Cleaning out the closet..........................

 

grown-up...................

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

-Louis L'Amour, Flint

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

    Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
    vacation with pay. Want more
    of everything ready-made. Be afraid
    to know your neighbors and to die.
    And you will have a window in your head.
    Not even your future will be a mystery
    any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
    and shut away in a little drawer.
    When they want you to buy something
    they will call you. When they want you
    to die for profit they will let you know.
    So, friends, every day do something
    that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
    Love the world. Work for nothing.
    Take all that you have and be poor.
    Love someone who does not deserve it.
    Denounce the government and embrace
    the flag. Hope to live in that free
    republic for which it stands.
    Give your approval to all you cannot
    understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
    has not encountered he has not destroyed.
    Ask the questions that have no answers.
    Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
    Say that your main crop is the forest
    that you did not plant,
    that you will not live to harvest.
    Say that the leaves are harvested
    when they have rotted into the mold.
    Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
    Put your faith in the two inches of humus
    that will build under the trees
    every thousand years.
    Listen to carrion – put your ear
    close, and hear the faint chattering
    of the songs that are to come.
    Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
    Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
    though you have considered all the facts.
    So long as women do not go cheap
    for power, please women more than men.
    Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
    a woman satisfied to bear a child?
    Will this disturb the sleep
    of a woman near to giving birth?
    Go with your love to the fields.
    Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
    in her lap. Swear allegiance
    to what is nighest your thoughts.
    As soon as the generals and the politicos
    can predict the motions of your mind,
    lose it. Leave it as a sign
    to mark the false trail, the way
    you didn’t go. Be like the fox
    who makes more tracks than necessary,
    some in the wrong direction.
    Practice resurrection.

-Wendell Berry

haunted..................

 

     The spirit of Plato, and that of his pupil and critic Aristotle, have haunted philosophy throughout its history, and it is to them that almost all medieval controversies in the subject and ultimately be traced.  They each bequeathed to the world arguments and conceptions of superlative intellectual and dramatic power, and it is not surprising that, wherever they were read, their influence was felt.  Each of the important Mediterranean religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—attempted either to assimilate their doctrines or to present some alternative that would be equally persuasive and equally compatible with our intuitive sense of the nature of the world and of our place within it.

-Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy

a general unrest..............

The full  moon often rises

in the wrong place.  Tonight I sense

activity up there, a general unrest.

-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

Truth.............(until the third one)

 

Faithful readers.........................

 .............may remember a series of posts about the Hopeful Birth of a Subdivision.  We started the process of developing 113 single-family residential building lots in 2021. We are 97% finished with our part of the development.  Our home builder partner, D. R. Horton, is about 60% finished with their portion of the project.  Drone photography is pretty cool.  This is what progress looked like this hazy afternoon:

The whole development

Phase 1 95% built out

Phase 2 is now really getting started

While not finished, we are announcing the successful birth of Conor's Pass Sub-division. There will likely be a wrap-up post, celebrating the development and construction and sale of all 113 houses next Spring.  Stay tuned.

Was ready ...................

.....................to a call bullshit on this:

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Richard McKenzie points out that one underappreciated cause of the increase in the concentration of wealth in the U.S. is that Americans are living longer. (via)

But then I remembered this.  Maybe it is correct.

Testing our self-awareness.................

...................................with 21 questions.

51 ideas.............................

 29. Occam’s Razor: If there are multiple explanations for why something happened and they are equally persuasive, assume the simplest one is true. In the search for truth, remove unnecessary assumptions. Trust the lowest-complexity answer.

30. Hickam’s Dictum: The opposite of Occam’s Razor. In a complex system, problems usually have more than one cause. For example, in medicine, people can have many diseases at the same time. 31. Hormesis: A low dose of something can have the opposite effect of a high dose. A little bit of stress wakes you up, but a lot of stress is bad for you. Lifting weights for 30 minutes per day is good for you, but lifting weights for 6 hours per day will destroy your muscles. Stress yourself, but not too much. 32. Robustness Principle: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. It’s a design guideline for software and a good rule for life: Hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold others to. 33. Legibility: We are blind to what we cannot measure. Not everything that counts can be measured, and not everything that can be measured counts. But people manage what they can measure, so society repeats the same mistakes. 34. Horseshoe Theory: Extreme opposites tend to look the same. For example, a far-right movement and a far-left movement can be equally violent or desire a similar outcome. People on both sides are more similar to each other than they are to people in the center.

-full list here

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

..........................Motown's Greatest Hits

Powerful.............................

 ..................................productivity choices.

A teaser.........................

..................................as I crack open the third "summer of Scruton" book.

Sometimes the lines between...........

 .............correlation and causation do touch.

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

 If I can resort to politics to impose my own preferences on the behavior of others, even if these preferences are not highly valued intrinsically, then it would seem that other persons, working in democratic process, can do the same to me. I may find that the political process is double-edged. 

-James Buchanan, as quoted here

And all of a sudden...................

 .................BJJ (Brazilian jiujitsu) is a big thing.  

Back and forth...............

 Raindrops on your glasses;

there you go again,

reading the clouds.

-Either Jim Harrison or Ted Kooser from Braided Creek

your turn David

Overstuffed..........................

 .............................slack is underrated.

-Seth Godin

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

.................. Semi-retired but still in the game.

The old rights and responsibilities problem....

Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in. . . . A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.

-attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals

thanks Kurt

straight............................?

 What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

-Tennessee Williams, as channeled by David Kanigan

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

 . . . I lean toward the position that not doing negative things may be far more important than doing positive things.

-Michael Wade

The gift....................

 ...............that never stops giving. Love the "so far" part.

Great moments in understanding............

Yet five men got into this metal tube and tried to go to the bottom of the darkest depths of the ocean. Again: driven by a game controller. I’ve never more fully understood and yet not understood men than after reading about this tiny submarine controlled by—one more time—a video game controller. There’s a reason men make great and strange discoveries and also have a shorter life expectancy than women. 

-Nellie Bowles, from here

Time............................

 Sometimes, I wish that I could be around in another 30 years, to see where technology has taken us. But, that privilege will be reserved for the fresh, young faces that I observed yesterday. Be good to each other. Time flies.

-Rick Georges, from here

balancing......................

 It may be wise to question whether we should always be living in the moment and whether this is the best way to foster creative thinking. Finding this ‘middle way’ between mindfulness and mind wandering can help us enjoy the optimal benefits of both ways of thinking. Mindfulness helps us truly see what’s around us—a skill of paramount importance in life and art—but it must be balanced with giving the mind space to dream, fantasize, and simply roam free.

-as cut and pasted from here

influenced..................

 A lot of times we’re not interested in truth – we’re interested in the elimination of uncertainty, and that fact alone causes us to believe things that have little relation to reality.

-Morgan Housel, from this post

infinite capacity................

 We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.

-Dee Hock, as culled from here

Checking in with George Carlin....

 

We often forget the "duties" part........

 But in itself morality consists in the "side constraints," to use Nozick's expression, that make agreement rather than coercion into the foundation of our social conduct.  These side constraints are embodied in a system of rights and duties: around each individual is a wall of rights that protect him or her from unjust coercion, and on every individual is imposed a set of duties by which those rights are guaranteed.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

gatekeepers.........................

      Universities have long served as gatekeepers for the upper classes, but they are doing less well at what was arguably their greatest twentieth-century triumph: expanding opportunities for the many.

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

an intensifying reaction.............

   It was not the same Paris that he had known in the crowd-ruled days of '92 and '93.  Ever since the fall of Robespierre in '94 the capital had followed the countryside in an intensifying reaction—religious and political—against the Revolution.  Catholicism, led by nonjuring priests, was regaining its hold upon a people that had lost belief in an earthly substitute for supernatural hopes and consolations, for sacraments, ceremonies, and processional holydays.  The decadi, or decimal day of rest, was increasingly ignored; the Christian Sunday was flagrantly respected and enjoyed.  France was voting for God.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Paris in 1797

Purpose........................

 To no purpose does the man avoid war who cannot enjoy peace, and to no purpose does the man flee from trouble who does not have what it takes to relish repose.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 2, Chapter 3

About time...................

  Housing starts surged well above expectations in May, crushing the forecast from every economics group and putting in the largest monthly gain in the number of homes started since January 1990.  Looking at the details, gains were broad-based with three of four major regions and both single-family and multi-unit starts contributing.  While one month doesn’t make a trend, housing starts are now at the highest level since the previous peak in April of 2022, before mortgage rates began to surge.  This signals that the developers may have finally found their footing in what has been a challenging environment for sales. While 30-year mortgage rates continue to hover near 7% it looks like some of the sticker shock from the rapid run-up in financing costs last year is wearing off.

-Brian Wesbury, from here

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

 

less exacting and freer..................

 

     A man advanced in dignity and age counted drink among the three principal comforts that he used to say he had left in life.  But he took it in the wrong way.  Fastidiousness is to be avoided in it, and careful selection of wines.  If you make your pleasure depend on drinking good wine, you condemn yourself to the pain of sometimes drinking bad wine.  We must have a less exacting and freer taste.  To be a good drinker, one must not have so delicate a palate.  The Germans drink almost all wines with equal pleasure.  Their aims is to swallow rather than to taste.  They have much the better of the bargain.  Their pleasure is much more plentiful and ready at hand.

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

Youngsters..................

      Nevertheless France was weary of revolution . . . Youngsters, constitutionally rebellious, were now rebelling against revolution.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Paris in 1795

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

 I honestly don’t buy the idea that money doesn’t buy happiness.  Money can fix a lot of problems in terms of comfort and convenience.   But your personal preferences and internal wiring will likely have a bigger impact on your relationship with money and happiness than some number.

-Ben Carlson, from here 

Surely you jest......................

 

One could only hope............

 People who lived through the rigors of the coronavirus pandemic may demand that the experts prove they were worthy of the trust and obedience they demanded. 

-Ann Althouse, as she takes a peek at the presidential crusade of "anti-vaccine activist" Bobby Kennedy, Jr. 

Capping off a fabulous Fathers' Day..........

.............My Sweetie humored me and we ventured out to the wondrous Midland Theatre in downtown Newark to catch a live performance by Pat Metheny.  He is an amazing musician and has more energy than most.  His sidekicks, a keyboardist and drummer, were no slouches either.  A great time was had by all.

 

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

Jimmy Buffett....................the License to Chill album

 

the downside of "meritocracy"...................

Between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled for 25 percent to 48 percent.  As Bell observed, parents of  high status in a meritocracy will use their advantages to improve their children's prospects, and in this way, "after one generation a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class." 

----------------------------------

Those who harbor a sense of natural superiority tend to support strong governmental action in line with their personal values and an overconfidence in their own competence, according to research by Slavisa Tasic of the University of Kiev on decision making in government.  But the history of unaccountable rule by "experts," or those claiming intellectual superiority, is less than encouraging for liberal democracy.

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

On speculation..........

 You must learn not to overwork a dollar any more that you would a horse.  Three per cent is a small load for it to draw; six, a safe one; when it pulls in ten for you it's likely working out West and you've got to watch to see that it doesn't buck; when it makes twenty you own a blame good critter or a mighty foolish one, and you want to make dead sure which; but if it draws a hundred it's playing the races or something just as hard on horses and dollars, and the first thing you know you won't have even a carcass to haul to the glue factory.

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

in charge......................

      To develop fully as persons, I have argued we need the virtues that transfer our motives from the animal to the personal center of our being—the virtues that put us in charge of our passions.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

understand things rightly...............

 Human beings find their fulfillment in mutual love and self-giving, but they get to this point via a long path of self-development, in which imitation, obedience, and self-control are necessary moments. This is not a hard thing to understand once we see the development of personality in the terms suggested by Aristotle. But it is a hard thing to practice.  Nevertheless, when we understand things rightly, we will be motivated to put virtue and good habits back where they belong, at the center of personal life.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

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

............................with Peter Mallouk:

What strange times we live in...............

One of my favorite pundits looks at the 2024 presidential race and has some thoughts.  Hope he is wrong about Bobby Kennedy, Jr.

 To earn the nomination, however, DeSantis will have to persuade an angry Republican base of his alienation from the government he is expected to preside over. He must demonstrate that, despite his orthodox trajectory and obvious ease with handling policy, he is not a mere politician or a creature of the institutions. Just as the Democratic Party today is the home of establishment and reaction, Republicans are the party of populism and revolt. By an inner necessity, the Democrats will nominate a safe insider; that happens to be Joe Biden’s sole qualification for the presidency. The inverse process will turn the Republican contest into a scramble for the outside rail.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

Stuck...................

 When your are stuck, explain your problem to others.  Often simply laying out a problem will present a solution.  Make "explaining the problem" part of your troubleshooting process.

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

Fathers........................

 “I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”

-Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

via and via

It's a strange, strange world...............

 back story here

 More fun here