Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Wisdom.............................
When I think I am getting too caught up in daily events, I do two things: First, I wait 24 hours (or at least overnight) before starting to form an opinion. Second, I try to think like a historian and put myself 50 or 100 years in the future and frame the disagreement that way.
Fingers crossed that ......................
.....................it will all be worth it.
To say that people, companies and the market are unsettled would be an understatement. Everyone is whipsawed by tariff announcements, other foreign affairs issues, uncertainty about where federal spending and the deficit are headed. So no surprise that indicators on economy-wide trends are also in flux. Going to be an interesting next few months.
Noah Smith decides.........................
.................it's time to start panicking about the national debt.
Welcome to the party, although I disagree with some of his analysis. But still...........
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
I like simple and boring..............
I watch financial markets every day because I think they’re a window into culture and behavior. They’re so fascinating, so beautiful, like art. But my personal finances are simple and boring. They will win no awards. But they’re practical for me and my family. They provide what I need them to do. Isn’t there beauty in that?
-Morgan Housel, concluding this post
habits...................
You need ritual, not inspiration. Everyday, no matter what, you must practice. Your practice ritual is your highest priority—an unbreakable commitment. Stubbornly protect this time against the demands of the world.
-Derek Sivers, How To Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion
the path................................
Don't hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.
balance......................
Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth, and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself, but falsehood; . . . How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic. It is incipient insanity.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from this essay
responsibility....................
Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility. . . . In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility.
the unending tug of war..............
From the outset, the convention reflected a pointed truce in the unending tug of war between those who believed in the necessity of a functioning union and those who feared the encroaching despotism of a national government and clung to states' rights; between fervent slaveholders and ardent abolitionists; between those who worried that small states would be smothered by the political juggernaut of the big states and those who worried about the tyranny of the minority; and between radicals who wanted a clear repudiation of the past and traditionalists who wanted only to tinker at the margins. The reality was that after more than five generations of laying down roots in America, the exigencies of life had only sharpened the old insistence upon demands for personal liberty and equality. Now the Americans found themselves arguing both for the historic and chartered rights they had once enjoyed as Englishmen, and for the timeless and universal rights of man.
It was complicated, it was messy, and somehow everything came together. Politicians all, the delegates compromised repeatedly.
-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800
Monday, March 17, 2025
Checking in ..................
.................................with Mark Manson
People like to make happiness complicated, but it’s actually quite simple.
The art of stoicism.........................
But in Stoicism the art of journaling is more than that, more than some simple diary. This daily practice is the philosophy. Preparing for the day ahead. Reflecting on the day that has passed. Reminding oneself of the wisdom we have learned from our teachers, from our reading, from our own experiences. It’s not enough to simply hear these lessons once, instead, one practices them over and over again, turns them over in their mind, and most importantly, writes them down and feels them flowing through their fingers in doing so.
As questions go.............................
...........................this one is pretty legitimate.
Either way, Trump’s salvo brings to the forefront a major unanswered question about the Biden presidency: who made executive decisions in the last four years?
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Checking in..........................
.............................with Farnum Street:
The most powerful productivity tool ever invented is simply the word "no."
The single most effective habit is the willingness to change your own mind.
If you want to understand someone, figure out the narrative they
tell themselves about themself.
If you want to change your behavior, change your narrative. If
you want to change someone else’s behavior, offer them a more compelling
narrative they can tell themselves.
If you are not reading....................
...............David Kanigan's Thrive, well, please do.
When will we finally understand that we are all drops of the same ocean, hurting together, healing together, hoping together? Don’t just pray for hands to heal the hurting. Pray with hands that are healing the hurting. Don’t just pray for arms to help the helpless. Pray with arms that are helping the helpless. Don’t just pray for feet to respond to need. Pray on feet that are responding to need. Don’t just pray for someone to do something. Be someone who does something.
-David Kanigan, channeling L.R. Knost
conceptions..........................
Let all your efforts be directed to something, let it keep that end in view. It’s not activity that disturbs people, but false conceptions of things that drive them mad.
-Seneca, “On Tranquility of Mind,” 12.5
The challenge...............................
..........................of behaving ethically.
Some people dine out on a single good deed for years.
Saturday, March 15, 2025
Friday, March 14, 2025
gain...............................
Has a man gained anything who has received a hundred favors and rendered none?
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay Compensation
spelling.....................
It is a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
-attributed to Andrew Jackson, Mark Twain, and others
grounds.............................
The civil service can never be placed on a satisfactory basis until it is regulated by law. For the good of the service itself, for the protection of those who are intrusted with the appointing power against the waste of time and obstruction to the public business caused by the inordinate pressure for place, and for the protection of incumbents against intrigue and wrong, I shall at the proper time ask Congress to fix the tenure of the minor offices of the several Executive Departments and prescribe the grounds upon which removals shall be made during the terms for which incumbents have been appointed.
-James A. Garfield, as excerpted from his March 4, 1881 Inaugural Address
Thank you........................
Let's pause here to remember that you don't actually have to do any of this. Use your time in a worthwhile manner, I mean. Find ways to get around to what matters most. None of it is compulsory. You have my permission not to bother.
-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
pay it forward.................
Figure out what you're good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. But don't measure—your patience will run out if you count.
-Eric Jorgenson, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Maybe........................
All movements tend to extremes, which is approximately where we are today.
-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)
Thursday, March 13, 2025
Michael Wade..........................
............................opts for controversy:
The draft was not simply a way to augment the military. It was also one of the most important tools for strengthening the unity and fiber of the nation.
Us older guys probably should not get a vote here, but a pro-and-con debate over a few beers seems appropriate.
I really like Brooks's stuff...................
..........the fact that he is willing to read and think about Hegel makes him all the more impressive.
real freedom.............................
There are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty little unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.
weight loss.............................
.................................and mind games:
What you’ll often notice is that the cravings aren’t coming from a growling stomach. They’re coming from your head. Your tummy isn’t saying “hungry”, it’s your brain saying “tasty.” Your body is like a buddy-cop movie where your stomach’s the by-the-book detective, and your brain is the loose cannon.
Want a stark illustration? Try “the broccoli test.” Next time you swear you’re hungry ask yourself, “Would I eat plain broccoli right now?” If you were truly starving, of course you would. But if you turn up your nose at this question, you don’t want sustenance — you want tasty.
Feels about right.........................
Whether Trump is an authentic carrier of radical change is absolutely the central question to any analysis of his administration. But how do we judge? Taibbi isn’t exactly wrong. The financial fortunes of the 70 million who voted for the president belong in that discussion—but in a minor way. Why so? Because a true revolution is an almost spiritual event. Ordinary persons in large numbers will seize on some ideal devoid of immediate economic benefit—liberty, equality, salvation—and mobilize under that flag.
-Martin Gurri, from here
beauty..........................
But in all its varieties beauty has a remarkable quality, which is that it offers consolation without consumption: your enjoyment does not destroy the beautiful object but simply amplifies its power.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
the gift.......................
Seventy days on the river with a confusion between river turbulence and human tribulation. We are here to be curious not consoled. The gift of the gods is consciousness not my forlorn bleating prayers for equilibrium . . .
-Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods
drive...........................
Concern should drive us into action and not into depression. No man is free who cannot control himself.
this mode of love....................
When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy between two policemen, Robbie waited in the long dreary corridor, that before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as handcuffed and with a bowed head I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek.
-Welty/Sharp, The Norton Book of Friendship, Oscar Wilde from De Profundis
just stay with it....................
To fill time in his stand-up routine, in 1963, comedian Steve Martin decided to try to learn an instrument.
For no particular reason, Martin chose the banjo. He bought a book called How to Play the 5-string Banjo, by Pete Seeger. The first lesson was how to strum a C chord. When Martin strummed a C chord, "I couldn't tell the difference," he admitted. To him, when he strummed a C chord, it sounded just like when he strummed without touching any strings.
"But I just stayed with it," he said. "And I kept telling myself, 'Well, if I just stay with it, one day, I will have played for forty years.' Anybody who sticks with the banjo for forty years will be able to play it."
Martin stayed with it, and in 2001, he won a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Music Performance. It took thirty-eight years, one day at a time, staying with it.
When it gets tough, remind yourself that eventually the minutes and hours will add up.
Stick with it. Be patient.
-Paul Rabil, The Way of the Champion
first.......................
The first to apologize is the bravest. The first to forgive is the strongest. The first to move forward is the happiest. Be Brave. Be strong. Be happy. Be free.
-Marc & Angel Chernoff, 1000+ Little Things
without a compass......................
Never to examine, never to question: thus youth was taught at Cambridge. Many in the universities, wrote Bacon, "learn nothing there but to believe." From the sea of knowledge rose the classic Pillars of Hercules, boundary beyond which man durst not venture. To those with ambition to pass the Pillars—in Bacon's phrase to sail plus ultra—the University offered no compass.
-Catherine Drinker Bowen, Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man
Tuesday, March 11, 2025
buying in.........................
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules, and rewards.
Monday, March 10, 2025
Oracle.....................
In the center of the forest,
there is an unlikely stone that remembers when the mountains were new.
there is an unlikely stone that remembers when the mountains were new.
It waits in a circle of moss like the pupil of a green eye.
You kneel and ask it a wordless question.
It answers.
"Cherish exactly who you are. For there can never be another."
-Jarod K. Anderson, from Love Notes from the Hollow Tree
Life its ownself..........................
It’s a constant reminder that character isn’t tested only by poverty and hardship, but equally—and perhaps even more dangerously—by success.
-Rob Henderson, from here
On the importance of positioning.............
While most people understand that reputation matters, few recognize how it functions as a strategic asset that either unlocks opportunities or leaves you perpetually trapped. The mechanics of this process mirror an unlikely source of wisdom: the game of billiards.
A master billiards player approaches the table with dual vision. While amateurs focus solely on pocketing the immediate shot, professionals focus on how the current shot positions them for the next one. This deceptively simple insight—that present moves determine future options—perfectly captures how reputations function in our interconnected world.
-Farnam Street, from this week's episode
very few things.............................
What counts for most people in investing is not how much they know, but rather how realistically the define what they don't know. An investor needs to do very few things right as long as he or she avoids big mistakes.
If you have to start a week...............
Sunday, March 9, 2025
One can only hope....................
Yet even as the national party drifts off the reservation, there are hopeful signs of growing anti-woke pushback in the Democrats’ modern heartlands – namely, in America’s big cities.
-Joel Kotkin, from here
Democrats focusing on effective big city governance would be a major upgrade. Just saying.
a sensitivity........................
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
-Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, as cut-and-pasted from here
Let it go.....................
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
a sacred instrument...................
For myself, therefore, I desire to declare that the principle that will govern me in the high duty to which my country calls me is a strict adherence to the letter and spirit of the Constitution as it was designed by those who framed it. Looking back to it as a sacred instrument carefully and not easily framed; remembering that it was throughout a work of concession and compromise; viewing it as limited to national objects; regarding it as leaving to the people and the States all power not explicitly parted with, I shall endeavor to preserve, protect, and defend it by anxiously referring to its provision for direction in every action. To matters of domestic concernment which it has intrusted to the Federal Government and to such as relate to our intercourse with foreign nations I shall zealously devote myself; beyond those limits I shall never pass.
-Martin Van Buren, from his 1837 Inaugural Address
timing..............................
If you trap the moment before its ripe
The tears of repentance youll certainly wipe
But if once you let the ripe moment go
You can never wipe off the tears of woe
The tears of repentance youll certainly wipe
But if once you let the ripe moment go
You can never wipe off the tears of woe
Saturday, March 8, 2025
When luxury is a problem.....................
Net Zero is dead. Keir Starmer must in whatever way he can to sway his backbenchers and the chattering class, put NZ into the side of the road. That might mean sacking energy secretary Ed Milliband. Deindustrialisation must stop. Windmills, solar energy and happy thoughts cannot build a submarine, artillery shell factory or a bunch of anti-missile batteries. And screwing the British economy to make a tiny dent in C02 emissions so we feel all virtuous is a luxury belief. Luxuries are out.
-from this Samizdata episode
smarts..................................
I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.
talking without speaking...........
One of the problems he had with living alone was all the talking to himself, talking without speaking and occasionally deluding himself into thinking that he was actually talking to someone else.
-Richard Price, Lazarus Man
Eternity......................
He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
Friday, March 7, 2025
a bad habit..............
. . . their judgment was based more upon blind wishing that upon any sound prediction; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.
take the measure.........................
The fatal flaw in deism is thus not rational at all, but emotional. Pure reason is unappealing because it is bloodless. Ceremonies stripped of sacred mystery lose their emotional force, because celebrants need to defer to a higher power in order to consummate their instinct for tribal loyalty. In times of danger and tragedy especially, unreasoning ceremony is everything. There is no substitute for surrender to an infallible and benevolent being, the commitment called salvation. And no substitute for formal recognition of an immortal life force, the leap of faith called transcendence. It follows that most people would very much like science to prove the existence of God but not to take the measure of His capacity.
-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
avoid the anxious middle..............
Spend a handful of hours a day going fast. Crush a gym session. Do deep work on a project you care about. Spend the rest of the day going slow. Take walks. Read books. Get a long dinner with friends. Either way, avoid the anxious middle where you never truly relax or truly move forward.
-Charles Miller, as quoted here
forgetting..............................
"We all want to dissolve," the old Zen monk in red bobble cap and thin glasses tells me, with a wry chuckle, as he greets me in the chill mountains behind Los Angeles, three hundred miles south of Big Sur, where I've come at the end of December. "We all need the experience of forgetting who we are. I think that's what love is: forgetting who you are."
He flashes a crooked grin. "Forgetting who you are is such a delicious experience. And so frightening."
-Pico Iyer, Aflame
their eternal calm...................
To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Chapter III in his essay Nature
spare......................
There's an elephant in the room here that can't be tidied away, of course, which is that the consequences of any given choice might be vastly more sever for some people than for others. . . . But for most of us, if we're being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate the potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves of making a bold choice.
-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals
trade-offs.....................................
Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs—because there will always be trade-offs—and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.
-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals
Thursday, March 6, 2025
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