A Shakespeare jukebox.................

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

via

I see what you did there........................

Everyone says the new speaker, Mike Johnson, has no experience, but that claim just makes me smile. If our current condition is the result of “experienced” politicians, how could “inexperienced” politicians be any worse? Besides, I thought this whole “self-government” thing meant ordinary Americans could participate fully in the exercise of state power. At this point, any of the Johnsons of Rockridge would do, since nearly all House members are fluent speakers of authentic Beltway jibberish.

-Steven Hayward, from here

 

Trick or treat........................

Newark tends to celebrate Halloween on the final Thursday of October.  Not sure why, but it was a fine night for it.  Lots of fun was had by all:

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

      Driverless cars will finally solve the problem of moving people around with maximum efficiency, by ceding human control to impersonal algorithms.  They promise to bring a messy, dangerous domain of life under control at last.  Traffic jams will likely become a thing of the past, and accidents will be greatly reduced.  So we are told at any rate.

     In this case we can detect a familiar pattern.  Driverless cars are one instance of a wider shift in our relationship to the physical world, in which the demands of competence give way to a promise of safety and convenience.  The skilled practitioner becomes a passive beneficiary of something more systematic, rendering his skill obsolete.  

-Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

thanks Michael

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

      On the morning of May 11, 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried made his first television appearance.  He sat at his trading desk and talked into his computer screen to two female reporters on Bloomberg TV.  Thick black curls exploded off his head in every direction.  People who tried to describe Sam's hair would give up and call it an "afro," but it wasn't an Afro.  It was just a mess, and like everything about Sam's appearance felt less like a decision than a decision not to make a decision.  He wore what he always wore: a wrinkled T-shirt and cargo shorts.  His bare knee jack-hammered up and down at roughly four beats per second, while his eyes darted left and right and collided with his interviewers' gaze only by chance.  His general demeanor was that of a kid pretending to be interested when his parents hauled him into the living room to meet their friends.  He'd done nothing to prepare, but the questions were so easy it didn't matter.  Crypto Wunderkind, read the Bloomberg chryon, while the numbers on the left of the screen showed that, in just the past year, bitcoin's price had risen by more than 500 percent.

-Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

an immense treasure.................

      Like Warren Buffett, Munger inherited no wealth.  He built his fortune on the sheer power of his will and his business acumen.

     "While no real money came down, my family gave me a good education and a marvelous example of how people should behave, and in the end that was more valuable than money," explained Munger.  "Being surrounded by the right values from the beginning is an immense treasure.  Warren had that.  It even has a financial advantage.  People trusted Warren partly because he was a Buffett and people trusted the Buffetts."

-Janet Lowe, Damn Right!: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger

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

 Life is not a problem to be solved. It’s a paradox to experience. You can believe one thing and also believe its opposite.

-Derek Sivers, as culled from here

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

 It was fifty-five years ago, but I still have clear high school memories of borrowing my parents' Plymouth Fury (that was back when Detroit really knew how to build "lemons") and just going for a drive.  The very definition of freedom for a teenager in 1968.

Here's a mental framework..............

 In a world where the economy becomes a key tool that great powers use to prosecute their conflicts, it’s completely impossible to just “stick to the economics”.

-Noah Smith, from here  

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

 It is a very disorienting thing to watch as evil is denied in real time. Especially when that evil, in the case of Hamas, was filmed and broadcast by its perpetrators.

-Bari Weiss and Oliver Wiseman, from this substack

Sometimes it is easier......................

..........to simply cut-and-paste, than it is to figure out what to excerpt:

 If we exclude misanthropes, most people today can – without excessive simplification – be divided into two distinct camps: the Awestruck and the Awws. The Awestruck are unceasingly amazed at the modern world. They are enormously grateful for the countless amenities and benefits of life in the modern global economy. They are aware that nearly all of our ancestors not only did without the comfort and convenience of the likes of air-conditioning, automobiles, air travel, aspirin, automatic dishwashers, telephony, recorded music, and laptop computers and smartphones connected 24/7/365 by wi-fi to the Web, the Awestruck also realize that most of our ancestors did without access to antibiotics, artificial lighting, indoor plumbing, the ability to bathe daily, and even regular supplies of food.

The Awws, in contrast, are either ignorant of how most of our ancestors lived, or they believe that our ancestors’ experiences are irrelevant for assessing the state of the world today. Unlike the Awestruck, the Awws do not compare the state of the world today to that of the actual past. Instead, the Awws compare the state of the world today to fictions conjured by their imaginations. They compare today’s reality to what they imagine to be a Perfect World. The Awws then notice an undeniable reality: As marvelous as today’s world is, it’s not perfect. It could be marvelouser. Imperfections abound.

Upon noticing these imperfections the Awws, in their dismay, moan “Awww.” No matter how much higher standards of living for nearly everyone in today’s market-oriented economies are, living standards could be even higher. The costs of obtaining, maintaining, and further raising these living standards could be even lower. The ‘distribution’ of the abundance of goods and services could be more equal. And were there fewer disagreeable aesthetics of industrial, commercial society – what with its factories and mines and pipelines and strip malls and light pollution and telemarketers and vulgar websites – persons with finely polished sensibilities would indeed suffer fewer irritations.

-Don Boudreaux, from this post

Recommended...........................*

 

He knew how to make us more afraid of letting each other down than we were of any opponent.

To my surprise, Hakeem turned around and left.  That's when I learned that, for fear to win, you have to be afraid, and for that moment, I wasn't.

. . . the true measure of a competitor is not by the number of opponents they defeat, but by what they do to surpass what they have already accomplished.

Live on the edge, play on the edge, but never hurt the team.

The play would be a textbook example of the age-old cliche: it's not how you start, but how you finish.  Effort and finish had become my most consistent attributes.

Every friend ain't your brother, and every brother ain't your friend.

I had just learned a lesson about how money works.  It's not about using your labor as the sole source of all your income.  It's about using your labor to acquire cash that you save that gives you an opportunity to leverage credit or assets to buy other assets that make you money.

They'll tell athletes all the time that your financial advisor, your agent, your marketing rep, all these people work for you, you should be the boss, and most of us are unprepared to be a boss, and quite frankly, I had to learn that those people actually don't work for you.

During the national anthem, I gave a strong prayer to my ancestors.  I knew I was going to need all the help I could get, so I prayed for toughness, poise, and love.  All that I hoped they passed down onto me.

*although I wish his editor had worked a little harder

Probably a good thing..........................

      In truth, to the rest of the world, even as the American Founders boldly harbored utopian visions of the perfect republic, and as theyir wondrous ideas propounded in the Constitution fanned exuberantly outward, across the oceans, into the courts of the world's great powers, the United States remained little more than "revolting colonies," a fringe republic, an obscure land on the margins of Western civilization.  As Bernard Bailyn trenchantly reminds us, America was a "small, unsure, preindustrial borderland" filled with "provincials."  One European diplomat, the Comte de Montmorin, summed it up this way: "the united States," he sneered, were "the laughingstock of all the powers."  So, while Americans now groped forward to wrestle with their numerous inconsistencies—there were many—and their unresolved problems and seemingly insoluble dilemmas (they were numerous as well), the eyes of the world were not on these rustics.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800

Obviously................

 Admitting the obvious is to take a scary leap. It is to make decisions that bring your life into alignment with what you truly want—rather than what you think you should want or what others want from you. It is to risk taking the low-status meandering path, instead of the high-status linear one. 

. . . Sometimes the obvious truth is hidden from you for a reason, and it takes great care and lots of time to see it. 

Spiders weave webs across gaps that cannot be crossed by crawling or jumping. Instead, when a tiny spider wants to weave a web across a large distance, it produces a fine adhesive thread that it allows to catch and drift along the wind. It can feel by the sensitive vibrations passed along the thread when it catches and adheres on the other side of the gap. Then, it carefully walks across that first strand like a tightrope walker, laying another thread down as it goes.

It weaves back and forth like this—carefully, one step at a time—until a web is formed out of thin air. 

I think this is the way to admit the obvious. Loose a single thread in the direction of what you want. When it catches—follow it, and strengthen it. Eventually, you’ll be ready to cross the gap with confidence and spin a web of your own.

-Dan Shipper, from this essay

via

possession......................

 You may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.

-Arthur Schopenhauer, as quoted here

simple................................

 It's so simple: you spend less than you earn. Invest shrewdly. Avoid toxic people and toxic activities. Try to keep learning all your life. And do a lot of deferred gratification. If you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed. And if you don't, you'll need a lot of luck. And you don't want to need a lot of luck. You want to go into a game where you're very likely to win without having any unusual luck.

-Charlie Munger, as quoted here

Having fun with 107,000 friendly folks..........

 A friend offered two tickets to the OSU-Penn State game last Saturday noon.  Hard to pass that up.  Seats were pretty fantastic.  Game wasn't bad either.  An experience worth having.

Band passed the spelling quiz again.

Early voting has started........................

They make it really easy.   Visited the Board of Elections in downtown Newark this afternoon and cast my votes. Took less than five minutes; ends up with an actual paper ballot, printed out with your votes, that you get to post. Contests on the ballot include two constitutional amendments, school board seats, and the City Council-At-Large positions.  About twenty fellow citizens were participating at the same time I was there.  That is about 19 more than usual for this time of year.  Hmmm..............

free agents......................

       But the intelligent world is far from being so well governed as the physical.  For thought the former also has its laws, which of their own nature are invariable, it does not conform to them so exactly as the physical world.  This is because, on the one hand, particular intelligent beings are of a finite nature, and consequently liable to error; and on the other, their nature requires them to be free agents.  Hence they do not steadily conform to their primitive laws: and even those of their own instituting they frequently infringe.

-Charles de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws

order................................

 But the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights.  Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded on conventions.

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

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

      A sullen wedge of gun-metal-colored clouds rolled in from the west, autumn's jackboot crunching down on the Twin Cities.  A cold breeze sent fallen leaves skittering along the darkened October streets as a flash of blackbirds passed above the treetops, heading south.

-John Sandford, Judgment Prey

a sense of history............................

       Driven, singularly willed, quietly but fiercely ambitious, hot-blooded and bold, and uncommonly charismatic, he cherished the military, but he also cherished something even far greater: a sense of history.  And virtue.  Thus, when a movement among the troops mounted at the end of the war to make him king of America, he rebuked them; it had given him, he said, "painful sensations."  Thus, when he learned of the pending mutiny among unpaid and disaffected officers of his army, Washington personally rebuked them, saying an insurrection would only "open the floodgates of civil discord" and threaten the very liberties for which they had fought.  Thus, when he informed Congress after Evacuation Day that he was relinquishing military power and turning it over to them ("I retire from the great theatre of action"), he was self-consciously imitating the legendary Roman republican leader Cincinnatus, who returned power back to the Senate and retired to his farm.  This single action, more than any other, was a virtuoso performance: His refusal to seize power that a Caesar, or a Cromwell, or a William of Orange would have eagerly grasped, and, moreover, his refusal to even entertain the notion of accepting power others would have gladly handed over to  him, earned him an international prestige and a domestic power that no American, before or after, has surpassed.  The old French generals saw him as a great captain because he did not let a superior force destroy his army; the world recognized him as a great man  because he did not let his victorious army turn loyalty to him into a military dictatorship of the United States.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

On the benefits of risk taking......

 Over time, however, beginning in the 1960s and accelerating in the 1980s, the implicit understanding shifted from that of children as competent, responsible, and resilient to the opposite, as advice focused increasingly on children’s needs for supervision and protection. Rutherford noted, as have other reviewers, that in some respects—such as freedom to choose what they wear or eat—children have gained autonomy over the decades. What has declined specifically is children’s freedom to engage in activities that involve some degree of risk and personal responsibility away from adults.

My thesis is that it’s not just the kids. 

-from this Riskophilia essay

Re-runs...............................

 Wesco continues to try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. … It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, `It’s the strong swimmers who drown.’

-Charlie Munger, from here

by way of

On moral questions......................

     There has never been any question before the American public, whether political or economic, religious or military, which did not resolve itself, soon or late, into a moral question.  Even so dull a row as that over the currency produced its vast crop of saints and succubi, of martyrs and Pontius Pilates, of crimes, heathenries and crowns of thorns.  Nor has there ever been any surcease of that spiritual eagerness which lay at the bottom of the original Puritan's moral obsession; the American has remained, from the very beginning, a man genuinely interested in the eternal mysteries, and fearful of missing their correct solution. 

-H. L. Mencken, from his July 19, 1916 column in the Baltimore Evening Sun

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

 12.  Change your objective.  The goal is not to feel "good" all the time, it's to be able to express a healthy range of emotions without suppressing or suffering.

-Brianna Wiest, as culled from 101 Essays that will Change the way You Think

Worth remembering......................

 Economic sanctions against Russia failed just as 70 years of sanctions on North Korea, 60 years of sanctions on Cuba, and 40 years of sanctions on Iran all failed. One big reason is dictators really don’t care about their economies because they get rich — Fidel Castro reportedly died a billionaire. In fact, the worse the economy, the more powerful the dictator because poverty forces reliance on the government for sustenance.

-Don Surber, from here

not-so-subtle downsides.............

 There are a million ways to get rich, most of which involve exploiting specific niches and one-off opportunities, to say nothing of luck. Universal rules about how to get rich are hard to come by.

But losing money, or losing happiness when you have money, or becoming a slave to your money – those stories tend to have common denominators. They are so common you can call them laws.

-Morgan Housel, from this post

Moon....................................

 

Scientists say the moon grows 1 1/2 inches

farther away every year.  I'll fight

this cosmic terrorism hand to hand.

Earth touched Moon

with his shadow, and Moon

blushed.  Everyone saw it.

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

image via

Not Me..............................

      The God with whom you are having problems, or whom you hate or ridicule, is not the God we are talking about.

     When we talk about goodness, an animating intelligence in the universe and in our hearts or a pervasive positive unity or presence, we are not talking about an old bearded guy in the sky, Parvati, or a Jewish Palestinian baby.  We are talking about a higher power, a power that might be called Not Me, a kindness, a patience, a hope, which is everywhere, even in our annoying, self-centered, fraudulent selves.

     The lower powers—greed, hatred, addiction, ignorance—are easy to connect with and describe, but a higher power is not easily defined.  It can't be controlled, manipulated, or appropriated.  It opens us and heals us and brings us together, and turns hearts of stone into human hearts.  Anytime you are experiencing love, you are experiencing the God we are talking about.  But as novelist David James Duncan says, "God" is the "worst nickname ever."

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

Because.............................

      We picked up our oyster loaves and once again were out on the pier eating lunch together.  He sat at the very end of the dock on the crapping pier and tossed sticks to the dogs, who gallivanted into the shallow water to retrieve them.  They swam back to the pier, shook the water from their fur, and dropped the sticks at our feet, waiting for the next toss.  After several more throws, they sensed a change in mood and swam off toward the beach, leaving my father and me alone.

     "It's getting worse, Jim," he said flatly.  "It's the scariest thing I have ever been through in my life."  I didn't know what to say.  I was in tears but couldn't speak.  Saying I was sorry just didn't feel like enough.  My dad sensed this immediately and changed the topic.  "You know why I chose to fly instead of go to sea?"

      There it was, the question that had been nagging at me all these years.  Now, on the end of the pier near the end of his lucid days, I was going to get the answer.  "Why?" I asked.

     "Because it was what I wasn't supposed to do.  Looks like you have made a career out of that, doing what you're not supposed to do.  I'm proud of you, boy."

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

On leaving room for error and humility....

 The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight. But it’s easy to view the process that led to successful outcomes as something to emulate, and the process that led to failures as something to avoid.

-Morgan Housel, from here

On shoe boxes and pancakes.........

      Putting a state-of-the-art digital video camera with a zoom lens in the hands of a fifty-year-old man on Christmas morning is like giving a sixteen-year-old the keys to your Porsche.  It just shouldn't be done.  There I am, yelling a litany of parental cliches like "Look here, Cameron," "Puddy, what did you get?" "Savannah, what time did you get home last night?"  We all turn into overbearing, obtrusive directors with some half-baked notion that one day we will assemble all of the footage into a meaningful chronological account of our time on Earth.  I don't know about you, but I can tell you that most of the videos in my family wind up in a shoe box somewhere and surface only when some kind of cleanup is initiated around the house. . . .

       I know I've captured enough moments when I hear Savannah say through my headset, "Jesus, Christmas morning with Cecil B. DeBuffett.  Dad, we're hungry.  Please put the camera down and make us some pancakes."

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

humanness..............................

 This being human is a guest house

            Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

Some momentary awareness

            comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

The dark thought, the shame, the malice

        meet them at the door laughing,

                and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

        because each has been sent

                as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

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

      This country has felt more stunned and doomed than at any time since the assassinations of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, and while a sense of foreboding may be appropriate, the hate is not.  At some point, the hate becomes an elective.  I was becoming insane, letting politicians get me whipped up into visions of revenge, perp walks, and jail.  But it didn't work as a drug, neither calming nor animating me.  There is no beauty or safety in hatred.  As a long-term strategy, based on craziness, it's doomed.

     No one can take this hatred off me.  I have to surrender it every time I become aware of it.  This will not go well, I know.  But I don't want my life's ending to be that I was toxic and self-righteous, and I don't know if my last day here will be next Thursday or in twenty years.  Whenever that day comes, I want to be living, insofar as possible, in the Wendell Berry words "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts," . . .

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

a radical act..................

      Hating the way I was feeling helped me give up Camel cigarettes thirty-two years ago, and then alcohol.  It is good to surrender things that poison us and our world.  Am I free of such toxicity now?  Well, about forty percent, and that is a pretty good deal.  I'll take it.

     Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking.  It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky.  The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground.  So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can.  We square our shoulders and lift our gaze.

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

Recommended......................................*

 

-      At times Marion must have seemed a martinet.  But his rationale was simple: "Whenever any part of duty is neglected or done in a slovenly manner, though ever so minute, it tends to destroy disciple entirely."

-Marion preferred the loyalty of a few good men to the fickleness of many uncommitted ones.

-He possessed a strong mind, improved by its own reflections and observations, not by books or travel.

-As Lee would later write, "Marion and Lee were singularly tender of the lives of their soldiers; and preferred moderate success, with little loss, to the most brilliant enterprise, with the destruction of many of their troops."

-On March 21, while camped at Trapier's Plantation just outside Georgetown, Watson complained about Marion's style of warfare.  "They will not sleep and fight like gentlemen," Watson told the plantation owner, "but like savages are eternally firing and whooping around us at night, and by day waylaying and popping at us from behind every tree."  Had he heard this indictment, Marion might have taken it as a compliment.

*Assuming you like your wars fought by small numbers, with often conflicting loyalties, via hide-and-seek on horses, over a vast territory, punctuated by small skirmishes. 

diagnosed........................

 "He was never actually diagnosed as a kid," his mother says, "but he says he has Asperger's. and I'm sure he's right."  The condition was exacerbated by his childhood trauma.  Whenever he would later feel bullied or threatened, his close friend Antonio Garcias says, the PTSD from his childhood would hijack his limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses.

     As a result, he was bad a picking up social cues.  "I took people literally when they said something." he says. "and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really mean."  He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding.

     Like all psychological traits, Musk's were complex and individualized.  He could be very emotional, especially about his own children, and he felt acutely the anxiety that comes from being alone.  But he didn't have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked.  He was not hardwired to have empathy.  Or, to put it in less technical terms, he could be an asshole.

-Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

You can tell you're getting older......

 ..............when you understand this sentiment:

I would like to see social pressure applied also in other areas: against marijuana use; against promiscuous use of four-letter words; in favor of forming relationships that result in grandchildren. 

-Arnold Kling, from this substack

A remodeling project is on-going..................

 ...........................at Sippican Cottage:

So, we were presented with a common design dilemma. A Victorian house is laid out differently than a more recent pile of sticks and bricks. The rooms are too big, or too small, or not where you expect them. Bathrooms are always in short supply, although a Victorian bathroom in good repair is a wonderful thing. They invented bathrooms, after all. They pretty much got it right on the first go-round. Everything was white, for cleanliness. Toilet, sink, tub, lots of white tile, with interesting patterns on the mosaic floors.

A Victorian house with two bathrooms was a rarity. For instance there used to be a pecking order of poshness for Boston Irish, which I am, sorta.  They knew a thing or two about Victorian houses, and pecking orders. They had to mop the floors in them at first, and eventually they lived in them when the structures were run down enough to afford the rent. The bottom rung of the Boston Irish social climbing ladder was ignant bogtrotter. Then came shanty Irish. If you rose further in the world, you could become cut-glass Irish, also known as lace-curtain Irish. Middle class. The pinnacle, of course, was two-toilet Irish.

This is what peace of mind........................

............................................looks like. 

mirrored reciprocation......................

 While Newton’s third law was developed with physics in mind, it applies equally well to biology. When pushed on, we push back. The harder we push others, the harder they push back. How well we align with this simple principle of mirrored reciprocation determines whether our outcomes are good or bad.

-Farnum Street, from this mighty fine edition of Brain Food

the winding ill-lit stairway of our life...........

There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable.  The mistake is to describe it.  Jankélévitch is right about music.  He is right that something can be meaningful, even though its meaning eludes all attempts to put it into words.  Fauré's F sharp Ballade is an example; so is the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa; so is the evening sunlight on the hill behind my house. . . . Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words.  These moments are precious to us.  When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across an open window, through which, we catch sight of another and brighter world—a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

Fun with the..................................

 ................................................language.

embracing............................

 Makes you wonder, today as people endlessly “pursue perfect” — the perfect family vacation, the perfect athletic experience, the perfect house, the perfect life, are we missing the point? Instead of “searching for perfect”, should we instead be searching for unique experiences and embracing whatever this pursuit brings?

-Ted Lamade, from this guest post

About equality.....................

 Now, I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; rights must be given to every citizen, or none at all to anyone. . . .

     There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality that incites men to wish all to be powerful and honored.  This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter 3

eyes upward..........................

      If anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot.

-Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, Book 2, Essay 6

hear..............................

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.  As long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a beautiful element, and am not conscious of any limits to my nature. 

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay, Intellect

Wake up................................................!

 

  thanks Rob

Predictions are hard.....................

 ......................especially about the future:

A master-of-the-universe mentality is pervasive in finance because it’s a group of highly educated, competitive people. They see it as a sign of weakness if you admit you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

The problem is finance people (all people, really) are very good at telling you why something that just happened was obvious in hindsight. They are terrible at telling you what will happen in the future.

-Ben Carlson, from this post

On the importance.....................

 ..................................of stories.

moved..........................

 

   thanks David

The uncancelable......................

more fun here

Air sax...........................

   

In the dorm rooms of our snowbound college 

during certain parts of the Coltrane solos 

featured on the album Milestones, 

parts we had deemed exceedingly worthy, 

we boys would play imaginary 

tenor saxophones by placing a thumb 

in our mouths, leaving the free hand 

to handle the intricacies of the fingering. 

and with puffed-out cheeks and eyes closed, 

we would blow hard, instead of sucking 

as we had done in our infancy. 

And even though we would step back 

to laugh at the silly pathos of ourselves, 

there was always great intensity and joy in our playing.

-Billy Collins

On service.................................

 Service, for me, for us, is not a transactional act.  It's not a trick we undertake to get people to give us their money.  Yes, of course, great service has strategic value.  Every day we go out with the belief that we need to re-earn our customer's trust and make it worthwhile for people to want to spend time and money with us.  But really, service is a way of being in the world.

-Ari Weinzweig

via

an eminent man.......................

Most of the rewards of the Presidency, in these degenerate days, have come to be very trashy.  The President continues, of course, to be an eminent man, but only in the sense that Jack Dempsey, Lindbergh, Babe Ruth and Henry Ford are eminent men.  He sees little of the really intelligent and amusing people of the country, most of them, in fact, make it a sort of point of honor to scorn him and avoid him.  His time is put in mainly with shabby politicians and other such designing fellows—in brief, with rogues and ignoramuses.  When he takes a little holiday his customary companions are vermin that no fastidious man would consort with—dry Senators with panting thirsts, the proprietors of bad newspapers in worse towns, grafter praying on the suffering farmers, pawer and movie magnates, prehensile labor leaders, the more pliable sort of journalists, and so on.

-Henry Louis Mencken, from his 8/17/1931 essay, Imperial Purple

A rugged individual.....................

      "Remember when you got thrown out of the sailing club for leaving the race and sailing all the way across the bay?"  I only had to think a moment about that major event in my mis-spent youth.  It had been the same kind of a day as today.

     "You bet I do," I said with a laugh.

     "I never told you, but that was about as proud as I ever was of you.  I mean, being the first Buffett to get a college degree was good, don't get me wrong, but that time you just decided to light out on your own, that was the moment."

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

A pretty fair prophesy.................

     Mead was prophesying a revolution with profound social and political consequences.  Influence in this new world would accrue to people who could produce computing power and manipulate it with software.  The semiconductor engineers of Silicon Valley had the specialized knowledge, networks, and stock options that let them write the rules of the future—rules that everyone else would have to follow.  Industrial society was giving way to a digital world, with 1s and 0s stored and processed on many millions of slabs of silicon spread throughout society.  The era of the tech tycoons was dawning. "Society's fate will hang in the balance," Carver Mead declared. "The catalyst is the microelectronics technology and its ability to put more and more components into less and less space." Industry outsiders only dimly perceived how the world was changing, but Intel's leaders knew that if they succeeded in dramatically expanding the availability of computing power, radical changes would follow.  "We are really the revolutionaries in the world today," Gordon Moore declared in 1973, "not the kids with the long hair and beards who were wreaking the schools a few years ago."

-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

Choose wisely..........................

Comparison makes you unhappy, and there's no end to comparison in the world, if that's the path you choose.

-Dan Sullivan/Benjamin Hardy, The Gap and the Gain 

As mottos go........................

The family adopted a motto: "Live dangerously—carefully."

-Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

On beauty..........................

      I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe.  In the film Contact, when Jodie Foster's character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, "They should've sent a poet."  I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn't out there, it's down here, with all of us.

-William Shatner, Boldly Go: Reflections of a Life of Awe and Wonder

wringing...................

 They live laboriously, in order that they may live better; they fit themselves out for life at the expense of life itself, and cast their thoughts a long way forwards: yet postponement is the greatest waste of life: it wrings day after day from us, and takes away the present by promising something hereafter: there is not such obstacle to true living as waiting, which loses to-day while it depends on the morrow.

-Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

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

Bruce Hornsby............................the Hot House album

 

harboring...........................

 Despite the fact that it had been around for most of my adult life, I harbored a deep distrust for social media of any kind.  The idea of voluntarily revealing all that personal info to strangers had always struck me as dumber than dumb—and I'd seen far too many cases of Internet stalking, fraud, catfishing, and worse to change my mind about it.  Ever since my early twenties, when I'd shut down my meager Facebook account after some jerk tried to blackmail me for nudes via private message, I've used the Internet only for work and for the purchasing of shoes—an approach I believe could lead to world peace if more people shared it.

-Alison Gaylin, Robert B. Parker's Bad Influence: A Sunny Randall Novel

fierce determination............................

       One day when he was five, one of his cousins was having a birthday party, but Elon was punished for getting into a fight and told to stay home.  He was a very determined kid, and he decided to walk on his own to his cousin's house.  The problem was that it was on the other side of Pretoria, a walk of almost two hours.  Plus, he was too young to read the road signs. "I kind of knew what the route looking like because I had seen it from the car, and I was determined to get there, so I just started walking," he says.  He managed to arrive just as the party was ending.  When his mother saw him coming down the road, she freaked out.  Fearing he would be punished again, he climbed a maple tree and refused to come down.  Kimbal remembers standing beneath the tree and staring at his older brother in awe. "He has this fierce determination that blows your mind and was sometimes frightening, and still is."

-Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

that vision thing.................

 Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

-Richard Wiseman

toward.................................

 The key to productivity is doing more of what matters and less of what doesn't. When you concentrate your mental and physical energy in one direction, you have the most impact. . . .

Being busy and being productive are not the same thing. Running around in circles is busy. Going toward your destination is productive. It's easy to be busy. It's hard to be productive.

-from our friends at Farnum Street

Louis XVI..................................?

 In some industries – admittedly not all – the executive to employee pay imbalance is in Louis XIV territory, and the peasants are actively rattling the cage doors for their slice of cake.

For instance, while the UAW demands seem insane, greedy, and self-defeating on their face, when you look at them in relation to what they’re paying, say, the insipid head of GM (Her 2022 compensation comes in at a paltry $28,979,570 which, if you can believe it, meant she made a little less than in 2021.)? You have a sense of where the anger may be coming from.

-as culled from here

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

The Oscar Peterson Trio..................The Good Life

 

Because nobody wants to get rich slow......

 ..................................twenty-four beliefs.

wild-cattish................................

       It seems to me that the newspaper reporters of today know very little of the high adventure that bathed the reporters of my time, now nearly thirty years ago.  The journalism of that era was still somewhat wild-cattish: all sorts of mushroom papers sprang up; any man with a second-hand press and a few thousand dollars could start one.  Thus there was a steady shifting of men from paper to paper, and even the most sober journals got infected with the general antinomianism of the craft.  Salaries were low, but nobody seemed to care.  A reporter who showed any sign of opulence was a sort of marvel, and got under suspicion.  The theory was that journalism was an art, and that to artists money was somehow offensive.

      Now all that is past.  A good reporter used to make as much as a bartender or a police sergeant; he now makes as much as the average doctor or lawyer, and probably a great deal more.  His view of the world he lives in has thus changed.  He is no longer a free-lance in human society, thumbing his nose at its dignitaries; he has got a secure lodgment in a definite stratum, and his wife, if he has one, maybe has social ambitions.  The highest sordid aspiration that any reporter had, in my time, was to own two complete suits of clothes.  Today they have dinner-coats and some of them even own plug hats.

-H. L. Mencken, from a 1/10/1027 Baltimore Evening Sun article