The Queen City.................

 My Sweetie and I ventured to Cincinnati over the weekend.  We both agreed we could live comfortably in the downtown area (if we could figure out how to have a garden).  Lots going on. It also appeared that there is a concentrated effort to restore many of the grand old buildings, of which Cincinnati has many.  Fun time.  Highly recommended.

One of the first stops was the Rhinegeist Brewery. 
Took the tour and drank their beer (or tea).  Our
guide said that the Over-The-Rhine district in the
city got its name back in the canal days.  A canal
separated the breweries from the residential district. 
The early workers tended to be Germans. They
named the canal after the Rhine River in their
homeland.  Going to work, they had to go over
the "Rhine". Can't verify the truth, but it makes a
good story.  Good beer too.

The guide books say that the Findlay Market is
pretty special.  We went. Pretty cool.  Big crowd
for a Saturday afternoon.

A wee portion of the inside part of Findlay Market

Seeking some shade in Washington Park, we
stopped to enjoy kids playing in the fountain.

My Sweetie and the mighty Ohio River

Old friends sit for a spell.

Cincinnati is known for its murals.  Rightly so.

my favorite

a mural in progress

Some new architecture to go with the old

A controversial sculpture of our 16th president,
without his beard.

A nighttime view of the downtown from our hotel's
rooftop bar

Pretty busy coffee

Is there anything man-made more perfect than
a baseball diamond?  90 feet between bases,
60' 6" from the mound to the plate.  Timeless.

Mascots messing around pre-game entertaining
early arrivers

Forgot the sun screen.  Only bad idea of the weekend

Can't leave Cincinnati without saying "Hi" to Pete Rose

Sixty years ago........Things were simpler back then

The Trashmen..............Surfin Bird' - Bird is the Word

 

not so neat and simple..........................

 Jesus was a rabbi, schooled by rabbis, who thought like rabbis.  Rabbis, upon being asked a question by a disciple, usually answered with a paradoxical inquiry or a story.  This can be annoying and time-consuming for those of us looking for neat, simple answers.  But truth is too wild and complex to be contained in one answer, so Jesus often responded with a question or a parable.

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

One of the great ones...............

Michael Stanley Band..Stagepass/Let's Get the Show On the Road

 

The trouble with binary elections..................

....................is that one of them has to win.  If rants are your thing, enjoy Fred Reed's latest here:

 I despise Trump. He is a mean-spirited son of a bitch. His licking the boots of those revolting pseudo-Cubans in Miami and increasing sanctions, utterly unjustified, on Havana, are grounds enough for putting him behind bars. Trying to starve thirty million Venezuelans into giving up control of their oil, trying to assassinate Maduro are grounds for rehabilitating the guillotine. Beginning a cold war against China and driving a growing crop of countries into alliance against America gives new meaning to “stupidity.” This is Trump.  I wouldn’t use him for dog food. I like my dog.

But: He isn’t Biden. He has my vote.

On 'life support systems'...........................

      Today, almost the entire capacity of the Earth's 'life-support system for humans' has been provided not for us but by us, using our ability to create new knowledge.  There are people in the Great Rift Valley today who live far more comfortably than early humans did, and in far greater numbers, through knowledge of things like tools, farming and hygiene.  The Earth did provide the raw materials for our survival—just as the sun has provided the energy, and supernovae provided the elements, and so on.  But a heap of raw materials is not the same thing as a life-support system.  It takes knowledge to convert the one into the other, and biological evolution never provided us with enough knowledge to survive, let alone thrive.  In this respect we differ from almost all other species.  They do have all the knowledge that they need, genetically encoded in their brains.  And that knowledge was indeed provided for them by evolution—and so on, in the relevant sense, 'by the biosphere.'  So their home environments do have the appearance of having been designed as life-support systems for them, albeit only in the desperately limited sense the I have described.  But the biosphere no more provides humans with a life-support system than it provides us with radio telescopes.

-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World

Awesome........................

 thanks Jessica

Three cheers for............................

 ...................................India's moon landing:

If you listen carefully..................

 

thanks Rob

Been obsessing over this one................................

Emma Kok - Voilà, with André Rieu and his orchestra

    

[Verse 1]
Listen to me, me, the half singer
Talk about me, to your loved ones, to your friends
Tell them about this little girl with black eyes and crazy dreams
What I want is to write stories that you will hear about
That's all

[Chorus]
Voilà, voilà, voilà, here is who I am
Here I am, even if I'm scared as I'm naked, yes
Here I am in the noise and in silence

[Verse 2]
Look at me, or at least what's left of it
Look at me, before I hate myself
What can I say that another hasn't already said?
I don't have much, but I place here what I do have
Voilà

[Chorus]
Voilà, voilà, voilà, here is who I am
Here I am, even if it's the end as I'm naked
That's my face, that's my scream, here I am, never mind
Voilà, voilà, voilà, voilà right here
Me, my dream, my will, how I'm dying from it, how I'm laughing at it
Here I am in the noise and in silence

[Verse 3]
Do not leave, I'm begging you to stay for a long time
It might not save me, no
But I don't know how to live without you
Love me how you would love a friend who's leaving forever
I want to be loved, because I don't know myself how to like the shape of me

[Chorus]
Voilà, voilà, voilà, here is who I am
Here I am, even if it's the end as I'm naked
Here I am in the noise and in rage too
Finally, look at me and my eyes and my hands
All I have is here, it's my face, it's my scream
Here I am, here I am, here I am
Voilà, voilà
Voilà, voilà

Voilà

-Barbara Pravi

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

 It turns out that a life lived conveniently isn’t always a better one. The cost of convenience ends up being too high.

-Seth Godin, from here

Probably true..............

 The world is careening toward a climate crisis, and by that we do not mean nasty weather or impending human extinction. The real challenge lies in adapting to a changing climate without undermining an already stressed global order, not to mention imperiling democracy. . . .

Perhaps the biggest obstacle lies in geopolitical realities. In China, India, Vietnam, and much of Africa, the demand for affordable and reliable power has clear priority over achieving “net zero” in the near future. Ultimately what the West does may matter more to its own self-righteousness than the planet itself.

-Joel Kotkin, from here

Retirement..........................

 .............................is for sissies.

pretending.......................

 One of my rules is to not forecast markets. Neither stock markets nor interest rates markets. Partly that’s because I will always be wrong and I don’t like being wrong. Partly it’s because it really bothers me when finance media people pretend they can predict the future. In reality, that specific habit of forecasting by otherwise supposedly serious finance media people should earn them a fortune-teller’s cap (with all the stars and lightning bolts) to signal their likely accuracy.

-as extracted from this Bankers Anonymous post

perpetual student...................

  In school, the people who never make mistakes are called “intelligent.” But after we grow up, it’s the people who make mistakes and learn that are truly “intelligent.”

-from this Barking Up The Wrong Tree post

Yes..................

 

image via

Truth................................

 You often feel tired, not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you.

-from this David Kanigan post

The journey is the point.....................

 Dorothy had the slippers all along.  The Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion already possessed everything they needed to find happiness.  And the wizard didn't actually need a broomstick.  So why bother going on this perilous journey?

     The quest for the broomstick was a MacGuffin, of course, an illogical centerpiece that moved the story forward.  Illogical, and yet, The Wizard of Oz, eighty years later, remains one of the most remembered and beloved movies ever made.

     Corporate profits aren't at the center of Dorothy's journey in the Wizard of Oz.  Neither is selfish gain.

     The movie resonates with us because it's about connection and possibility.  It captures our desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to help others when, perhaps, there's not much in it for us.

-Seth Godin, as excerpted from The Song of Significance

except..................................

 He eschewed the spiritual life, except as his human spirit was sustained by nature, jazz, books, wine.  A role model isn't a mentor.

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

To ask the question is to answer it........

 Spinoza, according to all the seventeenth-century interpreters, rejected all the traditional ideas about God, he was indisputably a heretic.  Yet his manner of living was humble and apparently free of vice.  then, as now, the philosopher seemed like a living oxymoron: he was an ascetic sensualist, a spiritual materialist, a sociable hermit, a secular saint.  How could his life have been so good, the critics asked, when his philosophy was so bad?

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

On culture.................

 When a culture is working wholesomely, beneficent pendulum swings—effective feedback—do occur.  Corrective stabilization is one of the great services of democracy, with its feedback to rulers from the protesting and voting public. . . .

     But powerful persons and groups that find it in their interest to prevent adaptive corrections have many ways of thwarting self-organizing stabilizers—through deliberately contrived subsidies and monopolies, for example.  Or circumstances may have allowed cultural destruction to drift to a point where the jolts of correction appear more menacing than downward drift. . . .

     The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others, making it more likely that others will give way.  With each collapse, still further ruin becomes more likely, until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses.  Beneficent corrections of deterioration are not guaranteed.

-Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (2004)

bees.............

 If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay Prudence

Opening paragraphs........(plus a genealogy lesson)

 My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.

     Mathew Grant, the founder of the branch in America, of which I am a descendant, reached Dorchester, Massachusetts, in May, 1630.  In 1635 he moved to what is now Windsor, Connecticut, and was the surveyor for that colony for more than forty years.  He was also, for many years of the time, town clerk.  He was a married man when he arrived at Dorchester, but his children were all born in this country.  His eldest son, Samuel, took lands on the east side of the Connecticut River, opposite Windsor, which have been held and occupied by descendants of his to this day.

     I am of the eighth generation from Mathew Grant, and seventh from Samuel.

-Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters

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

The Benoit/Freeman Project album

 

Vacation over................

................Cultural Offering is back in business.

Don't shout at the crops...................

 .................and six other important pieces of advice wisdom may be found here.

He wrote this in 1995................

 

more on the book can be found here.

Leave it to a sports writer......................

 ..................to capture the USA:

Messi has certainly lived up to the billing in America so far, taking this massive & slightly eccentric country and making them coo in the palm of his hand.

Full post here.  If you enjoy fun writing, read it.

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

 ..........................with Montesquieu:

I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise.

I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.

Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.

full of years.........................

The opinions of a young boy

     Without much experience in life,

May arise from thoughts that an old man,

     Full of years, might never comprehend.

-Rumi

Clarity.........................

      When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at "the house of the dying" in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life.  On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa.  She asked, "And what can I do for you?"  Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.

     "What do you want me to pray for?" she asked.  He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: "Pray that I have clarity."

     She said firmly, "No, I will not do that."  When he asked her why, she said, "Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of."  When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, "I have never had clarity, what I have always had is trust.  So I will pray that you trust God."

-Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God

idealized...........................

      The school did not teach science but did give classes in freehand drawing and also technical drawing, a subject that provided Dirac with one of the foundations for his unique way of thinking about science. . . . Technical drawing, used by engineers to render three-dimensional objects on a flat piece of paper, is now taught at very few English junior schools, and rarely at senior level.  Yet, in the early twentieth century, it was a compulsory subject for half the pupils: for a few lessons each week, the class would be split into two: the girls studied needlework, while the boys were taught technical drawing.  In these classes, Dirac learned to make idealized visualisations of various manufactured products by showing them from three orthogonal points of view, making no allowance for the distortions of perspective.

-Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom

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

 It was possible, Sofia Ravello would tell the Carabinieri later that day, to spend the majority of one's waking hours in another man's home, to prepare his meals and wash his sheets and sweep his floors, and to know absolutely nothing about him.  The officer from the Carabinieri, whose name was Caruso, did not take issue with her statement, for the woman who had shared his bed for the last twenty-five years was at time a perfect stranger to him.  He also knew a bit more about the victim than he had thus far revealed to the witness.  The man was a murder waiting to happen.

-Daniel Silva, The Collector

Impossible.............................

Gioacchino Rossini........................William Tell Overture (the fun starts at 8:45)

 

cartoon from here

Is this a great country, or what.............?

 more fun here

Having fun with the HOA...................

 

more birding fun here

Life Its Ownself.......................

 ...........the joys of parenting — and grandparenting:

Should you choose (or decide)..............

...................... a tutorial from Nicholas Bate.

The Luckiest Generation......................

 Ben Carlson posts on the amazing investment returns (in all investment categories) available over the last 40 years and opines that the world will never see the like again.  Us Boomers have been lucky, plain and simple.  Too be fair, Carlson also points out that it wasn't always smooth sailing and beds of roses and that significant perils had to be faced along the way.  Won't be challenging his perception of us Boomers being lucky, but he left out our most important piece of luck - the people we were parented by,

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

Michael Franks..............................Michael Franks

 

unconventional analysis......................

. . . you can design an organization while thinking of the history of Arabia and Indochina.

-Michael Wade

lifelong skepticism................

      Like Churchill, Orwell saw little of his father, who traveled from Burma to visit his family in 1907, and then moved in with them when he retired in1912. "I barely saw my father before I was eight," Orwell noted.  By that time, the boy had been shipped off to boarding school.  The distant figure of Orwell's father "appeared to me simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying 'Don't.'"  So began Orwell's lifelong skepticism of authority.

-Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

Home......................

 

Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant.  Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse.  But in any case, these are mistakes.  Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling insignificant for not being a cow.  Or a herd of cows.  The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource.  The bigger the better.

-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

image via

churning..............................

 Both Tim Ferriss and Naval Ravikant have spoken of the need to quiet their "monkey mind." This is an ancient Buddhist description of the churning of the ego. Makes a lot of sense when seen in that light.

-Chris Lynch

Two down.........................

more fun here 

On leadership.....................

 It would be to Adams' detriment as president that he would not be able to lead so well as his predecessor did.  Washington understood, as Adams did not, that especially in a new republic, these large gestures would resonate with the people.  In this nation, the people were not the governed, they were sovereign, which meant their needs must be addressed.  Adams never liked that fact or even really understood it, and that failure would haunt his presidency.

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles

The core............................

 The core here is realizing that people are not spreadsheets. They are emotional, hormonal, misinformed, status-seeking, insecure creatures trying their best to make it through the day. So if you have to choose between understanding how the world should work in theory vs. how it actually works in practice, lean towards the latter. It’s like historian Will Durant once said: “Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.” That is so smart.

-Morgan Housel, from here

supposes..........................

 Excessive obedience supposes ignorance in the person that obeys: the same it supposes in him that commands, for he has no occasion to deliberate, to doubt, to reason; he has only to will.

-Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

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

Gato Barbieri.....................Chapter One: Latin America

 

practice self-compassion.........

 People who practice self-compassion experience lower levels of depression and anxiety. When we know it’s normal to experience problems, they don’t overwhelm us. Everything gets easier when you remember we all have bad days, and we all occasionally screw up when trying to make them better. You’re a “work in progress.” We all are.

-as excerpted from this Barking Up The Wrong Tree post

formula........................

      It was then that Gnanmuni had his awakening.  He gave up his business career, renounced his possessions, traveled to India, and enrolled in a Hindu seminary.  Six years later, he emerged a monk.  From that time on, the sum total of his worldly possessions has been two robes, some prayer beads, and a wooden bowl.  He is prohibited from even touching money.

      What would this rebel who had left the capitalist world behind have to say about free enterprise?  I took a deep breath, and posed my query nonetheless.  "Swami, is free enterprise good or bad for the soul?

     His response was rapid.  "It's a good thing!  It has saved millions of people in my country from starvation."  This was not quite what I expected.  "But you own almost nothing," I pressed.  "I was sure you'd say money is corrupting."

     He laughed at my naivete.  "There is nothing wrong with money, dude.  The problem in life is attachment to money."

     The formula for the best life, as he told it, was this:

     Abundance without attachment.

-Arthur C. Brooks, The Conservative Heart: How To Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America

On the importance of literacy...................

     Not surprisingly, given Jefferson's years of being taught by Douglas and Small, two Scots, his views would come to reflect Scottish thinkers of the time. . . .

 Scotland's influence on American history was profound and remains underappreciated.  The story of this development is fascinating.  In the early eighteenth century, Scotland was a poor country, isolated in the northwestern corner of Europe.  Yet in the subsequent decades it achieved a high literacy rate and enjoyed an intellectual explosion, with a noted above, Scots more or less inventing the fields of modern economics and geology, as well as eventually setting off the Industrial Revolution with the steam engine.

     The Scottish divergence from English thinking had its roots in changes that began two hundred years earlier, when the Scottish church, long independent of the English one, underwent a Calvinist reformation from which the Presbyterian Church emerged.  This new church placed a strong emphasis on literacy, because it believed the people should be able to read their Bibles.  In 1661, it became church policy that every Scottish town should have a schoolmaster educated in Latin, while rural parishes should have a minister capable of giving basic instruction to country youth.

     Within a few generations, the effect of this policy could be seen across Scotland.  By 1750, according to some estimates, 75 percent of Scots could read, compared to 53 percent in England.

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

go home.......................

 Some philosophers merely argue their philosophies.  When they finish their disputation, they hang up the tools of their trade, go home, and indulge in the well-earned pleasure of private life.  Other philosophers live their philosophies.  They treat as useless any philosophy that does not determine the manner in which they spend their days, and they consider pointless any part of life that has no philosophy in it.  They never go home.

     Spinoza belonged unambiguously to the latter group.

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

I tried that strategy......................

..........................but got different results:

Late in life, Churchill would claim that "I gained a lot by not overworking my brain when I was young."  Typically, he tried to make a plus out of a minus, arguing in 1921 that "it is a mistake to read too many good books when quite young. . . . Young people should be careful in reading, as old people in eating their food.  They should not eat too much.  They should chew it well." 

-Thomas E. Ricks:  Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

Well, that explains a lot..................

 That which we want, desire, and insist upon from another person is felt by them as pressure.  They will, therefore, unconsciously resist.

-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender

hard to quantify...................

 Most decisions aren’t made on a spreadsheet, where you just add up the numbers and a rational answer pops out. There’s a human element that’s hard to quantify, hard to explain, and can seem detached from the original goal, yet carries the most influence.

-Morgan Housel, from this post with some interesting examples

Randomly......................

more fun here

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

At the movies..................................American Graffiti

 

Try differently................

 You’re more likely to unlock a big leap in performance by trying differently than by trying harder. You might be able to work 10% harder, but a different approach might work 10x better. Remain focused on the core problem, but explore a new line of attack. Persistence is not just about effort, but also strategy. Don’t merely try harder, try differently.

-James Clear

Mostly true............................

 

processes.........................

 Success in education seems to mean only that a child leaves the classroom with more information in his or her head than when he or she walked in.  That crude way of thinking about what teachers do is exemplified in the (comprehensively misleading) documentary Waiting for "Superman," where learning is visualized as a teacher simply opening the brains of students and pouring knowledge in.  This is a ridiculous way to portray the work of schooling, even setting aside the fact that sharing knowledge is in fact a very small part of teaching.  (Facts can be Googled; it's learning processes, skills, that make education valuable.)  No one who has ever taught would agree that teaching children is a straightforward affair, or that all children are equally easy to teach.  

-Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice

the key question......................

      Orwell and Churchill recognized that the key question of their century ultimately was not who controlled the means of production, as Marx thought, or how the human psyche functioned, as Freud taught, but rather how to preserve the liberty of the individual during an age when the state was becoming powerfully intrusive into private life.

-Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

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

      It was sort of a lonely moment for a historian, even if it was expected.  Never a historically minded people, Americans seem even less interested in the past these days.  Meanwhile, it remains unclear what history can do, whom it should serve, what it should be.  Academics continue to doggedly address these issues, but in the process produce much that is unreadable.  Popular history is easier to consume but varies wildly in quality; the genre is largely the province of journalists, who often lack the background to see deep trends and long-term causation.  The path forward remains cluttered with question marks.

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

John Denver.......................Rocky Mountain High

 

One afternoon in the garden...............

 

agreeable.............................

 History is not always a very good guide to the way people felt about things when they happened.  Nothing today would seem more expressive of health and well-being than such great Impressionist paintings as Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere or Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party or Monet's Terrace of Sainte-Adresse.  Simply to look at these paintings makes one think of how agreeable life must have been at that time.  But, in fact, when they were first exhibited, most people regarded them as immoral daubs—flashy, inept and practically incomprehensible—while those most qualified to judge regarded them, at best, as a repudiation of everything that mattered.  To academicians art was a matter of trade secrets, and nature was manipulated according to fixed laws.  The Impressionists, on the contrary , staked everything on the actual and previously unrecorded look of things.  As the name suggests, they saw the world in terms of instantaneous impressions that were to be set down as truthfully as possible.

-John Russell, Time-Life Library, The World of Matisse 1869-1954

Édouard Manet      oil on canvas          1882
Un bar aux Folies Bergère

Pierre-Auguste Renoir       Oil on Canvas      1881 
 Le Déjeuner des canotiers

Claude Monet      Oil on Canvas        1867 
Terrasse à Sainte-Adresse

feeling and following...........

 But even Maury thought that the purpose of learning a bit of history, literature, and geography was essentially social, in that a smattering of such knowledge would enable "a Virginia gentleman" to converse with confidence and thus same him from the embarrassment of making "a ridiculous & awkward Figure in Life."

     Indeed, judging by Jefferson's literary commonplace book, into which he copied passages from authors who had caught his attention, Maury immersed the young man in the classics. There are few better ways to study a literary passage than to write it out in one's own hand, feeling each word and following the flow of thought.  Not surprisingly for an intelligent fourteen-year-old who had just lost his father, Jefferson was especially inclined toward commentaries on mortality.  He began by copying several passages from Cicero's Tusculum Disputations about the inevitability of death.  Jefferson liked Cicero's essays, considering him "the first master" of style, but in notable contrast to the taste of the time, held the Roman's speeches in low esteem.  The best models of oratory, he wrote, were "Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, & most assuredly not in Cicero."

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

dreaming..........................

 I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

-Thomas Jefferson, in correspondence with John Adams

enemies unseen..................

But these boys were also volunteers.  They wanted to become soldiers, and this was the only process being offered to move them around and get them deployed and shooting.  So they drilled and continued to drill until they began to feel the power of the whole, which was the entire point.

     It was also a big problem.  Most of these boys had arrived in what we would call good shape: lean and physically fit from lives on farms or strenuous work elsewhere, used to walking and being outdoors.  But they were weak in ways they never suspected and living together—sleeping in twelve-man Sibley tents and eating in mass messes—almost immediately reveal their lack of immunity to measles, mumps, and tonsillitis, childhood diseases that soldier from cities would have already experienced.

     These put them down in huge numbers, half or more during their first months of service.  So many were sick that Sergeant Spotts of the Eighty-seventh Indiana was shocked to see "only 400 guns (out of 1,000) stacked at night.  Though most recovered, many were weakened for the arrival of real killers, smallpox, and the streptococcus erysipelas.  Before long. boys were helping to bury their friends and neighbors, casualties of an enemy they couldn't see and hadn't signed up to fight. 

-Robert L. O'Connell, Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman

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

Diana Ross.......................Touch Me in the Morning

 

We will see..............................

 Debt used to be frowned upon. Now it’s a way of life.

-Ben Carlson, from this post on why he isn't worried about $1 Trillion (in total, not his personally) in credit card debt

an act of mercy...........................

 Given that pain and suffering are literally and permanently unavoidable in human life, teaching others to be resilient rather than teaching them to be victims is an act of mercy, and cultivating resilience in yourself is an act of essential personal growth and adult development.

-Freddie deBoer, from this substack post

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

Willie Nelson.............................Shotgun Willie

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

..............................with Louis Brandeis:

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

At the foundation of our civil liberty lies the principle which denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.

Yes, but..........................

.......................eventually someone will win it.  In the meantime, I get at least $4 worth of enjoyable daydreams.  As investments go, that is better than some.  Back story here:

 What would you do if you won the Mega Millions?  It’s now up to a record $1.55 billion!  We would start a not-for-profit to educate people not to play the lottery.  Why? Your odds of winning are 1 in 302.6 million…you are 70 times more likely to die in a shark attack than win this lottery.

But it’s even worse than that because only 50% of the proceeds of ticket sales go into the prize pool.  Half of your “investment” is gone the second you buy a ticket.  The other half is gone when they do the drawing, unless lightning strikes, which is unfair to lightning because you are more likely to get hit by real lightning.  In other words, it’s a total waste of money. 

But people still play, and dream.  We think about this because government sponsors this crazy lottery at the same time it shirks its own fiduciary responsibilities. 

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

Kris Kristofferson..............................Why Me

 

I don't usually listen.....................

 ....................to gothic rock, but if I had to I'd probably start here. If broadening your musical horizons is important to you, check in with The Hammock Papers and Cultural Offering on a regular basis.

About those incandescent........................

 ......................................light bulbs:

The transition to more sustainable products should feel like an upgrade for consumers, not a sacrifice.

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

Jesse Colin Young...............the Light Shine album