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

 ...............with Joseph Heller's Catch-22:

Insanity is contagious.

it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.

There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.

Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.

History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; WHICH men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.

He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.

Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours.

“From now on I'm thinking only of me."  Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way."  "Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?”

a hierarchy..................................

  I read about the duties of the Policy Review Board I am asked to join.  It "serves a critical function in this work.  The Board, consisting of leading citizens with many different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences, functions to guarantee the objectivity of the Public Agenda's work.  Board members review Public Agenda projects, publications, and other material to insure that they are free of ideological bias, that they are balanced and thoughtful, and that they represent the highest level of analysis and research."  Prose like that gags, doesn't it?  I mean, if leading citizens with different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences guarantee objectivity, they why isn't the United Nations objective?  And are we sure we want to be free of ideological bias?  Isn't a hierarchy of values valuable?

-William F. Buckley, Jr., Overdrive: A Personal Documentary

One of the great tragedies.......................

....................of our current society is that conversations like this just don't happen anymore.  Watch as William Buckley sorts out, in response to a question from Huey Newton, what side he might have been on in 1776.  Firing Line was special.   Money quote from Huey: "one of my principles is contradiction is the ruling principle of the Universe."  Enjoy.

 

On youth......................

The only quality of youth I covet is their health, not their age; life is wonderful, but the thought of reliving it is altogether repelling; spiritually, and even biologically, exhausting.  When the character in Catch 22 said he intended to live forever or die trying, I sensed an exalted fatalism, nicely captured by the easy superficiality of the biological paradox.

-William F. Buckley, Jr., Overdrive: A Personal Documentary

time passage.....................

      General Dreedle had thrown open Colonel Cathcart's private skeet-shooting range to every officer and enlisted man in the group on combat duty.  General Dreedle wanted his men to spend as much time out on the skeet-shooting range as the facilities and their flight schedules would allow.  Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them.  It trained them to shoot skeet.

     Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly.  He figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.

-Joseph Heller, Catch-22

In case I needed it.....................

 ...........................more proof I'm getting old.  Younger investors and real estate agents are bemoaning the "high" current mortgage rates.  For half of our career, we would have been thrilled with this sort of rate:

A little context:

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

    War............................................Cisco Kid

 

Uh-oh......................

 As blogger Tim Urban describes it, your brain gets hijacked by an instant gratification monkey, who picks what's easy and fun over the hard work that needs to be done. . . . 

     Many people associate procrastination with laziness.  But psychologists find that procrastination is not a time management problem—it's an emotional management problem.  When you procrastinate, you're not avoiding effort.  You're avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up.  Sooner or later, though, you realize that you're also avoiding getting where you want to go.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

Even though he is a .........................

 .....................Wolverine fan (or maybe because he is one), Rob Firchau is a treasure.

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

 ............if the underlying assumptions are correct.  While truly not having a clue, I'm going to hypothesize that governmental re-regulation plays a considerable role. 

    via

no guarantees.......................

"Best time of the day to be out there, though.  You wake up before the sun, see a new day unfold right in front of you on the water.  Ain't none of us guaranteed another hour of living, don't care who you are or how much you got.  Might as well get up early and enjoy what time you got left, I say."

-David Baldacci, The Edge

a never-ending chain............

      If you've relied on data and logic alone to make sense of the economy, you'd have been confused for a hundred years straight.

     Economist Per Bylund once noted: "The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any)."

     Not utility, not profits—just whether people want it or not, for any reason.  So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of. . . .

     The danger, one you see often in investing, is when people become too McNamara-like—so obsessed with data and so confident in their models that they leave no room for error or surprise.  No room for things to be crazy, dumb, unexplainable, and to remain that way for a long time.  Always asking, "Why is this happening?" and expecting there to be a rational answer.  Or worse, always mistaking what happened for what you think should have happened.

     The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.

-Morgan Housel, as excerpted from Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

It's a subjective world...............

 "Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others."  This subjective layer is what we want to focus on in our quest to know other people.  The crucial question is not "What happened to this person?" or "What are the items on their resume?"  Instead we should ask: "How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things?  How do they construct their reality?"  This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.

     An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room then an introvert does.  A person who has been trained as an interior designer sees a different room than someone who's been trained as a security specialist.

-David Brooks,  How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Creationism...........................

 Your mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies, and you live within that construction.  People don't see the world with their eyes, they see it with their entire life.

     Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person "constructionism."  Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don't passively take in reality.  Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality.  That's not to say there is not an objective reality out there.  It's to say that we have only subjective access to it.

-David Brooks, How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

The best you can do............

 Unfortunately, there are many variables outside of your control when it comes to investing.

You can’t control the timing or magnitude of returns the markets offer. You also don’t control interest rates or inflation or economic growth or tax rates or the labor market or the actions of the Fed and politicians.

Life would be easier if you did but no one said life is easy.

The best you can do is focus on what you can control — your behavior, your savings rate, your asset allocation, your costs, your time horizon — and play the hand you’re dealt.

-Ben Carlson, as he concludes this post

Pensieri.........................

 

much more from Nicholas Bate here

Tomorrow ......................?

 

On this day in 1920...............

.....................The Mark of Zorro, with Douglas Fairbanks as our hero, was released in New York.

 

Something you don't see everyday..........

 ................someone praising social media:

Over the last six weeks, legacy media has given me literal Hamas propaganda, quite proudly, on the front page, over and over again. And now we all know it. Which makes the legacy media very mad indeed. The screaming and thrashing about social media are the old world’s death throes. Don’t get me wrong; social media is a mess. Twitter?! It’s vile. It’s full of offensive lies and just offensive reality. It’s vile because the world contains vile things and people are monstrous and weird. I see images I shouldn’t. I see hedgehogs who seem too tame (is that legal?). I see Susan Sarandon retweeting MAGA accounts in ways that trouble my sleep. And yet. I would take the mess over my apportioned journalism-school-Hamas-propaganda-oatmeal any day. God bless this mess. I’m grateful for social media.

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

The Rippingtons/Welcome To The St. James Club album

types........................

      Two days now Matt Sabre had been marshal of Painted Rock.  Yet the job was not new to him, for he had been marshal before in other towns.  And this town was no different.  Even the faces were the same.  It was strange, he thought, how little difference there was in people.  When one traveled, got around to many towns, one soon realized there were just so many types, and one found them in every town.  Names were different, and expressions, but it was like many casts playing the same roles in a drama.  The parts remained the same, only the names of the cast had changed.

-Louis L'Amour, from his short story The Marshal of Painted Rock

by design........................

 It seems to be our liberal political instincts that push us in this direction of centralizing authority: we distrust authority in the hands of individuals.  With its reverence for neutral process, liberalism is, by design, a politics of irresponsibility.

-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

On thinking versus doing..............

 . . . the twentieth century saw concerted efforts to separate thinking from doing.  Those efforts achieved a good deal of success in ordering our economic life, and it is this success that perhaps explains the plausibility the distinction now enjoys.  Yet to call this "success" is deeply perverse, for wherever the separation of thinking from doing has been achieved, it has been responsible for the degradation of work.

-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

part of the disciplinary process.....................

      The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. . . . One symptom Lears points to is a 1907 book with the immodest title The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Nelson Patten, in which the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants become not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process.  That is, part of the disciplinary process.  As Lears writes, "Indebtedness could discipline workers, keeping them a routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly."

-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

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

      Passenger train travel was not known to be particularly dangerous, especially in Europe where the machines soared like the wind on rigorously sculpted rails that translated to silky smooth rides.  There were many departures a day between Geneva and Milan operated by several railway companies; one could travel early in the morning or later at night.  The trains ran at a maximum speed of two hundred kilometers per hour, while their passengers napped, worked, binged shows on streaming platforms, or ate and drank in considerable comfort.  This particular ride was a bullet-nosed silver Astoro tilt train operated by Trenitalia.   None of the hundred-plus passengers was contemplating dying today.

      Except for one.

-David Baldacci, The Edge

A Licking County tradition.......................

...............................on the Friday after Thanksgiving:  the Christmas lighting of the County Courthouse:

Good looking building even without the lights

Santa getting ready to hit the switch

All lit up for the season

A Large Regular resurrected .................

....................a poster for the historic WKRP Turkey Drop. Here is how it played out:

 

A proclamation...............................

 A Proclamation

 

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor—and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their Joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."

 

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be—That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks—for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation—for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war—for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed—for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

 

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions—to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed--to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord—To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and Us—and generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

 

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

 

Go. Washington

A time for family.....................

..............expecting 27.  A degree in space planning would have been useful, but it looks like all will fit in the dining room.  More food has been prepared that you can shake a stick at.  Good thing we all appreciate the leftovers.

As rules go...................

.................this is a mighty fine list;

10. Thou shalt be thankful. You're above ground and functioning in an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time. Many people paid a very heavy price (and I'm not talking about groceries) to give you this day. Take some time to think of them and to express gratitude to your friends and relatives. Above all, give special thanks to the divine power who blesses you in innumerable ways.

Highly recommended.................

 

Avoiding regret is a key component to life satisfaction.

Good judgment is expensive, but poor judgement will cost you a fortune.

Most errors in judgment happen when we don't know we're supposed to be exercising judgment.

The key to getting what you want out of life is to  identify how the world works and to align yourself with it.

But being wise requires more.  It's more than knowing how to get what you want.  It's also knowing which things are worth wanting—which things really matter.

Work...........................

 

Ah, history.....................................

      There is so much we don't know. And not just about the future, but the past.

      History knows three things: 1) what's been photographed, 2) what someone wrote down or recorded, and 3) the words spoked by people whom historians and journalists wanted to interview and who agreed to be interviewed.

     What percentage of everything important that's ever happened falls into one of those three categories?  No one knows.  But it's tiny.  And all three suffer from misinterpretation, incompleteness, embellishment, lying, and selective memory.

-Morgan Housel, as cut-and-pasted from here

Every single one.........................

 

      via and via

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

 ............................Shane Parrish:

The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated.

When you don't communicate what's most important, people are left guessing about what matters.

The future is not like the weather.  It doesn't just happen to us.  We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, just as our present situation was shaped by choices we made in the past.

Admitting you're wrong isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength.

The biggest mistake people make isn't their initial mistake.  It's the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it.  The first mistake is expensive; the second one costs a fortune.

The most critical step in any decision-making process is to get the problem right.

The way you define a problem changes what you see.

Shifting your frame of reference is a powerful safeguard against blind spots.

Show me your role models and I'll show you your future.

Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people.

You don't tap into peoples' resourcefulness, intelligence, and skills by command-and-control.

except when it isn't..............

 The complacent investor view that geopolitics should be ignored might be true, except for the times when it isn’t. We suspect we are in one of those times. If we are right, current extreme levels of geopolitical tension will lead to lower stock prices over a timeframe that lasts more than a couple of hours.

-David Einhorn, from here

One way..........................

 ......................................to get new ideas.

This is why............................

 ......................one always checks in with Sippican Cottage.

And with God as my witness, I have played a polka version of Sweet Child of Mine. I’m not proud of that, exactly, but I’m not ashamed of it, either. Why be normal?

As we say around the neighborhood, normalcy is merely the psychosis of the majority.

inexplicable....................

 I will not attempt to sound the depths of psychoanalysis to explain human behavior, which is inexplicable as life itself.  More than sex or infantile aberrations, I believe that most of our ideational compulsions stem from atavistic causes—however, I did not have to read books to know that the theme of life is conflict and pain.  Instinctively, all my clowning was based on this.  My means of contriving comedy plot was simple.  It was the process of getting people in and out of trouble.

-Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography

This might explain my remarkably good health....

 

the great debates...................

 In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public. When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization.

-Richard Feynman

the close at hand..................

 It means that a good person tries to look at everyone with a patient and discerning regard, tries to resist self-centeredness and overcome prejudice, in order to see another person more deeply and with greater discernment.  The good person tries to cast a selfless attention and to see what the other person sees.  This kind of attention leads to the greatness of small acts: welcoming a newcomer to your workplace, detecting anxiety in somebody's voice and asking what's wrong, knowing how to host a part so that everyone feels included.  Most of the time, morality is about the skill of being considerate of others in the complex situations of life.  It's about being a genius at the close at hand.

-David Brooks, How To Know a Person:  The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Some quotes...................

 Risk is what's left over after you think you've thought of everything.
-Carl Richards

The idea that what you don't see might refute everything you believe just doesn't occur to us.

-Daniel Kahneman

Invest in preparedness, not in prediction,

-Nassim Taleb

- All quotes used by Morgan Housel in his new book

predictions...........................

 Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible.  But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliation, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I'd take.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

advantage........................

All the time and energy you spend fixing your unforced errors comes at the expense of moving toward the outcomes you want.  There is a huge advantage in having more of your energy instead go toward achieving your goals instead of fixing your problems.

-Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results 

Suspecting that..................

. . . an accurate and comprehensive list of what we really do not know would dwarf an accurate and comprehensive list of what we truly know.   For instance:

    via

As purposes go.....................

  And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.

-Kurt Vonnegut via Kurt Harden

Speaking of..........................

 ......................................purposes.

I was a history major.............

..........who only took two econ courses, so maybe I'm wrong, but sooner or later, this is going to hurt:

. . . the US is currently running the most reckless budget in the history of the country.  Never before has the deficit soared so quickly to such a high level when the US is still at peace and not in recession. 

-as culled from Brian Wesbury's most recent post

Oh, right....................

 Best practices aren't always the best.  By definition, they're average.

-Shane Parrish

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

David Sanborn.........................................Pearls

 

Couldn't agree more.......................

 

     thanks Kurt

muddy..........................

 Every current event—big or small—has parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, siblings, and cousins.  Ignoring the family tree can muddy your understanding of events, giving a false impression of why things happened, how long they might last, and under what circumstances they might occur again.  Viewing events in isolation, without an appreciation of their long roots, helps explain everything from why forecasting is hard to why politics is nasty.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

quite unlike himself.................

 One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way – said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

-Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

fun............................

 He had these enthusiasms for his projects and his future—his present.  It was not as if you had to deny yourself in the present for the future.  The focus was on how interesting things are today, how much fun to see them built.  It was so much fun being in the moment.  That's what he always communicated.

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

a yeoman aristocracy....................

 The best sort of democratic education is neither snobbish nor egalitarian.  Rather, it accords a place of honor in our common life to whatever is best.  At this weird moment of growing passivity and dependence, let us publicly recognize a yeoman aristocracy: those who gain real knowledge of real things, the sort we all depend on every day.

-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Preview..........................

      Change captures our attention because it's surprising and exciting.  But the behaviors that never change are history's most powerful lessons, because they preview what to expect in the future.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Worth pondering..............

 News and social media are a drag on happiness. If I had to describe the economy using one word, I would use “strong.” If I had to describe the consumer in one word I would use “anxious.”

-Michael Batnick, from this post

Yes, and..............................

 We need patience and curiosity rather than fear and reactivity.

-Tony Isola, from here

the eminent dead.....................

 I learn better sort of plowing through written material by myself.  I've done a lot of that in my life.  I frequently like the eminent dead better than the live teachers.

-Charlie Munger

Souls.........................

      Now, you may be an atheist, an agnostic, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, or something else, but this posture of respect and reverence, this awareness of the infinite dignity of each person you meet, is a precondition for seeing people well. You may find the whole idea of God ridiculous, but I ask you to believe in the concept of a soul.  You may just be chatting with someone about the weather, but I ask you to assume that the person in front of you contains some piece of themselves that has no weight, size, color, or shape yet gives them infinite value and dignity.  If you consider that each person has a soul, you will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside them.  You will be aware that at the deepest level we are all equals.  We're not equal in might, intelligence, or wealth, but we are all equal on the level of our souls.  If you see the people you meet as precious souls, you'll probable wind up treating them well.

-David Brooks, How To Know A Person

lessons learned...............

      The judicious will not fail to extract other lessons from the two conventions.  For example, the lesson that politicians, in the main, are poor hands at practical politics—that their professional competence is very slight.  Very few of them, indeed, show any sign of ordinary good sense.  Their tricks are transparent and deceive no one, not even other politicians.  When they accomplish anything, it is usually by accident.

-Henry Louis Mencken, from a 7/14/1924 essay

the infallible judgement of reality........

      The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy.  The seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth.  He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.  Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world.  But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.  His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous "self-esteem" that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Hugs are pretty important....................

 But, trust me, money is no substitute for mental health. I would rather be poor and happy, than subject myself to constant stress in a work environment. You will not starve if you opt for a solo practice. You probably won't have luxuries that others have; but, in the end, spend your time developing a happy relationship with another human being. Your money can't hug you in the middle of the night.

-Rick Georges

Rising to the defense...................

 ....................................of true liberals.

Here’s another reality understood by Smith – and by F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Deirdre McCloskey, Richard Epstein, George Will, and all other true liberals: If you fail to instill in people liberal tolerance, and especially if you recruit them into the ranks of zealots attempting to create on earth their vision of heaven, you will then surely turn them into brutes. Single-mindedly devoted to their particular causes, individuals become monsters who recognize others only as comrades and enemies, the former of which are to be allowed no room for deviation and the latter of which are to be brutalized and slaughtered.

-Don Boudreaux

Then nice people at .................................

 ........................Barnes & Noble assure me my copy will be delivered Friday!

The unbreakable...................

 ........Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again?   Likely too early to tell, but check this story on the Inflation Innovation Reduction Act.

via

Seeing both sides now.................

Does the economy have you confused?  Should you believe the government's statistics or your own "lying eyes."

Ben Carlson posts, "To avoid my own cognitive dissonance, let’s look at both the good and the bad in the U.S. economy right now:"  

Having read his post, clarity remains elusive, although I believe this is fairly important:  "Savers are no longer being punished. For the first time in a decade-and-a-half, you can find decent yields on CDs, money market funds, online savings accounts and bonds."

 

Bows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feathered canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud's illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
When every fairy tale comes real
I've looked at love that way

But now it's just another show
You leave 'em laughing when you go
And if you care don't let them know
Don't give yourself away

I've looked at love from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say "I love you" right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I've looked at life that way

But now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I've changed
Well something's lost but something's gained
In living every day

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

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

      What happens in ordinary moments determines your future.

-Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking

need.................................

 Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water.  No crueler punishment can be devised that to not see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible.  "The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them," George Bernard Shaw wrote, "but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."  To do that is to say: You don't matter. You don't exist.

-David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

The virtue of poker playing.............

"Playing poker in the Army and as a young lawyer honed my business skills," said Charlie.  "What you have to learn is to fold early when the odds are against you, or if you have a big edge, back it heavily because you don't get a big edge very often.  Opportunity comes, but it doesn't come often, so seize it when it does come."

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

On being useful.....................

      The scope of the economic crisis is still uncertain as I write this; it may turn out to be a mere disturbance, soon forgotten.  But, however briefly, we are experiencing a genuine crisis of confidence in our most prestigious institutions and professions.  This presents an opportunity to reconsider some basic assumptions.  The question of what a good job looks like—of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honored—is more open now than it has been for a long time.  Wall Street in particular has lost its luster as a destination for smart and ambitious young people.  Out of the current confusion of ideals and confounding of larger hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity.  The meta-work in trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people's work suddenly appears as what it is, and it becomes possible once again to think the thought, "Let me make myself useful."

-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Fred Reed.....................

 .........shares opinions not often found in the mainstream media.  He starts this week's essay:

I expect my columns to be gems of lucidity and concision, such as to arouse despair in other writers. I have been expecting this for decades now. It may still happen. Meanwhile I fear today’s effort will be helterskelter, having the literary aspect of a tossed salad. I beg patience.

In this paragraph he suggests that one should be careful about what one wishes for:

A very, very important point: Wars usually do not turn out as expected. Here i repeat myself but I ask regular readers, if I have one, to be patient. Let’s look at some actual wars and how well they matched expectations. The American Civil War was supposed to be over in an afternoon at First Manassas. Wrong by four bloody years and 650,000 dead, equivalent to about six and a half million today. Nobody had the slightest idea of what that war would be. When Napoleon invaded Russia, he had no idea that Russian troops would soon be marching in Paris. Which is what happened. When the Germans launched WWI, they expected a short, victorious war of maneuver. They got four years of bloody, losing trench warfare. When Hitler invaded Russia, having Russian and American GIs divide up Berlin was not a major war plan. It happened. When the Japanese army urged war with America, it did plan on American sailors doing the boom-boom, as the Vietnamese used to say, with its daughters in the bars of Tokyo.  When the French recolonized Vietnam after WWII, they did not expect to be outfought and outsmarted at Dienbienphu. When the Americans repeated the French mistake, they also did not foresee being handed their ass, as is said in the military. It happened. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan, they did not expect to lose. But did. When the Americans, seeing the Russian defeat, also did not expect to lose. But did. The current war in the Ukraine goeth not as expected.

taking the good with the bad............

 Reversion to the mean is one of the most common stories in history. It’s the main character in economies, markets, countries, companies, careers – everything. Part of the reason it happens is because the same personality traits that push people to the top also increase the odds of pushing them over the edge.

-Morgan Housel, from here

No worries......................

 To worry that the American electorate will be mislead by AI in any way that worsens political outcomes is akin to worrying that a man drowning in the Pacific ocean will be made worse off by the sudden appearance of a small rain shower off the coast of California.

-Don Boudreaux, from here  

alone but not lonely............

 . . . when I’m walking or biking, I don’t consider being alone with my own thoughts to be a waste of time.

-Arnold Kling, from here  

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

 Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. “You get out,” I heard a thousand times, “what you put in.” They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor's, you don’t get half as many customers. You get no customers, and you go out of business.

-Paul Graham, Superlinear Returns

via

truly free.....................

 The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.

-Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

via

From the chapter.....................

 ..........................102 Ways to not let Irrational Thoughts Ruin Your Life:

04.  Fire can burn down your house, or it can cook your dinner each night and keep your house warm in the winter.  Your mind is the same way.

09.  Stop being so cerebral.  Do things with your hands.  Cook, clean, go outside.

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.

20.  Do not always trust yourself.  Give yourself space to be wrong.  Open yourself up to the idea that you don't know what you don't know.  If your feelings are informed by irrational thoughts, they can very well be incorrect.

27.  Expand your perceptions.  If you're uncomfortable, you're being pushed to think beyond what you've known.  You're being called to see yourself in a new way.  Open yourself to possibilities you normally wouldn't consider, or layers of yourself you've yet to see.

42.  Remember that you can choose what you think about, and even when if feels like you can't, it's because again, you're choosing to believe that.

44.  Go outside and look at the stars and drink a glass of wine.

58.  Practice happiness.  External events don't create meaning or fulfillment or contentment: how we think about them does.  If you are operating on a scarcity mentality, you'll always be unhappy, no matter what you have of get.

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

value added..................

      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."

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

an affabale complaisance................

 Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provide by, for example, a carpenter's level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame.  The rise of "teamwork" has made it difficult to trace individual responsibility, and opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation of workers by managers, who now appear in the guise of therapists or life coaches. Manager themselves inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape, and are made anxious by the vague imperatives they must answer to.  The college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn't care what he majored in.  He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance.  Is all his hard work in school somehow just for show—his ticket to a Potemkin meritocracy?  There seems to be a mismatch between form and content, and a growing sense that the official story we've been telling ourselves about work is somehow false.

-Matthew B. Crawford,  Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

independence..........................

      Munger and Buffett had something else in common.  "Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich," said Charlie, who early on earned his living as a lawyer. "Not because I wanted Ferraris—I wanted the independence.  I desperately wanted it.  I thought it was undignified to have to send invoices to other people.  I don't know where I get that notion from, but I had it.

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

Unhampered.........................

      He was out to get all the soft-heads, and he got them triumphantly.  Unhampered by anything resembling a coherent body of ideas, he was ready to believe up to the extreme limits of human credulity.  If he did not come out for spiritualism, chiropractic, psychotherapy, and extra sensory perception it was only because not one demanded that he do so.  If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayers' expense.

     So we now have him for four years more—four years that will see the country confronted by the most difficult and dangerous problems presented to it since 1861.  We can only hope that he will improve as he goes on.  Unhappily, experience teaches that no man improves much after 60, and after 65 most of them deteriorate in a really alarming manner.  I could give an autobiographical example, but refrain on the advice of counsel.  Thus we seem to be in for it.  I can only say in conclusion that the country jolly well deserves it.

-Henry Louis Mencken, from his 11/7/48 piece in The Baltimore Sun, in which he opines on Harry Truman's election

keep.........................

 If you want to be successful and live a long, stimulating life, keep yourself at risk intellectually all the time.

-Byron Wien, as culled from here

thanks Chris

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

 -  The funny thing is - this would work. Any politician would have to deploy for any war they vote funds for. If over 35-years old their kids would have to sign up

-Chris Lynch

creeping concealment.................

      The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.  And, in fact, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to "hide the works," rendering many of the devices we depend on every day unintelligible to direct inspection.  Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones) and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the proto-humans in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Essentially, there is another hood under the hood.  This creeping concealment takes various forms.  The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards.  By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods.  It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.

-Matthew B. Crawford,  Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Ed. Note:  As a college junior, my parents, concerned about my apparent aimlessness, had me take one of those personality tests designed to uncover what profession one might be good at.  All I remember about the results was a warning that I should avoid anything to do with "spatial relations."  That made abundant sense, as I was totally lost viewing a "conceptual schematic."  Would have been easier to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Assuming the shelves.......................

 ...........are still loaded with books, this could be one of the greatest historic renovation, and/or urban renewal project, ever imaged.