dogs........

 

Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.

-attributed to Diogenes

a curious thing.........................

 

One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on the opposite sides of different issues.  The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other.  They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy to education.  Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again.  It happens too often to be coincidence and it is too uncontrolled to be a plot.  A closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises.  These different premises—often implicit—are what provide the consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous, unrelated issues.  They have different visions of how the world works.

-Thomas Sowell,  A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

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

 

It was early February and snowing again in Boston.  I felt as if it had been snowing since Thanksgiving.  Or perhaps since the autumn equinox.  The TV meteorologists, talking excitedly every night about more record snowfall numbers, and about ten more inches than we'd gotten ten years ago, continued to treat the whole thing like porn.

-Mike Lupica, channeling his inner Robert B. Parker, Hot Property: A Spenser Novel

About perfection................

 

. . . it's precisely because you'll never produce perfect work that you might as well get on with doing the best work you can . . . There are no guarantees—except the guarantee that holding back from life instead is a recipe for anguish.

-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals

hangs.......................

 

Everything hangs on one's thinking . . . a man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.

-attributed to Seneca

The James Webb Space Telescope..................

 

............................................continues to surprise.  Hate it when our "models" don't work:

They contain a significant amount of nitrogen, far more than what we observe in our Sun, while most other metals are present in lower quantities. This suggests there were processes at play in the early universe we don’t yet fully understand.

JWST has shown our models of how stars drive the chemical evolution of galaxies are still incomplete, meaning we still don’t fully understand the conditions that led to our existence.

as culled from here

image via

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

 

    One of my favorites.....John Klemmer....Touch

 

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

 

Flying in January should be a violation of the Codex.  Between the howling storm and the incessant fog in my goggles, I can't see shit as we cut through the blustering snow squall above the mountains near Basgiath.  Hoping we're almost through the worst of it, I grip the pommels of my saddle with gloved hands and hold tight.

-Rebecca Yarros, Onyx Storm

Unimaginable................

 

                    via

                     enlargeable photo and description here

Coyote Blog.....................

 

.........................................is back in business.  Welcome back, Warren.  You were missed.

Wimped out.....................

 

...................choose not to walk this morning:

Shortcuts...........................

 

The successful learn vicariously; the foolish insist on firsthand pain.

-Farnum Street

One of the greatest...........................

 

...............................letters ever written.

hobbies.......................

 

                         thanks Chris

Understanding "wokeness".................

 

...................Paul Graham writes the primer.

 

     more fun here

Don't always read what's on Vox...........

 

.........but sometimes their stuff is pretty good.  To wit:

But in both cases, the president and his allies in Congress made a conscious choice, for good or ill. What stands out about Biden is the degree to which he simply refused to choose at all.

It's the little things...........................

 

......................like telltale brown M&Ms.

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

At the cinema............Sean Connery and Michael Caine:                  The Man Who Would Be King

 

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

 

In the comics:  Garry Trudeau and Doonesbury

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

 

At the news stand:  Jerry Ford and the Economy

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

      On the TV.......................Welcome Back, Kotter

 

Judging by the weather forecast................

 

..........we should have stayed another week.

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

On the TV....The Jeffersons begins an 11 year run

 

intrinsic.....................

 

Money:  It's your measure not your motivation. Money as a motivator is not sustainable.  Do what you love; love what you do.  Find the intrinsic worth in anything that you do.

-Nicholas Bate, Morph!

logical consequences...........

      

     Is the idea of man as an image of God not utterly preposterous?  How could flawed man, even the lowliest man or woman, possess a direct relationship to the divine? . . . But in the absence of that divine proposition, where would we be? . . . How could we possible manage without the tradition of inalienable rights and intrinsic individual responsibility that is the logical consequence of that axiomatic proclamation of our sacred worth?

-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

Paths......................

 

There's no such thing as a sweet deal without a clear path to significant growth.

-Brad Jacobs, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars

On baking a bigger pie.................

 

      To allow scarce and valuable skills a free hand is to risk having such skills become so highly rewarded as to provoke envy—a powerful and dangerous political force.

     Part of such envy is natural, but much of it is hyped by intellectuals and politicians—both of whom get more worked up about how the pie is sliced than how big a pie it is.

-Thomas Sowell, from an essay found here

Morgan Housel........................

 

.............tries to make sense of our world:

But let me put it this way: As the world improves, our threshold for complaining drops.

In the absence of big problems, people shift their worries to smaller ones. In the absence of small problems, they focus on petty or even imaginary ones.

A fascinating three minutes

Changing right before your eyes: Top 10 S & P  500 Companies by Market Cap (1980-2020)

 

By way of an update, here is the current Top Ten:

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

 

..........................at the Cinema in 1975:

Jaws

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Shampoo

Dog Day Afternoon

The Return of the Pink Panther

Three Days of the Condor

Funny Lady

The Other Side of the Mountain

Tommy

The Apple Dumpling Gang

Rollerball

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

Gilberto Gil & Jorge Ben – The Gil E Jorge album

 

But for reconciliation to take place..........

 

.....................................there must first be truth.

And we have front-row seats............

 

The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technology-driven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened—yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.

-Martin Gurri, as culled from here

One take on.....................................

 

......................the coming confirmation hearings:

But where's the cleansing sort of justice where you call up certain senators (I'm not going to name names) and say not only will we primary you and make sure you lose your Senate seat. We'll make certain you don't get a job after you leave the Senate. And then we're going to unleash some of the toughest people in the Republican Party to take a really close look at you. We're going to do to you what you plan to do to our nominees.

-Tucker Carlson

On eating the rich.....................

  Effective anti-poverty strategies should focus on fostering self-sufficiency rather than perpetuating dependency.

-from the Mises Institute

via

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

 

As always, the censors claimed that they needed sweeping powers to make the world better, safer and more truthful. And as censors always do, they proved themselves unworthy of those powers, which they deployed not just against ideas that were false but against politically inconvenient truths. In the process, they demonstrated why no one, of any ideological stripe, should be trusted with that kind of authority.

-Megan McCardle, from here

via

Crack my head up.................

 

ITEM 4: The New York Post tweeted, “Billy Joel and Rod Stewart to play Yankee Stadium in July.”

Really? Those two rockers are so old, they should be in the Senate, not on tour.

via

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

Roxy Music............................the Siren album

 

Data centers...................

 

Data centers are electricity hogs, substantial water users, take up very large tracts of land on which they build very large buildings, and they offer very few (non-construction) jobs. They also pay a premium for sites they want, forcing land values up.  Western Licking County is already home to data centers for Facebook, Google, Amazon, and more. Micro Soft just purchased two large tracts of land in central Licking County to build two more of them.  They paid a lot.  A mixed blessing.  As long as AI continues is growth pattern, we will undoubtedly see more in our future.  We don't have to like it, though.

chart from

Aging like a fine wine.................

 

via

Lies, damn lies, and statistics...........

 

Data can be biased: There is a widely held belief that data is objective, at least if it takes numerical form. In the hands of analysts who are biased or have agendas, data can be molded to fit pre-conceptions. 

-Aswath Damodaran, as culled from here

 

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

Supertramp........Crisis? What Crisis? album

 

One understanding..................................

 

..............................of Trump's election victory:

With The Great Clarification of what was really going on with lawfare, back-channel understandings between Big Tech and Big Govt, and questionable conduct by the FBI and the CIA, fear of him was replaced by fear of them.

The wonder and mystery of it all.......

 

description and enlargeable photo here

Baby boomers aging...........................?

 

via

Tanmay Vora...............................

 

............................goes with the flow.

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

..................................with Joseph Schumpeter:

 We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going

The masses have not always felt themselves to be frustrated and exploited. But the intellectuals that formulated their views for them have always told them that they were, without necessarily meaning by it anything precise.

The way in which we see things can hardly be distinguished from the way in which we wish to see them.

Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.

History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.

 . . .the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

Every piece of business strategy must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction.

I felt it my duty to take, and to inflict upon the reader, considerable trouble in order to lead up effectively to my paradoxical conclusion: capitalism is being killed by its achievements.

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

 

.............time for remedial breathing lessons:

Your nose is literally built for breathing. It’s like that top-of-the-line air purifier but you’re over here using your mouth like it’s some open sewer grate. 

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

              The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album

 

A few more minds........................

............to follow in no particular order: 

Emerson.  Feynman.  Aurelius. Thoreau.  Frost.  Mencken.   Blake.  Munger.  Scruton.  Frankl.  Durant.  Larson.  Watterson.  Hawkins.  Russell.  Spinoza.  King.  Firchau.  Harden.  Wade.

Adulting.....................................

 

via

Proposing a new holiday...................................

 

.........................................Silent Letter Day!

Newsweek deliveres the opinion that..............

 

........America is getting the President we deserve.

You can read the essay yourself if you wish.  I will tell you that the following sentence made me stop and say, "What?":

When approximately half of adults in the U.S. lack literary proficiency, is it any surprise we elect leaders who speak in soundbites rather than solutions?

In 2025 almost half (actually, if you follow the link the number used is 54%) of the adults in the United States "lack literary proficiency"?   Can that possibly be true?

via

Speaking of sobriety...............

 If you have a bad habit, replace it with a good habit. Do not try to suppress it entirely. This astute observation echoes a point made by Aristotle himself, more than two millennia ago. It was valid then; it is valid now.

-Stuart Schneiderman, from this post

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

Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes.....Wake Up Everybody

    

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

 

.............................James Clear:

Writing is the superpower of humankind. It is our truest form of magic.

Writing allows you to conjure up something of value where nothing previously existed. It costs little for you to write down the lessons of your life and yet those few minutes spent writing can be life-altering for the right reader. As I once saw it put: "there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words."

. . . The world is richer because we write and nobody is made poorer in the process.

trade-offs............................

 

Politics and economics are not just different.  They are antagonistic.

     The basic premise of economics is scarcity.  There is never enough to satisfy everybody.  That means there is no free lunch, no "solutions" but only trade-offs.

     Politics is full of "solutions."  There are free lunches for every voting bloc.  The game in politics is to do a little good, right under your nose, and ignore the harm created elsewhere.

-Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?: and other essays

play.......................

 

. . . if you can play with the horizon of the future, you are indeed doing well.

-Jordan B. Peterson

Tyler Cowen.....................

 

.........visits with Jonathan GPT Swift:

COWEN: If I try to boil your different works — from Gulliver’s Travels to Modest Proposal to the political and coinage writings — down to a common theme, I would say it is this: “Moral and intellectual progress is extremely difficult and is not to be taken for granted.” What would you say to that?

SWIFT: My dear reader, your assessment is perceptive, capturing a common thread that weaves through my diverse body of work. Indeed, I endeavored to convey that moral and intellectual progress is a most arduous endeavor, one that requires constant vigilance and reflection.

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

Allen Toussaint......................Southern Nights

 

Thanks, but I will stick with real estate......

 

Ben Carlson updates his market performance chart:

A demand..................................

 

.........................................worth making.

Chris highlights the problem with this quote attributed to C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

listen.................................

 Yesterday is done. Tomorrow never comes. Today is here. If you don't know what to do, sit still and listen. You may hear something. Nobody knows.

-Carl Sandburg

On problem solving..................

Walking, on its own, is already great for your brain. It gets the blood flowing, lowers stress hormones, and makes you look like one of those mysterious, deep thinkers who stride purposefully through parks. But when you pair walking with my powerful “What If” hack, your perambulations transform into something far more powerful.

Here’s how it works:

1.   Start walking. This is the easy part.

2.   Instead of spiraling into despair about your unsolvable problem, introduce a single, magical question: “What if?”

That’s it. Those two words are the key.

-Hugh Gallagher, from here

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

 

. . . rejecting negative nationalism doesn’t require us to abandon positive patriotism. You can love your people without hating others.

-Adam Grant, from here

Giotto.......................

 

Annunciation: The Virgin Receiving the Message
Giotto      fresco    1306

Adoration of the Magi
Giotto       fresco    c 1311 - c 1320

St. Francis Mourned by St. Clare
Giotto     fresco      c 1330

That very obligation which the craftsmen of painting owe to nature, who serves continually as model to those who are ever wresting the good from her best and most beautiful features and striving to counterfeit and to imitate her, should be owed, in my belief to Giotto, painter of Florence, for the reason that, after the methods of good paintings and their outlines had lain buried for so many years under the ruins of the wars, he alone, although born among inept craftsmen, by the gift of God revived that art, which had come to a grievous pass, and brought it to such a form as could be called good.

-Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

first light...................

 

By the infinite flood of evils which had laid prostrate and submerged poor Italy there had not only been ruined everything that could truly claim the name of building, but there had been blotted out (and this was of graver import) the whole body of the craftsmen, when, by the will of God, in the city of Florence, in the year 1240, w\there was born, to give the first light to the art of painting, Giovanni, surnamed Cimabue, of the family, noble in those times, of Cimabue.

-Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

art work via

knots.................

O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;

It is too hard a knot for me t' untie.

-Viola

-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or, What You Will:  Act II, Scene II

Merry Christmas all.........................

A major Christmas present.................?

 

.............Scott is posting at Sensory Dispensary again?

Unorganized Hancock's.............................

 

......................................gift of Christmas music.

In praise of construction................

 

That’s shadowed by less irksome regulations, something that unsurprisingly meant more construction. Drive around any of the big Texas metros, particularly the suburbs, you’ll see new buildings everywhere. Permissive zoning laws mean that what, until recently, were rural pathways are now packed with cars and fast-food joints. 

-Joel Kotkin, from here

Some good questions.................

 

How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)? They’re hard to tell apart without hindsight.

-more here

When elites aren't........................

 There’s a radical dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo across the democratic world. The people in charge are distrusted and despised by the public: They are thought to be in business for themselves and indifferent to the concerns of ordinary people. From government agencies to the scientific establishment, the institutions that buttress modern society have been tainted by the corruption and poor performance of the ruling elites. The public has come to view these institutions as cash cows for the haves—and an oppressive machinery for bleeding the have-nots.

-Martin Gurri, from here

rare fabric....................

 

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?

-Anatole France

enlargeable image, with description, via

Sing, choir of angels.......................

Carrie Underwood.....................O Come All Ye Faithful

 

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas........