Over the course of his work, he concluded that most of what we truly care about in life is somewhere outside the scientific map and rational calculation, but that much of our misery comes from looking for it inside that map—the palace of crystal—"all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude."
-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness
Let me begin my story with a few words about my family. They were all plan Missouri farmers, proud, honest, hardworking and poor. Desperately poor.
According to family legend, my Bradley ancestors immigrated from the British Isles sometime in the mid-1700s to Madison County, Kentucky. In the early 1800s they migrated west to what would become the State of Missouri. They settled on small, hard farm parcels in Randolph County in the central part of the state near Clark, a farm village, and Higbee a coal-mining town.
My grandfather, Thomas Minter Bradley, still in his teens, served as a private in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. When he came home, he married Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, the daughter of a poor Clark farmer. They had nine children. My father, John Smith Bradley, born February 17,1867, was the oldest.
Like all the Missouri Bradley's, my father began life as a sodbuster. But he became the first Bradley to break out of the mold. At age nineteen, and until then largely self-educated, he entered one of the rural schools near Clark. He was a quick study. Two years later he had advanced far enough to qualify as a teacher in the rural school system and about 1888 he launched his life's work.
My father was a curious blend of frontiersman, sportsman, farmer, and intellectual. Powerfully built and fearless, he was a superb hunter and shot—indisputably the best in Randolph County. A pioneer in baseball, he carved his own bats, taught himself to pitch curve balls and organized and starred on local teams. In the months when school was not in session, he usually hired out to farmers or sharecropped to earn enough money to survive. At the same time, he was an omnivorous reader and lover of books. Everywhere he taught, he encouraged his students to read and created small libraries for them.
-Omar N. Bradley (with Clay Blair), A General's Life: An Autobiography by General of The Army Omar N. Bradley
We have men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.
-Omar N. Bradley, one of only a handful of 5-Star Generals in U. S. history, from a 1948 speech
The year was 1966:
Francis Sinatra...............Strangers In The Night
The Beach Boys.............Good Vibrations
The Young Rascals.........Good Lovin'
............................with Jared Dillion:
There is a chart that gets passed around from time to time which is a chart of the S&P 500 going up annotated with all the reasons why it might go down over the last 40 years or whatever, the most recent example being the Iran War. The price of oil goes up 50%? Fuck you, stocks are going up anyway. That has been our experience, pretty much, for most of the last 20 years. Every worry, every pullback has been a buying opportunity.
Now, it doesn’t take a galaxy brain to figure out that this dynamic might not continue indefinitely.
-------------------------
We just elected large-C Communist mayors in Seattle and New York. The Democrats are moving to the far left faster than you can say Hegelian dialectic. It seems as though the stakes are higher for each successive election, and it says something when Gavin Newsom is probably your most centrist candidate. Newsom would have been far to the left of Carter in the 1970s. But here we are, and the polarization is a freight train coming through your living room.
Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to crash the economy.
As Lopatto concludes: “At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.” They still have a lot of work to do.
Cal Newport, from this essay
Goodspeed has little patience with the moralising that claims recessions are a nation’s just deserts for periods of greed and moral decrepitude. He disapprovingly cites Alan Greenspan’s description of periods of “irrational exuberance” for which Greenspan suggested that downturns and recessions were just punishments. Goodspeed compares much of this sort of discussion to “the parables of Jesus or Aesop’s fables”: fine for moral instruction, but not really the prime causes of economic downturns.
-Joel Kotkin, from this substack post
Reality is what is happening right now. It is the objective circumstance that is occurring without any meaning or judgment attached to it. And so what we experience is not reality itself but our perception of reality. Any meaning or thinking we give something is self-created and our choice. . . . the meaning we give something is the filter through which we see life.
-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is the Beginning & End of Suffering
I do not bring into this assemblage politics, certainly not partisan politics; but it is a fair subject for our deliberation to consider what may be necessary to secure the prize for which they battled. In a republic like ours, where the citizen is the sovereign, and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign—the people—should possess intelligence.
-U. S. Grant, as lifted from here
Towards the end of his life, riven with chemotherapy, John threw fistfuls of his hair out his window, hoping they would commingle with the sheep wool floating about his neighbour Tim Conner's field. A few months later that hair was the lining of a chaffinch's nest where she laid her egg and reared her young.
Let us all have a nest with a lock or two of John's hair in it. God knows what could grow from it.
-Martin Shaw's introduction to John Moriarty's, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
My problem was that for my first ten years in school, I was at the back of the class. In the end, I came to see myself as my teachers saw me and as everyone in my class saw me. Without knowing it I made a compact with being last. And when, eventually, my exam results showed that I was first, I regarded it as a fraud. Nothing so trivial as a fact could give the lie to an old sense of self.
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
I'm walking on Revere Beach outside of Boston where the low tide has pushed the ocean far away from the shore, and the wet sand is squishing between my toes. I came here for no particular reason—just to clear my head after two frantic weeks in the city surrounded by noise, construction, and crowds. A briny, sweet smell hangs over everything in the thick humidity of September. Warm air and wafts of cool breeze intermingle—it is T-shirt and jacket weather both at the same time.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
We may think of science and art as standing in opposition to one another, but they are bound by a common objective. Science seeks to find truth in the natural world; art seeks to find truth in the emotional world. Medicine fits somewhere in between, bridging science, art, and the emotions that move us toward the will to survive, to heal, to take our medicine, to exercise, and to put in motion all those things that keep us healthy.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
We all have a desire for transcendence. We want to reach higher and outward beyond our limitations so we can grow and do great things. That yearning is part of who we are; it’s behind the greatest art and music and scientific achievements. But transcendence that ignores the human condition isn’t enlightenment. It’s chaos. As we seek to transcend the limitations of the natural world, we should respect the boundaries that make us human.
-via the Rogue Highway substack
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.
-C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and open hearted enlightenment, our own wisdom.
We live in an era that often feels defined by great despair. War rages, lawlessness spreads, politicians betray their values, and it can seem, at times, that we are simply drowning in the uncertainty of it all.
And then something breaks through. For the first time in more than 50 years, we sent human beings to the moon and back. For 10 days, we watched as they beat a new path for exploration beyond anything we have ever known.
We watched them record detailed scientific observations of the lunar surface. We pored over their remarkable images of the far side of the moon. We saw them collect biological samples, test radiation-monitoring equipment, and conduct bone marrow experiments, all while traveling more than 24,000 miles per hour through the solar system.
For 10 days, we were captivated by achievements most of us could never imagine. And yet, the most compelling part of it all was not how foreign it felt, but how familiar.
-from The Free Press
When culture is in woeful crisis, the insights rarely come from parliament, senate, or committee, they tend to come from a hut at the edge of the village. Let’s go there. There is tremendous, unexpected hope waiting.
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy, the moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days, my friends, will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves—to our fellow men.
-Franklin Roosevelt, from his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
Scarcity dictates what’s meaningful.
When you are alone, a relationship feels meaningful.
When you’re in a relationship, time to yourself feels meaningful.
When you are overworked, time off feels meaningful.
When you have plenty of downtime, work feels meaningful.
The scarcity never gets solved, it simply changes form.
-Mark Manson, from this episode
"What have you learned from the Grant Study men?" Vaillant's response: "That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people."
The human mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild. But whether cultivated or neglected, it must and will bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall, accumulate, and will reproduce their own kind.
Just as the gardener cultivates the plot, keeping it free from weeds and cultivating the flowers and fruits which are required, so may we tend the garden of our mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts.
-James Allen, As A Man Thinketh
In other words, so far, AI is replacing tasks, not jobs.
-Noah Smith, thinking about the future of work
272. One of my goals is to be an ambitious 85-year-old.
273: Life is a series of continuing education classes.
-Michael Wade, Random Thoughts: Brief Reflections and Moments of Clarity
Elias Schwartz repairs shoes. He's short and round and bald and single and middle-aged and Jewish. "An old-fashioned cobbler," says he, nothing more, nothing less. I happen to be convinced that he is really the 145th reincarnation of the Haiho Lama.
See, the Haiho Lama died in 1937, and the monks of the Sa-skya monastery have been searching for forty years for his reincarnation without success. The New York Times carried the story last summer. The article noted that the Lama would be recognized by the fact that he went around saying and doing wise things in small, mysterious ways, and that he would be doing the will of God without understanding why.
Through some unimaginable error in the cosmic switching yards, the Haiho Lama has been reincarnated as Elias Schwartz. I have no doubts about it.
My first clue came when I took my old Bass loafers in for total renewal. The works. Elias Schwartz examined them with intense care. With regret in his voice he pronounced them not worthy of repair. I accepted the unwelcome judgment. Then he took my shoes, disappeared into the back of the shop, and I waited and wondered. He returned with my shoes in a stapled brown bag. For carrying, I thought.
When I opened the bag at home that evening, I found two gifts and a note. In each shoe, a chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in waxed paper. And these words in the note: "Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about it. Elias Schwartz."
The Haiho Lama strikes again.
And the monks will have to go on looking. Because I'll never tell—we need all the Lamas here we can get.
-Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten
Faithfulness is not blind belief; it consists of steadfastly practicing the principle of shunning those things which are not within your control, leaving them to be worked out according to the natural system of responsibilities. Cease trying to anticipate or control events. Instead accept them with grace and intelligence.
-Epictetus, A Manual for Living
Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed “experts” mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility.
-and the rest of the story is here
God loved the world so much that he gave his son and he gave him to a virgin, the blessed virgin Mary, and she, the moment he came in her life, went in haste to give him to others. And what did she do then? She did the work of the handmaid, just so. Just spread that joy of loving to service. And Jesus Christ loved you and loved me and he gave his life for us, and as if that was not enough for him, he kept on saying: Love as I have loved you, as I love you now, and how do we have to love, to love in the giving. For he gave his life for us. And he keeps on giving, and he keeps on giving right here everywhere in our own lives and in the lives of others.
It was not enough for him to die for us, he wanted that we loved one another, that we see him in each other, that’s why he said: Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.
-Mother Teresa, from her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech
Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.
-Abraham Maslow, as cut-and-pasted from A Theory of Human Motivation
Here's a wonderful way to avoid an argument—simply ask questions. Instead of jumping in and disagreeing before you know any more about the subject under discussion and the other party, ask the person to state his case, specifically, and to define his terms. People who like to argue, and will at the drop of a word on any subject, are people who enjoy ruffling the feelings of others. Willard Sloan once wrote an article entitled, "Arguments Don't Win Friends" in which he points out that arguments are useless and largely ridiculous. They're more a matter of temper than temperate conversation and discussion.
-Earl Nightingale, as excerpted from The Essence of Success
In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, as found here
The essence of God does NOT include human frailties such as partiality, controllingness, duality, judgmentalism, vindictive retaliation, wrath, righteous anger, resentment, vanity, limitation, arbitrariness, revenge, jealousy, vulnerability, or locality.
-David R. Hawkins, Spiritual Power and Integrity
Your economic future is not going to be determined by the economy, but rather your own philosophy.
-Jim Rohn, as culled from Leading an Inspired Life
Already, the global chessboard looks unrecognizable.
And if the winners in this great reshuffling are not yet known, it’s easy to identify the losers.
That would be the national and transnational grandees who had pictured themselves as pillars of a “rules-based world order.”
These are elite types who worship at the altar of process: Every crisis must be papered over with consultations, negotiations and proclamations, until the public’s attention wanders and the trouble is decently shoved offstage.
Trump’s rage for change, for an actual outcome, feels to them threatening and immoral — a trampling on the proprieties.
In the rules-based world order, the point isn’t to defuse lethal situations like a hostile fanatical regime acquiring nuclear bombs — it’s to play-act at doing so, while adroitly turning present difficulties into someone else’s nightmare in the future.
I love that my life is made up of broken edgy frayed magnificent glorious sexy gooey messy amazing life-pieces.
...................................after another:
Or perhaps, “beneficiaries of the accumulated hard work of those who came before them in a way that leaves them able to spend their days solving new problems.”
..............................of Ed Sullivan.
Twelve year old Steve, with sister Kate and our parents (and most of the nation), watched the Beatles first performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. We were watching on a 24" Philco black and white set. My overwhelming memory of that night is not really being able to hear the music over the screaming of the girls in the audience.
But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.
-Milton Friedman, as quoted here
‘Old school’ means living by timeless principles. Who does not value punctuality or resourcefulness under pressure? These are never obsolete; they are the foundation of ease of working and ease of living.
-Nicholas Bate, from here
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.
---------------------------
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.
-Robert Frost, from Two Tramps in Mud Time
................and I ventured out to the wondrous Midland Theatre in Downtown Newark last evening. George Thorogood and the Destroyers were the headline act. George, at age 76 and aging like a fine bourbon, can still command the stage. Great show.
............a history major would pay off:
By contrast, the invaluable abilities to distinguish fact from opinion, organize a logical argument, think creatively, and express oneself orally and in writing with clarity and verve — all of which a good liberal education bestows — never suffer obsolescence. Rather, these capacities equip liberal-arts graduates for high-paying positions by mid-career in management, law, and other fields, offering students durable advantages in work and in life. They are gained through exposure to a broad and rich curriculum, through the accretion of specific knowledge and concepts from the earliest grades.
As early as 1826, there were proposals to amend the Constitution by members who saw the legislative elections as fraught with corruption and delay. At the start of the twentieth century, William Jennings Bryan and others pushed for direct elections, and many argued that the Senate was " a sort of aristocratic body too far removed from the people, beyond their reach, and with no special interest in their welfare." It was an interesting argument, since that was precisely what it was designed to do. The framers wanted to merge the stability of oligarchic and democratic systems. This marriage was perfectly captured in a House with short terms of popular-election members and a Senate with longe terms of legislatively selected members. That changed in 1913 with the Seventeenth Amendment specifying that senators would be chosen, like House members, in direct elections. While there were clearly good arguments for direct elections to make senators more accountable to the voters, the change removed arguably the most important control of states in Congress. With the expansive interpretation given interstate commerce, states would face increasing federal authority and decreasing political control.
-Jonathan Turley, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution
................................of schools teaching writing.
Writing for an audience is a completely different cognitive exercise than writing for yourself. When you write for yourself, you can skip the hard parts. You already know what you mean when you say something, you don’t have to explain your logic, and you can be as elliptical and associative as you want. When you write for an audience, you have to think about what they need to understand. You have to structure your argument so it actually lands. You have to use a sentence that communicates, not just a sentence that feels right in your head.
...................................................washing.
(Except when noted, this blog remains AI-free)
The State Governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal Government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organisation of the former. Without the intervention of the State Legislatures, the President of the United States cannot be elected at all.* They must in all cases have a great share in his appointment, and will perhaps in most cases of themselves determine it. The Senate will be elected absolutely and exclusively by the State Legislatures.** Even the House of Representatives, though drawn immediately from the people, will be chose very much under the influence of that class of men, whose influence over the people obtains for themselves an election into the State Legislatures. Thus each of the principal branches of the federal Government will owe its existence more or less to the favor of the State Governments, and must consequently feel a dependence, which is much more likely to beget a disposition too obsequious, than too overbearing towards them. On the other side, the component parts of the State Governments will in no instance be indebted for their appointment to the direct agency of the federal government, and very little if at all, to the local influence of its members.
-The Federalist #45, James Madison, January 26, 1788
*in 1800, the President was elected by the Electoral College. In ten states, at that time, the Electors representing that state, were appointed by the State Legislatures.
**the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1913, established the direct election of U. S. senators in each state.
................................like a fine wine:
The main culprit here is something called “genomic instability.” This is science’s polite way of saying that as we age, our cells go on a bender. They’re mutating left and right, spiraling out of control. Your cells go from reliable employees to either early retirees or anarchists, and the repair crew is phoning it in.
In the end, the $300 billion question isn't really about Iran. It's about whether Congress will admit that nothing the federal government does is free, and that the bill always comes due. The only choice is who pays for it and when.
-Veronique de Rugy, from here
.................If mainstream media (or Intertunnel) coverage of the various on-going wars doesn't satisfy your desire for knowing, visit The Institute for the Study of War. It has become a daily stop.
And what I dare say our cunning Chief Justice [Marshall] would swear to, and find as many sophisms to twist it out of the general terms of our Declarations of rights, and even the stricter text of the Virginia 'act for the freedom of religion' as he did to twist Burr's neck out of the halter of treason. May we not say then with him who was all candor and benevolence 'Woe unto you, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with burdens grievous to bear.'
-Thomas Jefferson, from his 1/14/1814 letter to John Adams
You are not an isolated entity, but a unique, irreplaceable part of the cosmos. Don't forget this. You are an essential piece of the puzzle of humanity. Each of us is a part of a vast, intricate, and perfectly ordered human community. But where do you fit into this web of humanity? To whom are you beholden?
Look for and come to understand your connections to other people. We properly locate ourselves within the cosmic scheme by recognizing our natural relations to one another and thereby identifying our duties. Our duties naturally emerge from such fundamental relations as our families, neighborhoods, workplaces, our state or nation. Make it your regular habit to consider your roles—parent, child, neighbor, citizen, leader—and the natural duties that arise from them. Once you know who you are and to whom you are linked, you will know what to do.
-Epictetus, A Manual for Living
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