Did I mention we just got back from Napa Valley?

The Fireballs......................................Bottle of Wine

 

Tough duty...........................

 There are prophets, there are guides, and there are argumentative people with theories, and one must be careful to discriminate between them.

-Peter Brook

via

It could have been worse........................

 

..........................as us Browns fans truly know.

Never let book-learning.............

 

.................................get in the way of your education.

I fell off the top....................

 

...............................of one of these things in third grade at Merion Elementary School.  Landed on my head.  Might explain a lot.

via

As investment advice goes...................

 

....................................it would be hard to improve on this list.   A wee sample:

To reap the biggest rewards you must be able to take the painful hits and keep moving forward. Which is why the ultimate superpower in investing is being good at suffering.

Just because........................

Manfred Mann............Doo Wah Diddy Diddy

genuine........................

 

Unless we, both as individuals and as a society, start to embrace a genuine existence that brings risks of failure, unpleasantness, and unpredictability as well as achievement, happiness, and love, we will eventually wind up in a very artificial and narrow existence: a prison cell of our own making.

-Michael Wade, as culled from here

Harder than it looks................

 

Our society is what we make it.  We can shape our institutions.  Physical and human characteristics limit the alternatives available to us.  But none prevent us, if we will, from building a society that relies primarily on voluntary cooperation to organize both economic and other activity, a society that preserves and expands human freedom, that keeps government in its place, keeping it our servant and not letting it become our master.

-Milton & Rose Friedman, Free To Choose: A Personal Statement

a product.......................

 

Material possessions can be here today and gone tomorrow, and if your happiness is tied up in them, it too can be here today and gone tomorrow.  But happiness, a product of a mindset that combines curiosity, the joy of perpetual intellectual discovery, and an appreciation of life's experiences, can be more lasting.

-Gad Saad,  The Saad Truth About Happiness

compulsive................

 

First Facebook, then the iPhone compulsive communicating and connecting—supported by mysterious, almost magical innovations in radio modulation and fiber-optic routing—swept our culture before anyone had the presence of mind to step back and re-ask Thoreau's fundamental question: To what end?

     The result is a society left reeling by unintended consequences.  We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidentally degrading our humanity.

-Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

To your ownself be true....................

 

A talented person can quickly become mediocre when you force them to be someone they aren’t.

-Morgan Housel, from here

Don't ask the question if you can't handle the answer.....................

 I run into trouble when I ask myself why I’m doing things.

-Annie Mueller

goals..................

 

Seemingly impossible goals are more practical than possible goals because impossible goals force you outside your current level of knowledge and assumptions.

-Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More By Doing Less

encroachment..................

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial.  Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.  The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. 

-Louis Brandeis

bad parenting........................

 

     However, government's responsibility for the depression was not recognized—either then or now.  Instead, the depression was widely interpreted as a failure of free market capitalism.  That myth led the public to join the intellectuals in a changed view of the relative responsibilities of individuals and government.  Emphasis on the responsibility of the individual for his own fate was replaced by emphasis on the individual as a pawn buffeted by forces beyond his control.  The view that government's role is to serve as an umpire to prevent individuals from coercing one another was replaced by the view that government's role is to serve as a parent charged with the duty of coercing some to aid others.

-Milton & Rose Friedman, Free To Choose: A Personal Statement

He is pretty focused..................

 

     The central focus of this book is to explore another set of pathogens that are potentially as dangerous to the human condition: parasitic pathogens of the human mind.  These are composed of thought patterns, belief systems, attitudes, and mindsets that parasitize one's ability to think properly and accurately.  Once these mind viruses take hold of one's neuronal circuitry, the afflicted victim loses the ability to use reason, logic, and science to navigate the world.  Instead, one sinks into an abyss of infinite lunacy best defined as a dogged and proud departure from reality, common sense, and truth.

-Gad Saad, The Parasitic Mind:  How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

deprivation......................

 

Solitude Deprivation:  A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

-Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

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

 

...................................Edward Gibbon:

Conversation enriches understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

We improve ourselves by victory over our self. There must be contests, and you must win.

The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.

History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.

It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that good soldier should dread his own officers far more than the enemy.

Instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.

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

 

Toby.  Approach, Sir Andrew.  Not to be abed after midnight is to be up betimes; and "Deliculo surgere," thou know'st.*

Andrew.  Nay, by my troth, I know not, but I know to be up late is to be up late,

Toby.  A false conclusion; I hate it as an unfilled can.  To be up after midnight, and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes.  Does not our lives consist of the four elements?

Andrew.  Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.

Toby.  Th' art a scholar!  Let us therefore eat and drink.  Marian I say, a stoup of wine!

-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night,  Act II, Scene III

*Ed. Note:  Those of Shakespeare's time would have recognized Diluculo surgere saluberrimum est as "it is most beautiful to rise early.

Finding good advice where you can..........

 

     The popularity of health books or "dietaries" attested to people's concern bout personal health, as did the sections on home remedies for the sick to be found in many cookbooks.  The dietaries were comprised largely of advice on diet as related to health.  Every edible thing was analyzed with relation to its effect on health.  Those with "melancholicke" nature were advised to eat certain foods and avoid others; those of "cholericke" temperament were warned against foods that might increase their choler.  Some foods were dangerous because they caused "bad blood"; still others could fill the body and head with "evil vapours."  And some foods could "increase man's seed," a desirable thing, it may have seemed to many, since so many children died young.

-Madge Lorwin, Dining With Shakespeare:  Thirteen complete Shakespearean feast menus, spiced with essays and comments on the food and social customs of Elizabethan England

Contravening a breach of the peace...........

Long John Baldry..................Don't Try To Lay No Boogie-Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll

 

Because you know he would......................

 

                          more fun here

Never underestimate................................

 

................................................the power of zen.

More than quite likely.....................................

 

They call it ‘crowd control’ for a reason. If you’re in a crowd, it’s quite likely someone is trying to control you.

-Seth Godin, from here

When the word "elite" is applied to......................

 

...........to current world-wide political leadership it feels like an abuse of our language. We should reserve the word for those who truly deserve it - our greatest professional athletes.

Full story here.  Money quote here:

These three skills – attention, memory and creativity – have technical names: inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility, respectively.   They are the three core executive functions used by the brain to execute complex tasks.

via

Doesn't get.......................

 

........................................better than this.

There is some truth in this..................

 

Most of us are making it up as we go, moving the goalposts continually and never settling on a specific definition of money or happiness.

-Ben Carlson, as extracted from here

and he has a pretty good imagination..............

 I cannot ever imagine a world where economic volatility is tamed and people stop making financial decisions they eventually regret – no matter how much history of past mistakes we have to study.

-Morgan Housel

pretty good reasons....................

 

     Every year at leaf-fall, Pwyll and his men rode to Arberth.  Riding through a valley five valleys from home they were like an old story Taliesin would tell.  And they had it in them to go with the story.  They had it in them, living now, riding now to Arberth, to be a tale told by a fireside in the far past, to be a tale told by a fireside in the far future.  And they would say, would sometimes say, that their only reason for being in the world was to give the world a chance to live out its own strangeness, its own danger, and its own wonder in them.

-John Moriarty, Dreamtime

thanks Rob

When YouTube...........................

 

.............................................watches you back.

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

 

     Like everything else, the world of bodyguarding is split between the real and the phony.  Phony bodyguards are just glorified drivers, big men in suits chosen for their size and shape and appearance, not paid very much, not very useful when push comes to shove.  Real bodyguards are technicians, thinkers, trained men with experience.  They can be small, as long as they think and endure.  As long as they can be useful, when the time comes.

     I am a real bodyguard.

    Or at least, I was.

-Lee Child, Safe Enough and Other Stories

The never ending question...................

 

These developments, Chase said, raised fundamental questions: "Shall the government of this country be administered by the people, for the people, or by a privileged class, for a privileged class.

-Walter Stahr, Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival, from an 1858 speech

Homework........................

 

Withdraw from the unrest of external activities, then flee away and hide from the turmoil of inward thoughts, for they create discord.

-Meister Eckhart

More homework.....................

 

What would make cooking a spiritual practice rather than mere work is cultivating a sense for what is sacred and doing you best to bring that alive in the world of the kitchen.

-Edward Espe Brown,  No Recipe: Cooking as a Spiritual Practice

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

 

.................of merging the longer view with a focus on the here and now.

Michael Wade's Substack is up and running.  Tune in!

problem solving.........................

 Accessing the problem-solving power of your mind is not about pushing; it’s about stopping. Mental processes are at their most effective during times of stillness, but we’ve stopped giving ourselves that opportunity. Because we keep forcing our minds to process, we never give them space to think, and by doing so, we take away their ability to solve.

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Unfortunately.............................

 

There is something here, and time will tell what exactly that is.

-Tyler Cowen, from here

Figuring out the future..................................

 

.................................is difficult at best.

A most impressive resume...............

 

But, he described himself as a graduate of the New York City Public Library.

Lifeitsownself...................................

 

      via

If only I had known...........................

 

.......I would have studied gastrophysics in college.

Until we start building 1,000,000.....................

 

..........houses per year expect housing prices to keep rising.  It's that old supply & demand thing.

A fact.............................

 

............................................multiplied by a story.

Thank God..............................

 

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

-Frank Herbert, Dune

the generational circle of life...........................

 

...........this Boomer is rooting for the Millennials.

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

Ostensibly, these “nuisance-protests” are carried out by distinct groups motivated by a particular cause, such as the environment, Palestine, trans-rights, or immigration. In reality, however, all are animated by the same, self-destructive ideology: neotoddlerism.

-as culled from here

Never bet against America.....................

..........................................says Warren Buffett

(ignore the mis-leading hype about a collapse)

 

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

 

If anything, the Democrats synchronized swimming of the past month could only occur in a party largely uniform in its core constituencies and essential beliefs. They shift positions and allegiances through technology and media control, using influencers to hide troublesome past positions with a dexterity that a Communist vozdh like Joseph Stalin would have appreciated.

-Joel Kotkin, from "What Happened to My Party?"

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

 

Jim Croce.....................................I Got A Name

 Purists will point out that this album was released in December of 1973. In the real world, Croce's music was all over the radio and the charts in 1974. One of the highlights of the summer of my sophomore year in college was seeing Croce perform up-close-and-personal in a venue that held 250 people. A great presence.  His death in 1973 was a tragedy. More thoughts on Croce here.

 

A good guide.......................

 

     via

The basic...................................

 

................................................basics.

The problem with...............................

 

...................................binary choices.

On ecological...................................

 

.................................balancing acts.

Every day...............................

 

....................should be Thanksgiving Day.

dark ages.............

 

Consult history. You’ll find, without exception, that when government uses price controls to push prices downward the results include shortages, queues, waste, deterioration of product quality, and corruption. You’ll also often find literal violence erupting as desperate buyers struggle against each other to grab the relatively few units of the price-controlled goods that are available.

-Don Boudreaux

just for an instant.....................

 

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

-Thoreau

Never crossed my mind.................

 

I wonder what Earth will be like 88 million years from now.

-Elon Musk

the world......................

Man was made for joy and woe,

And when this we rightly know

Through the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,

A clothing for the soul divine.

-William Blake

thanks Rob

scaling......................

 

The way to do really big things seems to be to start with decep­tively small things.

-Paul Graham, as quoted here

be warned...........................

. . . if a new type of technological product is being pushed by government in order to meet national policy targets, that means that it has not been through the filter of large numbers of people freely deciding to buy it and telling their family and friends that it benefited them as individuals.

-from this Samizdata post

On doing good.....................

 

.......................................and feeling good.

Curator’s Corner.........

Irving Finkel is a treasure...................

 

Having fun with statistics: but there is some question about causation vs. correlation....

  Post-legalization [of marijuana], incomes in legalizing states grew by about 3%, home prices went up by 6%, and populations rose by about 2%. 

-as culled from this Marginal Revolution post

An evergreen quote..................

 

Your best strategy is to focus on what you can control.

-Tony Isola, from here

Ed. Note: happily, the list of things we can control is fairly small.

That's a lot of equity........................

 

Since the start of the pandemic, U.S. homeowners have added more than $13 trillion in home equity. As recently as 2015, that was the total amount of home equity.

-Ben Carlson, as he looks at the housing market

Ceaseless..................

 

...............................................flow.

A couple of bottles of wine and a few cigars......

 

..........................and we might make a dent in this.  Worth trying anyway.

The more things change..........................

 

.......................the more they stay the same:

Still, he preferred the nomination of Seward, whom he viewed as a real Republican, to the nomination of Bates or Bell, the elderly conservatives whose names were often mentioned that Spring.  "I have lost patience with what I hear of hunting of the fossils," Chase wrote to a friend.  "It will do for paleontologists but not for Republicans."

-Walter Stahr, Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival.  The setting is the campaign for the Republican presidential candidate in 1860.

Turn the TV off....................

 Your most precious asset isn’t your financial portfolio; it’s your attention.

Media outlets are fighting tooth and nail to capture bandwidth by any means necessary. Their favorite tactic is to scare the hell out of you.

-Tony Isola

A few little ideas....................

 

Remember this the next time you hear a confident political forecast. No one knows anything, even when it looks obvious.

-Morgan Housel, from here

On bigness..........................

 Adversarial interoperability creates productivity and value. And having a smaller part of a more vibrant market is far better than dominating a moribund one.

-Seth Godin, from here

according to history, anyway...............

 

Rebellion is treason until successful . . .

-Salmon P. Chase

Never bet against Big Al..........................

 

    via

Blaming the voters...............

 

Congress won’t tackle the debt unless Americans force the issue.

Good thing, since that is where he works.........

 I am endlessly fascinated by the human element of financial markets. It’s a constant cycle of fear, greed, envy, panic, and euphoria. The financial markets are like a laboratory for testing human emotions and behavior on a grand scale.

Things can go from boring to exciting in the blink of an eye because human nature never changes.

I love the stock market.

-Ben Carlson, from here

accountable versus responsible.....

 

“The quality of a decision increases directly proportional to the degree to which the person is responsible.

If I tell you to do something, you’re accountable but not responsible. Following a process makes you accountable, not responsible. Using judgment to opt out of the process makes you responsible. Completing assigned homework makes you accountable. Seeking out additional resources to deepen your understanding makes you responsible. Remembering your partner’s birthday makes you accountable. Consistently finding ways to make them feel appreciated makes you responsible.

Focusing on accountability does little to improve the quality of decisions. Embracing responsibility does.”

-from this Farnum Street post

demand...............................

 

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

Putting responsibility where it belongs....

 

"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

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

 

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

taking a little R & R..................

 

Sunrise/Sunset........................

And we've been stretching a lot lately.....

 The trouble is that when the truth gets stretched far enough, something eventually breaks.

-Ted Lamade, from this post

A good question for today...........

 

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...........................

A Constitution for Teenage Happiness...........

  The taut cable of high expectations has been slackened, and the result is the current mood: listlessness.

-Ruby LaRocca, from this award-winning essay

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

 

...........................grandparenting is pretty great.

dread........................

 

And somewhere C. S. Lewis smiles.........

 

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.

-John Podhoretz

Congratulations...........................

 

...................................are in order.

The art.....................................

 

.............................................of teaching.

Starting to think that.......................

 

................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

Ah, the 21st century....................

 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

The good life..........................

 

........................................well lived.

astray....................

 

. . . a man unaware of his ignorance will be led astray by his knowledge.

-Rob Firchau

Ah, democracy...................

 

A “democracy” where unelected bureaucrats have effective veto power is not a real democracy. 

-as cut-and-pasted from here

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.

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

 

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.

Carpe diem...................................

 

all you could possibly want to know is here

And doing a mighty fine job of it..........

 

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

avoidance......................

 

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

Post-truth....................

 

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

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

 

. . . 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.