what we need?

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 53

This disposition......................

 This disposition, to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.  That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue, and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

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

Yvonne Elliman.............I Don't Know How To Love Him

 

Competition..................

 

via

bridging.........................

     There are good biological reasons for accepting the fact that man is so constituted that he possesses an inner world of the imagination which is, different from, though connected to, the world of external reality.  It is the discrepancy between the two worlds which motivates creative imagination.  People who realize their creative potential are constantly bridging the gap between inner and outer.  They invest the external world with meaning because they disown neither the world's objectivity nor their own subjectivity.

-Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return To The Self 

Average..........................

U2....................................................Cedarwood Road

     While I loved poetry and history, I didn't feel as clever as my friends.  I started to feel stupid and, because of that, became angry.  I was afraid deep down that I was average.  I didn't realize that my whole life would be pitted against the concept that anyone is average.  "No man need be a mediocrity if he accepts himself as God made him," is how the poet Patrick Kavanagh put it.

-Bono, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

Responsibility...................

 Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life. . . . Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life.  If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it's always your fault and you just fix it as best you can . . .

-Charlie Munger

Cycles........................

      And in so far as the apparent prosperity is caused by an unusual plentifulness of loanable capital and a consequent rise in prices, that prosperity is not only liable to reaction, but certain to be exposed to reaction.  The same causes which generate this prosperity will, after they have been acting a little longer, generate an equivalent adversity.

-Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873)

On "nomads"...................

      Our infatuation with nomadic life has grown in direct proportion to the rise of highly complex, circumscribed, and crowded societies.  Nomads are our alter ego, a personification of escape from the gray flannel suit and the tract home. . . . These adventurers, most of whom were semi-tamed rebels themselves, were obsessed with nomads' "freedom of movement, freedom from authority, freedom from the habitual anxieties of urban living, freedom from the constraints of organized agriculture, freedom from any convention but their own." . . . 

     Pastoral nomads, of course, are not "rootless wanderers," free to go where they please.  Their harsh, often chosen way of life, is defined by movement for survival's sake, not exploration or a quest to live "without ties."  Most pastoral nomads, diverse as they are, follow seasonal pathways, moving back and forth to graze their flocks in the best pastures.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Counterintuitive, but true.................

 The government has little incentive to regulate banks effectively. When there is a breakdown, public officials just end up with more power.

-Arnold Kling, from here

Freddie deBoer.....................

 ........is not impressed by all the noise about ChatGPT.

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

R. E. M. ....................................Out of Time

 

“A belief is not dangerous . . .

 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . until it turns absolute.”

So much of what people call “conviction” is actually a willful disregard for facts that might change their minds. It’s dangerous because conviction feels like a good attribute, while its opposite – being wishy-washy – makes you feel and sound like an idiot.

There’s this thing in psychology called the end of history illusion, which is the idea that people are aware of how much their personality has changed in the past, but they assume it will be stable in the future. I laugh at who I was at age 20, but I assume that by age 60 I’ll roughly be the same person I am today. Part of the reason it occurs is because it’s too painful to accept that the beliefs I hold today might be wrong, temporary, or subjective.

Morgan Housel, from this post

a parallel narrative.....................

      Lost in the American mythology of the Mayflower is a central question:  How did a group of disenfranchised religious separatists finance a large ship, pay an experienced crew, and provision for a year's worth of supplies on the way to the New World?  Even for sovereign authorities of the early seventeenth century, outfitting a trans-Atlantic voyage was no small financial undertaking.  Certainly, impoverished political refugees of today, when crossing oceans, do not do so in chartered transportation or arrive with any capacity for financial sustenance.  The financial story behind this journey points to a parallel narrative, one in which the exalted sentiments of religious liberty found themselves subordinated to economic considerations and motivations.

-Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

Bags of time.....................

 When the keeper of the inn

where we stayed in the Outer Hebrides

said we had bags of time to catch the ferry,

which we would reach by traversing the causeway

between this island and the one to the north,

I started wondering what a bag of time

might look like and how much one could hold.

Apparently, more than enough time for me

to wonder about such things,

I heard someone shouting from the back of my head.

Then the ferry arrived, silent across the water,

at the Lochmaddy Ferry Terminal,

and I was still thinking about the bags of time

as I inched the car clanging onto the slipway

then down into the hold for the vehicles.

Yet it wasn't until I stood at the railing

of the upper deck with a view of the harbor

that I decided that a bag of time

should be the same color as the pale blue

hull of the loan sailboat anchored there.

And then we were in motion, drawing back

from the pier and turning toward the sea

as ferries had done for many bags of time,

I gathered from talking to an old deckhand,

who was decked out in a neon yellow safety vest,

and usually on schedule, he added,

unless the weather has something to say about it.

-Billy Collins

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

      Japanese soldiers described World War II as a "typhoon of steel."  It certainly felt that way to Akio Morita, a studious young engineer from a family of prosperous sake merchants.  Morita only barely avoided the front lines by getting assigned to a Japanese navy engineering lab.  But the typhoon of steel crashed through Morita's homeland, too, as American B-29 Superfortress bombers pummeled Japan's cities, destroying much of Tokyo and other urban centers.  Adding to the devastation, an American blockade created widespread hunger and drove the country towards desperate measures.  Morita's brothers were being trained as kamikaze pilots when the war ended.

-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

lustre.................................

 . . . the candidates for fortune too frequently abandon the paths of virtue, for unhappily, the road which leads to the one, and that which leads to the other, lie sometimes in very opposite directions.  But the ambitious man flatters himself that, in the splendid situation to which he advances, he will have so many means of commanding the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be enabled to act with such superior propriety and grace, that the lustre of his future conduct will entirely cover, or efface, the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation. . . . But, though they should be so lucky as to attain that wished-for greatness, they are always most miserably disappointed in the happiness which they expect to enjoy it in.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Intuition.......................

 But my intuition is that the main problem in the U.S. economy is that too many highly educated people work for government and for non-profits, where they mostly make trouble for the productive sector.

-Arnold Kling, from here

A question not asked very often............

 Everyone remembers the children’s story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You know, this porridge is too hot, this one is too cold, this one is just right.

Well, pain kinda works in the same way. Too much pain will lead to trauma and helplessness. Too little pain will lead to entitlement and selfishness.

But just the right amount of pain and struggle: that’s what allows us to feel a sense of accomplishment and meaning in our lives, which then builds up our sense of autonomy and self-worth—the bedrock of a mentally healthy and happy person.

So, how do you define the Goldilocks Zone of Pain? How do you know how much pain is “just right?”

-Mark Manson, from here

Mistakes.......................

I don't want you to think we have any way of learning or behaving so you won't make a lot of mistakes.  I'm just saying that you can learn to make fewer mistakes than other people—and how to fix your mistakes faster when you do make them.  But there's no way that you can live an adequate life without making many mistakes.  In fact, one trick is to get so you can handle mistakes.  Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke.

-Charlie Munger

More proof (as if you needed any)....

 ..........that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

via

This qualifies.......................

 ................as dangerous behavior today:

It seemed like a good opportunity to understand the crux of this conflict and hear multiple perspectives directly from those who hold them, as opposed to how they’re described by others. I listened, I found it enlightening, and I shared it.

-Mo Perry, from here

thanks Patrick

Mental health.........................

 

"Checkism".........................

 Noah Smith opines that progressives need to embrace progress:  here

This “clear consensus” exists only within an echo chamber. 

Do check in with....................

............................................McSweeney's:

 In another sign of the times, the imaginary arguments with your neighbors in your head have gotten sadly acrimonious lately.

Wow, I think he is talking about Newark, Ohio...

 Urbanism is not dead, but it is morphing into a new form. The most promising cities are currently taking shape on the periphery of the most densely settled areas, which lets them accommodate companies and families in a safer, healthier environment. These new cities are found around economically and demographically dynamic regions, largely in the sunbelt, but also in parts of the Midwest such as around Columbus and Indianapolis.

-Joel Kotkin, from here

Creation........................

 Even though we can’t measure luck, we can all agree that experiencing more good luck is a good thing. Believe it or not, we can actually create some of this good luck ourselves.

-creation story from Jack Raines here

A Bill of Rights.......................

 ......................for slow learners:

1. Focus on direction, not destination
Immerse yourself completely in the journey and you will reach your final goal gradually.

2. Raise your hand
Asking questions is a fundamental human right.

Eight more of "you have the right to" here.

Happy.........................

 

To the child of my child: I may not be around when you read this but I want you to know that this morning I walked on a path and I could see the full moon above the pine trees. It was very bright and round and full and it made me very happy to see it. Someday you will be watching that same moon. I hope it makes you happy too.

-Leonard Cohen

via

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

 I just think it’s important to recognize that outward measures of success don’t automatically translate into inward feelings of happiness.

Life is often more complicated than it seems.

-Ben Carlson, from here