Ouch.......................

 The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What’s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.

As these documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation.

-Matt Taibbi, from here

Checking in with.............................

 ................................Thomas Sowell:

Ideas, as the raw material from which knowledge is produced, exist in superabundance, but that makes the production of knowledge more difficult rather than easier.

Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.

Understanding the limitations of human beings is the beginning of wisdom.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

Envy plus rhetoric equals 'social justice'.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.

Maturity is not a matter of age. You have matured when you are no longer concerned with showing how clever you are, and give your full attention to getting the job done right. Many never reach that stage, no matter how old they get.

Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.

Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups.

Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?

Although I am ready to defend what I have said, many people expect me to defend what others have attributed to me.

thanks Chris

"social debt".............................

 . . . once money goes from being a tool you can use to make yourself happy to a symbol of what other people measure you by, you are buried in a kind of social debt that’s hard to measure but has a real impact on your happiness.

-Morgan Housel, from here

Wedged...............................

 Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.

-Anthony Burgess, as quoted in this Martin Amis piece

Rigor..............................

........................or, why I was a History major:

     "It's just first year engineering," she said.  "Everybody cries."

     I was a little concerned, and a little curious, so I poked around a bit and talked to a grad student I knew in mechanical engineering.  He told me that only one in three students who started as an engineering major would finish with the degree, and that in fact early courses in the major were designed to be "weed out" classes, meant specifically to compel students to drop the major and choose another.  Why?  Because the rigor of the engineering programs was so high that a large percentage of students were guaranteed to drop out eventually, and it was far better for them to do so early in their college careers before they had accumulated a lot of credits.  What had seemed like cruelty to me was in fact an act of mercy, an artifact of a pragmatic and necessary acknowledgement that not all students possess the underlying ability necessary to flourish in some fields.  In time I would learn that many college classes, such as calculus and organic chemistry functioned in much the same way.  And I grew to think that rather than representing a failure of educators to do their jobs, these classes that screened out students performed a necessary if unfortunate function for institutions dedicated to training young people for their futures.

-Fredrik deBoer,  The Cult of Smart

A good question................

 Our friend Ben Carlson opines on, Why Higher Interest Rates Haven’t Mattered (Yet).  Included with this post is this handy pie chart:

The proposition is that the overwhelming majority of home borrowers have locked in very low rates and are unaffected by the recent rate increases.

It is hard to disagree with that, but we're pretty sure it doesn't tell the whole story.  Most commercial and investment loans are variable rate mortgages.  Typically, they are fixed for a three- or five-year period, then they adjust to reflect the current market conditions.  We believe that there is a bit of turmoil ahead as those loans adjust over the next year or so.  As an example, we recently had a five-year adjustable-rate mortgage adjust from 3.75% to 8.25%.  Yeow.  Fortunately for us, we were able to pay the loan off.  Not all borrowers we be as fortunate.  Stay tuned.

Recommended........................

 

Union............................

 "Compassion arises when the jewel of the mind rests in the lotus of the heart."*

     In the West, we tend to separate the mind and the heart.  The mind thinks rationally.  It knows hard and objective truths.  It judges good from bad, right from wrong.  The heart is emotional and soft.  If we pay too close attention to it, it will make us weak and or lead us astray.  But the truth lies outside of this dichotomy altogether.  The mind is powerful when it is situated in the heart, when striving and trying to get something right is held with love and compassion. 

-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

*quote attributed to Jack Kornfield

On comparing....................

 Contrary to the cultural norms of heroic individualism, do not compare yourself to others.  Compare yourself to prior versions of yourself and judge yourself based on the effort you are exerting in the present moment.

-Brad Stulberg,  The Practice of Groundedness

hard lessons...............................

 More than any of the other early presidents, George Washington learned in early life the pain of loss, humiliation, and hardship.  It is axiomatic among military historians that commanders learn more from defeat than from victory, but this is especially true of Washington.  He had been taught many hard lessons and would have two decades in which to mull them over before he fought again. Reviewing is experiences, he could have distilled them into some general maxims along these lines:

      -Know yourself, and know those who you are fighting.  This is a more complex proposition than it may seem, as it requires introspection, strategic thinking, and reliable intelligence.

     -Study terrain, and make it your friend.

     -As circumstances change, be ready to change views and abandon assumptions.  Listen to dissenters and know how to weigh alternatives.

-Thomas E. Ricks:  First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

Think we have witnessed this............

 . . .he became able to study a situation, evaluate its facts, decide which ones were meaningful, develop a course of action in response to work toward a desired outcome, and verbalize the orders that need to be issued.

      These are the basic steps in critical thinking, but the military commander's task is especially difficult because he or she must take one additional step, often the hardest one of all: ensuring that the orders are implemented.  It is one thing to know what to do, but quite another to get other people to do it.  New presidents often make the mistake, for example, of paying too much attention to formulating policy and not enough into implementing it.

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

Optimizing...................

 We are optimizing for all the wrong things: Busyness.  Nonstop information.  Digital relevance.  It is easy to convince ourselves that we are getting so much done when in fact we are hardly getting anything done, at least not of real value. . . . If the goal is to optimize, we shouldn't be focused on doing more for the sake of doing more.  Rather, we should be focused on being fully present for the pursuits and people that matter most to us.

-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

when slow is fast.....................

There is nothing heroic about quick fixes, hacks, or silver bullets, especially given they rarely, if ever, work.  Most breakthroughs rest upon a long-standing foundation of steady and consistent effort.  For so many of the meaningful endeavors in our lives, the best way to move fast is to go about it slowly, to proceed with a gentle yet firm persistence.

-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds—Not Crushes—Your Soul 

Your Silence..............

 There is a language so

beautiful that it is never spoken.

There is a deep sort of silence

that may never adequately fall into words.

That, I tell you, is more valuable

than any jewel

or any diamond.

-John M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows, channeling Meister Eckhart in Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul

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

      The classical world was far closer to the makers of the American Revolution and the founders of the United State than it is to us today.  Nowadays the Greeks and Romans are remote to us, their works studied by a few in college and then largely forgotten even by most of those readers.  But Greco-Roman antiquity was not distant to the leaders of the American Revolution. It was present in their lives, as part of their political vocabulary and as the foundation of their personal values.  In short, it shaped their view of the world in a way that most Americans now are not taught and so don't see.

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our County

thanks Jon

Quite the cast of characters..............

      The grew into distinctly dissimilar men: Washington a stiff-necked soldier; Adams a brilliant, honest, self-absorbed crank; Jefferson a dreamer of liberty who lived in hypocritical luxury off the sweat of captive humans; Madison already with one foot in the next generation, perhaps more American than a Virginian, and an unapologetic politician. Like Alexander Hamilton, he was more skeptical than his elders of the verities of the Enlightenment, with its core faith in human improvement.

-Thomas E. Ricks:  First Principles

Those were the days my friend.............

 The best place to begin to understand the views of the Revolutionary generation is with a look at the word "virtue."  This word was powerfully meaningful during the eighteenth century.  Today it is a mere synonym for morality, and also, anachronistically, a signifier of female chastity or the lack of it, as in the euphemistic phrase "a woman of easy virtue."  But for the Revolutionary generation, virtue was the essential element of public life.  Back then, it actually was masculine.  It meant putting the common good before one's own interests.  Virtue, writes the historian Joyce Appleby, was the "lynchpin" of public life—that it, the fastener that held together the structure.

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

gratitude and obligation................

 There is a line of obligation that connects us to those who gave us what we have; and our concern for the future is an extension of that line.  We take the future of our community into account not by fictitious cost-benefit calculations, but more concretely, by seeing ourselves as inheriting benefits and passing them on.  Concern for future generations is a non-specific outgrowth of gratitude.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Grand Tradition

Stringing words together........................

 ........................in a fun sort of way:

“I’ll have to ask you to forgive me for sounding like I’m suffering from Sudden Onset Multiple Personality Disorder — that’s a thing, right? — because I’m only following a news cycle that spins and flips around like two fat kids riding a seesaw mounted to a trampoline inside a bouncy house.”

Can I get...............................

 ................................an Amen?

An evening's stroll through the garden .........

 

proud property owners................

 The Peasantry:  Many of them in 1789, were still day laborers or sharecroppers, working other men's land; but by 1793 half the soil of France was owned by peasants, most of whom had bought their acres at bargain prices from the confiscated properties of the Church; and all but a few peasants had freed themselves from feudal dues.  The stimulus of ownership turned labor from drudgery into devotion, daily adding to the surplus that built homes and comforts, churches and schools—if only the taxgatherer could be propitiated or deceived.  And taxes could be paid with assignats—government paper money—at their face value, while products could be sold for assignats multiplied a hundred times to equal their nominal worth.  Never had the French earth been so zealously and fruitfully tilled.

     This liberation of the largest class in a now classless society was the most visible and lasting effect of the Revolution.  These sturdy providers became the strongest defenders of the Revolution, for it had given them the land, which a Bourbon restoration might take away.  For the same reason they supported Napoleon, and for fifteen years gave him half of their sons.  As proud property owners they allied themselves politically with the bourgeoisie, and served, throughout the nineteenth century, as conservative ballast amid the repeated paroxysms of the state.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon 

one man.........................

 But all made one error: they calculated without the human element.  Seldom in the history of Europe has the insignificance of one man had so profound an effect upon his period.  Frederick was no leader; indeed he was a man of so blank a personality as to defy all attempts to make him one.  In vain to say that the occasion mattered more than the man.  In the long run the enemies of the Hapsburg must be drawn into Frederick's quarrel or perish, but afraid to trust so mild a leader they hesitated until Frederick had fallen, until Bohemia and the Palatine were lost, and then spent a generation in trying to fill the breach which had been made.

-C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War

Passive patience vs active patience............

 The least effective form of patience is passive.

A person who is passively patient waits for the universe to give them what they think they deserve. Five years from now, they’ll still be waiting. Passive patience violates Newton’s third law, which states, ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.’

No action. No result.

The world isn’t indebted to you, and no one is destined to come your way, tap your shoulder, and present you with the golden opportunity you’ve been waiting for. It doesn’t work that way.

The most effective form of patience is active patience.

-Farnum Street, full post is here

contentment......................

 Test for yourself your capacity for the good man's life; the life of one content with his allotted part in the universe, who seeks only to be just in his doings and charitable in his ways.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4:25

shuffled.........................

Traveling one day—my brother the sieur de la Brousse and I—during our civil wars, we met a gentleman of good appearance. He was of the opposing party, but I knew nothing of it, for he pretended otherwise; and the worst of these wars is that the cards are so shuffled that your enemy is distinguished from yourself by no apparent mark either of language or of bearing, and has been brought up in the same laws and customs and the same atmosphere, so that it is hard to avoid confusion and disorder.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 2, Chapter 5

On friendly relations with some old friends....

      For let me tell you that since my arrival in Rome I have re-established friendly relations with some old friends - my books.  I had ceased associating with them, not because I found them annoying but because they made me slightly ashamed.  For having plunged into the middle of the most turbulent happenings in highly untrustworthy company, I felt I had not sufficiently followed the advice the books had given me.  But they forgive me . . .

-Marcus Tullius Cicero, from a letter written to Marcus Terentius Varro in 46 B.C.

Universities....................

 Universities can get away with obscurantism and enforced ideological conformism because of their enormous power over labor markets.  They are no longer primarily about learning, as Jane Jacobs noted, but about providing the credential needed for a high paying job.  One recent study of American college students found that more than one-third "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" in four years of college. Employers report that recent graduates are short on critical thinking skills.

     Equally worrying is that students in the West are not acquiring familiarity with their own cultural heritage.  Universities no longer take the care they once did to transmit the genius of the past—with its often inconvenient lessons—to the next generation.  We are in danger of "mass amnesia," being cut off from knowledge of our own cultural history, writes Jacobs.

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

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

John Coltrane...........from A Love Supreme:  Psalm

 

On dogma.......................

 

Understand the value of truth for its own sake. That is the vaccine to prevent you from falling so deeply in love with our own opinions.  That is the recipe for avoiding dogmatism. Be engaged, but don’t be dogmatic.

-as culled from here

Modern day friendships...........

back story here

the distant trail.........................

 The trouble with him was that he was not able to imagine. He was quick and ready in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their meanings.

-Jack London, from his short story, To Build a Fire

Can you blame him.....................

 . . . his desire to keep all unhealthy situations at arm’s length.

When he's right.......................

 more gardening fun here

results....................

 You'll get 10 times better results by elevating good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior, especially in children and animals.

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

grounded...................

Regardless of what the marketers, click-bait headlines, and pseudoscience evangelists say, there are no magic lotions, potions, or pills when it comes to deep happiness, lasting well-being, and enduring performance.

. . . happiness, fulfillment, well-being, and sustainable performance arise when you concentrate on being present in the process of living instead of obsessing over outcomes, and above all when you're firmly grounded wherever you are.

-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

hearing.....................

Only today

I heard

the river

within the river.

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

Walk....................

 

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

-Soren Kierkegaard, as quoted here

a precious inheritance...............

      In all those ways modern conservatism arose as a defence of the individual against potential oppressors, and an endorsement of popular sovereignty.  However, it opposed the view that political order is founded on a contract, as well as the parallel suggestion that the individual enjoys freedom, sovereignty and rights in a state of nature, and can throw off the burden of social and political membership, and start again from a condition of absolute freedom.  For the conservative, human beings come into this world burdened by obligations, and subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom, without which the exercise of freedom is likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

Morgan Housel.................

 .....gets in our game of posting favorite quotes.

Blue-eyed soul..................

................. Any Major Dude With Half a Heart has the mix.

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

 There’s nothing wrong with being risk averse at times but if you’re always risk averse you’re going to miss out on life.

-Ben Carlson, as lifted from here

Magic pills don't exist....................

  The shortcut turnpike is dark and filled with terrors.

-Tony Isola, from this post

Us pesky humans...............

 Man alone, of all created beings, displays a natural contempt for existence, and yet a boundless desire to exist; he scorns life, but he dreads annihilation.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1, Chapter XVII

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

 Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

-Will Durant

Checking in with...............................

 ................................Albert Camus:

One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.

Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.

Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.

Light and Glory......................

 

“I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.

“It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

“You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.

“Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will triumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”

-John Adams, as cut-and-pasted from here

On the inertia of busyness................

 Productive activity has nothing to do with being swept away by the inertia of busyness.  It is not about quantity either.  Rather, it is a deliberate choice of where and how to direct one's attention.

     The significance of this choice cannot be overstated.

-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

Ah............................

 If you can't tell what you desperately need, it's probably sleep.

-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living

Hope........................

 Time, and the work of changing days, has made

Many a bad thing good; fortune has played

With many men, and set them firm again.

-Virgil, as channeled by Montaigne, Book 2, Chapter 3

For a take on geopolitics..............

 .............that you likely won't find elsewhere, one should check in periodically with Fred Reed:

Here it is, step by step, following Fred’s First Law, an American war begins with overestimating American power, underestimating the enemy, and misunderstanding the kind of war it is getting into.

Checking in with Wendell Berry.........

While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and Bigbangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row

'Chance' is a poor word among
the mazes of causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, “By chance, of course!” As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
By chance? Prove it, then, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.

As seen from our deck last night.........

 

Look..........................

 Look beneath the surface: never let a thing's intrinsic quality or worth escape you.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Six

Asking......................

 .............................the tough questions.

the intention heuristic.............

 I am not a fan of the desire to do good. I call it the intention heuristic. I think that, on average, profit-seeking businesses do good, and non-profits do harm. But if you insist on doing non-profit work, I think that working for a hands-on charity is less likely to cause harm than working for a cause.

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

What I call the intention heuristic takes two forms:

Good intentions necessarily lead to good consequences.

Bad consequences necessarily indicate that someone had bad intentions.

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

-Arnold Kling, from this substack

The 4th of July......................

 

 

The fog of war.......................

Pickett's Charge. More like a long walk across an open field, hazarding cannon fire while armed enemy troops hide behind stone walls just awaiting your arrival.  Not sure why some very smart people thought this was a good idea. July 3, 1863.

 

An interesting exercise.................

 ...........would be to study the net worth of members of Congress prior to their election and after they have served multiple terms.  Just curious.

A distinction must be made when aristocracies and democracies accuse each other of facilitating corruption.  In aristocratic governments, those who are placed at the head of affairs are rich men, who are desirous only of power.  In democracies, statesman are poor and have their fortunes to make.  The consequence is that in aristocratic states the rulers are rarely accessible to corruption and have little craving for money, while the reverse is the case in democratic nations.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1, Chapter VIII, 1835

need......................Part 1

      We human beings live naturally in communities, bound together by mutual trust.  We have need for a shared home, a place of safety where our claim to occupancy is undisputed and where we can call on others to assist us in times of threat.  We need peace with our neighbors and the procedures for securing it.  And we need the love and protection afforded by family life.  To revise the human condition in any of those respects is to violate imperatives rooted in biology and in the needs of social reproduction.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

need.......................Part 2

 . . . But to conduct political argument as though these factors are too far from the realm of ideas to deserve a mention is to ignore all the limits that must be borne in mind, if our political philosophy is to be remotely believable.  It is precisely the character of modern utopias to ignore these limits - to imagine societies without law (Marx and Engels), without families (Laing), without borders or defenses (Sartre).  And much conservative ink has been wasted (by me among others) in rebutting such views, which can be believed only by people who are unable to perceive realities, and who therefore will never be persuaded by argument.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Grand Tradition

seeks.........................

 Philosophy, as Spinoza understands it, does not peddle in temporary cheer, modest improvements in well-being, or chicken soup for the soul; it seeks and claims to find a basis for happiness that is absolutely certain, permanent, and divine.  The principal—indeed, the sole—purpose of his mature philosophy, as expressed in his masterwork, the Ethics, is to achieve this kind of blessedness or salvation. . . . Like Socrates, Spinoza avers that blessedness comes only from a certain kind of knowledge—specifically, the "knowledge of the union the that mind has with the whole of Nature."

-Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

consistency.....................

 The consistency of your endeavors (exercise, companionship, work) is more important than the quantity.  Nothing beats small things done every day, which is way more important than what you do occasionally.

-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living

The Big Long vs The Big Short............

...................... or, contrarians are usually wrong.

supremely........................

 There is a way of losing that is finding. When soul overmasters sense. When the noble and divine self overcomes the lower self. When duty and honor and love immortal things bid the mortal perish. It is only when a man supremely gives that he supremely finds.

-Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

The left flank............................

Sitting atop Gettysburg's Little Round Top, protecting the left flank of the Union Army, the 20th Maine is about out of ammunition and under heavy attack.  There are no reinforcements to be had. Using the advantage of the high ground, the regimental commander, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, orders a bayonet charge down the hill at the advancing Confederate Army.   History shows Chamberlain and the 20th Maine saved the day.  July 2, 1863

 

time.........................

 I hope there's time

for this and that,

and not just this.

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

The high ground....................

Brigadier General John Buford and his 2,500 men get to Gettysburg first. His recognition of the importance of holding the high ground and of slowing the advance of the Confederate armies to enable the Union troops to occupy said high ground likely changed the outcome of the Civil War.    July 1, 1863.

 

a great difference............

 There is a great difference between the Idols of the human mind and the Ideas of the divine.

-Sir Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

Consider......................

 You see that I have set out opposing assertions in response to your question and I have touched on quite strong arguments in support of each position. Therefore consider now which seems the more probable to you.

William of Ockham, Dialogus

Trust me. Pick the Cabernet...............

 

more fun here