The
world, Solzhenitsyn said, “will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have
to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical
nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly,
our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.”
-as culled from this Douglas Murray post
"No people can be truly free," he wrote, "unless they are exempt from the debasing influence of ignorance and vice. Upon the knowledge and integrity of the people rests the whole fabric of self-government."
-Walter Stahr, Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival
The first indication of trouble was the light burning in the kitchen window of Wexford Cottage. Vera Hobbs, owner of the Cornish Bakery in Gunwalloe, spotted it at 5:25 a. m. on the third Tuesday of January. The day of the week was noteworthy; the owner of the cottage, Professor Charlotte Blake, divided her time between Cornwall and Oxford. Typically, she arrived in Gunwalloe on a Thursday evening and departed the following Monday afternoon—three-day work-weeks being one of the many perquisites of academic life. The absence of her dark blue Vauxhall suggested she had decamped at her usual time. The glowing light, however, was an aberration, as Professor Blake was a devout environmentalist who would rather stand in the path of a speeding train than waste a single watt of electricity.
-Daniel Silva, A Death in Cornwall
The trouble is that when the truth gets stretched far enough, something eventually breaks.
-Ted Lamade, from this post
Who spends money better: the person who spends his own money, or the person who spends other people's money?
-from the Calafia Beach Pundit, who loves his charts
such as this one...........................
The taut cable of high expectations has been slackened, and the result is the current mood: listlessness.
-Ruby LaRocca, from this award-winning essay
...........................grandparenting is pretty great.
We have the greatest country on earth, the greatest constitution, the greatest economy, the greatest everything, and we’ve ended up fostering a political culture so generally nauseating that even Screwtape must be feeling a little sorry for us.
................Bari Weiss is a national treasure:
What's become clear is the crisis of trust is more accurately a crisis of trustworthiness.
In other words, it's not that Americans have randomly stopped trusting the experts while softening toward the conspiracy theorists. It's that so many experts have been exposed as partisan and unreliable and stopped deserving our trust.
-as culled from here
But even as we consume more than ever before, big business faces a crisis of legitimacy. The pharmaceutical industry creates life-saving vaccines but has lost the trust of the public. The widening pay gap between executives and employees is destabilising our societies. Facebook and Google have more customers than any companies in history but are widely reviled.
-Sir John Kay suggests we read his newest book
A “democracy” where unelected bureaucrats have effective veto power is not a real democracy.
Ed. Note: The history major in me bristles when I hear people talking about the U.S. as a democracy. I suspect the Founding Fathers would share my bristles. They created, and we should still be considered, a constitutional republic, which is a very different animal from a democracy. Having said that, if you substitute "constitutional republic" for "democracy" in the above quote, the quote is still true.
Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history.
-Kelly Hayes, as culled from Morgan Housel's recent quote collection.
Ed. Note: Been reading Walter Stahr's biography Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival and I can tell you for certain that politics in 1840 were just as messy as they are today. I suspect by the time the author gets around to the late 1850s we will find the politics might have gotten even messier.
Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.
- Douglas Adams, via Chris Lynch
It can be difficult to appreciate how much avoiding the standard ways of failing dramatically increases the odds of success.
-from the good folk at Farnam Street
Truth isn’t the sum of many facts: It works the other way around. We erect frameworks of understanding which the facts must fit into or modify. A healthy society will debate the relationship between a given fact and its role in our understanding of the world. The catastrophic failure of the mediators means that we now debate the frameworks and their meanings among ourselves. In this rolling chaos, interpretations have turned tendentious and partial. Reality has splintered into a million pieces. That’s the post-truth condition. . . .
The 20th century’s illusion of narrative integrity is gone forever. We now stumble along in the dark, plagued by uncertainty—an accurate description, I note, of the human condition.
-Martin Gurri, from this essay
. . . if we trace these through the foregoing essay on driving, I think we arrive at a better understanding of the central issue of politics: sovereignty.
To see a problem that needs fixing often stems from a failure to see that a solution has already been achieved—through the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.
To drive is to exercise one's skill at being free, and one can't help but feel this when one gets behind the wheel. It seems a skill worth preserving.
...........................................from the Babylon Bee.
Ed Note: I especially liked #6 and #7
.................men and women from Matthew Crawford:
The most impressive and successful women, like their male counterparts, seem not to feel burdened with responsibility to advance the arc of History; they just do what they do, and find their satisfaction in meeting the demands of their craft.
But we have wandered off the topic of what makes men strong (answer: women who demand strength).
As Rousseau said, if you want to men to be virtuous, teach women what virtue is. . . . Men will make themselves into whatever women prefer.
. . . working-class women prefer their men to be manly, and in that respect may be said to accept male norms as valid, even crucial. The standard feminist response is to say that in doing so, they suffer a false consciousness that guarantees their subordination. But that is hard to square with what one sees. In fact, working class "patriarchy" can look an awful lot like matriarchy.
The very qualities that are called "toxic" in a man often seem to count as "empowerment" in a woman.
Administrative mandates and therapeutic regimens multiply—speech and behavior are ever more closely monitored—to protect the delicate sensibilities of our empowered young women.
Anything that lets us see a clear connection between effort and consequences—and that helps us feel in control of a challenging situation—is a kind of mental vitamin that helps build resilience and provides a buffer against depression. . . . Flourishing—that of rats and humans alike—seems to require an environment with "open problem spaces" that elicit the kinds of bodily and mental engagement bequeathed us by evolution and cultural development.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man's awareness followed rather than preceded the event. Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, "organically." Today, unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate. Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself. Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need. Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.
-Alvin Toffler, from his 1970 classic, Future Shock
The most selfish thing in the world you can do is be generous. Your generosity will return you ten fold.
To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
Ed. Note: Methinks if he had added "heart" to "intellect and judgment", he would have been on to something.
...........he has a pretty good sense of the real estate market:
We won’t be in this situation forever because something unexpected always happens eventually, but for now, we’re in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t housing market.
If anyone tells you low interest rates help buyers, ignore them. Low interest rates help sellers - because low rates enable a buyer to pay a higher price while maintaining a lower monthly payment. Much of the "affordability" crisis in housing has been brought on by over a decade of ridiculously low interest rates. In real estate, low interest rates are inflationary.
You didn't ask, but I'll tell you anyway: any interest rates for borrowers that do not allow financial institutions to pay an interest rate to savers that exceeds the rate of inflation is too low.
I want to sit here longer, to move unhurried, to glide, to breathe, to be ordered but not scheduled, to release into reverie, to let my mind wander, my shoulders loosen, my being melt and flow with curiosity, delight, warmth, ease.
-Annie Mueller, from here
“Welcome. You’re one of us now. The Wi-Fi password is getoffmylawn.”
-Eric Barker shares the secret to aging gracefully
That’s because they understand what the work involves, and they don’t confuse effort with results.
-Seth Godin, from here
When liberal policies were simply abstract inanity, average Americans could roll their eyes, hold their tongues, and let their lives go on. But the radical Left made the abstract concrete for average Americans. For their part, average Americans have found the radical Left’s policies as unavoidable as they are unendurable.
-J. T. Young, as culled from here
With frustration and some regret, she studied murder. It lay in the quiet room on a sofa the color of good merlot, with heart blood staining a pale gray shirt beneath the silver bolt of a scalpel. Her eyes, flat and grim, tracked the body, the room, the tray of artfully arranged fruit and cheese on the low table.
-J. D. Robb, Celebrity in Death
When a situation looks grim, but also you're not sure exactly how things stand, you form theories that are attractive not because they are the most plausible, but because they give you something to do, and doing something is the only way not to be crushed by miasmic uncertainty and despair. Fetching water had given me a purpose. As so often happens for mortals like us, it turned out to be pointless purpose. But string enough of these together and you've got yourself a life, of sorts. We are playthings of the gods, and to provide amusement is not nothing.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
I saw a description of Bitcoin being everything you didn't understand about computers combined with everything you don't understand about money. Now I feel seen.
-Chris Lynch, from here
Given how much our daily lives are nudged and steered into channels engineered by tech firms, one can no longer sensibly adopt a conceptual demarcation between "the private sector" and "government."
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
 |
| Evening Wind Edward Hopper 1921 |
There is something new and voracious in the world that feeds on individual agency, and is basically imperialistic in its aspirations. . . .
. . .the idea of sovereignty has suddenly reemerged as politically salient. If we take the political anger of populist movements at their word, it is a reaction to the imperiousness of political elites and corporate forces in pressing agendas of progress that seek to delegitimize the concerns of those deemed regressive.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
. . . in Germany, where on certain roads you are free to drive as fast as you please. But if you cause a serious accident, you are never allowed to drive again, essentially. The law grants wide discretion and assigns total responsibility. That is, it treats citizens as adults. This is a bracing concept, maybe a little too radical for the United States.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension—these are the essence of play spirit.
I believe that the people who institute our laws are the weak and the many. So they institute laws and assign praise and blame with themselves and their own advantage in mind.
-Plato, channeling Callicles, from Gorgias
A fundamental fact about human beings is that we are homo faber, as Hannah Arendt said. We make stuff. Doing so seems to express a deep necessity we have to point to something visible in the world and say, "I did that."
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
As creatures who are self-moving, freedom of movement would seem to be the most fundamental freedom there is, a minimal condition for that basic animal pleasure that makes life sweet. . . . What is at stake is not simply a legal right, but a disposition to find one's way through the world by the exercise of one's own powers.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
If one cares about safety (and who doesn't), one does well to take a skeptical look at the safety-industrial complex, and its reliance on moral intimidation to pursue ends other than safety.
. . . if left unchallenged, the pursuit of risk reduction tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities. Infantilization slips in, under cover of democratic ideals. I will insist, on the contrary, that democracy remains viable only if we are willing to extend to one another a presumption of individual competence. This is what social trust is built on. Together, they are the minimal endowments for a free, responsible, fully awake people.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
"Consistency of tone" is one of those precepts pressed upon writers by writing teachers. Any reader who expects consistency is likely to be bewildered in what follows, . . .
--Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
.........................from our friend at Sippican Cottage:
Time marches on. You can never put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can never put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The past is another county. Whatever. But I’m sure glad I didn’t forget to have kids in the first place.
Bad news: the universe is largely indifferent to your lucky socks.
-Eric Barker, from this post on "smart luck"
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another, you may be in the grip of an ideology. When you truly think for yourself, your conclusions will not be predictable.
But I also think that it is important to separate out what is real from what is just a comforting lie that we tell ourselves.
-James O'Malley from his Music Just Changed Forever post
No matter how you slice it, the home building sector seems strangely slow given our population growth . . .
Brian Wesbury offers a pretty good take on why the housing market is so tight. He includes governmental hurdles as a major problem. Maybe. We think the major problem (that he fails to mention) is the wipe out of the small homebuilder - the company that would build 10-12 houses per year - after the 2008 meltdown. Those guys never recovered and/or aged out, and have not yet been replaced. We were so focused on sending all high school graduates to college, we forgot the importance of the building trades. There is still a screaming need for plumbers, electricians, carpenters, drywallers, etc. The earning potential for those high school graduates entering those trades now seems significantly higher than college graduates with BA degrees. Just saying. As an honorable mention for housing problems, we should not forget the serious inflation of building material costs that the covid/broken-supply-chain-years brought us. Prices have moderated a bit, but not much. All in all, no quick fix to the housing problem is on the horizon.
In fact, good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.
This one patiently sat in the bookcase for about twenty years, waiting for its turn. Worth the wait.
Choose humility and accept the fact the only certainty is uncertainty.
Fortune doesn’t favor the brave. It rewards the realists.
All of us have won the Universe’s equivalent of the Mega-Jackpot Lottery by simply existing.
Don’t squander your good fortune by listening to people spraying a firehose of certitude.
-Tony Isola, from here
When it came to the economy, the federal government’s framework of understanding had lost touch with the truth.
-Martin Gurri, from here
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your life.
-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
.............................................is not "interactive":
But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head.
..................................with Morgan Housel:
I try to keep in mind that there are two ways to use money. One is as a tool to live a better life. The other is as a yardstick of success to measure yourself against other people. The first is quiet and personal, the second is loud and performative. It’s so obvious which leads to a happier life.
................................from some long shots:
Being an adult involves learning to accept limits imposed by a world that doesn't fully answer to our needs, to fail at this is to remain infantile . . .
We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.
-attributed to Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Playing your own game in life means understanding what truly matters to you. It’s about self-awareness and knowing your strengths and weaknesses. It’s about recognizing what brings you joy and what drains you.
viaWe live in a world awash with information and we’re not enamoured with imprecision, less still a clear and certain plan to live out the best of our days (whatever the consequences) and, in the process, we’ve annihilated mystery only to be replaced with (Ye Gads) Artificial Intelligence; or another way to say that is we’d rather let something else do our thinking!
There are no great answers, you could say, but only great questions made greater when their answerers are nobly defeated by the awe and mystery of the way things are.
Posts
All Comments
