Taking a walk around the yard..........

early bloomers

We love our peonies

A few alliums

Rhododendrens     My favorite plant

These azaleas have been around for a while

My Sweetie has the touch

Next week this will be magnificent

some begonias just hanging around

 

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

Joe Walsh.....The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get

 

Highly recommended....................

 

     Billions of data points are available at any given moment and we collect only a small number.  With this glimpse through a keyhole, we assemble an interpretation and add another story to our collection.

     With each story we tell ourselves, we negate possibility.  Reality is diminished.  Rooms of the self are walled off.  Truth collapses to fit a fictional organizing principle we've adopted.

     As artists, we're called to let go of these stories, again and again, and blindly put our faith in the curious energy drawing us down the path.

     The artwork is the point where all the elements come together—the universe, the prism of self, the magic and discipline of transmuting idea to flesh.  And if these lead you into contradiction—into territories that seem unbridgeable or unknowable—that doesn't mean they aren't harmonious.

     Even in perceived chaos, there is order and pattern.  A cosmic undercurrent running through all things, which no story is immense enough to contain.

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

 The corruption inherent in absolute power derives from the fact that such power is never free from the tendency to turn man into a thing, and press him back into the matrix of nature from which he has risen. For the impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.

-Rob Firchau channeling Eric Hoffer

the end of the "in the background" posts?.....

      In middle age, the prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness, and this has several implications.  The first is that rapid analysis and creative innovation will suffer—just what we would expect when looking at the evidence on decline.  The second is that some specific, once-easy skills become devilishly hard, like multi-tasking.  Older people are much more easily distracted than younger people.  If you have—or had—teenage kids, you might have found yourself telling them they can't study effectively while listening to music and texting their friends.  Actually, it is you who can't do that.  If fact, older adults can enhance their cognitive effectiveness precisely by taking their own advice: turn off the phone and music and go someplace completely quiet to think and work.

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

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

The Grass Roots.....................................Greatest Hits

 

On privilege........................

 Moreover, in politics as well as in philosophy and in religion the intellect of democratic nations is particularly open to simple and general notions.  Complicated systems are repugnant to it, and its favorite conception is that of a great nation composed of citizens all formed upon one pattern and all governed by a single power.

     The very next notion to that of a single and central power which presents itself to the minds of men in the ages of equality is the notion of uniformity of legislation.  As every man sees that he differs but little from those around him, he cannot understand why a rule that is applicable to one man should not be equally applicable to all others.  Hence the slightest privileges are repugnant to his reason; the faintest dissimilarities in the political institutions of the same people offend him, and uniformity of legislation appears to him to be the first condition of good government.

     I find, on the contrary, that this notion of a uniform rule equally binding on all members of the community was almost unknown to the human mind in aristocratic ages; either it was never broached, or it was rejected.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II,  Fourth Book, Chapter II

   

It's a pretty short list....................

 .............................................rules for life:

Mission creep..............................

 

more fun here

useful, provided you did not notice them....

The concept of the intellectual (though not the word) is new to the English language.  In the past we were in the habit of distinguishing the educated from the uneducated person.  And during the nineteenth century there were many educated people among our leaders—for example Disraeli and Gladstone, who between them did much to create the new style of politics, in which parties bargain for votes by promising goods that do not belong to them.  But the concept of the intellectual—as a creature whose social role is shaped by his critical posture outside society—was foreign to English life.  Coleridge had marked out an important role for the 'clerisy'; but he saw this class as a conservative force, maintained by church, university, and the professions.  The Romantic poet, the 'man of feeling', and the hermit had all be extolled and ridiculed, with Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock effectively putting a lid on their pretensions.  Thereafter, thinking and feeling re-assumed their old functions in social life: they were useful, provided you did not notice them.  The very idea that someone should draw attention to his intellect and emotions, and regard them as a qualification for overthrowing the established civil order, was anathema to the ordinary English person.

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

Gone, but not forgotten.....................

 .................................Jim Brown:

a rule..................................

 Your Ma did the cooking and I hustled for things to cook, though I would take a shy at it myself once in a while and get up my muscle tossing flapjacks.  It was pretty rough sailing, you bet, but one way and another we managed to get a good deal of satisfaction out of it, because we had made up our minds to take our fun as we went along.  With most people happiness is something that is always just a day off.  But I have made it a rule never to put off being happy till tomorrow.  Don't accept notes for happiness, because you'll find that when they're due they're never paid, but just renewed for another thirty days.

-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

rites of passage.................

      The youth culture prides itself on its inclusiveness.  That is to say, it removes all barriers to membership—all obstacles in the form of learning, expertise, allusion, doctrine, or moral discipline. For these would be rites of passage, constituting a tacit admission that to be young is not enough, that the world expects something, and that there is a higher stage of existence to which we all must eventually proceed.  This very inclusiveness, however, deprives the youth culture of human purpose.  It remains locked in the present tense, looking for good causes, spiritual icons, ways of representing itself as legitimate, but without crossing the fatal barrier into responsible adulthood.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998)

This chart measures.................

 .........the growth of interest payments on the U. S. debt.  Hang on.  It will be an interesting ride.

Turn off and tune out.................

 Our brains haven’t evolved to handle the deluge of bad news we now receive on a regular basis. Before 24/7 news, social media and alerts on our smartphones, most people simply weren’t aware of all the bad stuff occurring in the world.

-Ben Carlson

On "relative wealth"...............

 If our system is so unfair and “exploitative,” then why are tens of thousands of people every year willing to risk their health, even their lives, to try to get here? It’s because even poor people are rich, by comparative standards. The US is a marvel, but our friends on the left have to deny that, because admitting it would mean that their imaginary utopias are not actually better than the system we already have.

-Michael Munger, from this post

via

lists.......................

What gets you up in the morning?  What keeps you up at night?  If you're not working on these two lists, you're wasting your precious time.

-Alan M. Webber 

a picture...................

 A man who does not have a picture of the whole in his head cannot possibly arrange the pieces.

-Michel de Montaigne

worth....................

 Even when I was young, I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth, and I started treating myself that way.

-Naval Ravikant

vibration........................

     This is the essence of great art.  We make it for no other purpose than creating our version of the beautiful, bringing all of ourself to every project, whatever its parameters and constraints.  Consider it an offering, a devotional act.  We do best, as we see the best—with our own taste.  No one else's. . . .

      With the objective of simply doing great work, a ripple effect occurs.  A bar is set for everything you do, which may not only life your work to new heights, but raise the vibration of your entire life.  It may even inspire others to do their best work.  Greatness begets greatness. It's infectious. 

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

Lightly........................

 Touch everything lightly, enjoy it while it is within your reach, and no not regret it when it is gone, since that is the nature of things.

-Massimo Pigliucci

A little bit of wisdom............

 What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.

-Kevin Kelly

judged.........................

 Although I am always minded to say good of what is good, and inclined to interpret favorably anything that can be so interpreted, still it is true that the strangeness of our condition makes it happen that we are often driven to good by vice itself—were it not that doing good is judged by intention alone.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 2, Chapter 1

complexity.....................

 True wisdom requires discarding the intention heuristic. It requires accepting that the world is complex and that each individual is complex.

-Arnold S. Kling, from here

the line separating..................

 It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.

sale pending.......................

 The commercialisation of modern life has been the subject of lamentation ever since it was first remarked upon, and ambitious theories—commodity fetishism, conspicuous consumption, the affluent society, and countless lesser attempts—have arisen from the natural revulsion that intellectuals feel towards the "getting and spending" of others.  But something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world—a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything—virtue included—on sale.  The cynic, said Oscar Wilde, is the one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  And in a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas he described sentimentality as "the bank holiday of cynicism". Wilde's quips tend to be more exciting that truthful.  These, however, are exact.  Cynicism and sentimentality are two ways in which things of value are demoted to things with a price.

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

Our very own.....................

 ..................................next gen Real Intelligence unit, aka Dakota, explains the meaning of life its ownself to his grandparents..

God save..........................

 ...........................the King.

perspective...................

 Upon every culture there is an internal and external perspective—the perspective of the tribesman and that of the anthropologist.  Homer's Odyssey enables us to share the internal perspective on an enchanted world.  Thanks to such artists as Pope, Goethe, and Mozart, we can acquire the same internal perspective of the sober world of the Enlightenment.  They show us what it was like, to live through the loss of old authority, and to see the vision unfold of man in his freedom, with his dignity not yet degraded, and his religion not yet crumbled to dust. In art, literature, and music, the Enlightenment gave content to its universalism, with stories, epics and operas that might be set in any place of time, each devoted to the human substance beneath the local colour.  Its criticisms of old authority were accompanied by a fervent and pious attempt to retain the ethical view of man. . . . The Enlightenment, we discover, is part of us.  It belongs to the archaeology, rather than the pre-history, of modern consciousness, 

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

feel.........................

 We cannot prove by theoretical reasoning that there is a God; nor can we grasp the idea of God, except by a via negativa that forbids us to apply it.  Nevertheless, we have intimations of the transcendental.  In the sentiment of beauty we feel the purposiveness and intelligibility of everything that surrounds us, while in the sentiment of the sublime we seem to see beyond the world, to something overwhelming and inexpressible in which it is somehow grounded.  Neither sentiment can be translated into a reasoned argument—for such an argument would be natural theology, and natural theology is a thing of the past, believable only in an age of unquestioning faith.  All we know is that we can know nothing of the transcendental.  But that is not what we feel—and it is in our feeling for beauty that the content, and even the truth, of religious doctrine is strangely and untranslatably intimated to us.

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

Claude Monet     1896-97     Early Morning on the Seine 
oil on canvas

wisdom...................

 Perhaps the most counterintuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you'll get.  Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

believe.....................

 Those people who believe that money cannot buy happiness have not given enough away.

-Jon Hanson

Highly recommended......................

 

our new norm...........................

 When the Cold War ended, the Americans had the opportunity to do nearly anything.  Instead, on both the Left and the Right, we started a lazy descent into narcissistic populism.  The presidential election record that brought us Clinton and W Bush and Obama and Trump and Biden isn't an aberration, but instead a pattern of active disinterest in the wider world.  It is our new norm.

     Nor is there leadership beyond America.  There is no new hegemon-in-waiting, nor countries that will rise to support a common vision.  There is no savior waiting in the wings.  Instead, the world's secondary powers have already fallen back into their old habits of mutual antagonism. . . .

    China and Russia have already fallen back on instinct, heedless of the lessons of their own long sagas.  In the post-Cold War era, the pair benefited the most by far from American engagement, as the Order prevented the powers that had impoverished, shattered, and conquered them through the centuries from fully exerting themselves, while simultaneously creating the circumstances for the greatest economic stability they have ever known.  Instead of seeking rapprochement with the Americans to preserve their magical moment, they instead worked diligently—almost pathologically—to disrupt what remained of global structure.  Future history will be as merciless to them as their dark and dangerous pasts.

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

the odd out-of-season avocado........

      The same network of sacrosanct interconnections that has brought us everything from quick mortgages to smartphones to on-demand electricity has not only filled 8 billion bellies, it has done so with the odd out-of-season avocado.  That's now largely behind us. The web is failing.  Just past the horizon looms a world of lower and less reliable agricultural yields, marred by less variety.  A world with less energy or fewer manufactured goods is the difference between wealth and security or poverty and conflict.  But a world with fewer foodstuffs is one with fewer people.

     More than war, more than disease, famine is the ultimate country killer.  And it is not something the human condition can adjust to quickly or easily.

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

Community.................

 Communities depend upon the force which Burke called prejudice; they are essentially local, bound to a place, a history, a language and a common culture.  The Enlightened individualist, by forgoing such things, lives increasingly as a stranger among strangers, consumed by a helpless longing for an attachment which his own cold thinking has destroyed.

     These conflicts within Enlightenment culture are part of its legacy to us.  We too are individualists, believers in the sovereign right of human freedom, living as strangers in a society of strangers.  And we too are beset by those ancient and ineradicable yearnings for something else—for a homecoming to our true community.

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

Head's up Kurt................

      My world cannot function without coffee (7th by value) and I am . . . concerned.  Coffee is a lot like cocaine . . . in terms of where it can be grown.  It demands a very specific mix of elevations, temperature, and moisture conditions.  Too dry and the crop shrivels.  Too wet and it rots. Too hot and it is bitter.  Too cold and it won't flower.  Roughly 7,500 feet is the ideal elevation, putting it well above most lines of human habitation and making servicing and transport tricky.  Mass coffee culture is only possible in a globalized system in which the inputs can access such often-near-inaccessible areas.  The Arabica coffee you get at everything from McDonald's to your favorite espresso bar faces the greatest challenges, while the robusta coffee that goes into instant is far more heat and drought tolerant.  The combination of deglobalization and climate change suggests that most of the world is about to get a coffee downgrade.

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

Oil...................

 Modern energy in general and oil in specific is what separates our contemporary world from the preindustrial.  It separates what we define as "civilization" from what came before. . . .

     Without oil, the American-led global Order would have never had a chance.  Nor would have passenger cars. Or global food distribution.  Or global manufacturing. Or modern health care.  Or the shoes most of us are wearing.  Oil's power is such that in many ways, it has almost enabled us to ignore nothing less than geography itself. . . .

     Oil is different.  Because oil is central to everything from the shingles on your roof to the phone in your hand to the spatula in your kitchen to the pipes and hoses in your plumbing to the diapers on your kid to the paint on your walls to your daily commute to how products cross the ocean, a slight increase in demand for oil or a slight decrease in supply for oil results in wild price swings that are most assuredly not proportional. . . .

     The specifics will be as wild and unpredictable as the rest of the post-Order chaos, but a good starting point is to assume that 40 percent of global supplies fall into the Kashagan-style bucket:  too-dangerous export routes to survive globalization's end, too-expensive projects to maintain without outside financing, too difficult technically to operate without an army of out-of-region workers.  Such projects will go away and not come back for decades.  If ever.  And oil's absence for a few weeks, never mind a few decades, would be more than enough to crash modern civilization as we know it.

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

Coal..................

      Greentech in its current form simply isn't mature enough or cheap enough to move the needle for most people in most locations.  It is largely limited to developed countries with rich capital supplies who just coincidentally happen to have large population centers fairly close to sunny or windy locations.  The southwest quarter of the United States looks great, as do the American Great Plains, Australia, and the coasts of the North Sea

     Nearly all other locations will remain dependent upon more traditional fuels for the vast majority of their energy needs.  This is far worse than it sounds from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions because the vast majority of these locations will not be able to retain access to internationally traded oil and gas, either.  If they cannot source oil or natural gas and their geographies do not enable sufficient use of sun and wind, they will have a simple decision to make.  Option A is to do without the products that have enabled humanity to advance for the past two centuries, to suffer catastrophic reductions in product access and food productions, triggering massive downward revisions in standards of living and population. To go without electricity. To deindustrialize. To decivilize. 

     Or—Option B—to use one fuel source that nearly all countries have locally: coal.  Many particularly unlucky people will be stuck with something called lignite, a barely-qualifies-as-coal fuel that is typically one-fifth water by weight and is by far the least efficient and dirtiest fuel in use today.  Germany already today uses lignite as its primary power input fuel because Greentech is so woefully unapplicable to the German geography, and yet the Germans—for environmental reasons—have shut down most of their other power-generation options.

     As a planet, we are perfectly capable of suffering broad-scale economic collapse and vastly increasing our carbon emissions at the same time.

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

annoying.....................

 An annoying malady, to think yourself so wise that you persuade yourself that no one can believe the contrary!

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book One, Chapter 56

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

      Feudalism is making a comeback, long after it was believed to have been deposited in the historical dustbin.  Of course it will look different this time around: we won't see Knights in shining armor, or vassals doing homage to their lords, or a powerful Catholic Church enforcing the reigning orthodoxy.  What we are seeing is a new form of aristocracy developing in the United States and beyond, as wealth in our postindustrial economy tends to be ever more concentrated in fewer hands.  Societies are becoming more stratified, with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most of the population.  A class of thought leaders and opinion makers, which I call the "clerisy" provide intellectual support for the emerging hierarchy.  As avenues for upward mobility are diminishing, the model of liberal capitalism is losing appeal around the globe, and new doctrines are arising in its place, including ones that lend support to a kind of neo-feudalism.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

harmony here and discord there.....

 

There's always a lesson to be learned

whether in a hotel bar

or over tea in a teahouse,

no matter which way it goes, 

for you or against,

what you want to hear or what you don't.

Seeing Roland Kirk, for example,

with two then three saxophones

in his mouth at once

and a kazoo, no less,

hanging from his neck at the ready.

Even in my youth I saw this

not as a lesson in keeping busy

with one thing or another,

but as a joyous impossible lesson

in how to do it all at once,

pleasing and displeasing yourself

with harmony here and discord there.

But what else did I know

as the waitress lit a candle

on my round table in the dark?

What did I know about anything?

-Billy Collins, The Five Spot, 1964

On temper................

 Remember that when you're in the right you can afford to keep your temper, and that when you're in the wrong you can't afford to lose it.

-George Lorimer, Letters From A Self-Made Merchant To His Son

rooted..................

 The Enlightenment began with the rise of modern science, culminated in the French Revolution and then dwindled in wave after wave of yearning, hope and doubt.  It was characterized by a scepticism towards authority, a respect for reason, and an advocacy of individual freedom rather than divine command as the basis of moral and political order.  The Enlightenment expressed itself in many ways, according to national character and local conditions; but it owes its most celebrated definition to Kant who, in 1784, described it as 'the liberation of man from his self-imposed minority', adding that this minority lies 'not in lack of understanding, but in lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another'.  By the time of Kant's words the Enlightenment was at its crisis.  Herder's advocacy of 'culture' against 'civilization' was in part a reaction to Kant's view of human nature, as formed from a single pattern and fulfilled in a single way—through reason, freedom and law. The 'universalism' advocated by Kant seemed to Herder to threaten all that is most precious in the human soul—namely, the local, the loyal and the rooted.

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

If we are talking about..............

..................the best TV show theme songs, it would be 

difficult to ignore:  

    M.A.S.H 

    Hawaii 5-0 

    Mission Impossible 

    The Monkees 

 

a conscious effort.................

 Make a conscious effort this month…and every month after this one, to choose your attitude and focus on what you need to do each day. Then do just a little bit more.  Believe. Smile. Laugh. Engage. Commit. Show resilience. . . . I’ll be focused on building relationships, solving problems, and having fun.  What about you?

-Sean Carpenter, as culled from here

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