........................................Groundhog Day.
Sunday, February 2, 2025
I've always believed in it.........
The
“great man” theory of history lost favor a century ago, and for decades
university faculty have found it quaint, vulgar, or problematic. Like other
ideas that right-thinking people long ago discarded, its disreputable status
hasn’t stopped many from believing in it anyway.
Saturday, February 1, 2025
Ah, history..............................
The notion of a legitimate, loyal opposition had yet to take root. Schooled in the Revolution, each camp had a warrior's mentality. They argued that their rival's success jeopardized the nation's existence. They deemed the opposition not only wrongheaded but sinister, corrupt, even treasonous. Republicans accused Federalists of advocating a British-like monarchy. Federalists countered that Republicans sympathized with the French Revolution's violent radicalism. As strong as these passions were, even the most doctrinaire partisans thought the newfound party mania was temporary. They believed that the new constitutional order of separation of powers would stabilize government and cool men's fervency.
-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician
Victor Davis Hanson................
.....................always worthy of a look:
Last, Europe is mentally worn out by the war, and increasingly reneging on its once-boastful unqualified support for Ukraine, as it hopes the demonic Trump can both end the hated war and be hated for ending it. . . .
Trump’s success in resetting the United States will hinge not merely on outwitting the desperation of his enemies, but also on navigating the paradoxes of implementing his own maga agenda.
a potion.......................
I will reveal to you a love potion, without medicine, without herbs, without any witch's magic; if you want to be loved, then love.
-attributed to Hecato of Rhodes
Friday, January 31, 2025
self-education......................
Knowing is not enough; we must apply what we have learned. Willing is not enough: we must do.
-attributed to Bruce Lee
Bubble watch...........................
Two years ago everyone was convinced we were going into a recession. It was the most over-forecasted recession of all-time that never happened.
Radical.....................
....................The Office of Crisis Identification.
7. Finally, recognize that the job of an OCI is counter intuitive. It is to follow the method of hockey star Wayne Gretsky and skate to where the puck will be, not where it is. Traditionally, there is little, or no recognition given for preventing crises, and yet those bold actions are deserving of honor.
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Got that right...............
Unlike his contemporaries, he did not consider the human animal the pinnacle of nature’s imagination. “Never say higher or lower,” he scribbled in the margin of a book, arguing with the author. “Say more complicated.”
DeepSeek anyone................?
At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam, this is as good a time as any to remind ourselves how little we know about the present and how completely unexpected events can be in the future.
-Barry Ritholtz, from here
Certain......................
I will never be certain about the future. I’ve read too much about the past to be confident about the future. History is full of unpredictable events so the only thing I am confident about is that the future will be full of them too.
For us aficionados of Southern Rock.........
............................Any Major Dude With Half A Heart posts his Volume 2 mix tape. As a public service, Volume 1 is here.
Happy Birthday Sweetie...........................
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
rearranged their brains...............
I've come to know a lot of extremely successful people in my life, and while their temperaments run the gamut—lovable, aloof, enigmatic, even eccentric—they all have one thing in common. They think differently than most people. All of them, to a person, have rearranged their brains to prevail at achieving big goals in turbulent environments where conventional thinking often fails.
-Brad Jacobs, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars
Checking in with................................
................................................Julian
Who knows but they serve as
a useful reminded about (a) the mystery of life and (b) the limited time we’ve
left — and my life appears to be racing faster and faster right now and I decry
the fact that so much of it has been riven with the dread and despair about
doing meaningless, repetitive work.
manage.......................
That orientation is a spirit; a process or pattern that inhabits us, piques our interest, directs our intention, and motivates our action. What do we want to happen there, in our gardens, if and when we get it right? We may be incapable of tending the whole world, but we can manage our own small private natural spaces, and that is far from nothing.
-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God
born to thrive.....................
Our muscles are prompted to grow by failure,
healing from countless micro-injuries.
healing from countless micro-injuries.
Our minds, science, and technology
are similarly nourished by defeat.
are similarly nourished by defeat.
We are creatures born to thrive
on the borderlands of ruin.
on the borderlands of ruin.
Home is a valley between saw-toothed peaks of loss.
Here we sow failure and harvest miracles
Here we sow failure and harvest miracles
Jarod K. Anderson, "Losing"
Monday, January 27, 2025
senses......................
And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head.
-Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence
delivery..................................
Someone must have brought her makeup supplies, or she had ordered them in. Maybe Uber delivered cosmetics now the way it delivered everything else except good government.
-Mike Lupica, Hot Property
readily.......................
Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny,
To whatever your decrees have assigned me.
I follow readily, but it I chose not,
Wretched though I am, I must follow still.
Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.
On various acting individuals.........
Philosophers had long since been eager to ascertain the ends which God or Nature was trying to realize in the course of human history. They searched for the law of mankind's destiny and evolution. But even those thinkers whose inquiry was free from any theological tendency failed utterly in these endeavors because they were committed to a faulty method. They dealt with humanity as a whole or with other holistic concepts like nation, race, or church. They set up quite arbitrarily the ends to which the behavior of such wholes is bound to lead. But they could not satisfactorily answer the question regarding what factors compelled the various acting individuals to behave in such a way that the goal aimed at by the whole's inexorable evolution was obtained.
-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
to heal........................
In order to heal the stark divisions in our country, we need to approach one another with compassion and understanding. It’s baffling to see how many members of both parties have never taken the time to understand the other point of view and learned to say, “I disagree, but I understand.” This is vital for the future of constructive discourse in our nation.
Christine Schueckler, from here
Sunday, January 26, 2025
on winging it...................
You might believe you need more experience or qualifications in order to feel confident among your peers, but the truth is that even the most experienced and qualified people feel as though they're winging it much of the time—and that if you're ever going to make you unique contribution to the world, you'll probably have to do it in a state of feeling unprepared.
-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals
fear....................
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
too.....................
In any case, I've never wanted to be part of any group of believers. The globe is too wide, too various, to assume one knows it all.
-Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence
He wasn't always right..........
After two delightful days, Van Buren told Jefferson that he had to return to Washington for a committee meeting. A disappointed Jefferson told him not to fuss over dreary state affairs. Punctuality, he said, was "a losing business."
-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician
without apology......................
Van Buren's wooing of Jefferson captured the changing mores in US politics. The Revolutionary Era system of deference was rapidly crumbling. In most states, property qualifications were no longer a prerequisite for voting. A growing number of Americans—all white men, of course—were enfranchised and participating in the political process. The forty-one-year-old Van Buren typified this brash new style of egalitarian politics. He played the game of politics to win elections and build power, and he pursued those goals without apology.
-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician
fraternizing.............................
Levelheaded and calm, he rarely lost his cool in the company of others. He spurned codes of honor. He ignored insults. He fraternized with his enemies, and even enjoyed their company. At a time when political rivals still settled their differences on the dueling ground, Van Buren's example of courtesy toward the opposition set an important example in establishing some semblance of a peaceful republic.
-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician
About that village.............
The gullibility, and indeed ignorance, of contemporary governments and leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of their enemies are not surprising. The retreat to comfortable nonchalance and credulousness, often the cargo of affluence and leisure, is predictable given unchanging human nature, despite the pretensions of a postmodern technologically advanced global village.
-Victor Davis Hanson, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Can I get an Amen...........................?
“At a basic level, governing is about taking care of businesses and families,” she explained to me recently. “It all comes down to raising the quality of life.”
-Joel Kotkin, from here
peace from............................
. . . he came to see that success might be another word for peace and peace, at heart, for freedom from senseless striving.
-Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence
Some truth here....................
He is a powerful figure, but he is also a vehicle for the Normals, at home and abroad, who have finally had enough.
the power lies within.................
47. If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. If the cause of the trouble lies in your own character, set about reforming your principles; who is there to hinder you?
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: Book Eight
Helping me.............................
..............in many ways, including the leasing of office space:
People are social beings, not mere transaction devices or vending machines. They seek to connect with others and to find a higher purpose . . .
Friday, January 24, 2025
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
Thursday, January 23, 2025
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
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
Coyote Blog.....................
.........................................is back in business. Welcome back, Warren. You were missed.
Sunday, January 19, 2025
Saturday, January 18, 2025
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.
Friday, January 17, 2025
Thursday, January 16, 2025
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
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
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
By way of an update, here is the current Top Ten:
Monday, January 13, 2025
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.
On eating the rich.....................
Effective anti-poverty strategies should focus on fostering self-sufficiency rather than perpetuating dependency.
Sunday, January 12, 2025
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
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.
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