Tuesday, August 19, 2025
On exercise...........................
The absolute best exercises are the ones you will do every day, no misses, no excuses. Just saying.
start......................
The real
question is not "What is my current position?" but rather, "What
is my current trajectory?" Doing nothing builds nothing. Put yourself on
the path to something better. Start small, but make sure you start."
interesting theory....................
"the decline of the heavy manufacturing industry in the American “Rust Belt” is often thought to have begun in the late 1970s, when the United States suffered a significant recession. But theory suggests, and data support, that the Rust Belt’s decline started in the 1950s when the region’s dominant industries faced virtually no product or labor competition and therefore had little incentive to innovate or become more productive."
The rust-belt’s problems were caused not by its industries' and workers' confrontation with economic competition but, instead, from their insulation from competition— . . .
-Don Boudreaux, from this post
counsel.............................
who benefits....................?
As Bastiat understood, a very low rate of interest may benefit the rich, who have access to credit, more than the poor.
-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
Good questions.......................
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
Franklin at age 62.............................
The year is 1768..............
Above all, as he admitted in some letters, his views were in flux and he was still trying to make up his mind. . . .
That was the crux of Franklin's dilemma. He had rendered himself suspect, he noted in a letter to a friend, "in England of being too much of an American, and in America of being too much of an Englishman." With his dreams for a harmonious and growing British Empire, he still hoped he could be both. "Being born and bred in one of the countries and having lived long and made many agreeable connections in the other, I wish all prosperity to both," he proclaimed. Thus, he was intrigued, even hopeful, about securing a government job in which he could try to hold the two parts of the empire together.
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,
Monday, August 18, 2025
seeking to re-humanize...............
And purging style. If
communications were a form of fashion, text messages would be Mao suits:
sparse, functional, and devoid of charm. Although understandable when pressed
for time, they are now used even when time is abundant. . . .
If we don’t carefully explore and initiate ways to connect with one another, ways that go beyond electronic grunts, then we risk discovering that the scariest robots in the workplace are ourselves.
-Michael Wade, two excerpts from here
a vague nobleness.................
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'—Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. It is great to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay, Self-Reliance
"He is a man so sui generis, that I do not wonder at his not being apprehended till he is seen. His influence is of a curious sort. There is a vague nobleness and thorough sweetness about him, which move people to their very depths, without their being able to explain why. The logicians have an incessant triumph over him, but their triumph is of no avail. He conquers minds, as well as hearts, wherever he goes; and without convincing anybody's reason of any one thing, exalts their reason, and makes their mind worth more than they ever were before."
-Harriet Martineau, as quoted in Mary Oliver's Upstream essay on Emerson
on acquiring knowledge............
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
-Haruki Murakami, as borrowed from herea "system of response".............
I rarely worry about taking care of myself in most situations. This confidence is because I have a "system of response' to address external factors that my instructors have drilled so deeply into my muscle memory I don't have to think about what I'd do in a fight, as my body knows how to respond automatically. That's the beauty of having a reliable system—it gets the indecisive, overthinking, pausing brain out of the way and lets the body's natural but practiced response mechanism react without the conscious mind slowing things down.
-Kevin Ervin Kelley, Irreplaceable
responded......................
Remember the bad times as well as the good. Life is hard and always has been. You are what you are today not just because of the music you blasted or the traditions you followed but because of how you responded to the bad times.
-Jay Heinrichs, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion
nowise...........................
44. Make the best of today. Those who aim instead at tomorrow's plaudits fail to remember that future generations will be nowise different from the contemporaries who so try their patience now, and nowise less mortal. In any case, can it matter to you how the tongues of posterity may wag, or what views of yourself it may entertain?
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Eight
imagination....................
10 The name of the Lord is a strong tower;
The Rightous runs into it and is safe.
11 A rich man's wealth is his strong city,
And like a high wall in his own imagination.
12 Before destruction the heart of man is haughty
But humility goes before honor
-The Holy Bible, The Open Bible, Proverbs 18: 10-12
1
essence........................
Perhaps, simply feeling grateful and living with a prayerful attitude are the essence of the entire spiritual journey.
Bastiat.........................
L'État c'est la grande fiction à travers laquelle tout le monde s'efforce de vivre aux dépens de tout le monde.
The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.
About interest..................
"The emergency of interest to incentivize lending is the most significant of all innovations in the history of finance," writes the financial historian William Goetzmann. This point is well made. Finance allows people to transact across time. The farmer borrows barley to sow his fields but must wait until harvest before repaying the debt. Industrial processes—even the light crafts-based industries of the Ancie4nt Near East—require time in production from raw materials to the sale of finished goods. A text from third-millennium Mesopotamia shows that the preparation of cloth took over a year. Foreign trade consumes a lot of time. When capital is tied up in industry or trade, the interest charge bears some connection to the time used in production.
In any society with private property, whether in Mesopotamia or later civilizations, the payment of interest is required to induce people to lend their resources.
-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
on being careful what you wish for..............
. . . no trap is so deadly as the one you set for yourself, and suddenly the men who had humbled a king and boldly waged ideological war against the monarchs of Europe were reduced to frightened little pawns. Running for their lives, some managed to escape, with the faint hope of inciting civil war in the provinces, while others were placed under house arrest.
-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800
After the fall of the French monarchy in January of 1793, the triumphant Girondins were soon trumped by the Jacobins, who didn't survive too long either.
The more things change...............
As he prepared to leave for England in November 1764. Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter. It included paternal exhortations to be "dutiful and tender towards your good mama" and typical Franklin advice, such as "to acquire those useful accomplishments arithmetic and bookkeeping." But it also contained a more serious note. "I have many enemies," he said. "Your slightest indiscretions will be magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound and afflict me. It is therefore the more necessary for you to be extremely circumspect in all your behavior that not advantage may be given to their malevolence."
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Friday, August 15, 2025
Thursday, August 14, 2025
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
occasional messiness........................
Modern election campaigns are often criticized for being negative, and today's press is slammed for being scurrilous. But the most brutal of modern attack ads pale in comparison to the barrage of pamphlets in the 1764 Assembly election. Pennsylvania survived them, as did Franklin, and American democracy learned it could thrive in an atmosphere of unrestrained, even intemperate, free-expression. As the election of 1764 showed, American democracy was built on a foundation of unbridled free speech. In the centuries since then, the nations that have thrived have been those, like America, that are most comfortable with the cacophony, and even occasional messiness, that comes from robust discussion.
Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
54%....................................
The best in the world are not the best because they win every point... It’s because they know they’ll lose... again and again… and have learned how to deal with it.
My crystal ball is a bit cloudy...........
We’ll get another recession someday. Maybe in a year. Maybe in 7 years. Who knows?
Whenever an economic contraction occurs, we’re likely to see lower rates. These things aren’t scientific but mortgage rates have fallen by an average of around 1-2% during past recessions.
If that happens this time around I think you’re going to see an explosion of housing activity from pent-up supply and demand that has been sitting on the sidelines. We could also see a big uptick in cash-out refis and HELOCs if rates are at more reasonable levels because so much equity is tied up in homes these days.
People would be very confused by this but the housing market already went through a recession so it wouldn’t surprise me to see it lead us out of the next one.
-Ben Carlson, as cut-and-pasted from here
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Seven learnings ......................................
.............from a week spent with legends:
1. Intuition is earned.
2. You’re judged by your peaks, not your sums.
3. We need to look back more often.
4. Most people don’t know what they want.
5. Stop doubling down on a losing hand.
6. Vulnerability is contagious (and breeds strength).
7. Maybe you can have it all.
-Sahil Bloom, extrapolated from this post
cheap, not rare....................
People think good decision-making is about being right all the
time. It's not. It's about lowering the cost of being wrong and changing your
mind.
When the cost of mistakes is high, we're paralyzed with fear.
When the cost of mistakes is low, we can move fast and adapt.
Make mistakes cheap, not rare.
-Shane Parrish, from this episode
the great conciliator................
"When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair," he explained to his friend Cadwallader Colden, "one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater." It was a sentiment he would express in similar words when he became the great conciliator at the Constitutional Convention thirty-three years later.
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
progress...................
We don't abandon our pursuits because we despair of ever perfecting them.
-Epictetus, Discourses, 1.2.37b
We're never going to be perfect—if there is even such a thing. We're human, after all. Our pursuits should be aimed at progress, however little that it's possible for us to make.
-Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic
On work.........................
4. Poor is he who works with a negligent hand,
but the hand of the diligent makes rich,
5. He who gathers in summer is a son who acts wisely,
But he who sleeps in harvest is a sone who acts shamefully.
-The Holy Bible, Proverbs 10: 4-5
disquiet.........................
8. Look at the inmost causes of things, stripped of their husks; note the intentions that underlie actions; study the essences of pain, pleasure, death, glory; observe how man's disquiet is all of his own making, and how troubles come never from another's hand, but like all else are creatures of our own opinion.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Twelve
life its ownself................
Sometimes life sends you back to where you began so you can choose a different path forward.
The most important lessons in life can’t be taught. Only learned.
prevail...............................
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
-William Faulkner, from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December, 1950
Saturday, August 9, 2025
aversions...................
He didn't have all that much information on the Great Leader but he still refused to ask the FBI for help. They were both nosy and condescending and as the disaster of 9/11 indicated they didn't like to share information they themselves ignored. Roxie had done the best she could in helping him build a file but in four days he would no longer be able to use her services. Despite his apparent intelligence he had never learned the computer mostly because of a lifelong aversion to electricity. When he was seven a cousin had been electrocuted having climbed the fence of the power station behind the pulp mill,
-Jim Harrison, The Great Leader
heard..........................
I heard an Angel singing
When the day was springing
Mercy Pity Peace
Is the worlds release
side-effect.....................
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it was a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other that oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
-Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
crucial..................
One more time, because this point is crucial: a lie believed as truth will affect your life as if it were true.
-Craig Groeschel, Winning the War In Your Mind
That vision thing........................
Physics opens windows through which we see far into the distance. What we see does not cease to astonish us. We realize that we are full of prejudices and that our intuitive image of the world is partial, parochial, inadequate. Earth is not flat; it is not stationary. The world continues to change before our eyes as we gradually see more extensively and more clearly.
-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Checking in...................................
............................with Ray Dalio:
No system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail.
To see the big picture, you can't focus on the details.
What I don't know is much greater than what I know.
I have been wrong more times than I can remember, which is why I value diversification of my bets above all else,
. . . throughout time and in all countries, the people who have the wealth are the people who own the means of wealth production. In order to maintain or increase their wealth, they work with the people who have the political power, who are in a symbiotic relationship with them, to set and enforce rules.
-All quotes culled from the early-going of his book, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order
Wednesday, August 6, 2025
AI versus EI........................
Innovate. Break the rules, or at least use them to the human advantage. Be unpredictable in the best possible ways. Look up from that screen. Be a human.
-Kurt Harden, as he ponders Michael Wade's latest substack
A worthy experiment................?
Grocery aisles are today what sewers were in the early twentieth century: a major component of daily life run in an unfathomably dysfunctional manner. And just as the project of expanding and improving public sewers was derided until they became indispensable, municipal groceries will seem obvious once they are built and the difference they make can be felt.
Municipal grocery stores, "paying fair wages and reinvesting profits locally": what could possibly go wrong? One of the beautiful things about how our government is divided up is that it allows for experimentation. Let's encourage New York City to try opening - and operating - municipally-owned grocery stores and see how it works. The author points to two small Kansas communities where this sort of venture may, or may not, have worked. Good luck with that in the big city. The author may have missed a major point when he says "that the cost to launch a city-owned grocery store is comparable to the subsidies the city already hands out to private retailers — subsidies that do little to nothing to prevent closures." It's not the cost of launching that causes the problems, it is the cost of operation. The reinvestment of profits seems like wishful thinking. Massive tax-payer subsidies seem more likely.
efforts............................
Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.
your innate humanness...................
There's a common illusion that spiritually evolved, loving people never have any negativity, as though they are already angelic. They get annoyed that they still have negative feelings, and then it's compounded by their guilt and self-frustration. They have to realize that feelings are transitory, whereas their intention to evolve remains constant. Let go of feeling guilty that you are still just an ordinary human despite your angelic ambitions! Having compassion towards your innate humanness, its nervous system, and the brain function that goes with it allows for greater equanimity. Heavenly ambitions do not necessarily make us angels!
-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
Monday, August 4, 2025
equal.........................
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
-so begins Kurt Vonnegut's classic short story Harrison Bergeron
Uncertain..........................
The night before the D-Day Invasion, Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife Eleanor how she felt about not knowing what would happen next.
“To be nearly sixty years old and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous isn’t it?” she said.
-Morgan Housel, from here
Not universally true....................
The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.
Sunday, August 3, 2025
soul..........................
It's the great self-persuasion paradox: To believe in yourself, you first have to get yourself to believe in yourself.
Aristotle, the most rational of all rational beings, understood that logic rarely persuades on its own.
Choices complicate things.
Bad news, good news. Stuff happens. Your response determines what kind of soul you have, and how much you live up to that soul.
Opportunity requires a decision.
Chaotic moments—a sudden promotion or a piece of bad news—don't determine your future. Your choices do.
-all excerpts from the latest from Jay Heinrichs, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion
learned a new word today..................
10. Watch sunsets
Best show in town. Life is better as an opacarophile.
making do.................
We want things to go perfectly, so we tell ourselves that we'll get started once the conditions are right, or once we have our bearings. When, really, it'd be better to focus on making do with how things actually are.
To the very last...................
When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration.* When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of his blackboard in his study. There's a drawing on it. A drawing of the "light-filled box" in Einstein's thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to challenge one-self and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.
-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
*"With the death of Albert Einstein, a life in the service of science and humanity which was as rich and fruitful as any in the whole history of our culture has come to an end. Mankind will always be indebted to Einstein for the removal of the obstacles to our outlook which were involved in the primitive notions of absolute space and time." -Niels Bohr
the tree of life...............
13. How blessed is the man who finds wisdom,
and the man who gains understanding.
and the man who gains understanding.
14. For its profit is better than the profit of silver,
and its gain finer than fine gold.
15. She is more precious than jewels:
And nothing you desire compares with her.
16. Long life is in her right hand;
In her left hand are riches and honor.
17. Her ways are pleasant ways,
And all her paths are peace.
18. She is the tree of life to those who take hold of her,
And happy are all who hold her fast.
-Proverbs 3:13-18, The Holy Bible, The Open Bible Version
Friday, August 1, 2025
A legal immigrant......................
...........has many questions and a few observations:
Here’s a common-sense proposition: Since we can’t invite the whole world inside our borders, let’s consider the matter as one of optimal limits. Once the need to restrain immigration is acknowledged, the next step should be to seek consensus on the practicalities—the maximum number the country can absorb each year, the skills we most urgently need to import, and, of course, the most transparent and fair process for those arriving, as I once did, on the shores of this fortunate land.
In other words, our attention must turn fully to legality, not illegality. That should be the content of the politics of immigration: devising rules and procedures for legal entry that are intuitive to Americans as well as to potential migrants. The current system, we should accept, is a soul-devouring labyrinth that deserves to be demolished in its entirety.
-Martin Gurri
Slowing down...............
Never seek to do fast what is meant to be done slow. Durable businesses. Loving relationships. Robust health. These things all take a long time to build.
Ah, politics.........................
A
whopping 63 percent of voters have a negative view of the Democrats, according
to a Wall Street Journal poll, which adds that it’s the lowest rating
in 35 years. . . .
It’s not good: We need two equally hated parties to better ensure eternal gridlock and no Big Ideas. We need to not be sure whether this guy is a Republican or a Democrat and really, does it even matter? We need two different, identical groups of oligarchs fighting over America so that neither ever fully wins (except me, your favorite oligarch, who is beneficent). Because right now, all Republicans are doing is winning, and the center is shifting so fast that Nick Fuentes is starting to be just a normal guy raising a few interesting points.
-Nellie Bowles, as cut and pasted from here
Got to work on this one recently............
Take great
care to avoid mistakes when the decision is hard to reverse.
But! If you
make a mistake that is hard to reverse, there is no sense beating yourself up
about it. Your responsibility is to make the best next choice given your
current position. You must always make the most of the situation you are in.
Next play mentality.
-James Clear, from this episode
Checking in .......................
...............................with Walt Kelly
Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts.
God is not dead — He is merely unemployed...
Looking back on things, the view always improves.
Don't take life so serious, son, it ain't nohow permanent.
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
The best break anybody ever gets is in bein' alive in the first place. An' you don't unnerstan' what a perfect deal it is until you realizes that you ain't gone be stuck with it forever, either.
Halp! My powerful brain is blowed itself up!
Albert: I'd give them a piece of my mind if I could find it! I mean, them!
Porky Pine: [to Pogo] Y'know, ol' Albert leads a life of noisy desperation.
Porky Pine: [to Pogo] Y'know, ol' Albert leads a life of noisy desperation.
Eventually every man gotta face the problem of tryin' to figger if it’s worthwhile to prove that he is himself.
Sunday, July 27, 2025
iron..............................
Whenever you think that some situation of some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who is ruining your life. . . Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it's always your fault and you just fix it as best you can—the so-called "iron prescription"—I think that really works.
follow humbly......................
Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived Notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
standards.........................
A superior man in dealing with the world is not for anything or against anything. He follows righteousness as the standard.
The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.
Here are four of the characteristics of a superior man:— in his conduct of himself, he is humble; in serving his superiors, he is respectful; in nourishing the people, he is kind; in ordering the people, he is just.
The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.
What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.
centralization...........................
I think that extreme centralization of government ultimately enervates society, and thus, after a length of time, weakens the government itself; but I do not deny that a centralized power may be able to execute great undertakings with facility in a given time and on a particular point. This is more especially true of war . . . All men of military genius are fond of centralization; and all men of centralizing genius are fond of war . . .
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Fourth Book, Chapter IV
fences........................
That which is necessarily and inevitably axiomatic—that upon which everything else depends—is to be touched at great peril.
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
crucial........................
Living within your means is a crucial financial skill for anyone. It is especially valuable to someone who just fell into big bucks.
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