...................................change and risk:
Increasing health and falling fertility has been making our world older, and I think this is a big reason for the many ways it has been decaying and declining. Old secure folks are less willing to allow risky innovations or changes. They care more about keeping what they have than about maybe getting much more. Problem is, without sufficient change even what we used to have will slowly fade away.
.............................I've suggested to our kids not to count on it:
Social Security is the largest source of retirement income for a large number of retirees in this country. The program provides at least 50% of income for 40% of beneficiaries. One out of every 7 people who receive Social Security rely on it to provide at least 90% of their income.
-as culled from here
That’s a fundamental choice in our work. To close doors on our way to an answer, or to open them on the way to things we never expected.
-Seth Godin, from here
The issue of "student debt" doesn't seem to be going away. My parents paid for my education, my wife worked her way through school paying her own way, and we paid for our kids' education. All of which may explain my lack of sympathy for those who find themselves deeply indebted by the acquisition of a degree that won't pay for itself. Been reading stuff recently suggesting the radical notion that colleges should bear some responsibility and participate in the resolution of this problem. Here is an interesting proposition from 2017.
The real issue, though, isn’t outright fraud — it’s that colleges are partially insulated from basic market forces, and they behave accordingly. They have financial incentives to enroll as many students as possible, and little incentive — or at least, little direct financial incentive — to ensure that those students will graduate on time and find jobs that pay well enough to repay their loans. The issue is particularly acute at less selective institutions including, but not limited to, for-profit colleges.
One proposed reform to the student loan system that has bipartisan support is known as risk-sharing. In its simplest form, a risk-sharing system would directly tie an institution’s finances to the outcomes of its students.
............from this interview with Walter Russell Mead:
As it turns out, the greatest danger to human beings is not the natural world; it’s not the polar bears, the great white sharks, and the tigers. The biggest danger is us and the very technology that enables us to survive, or manage, these natural catastrophes. So we are now in this totally new era. During the Enlightenment, we thought that we were escaping all of that, that we were moving toward a world of security and abundance. And now that we’ve reached it, it turns out there isn’t any security there after all.
In the
game of bowling, your score depends on where you roll the ball. You either
knock the pins down or you don’t.
For
toddlers, bowling alleys invented bumper bowling.. If you roll a ball that would
have landed in the gutter, scoring zero, it instead hits a bumper and ricochets
toward the center of the lane. You get points every time, whether you are good
at aiming the ball or not. I see bumper bowling as a metaphor for what our
culture is looking like nowadays.
-Arnold Kling, from here
..............................or starting, but not worrying about finishing, a book:
It should be ruthless, taking no prisoners and offering no mercy. Similar to dating, a book you’re not into after 10 minutes of attention has little chance of a happy ending. Slam it shut and move on. You’re not a failure if you quit a book after three pages anymore than if you reject the proposition of a 10-hour date with someone you just met who annoys you. Lots of fish in the sea.
Lately, I've fallen into the habit of reading the first chapter, then the last chapter, then deciding if I want to read the rest. Seems to be a fairly effective sorting mechanism.
"We want solutions, but what we really need are attitudes. You don't need abs, but rather an attitude of training. You don't need the answer, but rather an attitude of curiosity. You don't need an easier life, but rather an attitude of perseverance. Attitude precedes outcome.
-James Clear, from here
...................................historians:
. . . And what I found truthfully shocked me because I saw our society
well on the road to crisis. Of course, our society is quite different from
ancient Rome or medieval France and even pre-Civil War United States. But at a
more abstract level, the drivers of instability were already working full
throttle. So that was one of the reasons why I decided to publish this
forecast. And I just want to emphasize that I’m not a prophet. This was a
scientific prediction.
BW: What
was the reaction when you predicted that?
PT: There
was, frankly, disbelief, and it was tinged with a desire to think that I must
be wrong because nobody wants to believe in bad predictions. People like Steven
Pinker and Max Rosen were making all of these rosy predictions right around the
same time. Those predictions were very popular because everybody wants to think
there is going to be a happy ending to this story. So, the reaction to my
prediction was negative, but it was fine because I had tenure at that point.
One of the advantages of American academics is that once you have tenure, you
can actually try dangerous, risky, intellectual strategies. And it was really
quite remarkable. It was thrilling.
..................Arnold Kling gives some thought to our health care system:
The most
important policy problem is that people
want unlimited access to medical services without having to pay for them.
When the political system tries to accomplish this, the result is excessive
spending on medical care.
.........................for the Intertunnel:
. . . that sort of thing is just an extreme expression of what the internet is: a parasitic digital organism that feeds on human time and emotion, extracting money or attention through the most useless and shameless means possible.
Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the early 1830s and famously proclaimed the emergence of Homo democraticus, a cheeky creature whose passion for equality and self-interest was tempered only by his ability to join fellow citizens in all manner of mutual associations for pragmatic benefit. He may not have approved, but it was obvious to him that this was something unprecedented. . . . Democratic enthusiasm remained high among those who joined the Army of the West, but these were largely rural young men who had little experience in hierarchical organization, and they were about to enter one that was traditional and intentionally rigid. Not unexpectedly. sparks would fly. But the process of mutual accommodation proved unique and remarkable. Other force structures in the Civil War faced similar challenged, but Sherman and his boys were together longer, faced a broader range of military problems, and were more consistently successful in solving them.
The key was a new kind of military adaptability. Change came not only top-down from an innovative commander, but bottom-up from the soldiers themselves. In the process, Sherman and his men revealed what intellectual historian Joseph Kett has described as a singular
American ability to reman creatively insubordinate within large organizations and still survive, even thrive.
-Robert L. O'Connell, Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman
The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.
-Paul Graham, from this essay
If you
had to develop a simple rubric for ex ante rating political candidates’
priorities and policies as reflected in their campaign platforms/agendas, what
might that look like?
What I
would most like to see is an awareness of the capacity for government to do
damage: to intervene overseas in ways that have bad consequences; to have
programs corrupted by special interests; and to undertake new initiatives
without addressing the failures and mismanagement of older programs. Also, I
really wish we had a candidate who had managed an organization larger than a
Senate staff. Dwight Eisenhower is the only President of the past hundred years
who I think appreciated the strengths and weaknesses of large organizations.
-Arnold Kling, from here
More significant, perhaps, for his fate as a strategist was a trait he first exhibited here in the face of overwhelming odds: He knew when to quit and cut his losses. This is a much-overlooked military capacity: in the heat of the moment to retain sufficient objectivity to recognize the prospect of sure defeat and then to summon the self-control to reverse course and withdraw. For some—Grant, for instance—this proved impossible. But Sherman's military career was studded with such moments, epiphanies of defeat, and they were emblematic of his eventual success. He came to realize that in war there would be good days and bad days, but the ultimate objectives must always remain paramount.
-Robert L. O'Connell, Fierce Patriot: The Tangles Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman
1. Stop worrying about what others think: that’s an instant path to freedom.
2. Be sensitive; don’t judge. Take feed-back. But stay free; be your own mind...................................latest post on Substack:
If the Democrats would say, "We'll have Joe Biden resign because of signs of dementia and age but only if you do the same for Mitch McConnell" - I be 100% fine with that trade... Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX has had all campaign charges against him dropped. Here's a list of the politicians SBF or FTX donated money to. Curious to see if any return his stolen money. And people wonder why there's a perception about unequal justice in the US... Albert Einstein once said, "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think." Modern education seems to consist in mainly getting the student not to think for themselves but to obey. Gigantic difference which will cause great harm.
. . . getting another opinion seldom is a lengthy process and not getting extra insight may wind up gobbling massive amounts of time.
-Michael Wade, from hereI have used up more than
20,000 days waiting to see
what the next would bring.
-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry
For years I've had a recurring dream in which I am caught in a futile struggle to get somewhere. Sometimes I'm running up a hill; sometimes I am climbing over boulders or swimming against a current. Often a loved one is in trouble or something bad is about to happen. My mind is speeding frantically, but my body feels heavy and exhausted; I move as if through molasses. I know I should be able to handle the problem, but no matter how hard I try, I can't get to where I need to go. Completely alone and shadowed by the fear of failure, I am trapped in my dilemma. Nothing else in the world exists but that.
-Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
Love has bridged the high rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.
-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
On the surface, the two men were quite different. Churchill was more robust in every way; born twenty-eight years before Orwell, he outlived him by fifteen years. But in crucial respects they were kindred spirits. In their key overlapping years in the middle of the century, the two men grapples with the same great questions—Hitler and fascism, Stalin and communism, America and its preemption of Britain. They responded with the same qualities and tools—their intellects, their confidence in their own judgments even when those judgments were rebuked by most of their contemporaries, and their extraordinary skill with words. And both steered by the core principles of liberal democracy: freedom of thought, speech, and association.
-Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom
Yes, we need to make a living. But how do we make a life? It might not be simply about the money. When the world is in turmoil, when our health is at risk and the future seems murky, perhaps paychecks and productivity simply aren't enough. Perhaps we can't manage our way into the future. What if we created the best job someone ever had? What if we built an organization people would genuinely miss if it were gone? How much better would our work be if we could simply talk about the work without hesitation? What if the work we did made things better?
-Seth Godin, as extracted from The Song of Significance
Everything is cyclical, and the thing that’s easy miss about cyclicality is that it doesn’t require any outside force to push it in the other direction. The act of getting big is enough to make you smaller without being pushed by anyone or anything.
A lot of mistakes in life come when you think risk is something caused by external forces, when in fact the weight of your own success is enough to pull you down without any outside help.
-Morgan Housel, from here
His footsteps were a rhythm, a cadence that connected him to the world around him. As he strolled through the quiet streets, he noticed the subtle changes that only the early morning bestowed upon the world – the dew-kissed grass, the soft whispers of the wind, and the occasional song of a waking bird.
...........................with Aldous Huxley:
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations.
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Thanks Rob
In the Midwest if someone says, "I'll let you know" - that means they're not coming.
Wealth, like a tree, grows from a tiny seed. The first copper you save is the seed from which your tree of wealth shall grow. The sooner you plant that seed the sooner shall the tree grow. And the more faithfully you nourish and water that tree with consistent savings, the sooner you may bask in contentment beneath its shade.
-George Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon
All those years
I had in my pocket.
I spent them
nickel-and-dime.
-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry
In summary, he told me, you want to exert effort in meditation practice but not more than necessary: “A bird flaps its wings and then soars on momentum, and doesn’t flap again until it needs to.”
If you spend time in Buddhist meditation settings you’ll hear variants of this advice frequently offered to “achiever” personalities who mistakenly think the more fierce their effort, the more plentiful their likely results. “Don’t try so hard to make something happen” “Soften your gaze” “Ease up” All different ways of getting at the simple but hard-to-follow guidance: Just relax.
Relaxation, as Tim Gallwey says, happens only when allowed, not as a result of “trying” or “making.”
You can increase your success rates for the rest of your life and your happiness levels will flatline, but if you raise your level of happiness and deepen optimism it turns out every single one of your success rates rises dramatically compared to what it would have been at negative, neutral, or stressed.
-Shawn Achor, as culled from here
..............................on the New Censorship:
A remarkable transvaluation has occurred since that idealistic time. In essence, the postmodern establishment Left has reversed the terms of the Jeffersonian ideal. The threat to democracy is now society—a realm of injustice and oppression, in which human wolves perpetually devour the weak. Trump and Musk stand as archetypes of the predator. They represent the authoritarian impulse, and they can manipulate the dull-minded masses, even unto insurgency, by spreading falsehoods and fake news. The pandemic showed them willing to kill with their lies, to undermine the authority of science.
Only a powerful, watchful government, in the hands of the Party of Truth, can impose democracy on a troubled society by controlling the words said, as well as the means of communication that convey them, to the public. A wise guardian class, advised by specialists, must be mobilized to assume control of politics and culture. In this framework, opposition can never be legitimate—it belongs to the Party of Lies. Those who follow Savio’s exhortation and throw themselves on the gears of the great institutions will be ground to pulp—for their own good.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
-Mario Savio, from a 1964 speech at UC-Berkeley
............a proposed amendment to our State's constitution. The question being asked in this special election (it is the only issue on the ballot) is should we make it more difficult to amend the constitution. The amendment would raise the threshold for passage of a constitutional amendment from 50.01% to 60%. Reasonable people might conclude that it should be difficult to amend a constitution. Reasonable people might also conclude that the Ohio legislature has a history of embarrassing itself, and we the people deserve the right to pull on their chain from time to time. My recommendation would be, if you are eligible, vote. The process, at least in Licking County, is painless and easy. Vote.
..............................when you don't know what you want.
............................or just living the healthy life, do not ignore this advice.
In order to observe the movement of your own mind and heart, of your whole being, you must have a free mind, not a mind that agrees and disagrees, taking sides in an argument, disputing over mere words, but rather following with an intention to understand—a very difficult thing to do because most of us don't know how to look at, or listen to, our own being any more than we know how to look at the beauty of a river or listen to the breeze among the trees.
When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering; then we do not observe what is; we look only at the projections of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.
-J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
In 1750, Mayhew, fresh from receiving his Scottish divinity degree, preached a sermon in Boston celebrating, somewhat shockingly, the hundredth anniversary of the execution of King Charles I. One of the lessons, the radical young man noted, was that "no civil rules are to be obeyed when they enjoin things that are inconsistent with the commands of God." Indeed, such resistance to authority was "a duty, not a crime."
Adams was paying attention to such thinking. He would later note that this was the sermon that made Mayhew's reputation. He studied it repeatedly before he went off to college. "I read it, till the Substance of it was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory," he told Thomas Jefferson decades later. "It was read by every Body, celebrated by Friends, and abused by Enemies."
-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles
I'm anxious that you should be a good scholar, but I'm more anxious that you should be a good clean man. And if you graduate with a sound conscience, I shan't care so much if there are a few holes in your Latin. There are two parts to a college education—the part that you get in the schoolroom from the professors, and the part that you get outsideof it from the boys. That's the really important part. For the first can only make you a scholar, while the second can only make you a man.
*Ed. Note: This book contains letters supposedly written in the 1890s. As such some readers may find the attitudes and mores of that time different and difficult.
...................of running for President. Don Surber has one perspective:
Now look at them Bozos, that’s the way you do it. You dump on Trump on C-Span TV. That ain’t working, that’s the way you do it. Money from donors and your trips for free.
Ah yes, a little Dire Straits for a nation in dire straits.
.....................................interesting stuff. Always good to remember to be careful around the "isms".
........................from James Clear:
Most of the time you don't need more information, you need more courage.
Avoiding mistakes is an underrated way to improve. It's easier to fend off a bad day than achieve a perfect day. Rather than do your best, avoid your worst.
Being good at what you do is partially about competence, but not exclusively. Two other things that matter: Reliability. You do what you say you're going to do—on time and as expected. Enthusiasm. You're excited to be here and eager to work on this problem. Skills matter, but in many cases it's your reliability or attitude that separates you from the pack.
................For the patient person, investing in farmland can be a really good thing. One caveat: don't do it with borrowed money. From personal experience, that takes a lot of the fun out of it. Back story is here.
Jozef Israels Oil on Canvass circa 1870s
There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.
Postmodern times are well served by premodern thinkers, especially when it comes to caring about cosmos and psyche.
-Matthew Fox, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic Warrior for Our Times
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.
-C. S. Lewis, from The Abolition of Man
America is great because the people who came before us and built this country were imperfect. And they knew it. Their obvious imperfections gave them humility. That is why they envisioned a country where no single imperfect person—or small group of imperfect people—would have all the power. Instead, all of us—imperfect as we are—would come together and work on problems together and figure things out together. While each and every one of us is imperfect, the final result of that democratic, constitutional process would achieve the most perfect solutions possible.
-Kristi Noem, Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland
Many things seem to us greater in imagination than in reality.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 6
The dominant political narrative of colonial American elites was the story of how the Roman orator Cicero put down the Catiline conspiracy to take over Rome. John Adams aspired to be the Cicero of his time—that is, the key political figure in late eighteenth-century America.
He would come very close to achieving that vaulting ambition, which is surprising, because he was in many ways the odd man out among the first four presidents. He was the only one who spent time as a schoolteacher, working for wages. The other three were emotionally reserved, while he wore his feelings on his sleeve and tended to wallow in them all his life. They were Virginians, while he was a son of Massachusetts, a colony founded by Puritans in 1628. He was also the only one of the four never to own an enslaved human being.
Most significant of all, Adams also was the first of the four men to move towards revolt. He was entertaining radical notions while still an adolescent—and while George Washington was striving to achieve rank and standing in the structure of the British empire. Indeed, long before the adolescent Adams crossed the Charles River to Harvard, he was full of thoughts about how to better resist British authority. It helped that he was both bright and naturally irascible. He had been questioning authority for years. More than most men, he was born to do so.
-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
In America the aristocratic element has always been feeble from its birth; and if at the present day it is not actually destroyed, it is at any rate so completely disabled that we can scarcely assign to it any degree of influence on the course of affairs.
The democratic principle, on the contrary, has gained so much strength by time, by events, and by legislation, as to have become not only predominant, but all-powerful. No family or corporate authority can be perceived; very often one cannot even discover in it any very lasting individual influence.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter III, published in 1835
People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
To be in process of change is not an evil, any more than to be the product of change is a good.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4:42
Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't.
There is no reason why social dancing of the kind I have been praising should not return. Indeed, the craze for Salsa suggests that it might. And there is no reason to think that young people will not find some other way of rediscovering the withness that they will not find by clubbing. Maybe the rise of sport as a social arena is to be explained, at least in part, by this hunger for an elegant display of the human body. And maybe, when young people search, as they must, for a paradigm of withness, they will find it on the football field, or learn it from watching what goes on there. All is not lost, if that is so. But it is worth drawing one last lesson from this thought. Social dancing of the kind I have praised did not merely exercise the virtues of freedom and order. It obeyed the precept of equality. Anybody could learn the steps, and everybody could join in, regardless of how agile, young, or attractive they were. The new replacement activities arise to a considerable extent from the official culture of equality and political correctness, with its fear of elegance and distinction. They are nevertheless massively discriminatory. The cult of sport, good though it is for our sense of withness, requires us to turn the spotlight on young, athletic, and attractive people, and to rub into the remainder the humiliating awareness that they are not part of the game. In losing the love of dancing, therefore, we have lost a major source of our love for ourselves.
-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic
The greatest successes are explained by the establishment of clever arrangements for the reduction of risks rather than by excessive risk taking.
-as culled from here
Today, industrial policy’s political purpose is to defuse angry populism that is blamed on “deindustrialization” displacing workers. But declines in the portions of labor forces devoted to manufacturing are normal as nations become richer, regardless of wide variations in nations’ economic policies. And the U.S. government’s would-be industrializers should hope that surly populists, who are eager to cause society’s upper crust to crumble, do not notice how industrial policy makes eager bedfellows of government bureaucrats and corporate elites — for their mutual benefit.
-Don Boudreaux, channeling George Will
Always be quick to give credit, and to take blame.
To manage yourself use your head, to manage others use your heart.
Don't let your inbox become your to-do list run by others.
Don't ever work for someone you don't want to become.
Experiences are fun, and having influence is rewarding, but only mattering makes us happy. Do stuff that matters.
Greatness is incompatible with optimizing in the short term.
The greatest teacher is called "doing."
. . . Freedom includes an act of choice, but its root is in the realization that the self is no sovereign, in the discontent with the tyranny of the ego. Freedom comes about in the moment of transcending the self, . . .
-as cut-and-pasted from this post
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