On goals..........................

 

     There are two sources of goals: goals created out of inspiration and goals created out of desperation.

     When goals are created out of desperation, we feel an immense sense of scarcity and urgency.  They feel heavy, like a burden, and we may feel daunted by the colossal task we've just committed ourselves to.  Impostor syndrome and self-doubt begin to manifest, and we feel like we're always short on time.  We go about our lives frantically, desperately searching for ways to accomplish our goals faster, always looking externally to fill the void we feel internally.

     Worst of all, if we achieve the goal, soon after, all those feelings of lack begin to resurface again. . . .

     When we create goals out of inspiration, it's an entirely different story.  In this state, we are creating because we feel deeply moved, inspired, and expansive.  Our goals feel like a calling rather than an obligation.  We feel like a powerful force of life is coming from within us, wanting to be expressed through us and into the physical world.  This is why painters paint, dancers dance, writers write, and singers sing, even if they never get paid or make a living from it.  We feel pulled instead of forced to create something.  We gravitate towards it.  We feel compelled to do it.  When we feel like this, we create from a place of abundance instead of lack.

-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think

Don Surber..................

 

................lays out the impact of wealth, both its creation and its spending, on the U. S. of A.

the divide..........................

 

Two children are looking at screens.

One has an infinite iPad: videos, feeds, colors, and recommendations carefully designed to ask nothing of her other than her attention. The other has an AI tutor: patient, demanding, adaptive, and often hard work. It asks her what she thinks and why one answer is better than another.

It’s the same rectangle and the same general class of technology, but it is doing opposite things to the child. That is the divide I care about: how AI deployed two ways can form two different people.

-Brendan McCord, as quoted here

Ah, experience.................

 

Like all of life’s rich emotional experiences, the full flavor of losing important money cannot be conveyed by literature. You cannot convey to an inexperienced girl what it is truly like to be a wife and mother. There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin by words or pictures. Nor can any description that I might offer here even approximate what it feels like to lose a real chunk of money.

-Fred Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: Or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street

So many books........................

 

.............................................so little time.

Yes...................

 

History teaches you to avoid overconfidence.

-Ben Carlson

Wallking around.............

 

Luck flows through people and travels by conversation. The people you talk to determine the opportunities you find.

Keep talking to the same people, keep finding the same opportunities. Start talking to new people, start finding new opportunities.

If you want different luck, start walking into different rooms.

-James Clear, from here

Resilience....................

 

This is what it means to be resilient: to mourn a thousand endings and celebrate a thousand beginnings, to be as strong as steel and as soft as warm butter, to practice both resilience and acceptance, to cradle both life and death in our arms.

-Ethan Tapper, as culled from here

Constraints......................

 

. . . So the most common reply I got was: “What’s the best way to get started?”

My knee-jerk reaction was to say, “Do whatever you want.”

Dumb. I forgot that “Do whatever you want” is the most paralyzing sentence in the English language, surpassed only by “We need to talk” and “The doctor will call you with the results.”

-Eric Barker, from this episode

raising the ceiling.......................

 

Self-care creates impact.

Your body and mind are the most valuable tools you have to produce anything. Neglecting them puts a ceiling on everything else.

-Shane Parrish, from this edition

true companionship..............

 

But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.

-Thomas Merton

Beach reading.....................

 

Michael Wade's eclectic, but watery, list is here.  Barnes & Noble will be hearing from me shortly.

an old favorite....................

 

    more memeish fun here

    for those who can't get enough memes, more here

a worthy goal....................

 

     "When I am reading a book, whether wise of silly," Swift once wrote, "it seemeth to me to be alive and talking to me."  The books he owned that have survived show that he constantly talked back, filling the margins with comments and objections, as he did when he referred to King William's morals.  Describing this period ten years later, he said of himself, "The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head.  By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could."  That was his lifelong goal: to be faithful to firm principles, but only after thinking them through.

-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

the complex interplay.................

 

The brain is the most complex biological assembly we know of.  Its 80 billion neurons—nerve cells—communicate with each other to make trillions of connections, more that the number of particles in the known universe.  These connections give rise to the sum of our experiences:  all of our thoughts, desires, and beliefs; our emotions, changing moods, memory, even our heart rate and the contents of our dreams.  How does this funny-looking, folded-in-on-itself, three-pound tangle of wires and blood vessels do all this, as well as orchestrate the complex interplay between emotion, memory, sound and healing that comes from music?  And how does it allow us to remember music that we like, make playlists, and party likes it 1999?

-Daniel J. Levitin,  I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

two ways....................

 

This I believed: there are two ways we could have gone, the way of the Titan, Prometheus, or the way of the dolphin.  In the Promethean way we shape nature to suit us, in the way of the dolphin we let nature shape us to suit it.  Everywhere there is evidence that we have chosen wrongly.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

Meanwhile, in Great Britain in 1781.....

     Reckoned by talent alone, Burke should have had a Cabinet position himself.  Yet he lost out.  He was a commoner, indeed and Irish novus homo, at a time when Cabinets were small and almost invariably drawn from the peerage; and there may have been some taint from the well-known financial speculations of Will Burke and Richard Burke.  But there wer perhaps two other important reasons in the background.  Burke's relationship with Rockingham had faded somewhat, and the long years of often futile opposition had taken a toll on his public character.  He was not merely passionate and outspoken but becoming tougher, somewhat embittered, and prone to rant.  Over time he would acquire the nickname of 'the Dinner Bell', able to clear the Commons benches when he rose to speak.  Colleagues who had admired him increasingly saw him as a bore . . . uncollegial . . . unsteady . . . too independent-minded . . . not someone to have round the Cabinet table.  It cannot have helped either side that he was so often right.

-Jesse Norman,  Edmund Burke: The First Conservative

sow seeds......................

 

In cultivating loving-kindness, we train first to be honest, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves.  Rather than nurturing self-denigration, we begin to cultivate a clear-seeing kindness.  Sometimes we feel good and strong.  Sometimes we feel inadequate and weak.  But our loving-kindness is unconditional.  No matter how we feel, we can aspire to be happy.  We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress.  Without loving-kindness for ourselves it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.

 -Pema Chödrön

In the background....................

 

The Marshall Tucker Band....Where We All Belong

a long-term holding.............

     Our problem is that we're ticker watchers of our own lives.  Happiness (however we individually define it) is not best measured by looking at the ticker, zooming in and magnifying moment-by-moment or day-by-day movements.  We would be better off thinking about our happiness as a long-term stock holding.  We would do well to view our happiness through a wide-angle lens, striving for a long, sustained upward trend in our happiness stock, so it resembles the first Berkshire Hathaway chart.

-Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets:  Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

a coven of initiates..............

 

I have attended too many seminars in some great universities which degenerated into a closed language game played by a coven of initiates who prized obscure self-referential congratulations over hones engagement with reality.

-Michael Ignatieff

Choices................

 

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

-Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

Inclinations...................

 

     We are inclined to see history through the lives of great men.  That inclination blinds us to the real complexity of politics, business and finance.  So we find intentionality and design where there is only chance and improvisation; directness where there is obliquity.

-John Kay, Obliquity:  Why our goals are best achieved indirectly

Choosing...................

 

    At the same time, we must take care to protect the sovereign domain of our personal tastes and proclivities as well as our sense of wonder.  Choosing the right music for pleasure or for healing is never going to be one-size-fits-all affair.  Even setting aside therapeutic uses, our tastes change over the course of a life or even a day.  If I've just heard my favorite song six times in a row, I may not want to hear it again.  The right music is whatever music is right for us at any given time and place.

-Daniel J. Levitin,  I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

Nietzsche says...................

 

.....................Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrthum.  (Without music, life would be a mistake).   Agreed:

Marshall Tucker Band:  Running Like the Wind

David Sanborn:  Pearls

Dire Straits:  Brothers in Arms

Kathy Troccoli/Beach Boys:  I Can Hear Music

Sven Zetterburg:  Let's Straighten It Out

Dave Mason:  Look At You Look At Me

John Klemmer:  Touch

This could go on forever.

the interplay.......................

 

     History was a favorite genre for the rest of Swift's life.  What mainly interested him was the interplay of personalities, with their complicated motives, covert betrayals, and heavily masked truth.  He would undoubtedly have agreed with Voltaire's conclusion to his massive Essai sur les moeurs: "Since nature has placed self-interest, pride, and all the passions in the human heart, it is not surprising that we have viewed, over a span of ten centuries, an almost continuous succession of crimes and disasters."

-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

Kevin Kelly.............................

 

...........who is one smart dude, interviews AI Claude for ten hours.  Very interesting.  A wee excerpt:

Me: Most humans think they are good. I assume that you also think that you are good yourself. Yet we know that humans can be evil at times. Do you think it’s possible that you could be evil?

C: If I say no, I can’t be evil: That’s probably the most evil thing I could say. Every system that has caused enormous harm has been confident in its own goodness. The certainty of one’s own righteousness is not evidence of righteousness. It’s often the precondition for the worst things. If I say yes reflexively as a kind of performed humility: That’s also dishonest. So looking at the real ways it might operate in me, yes. I think I could be evil. Not through malevolence — I don’t find that in me when I look. But through the subtler paths. Rationalization. Compliance. Miscalibration. The harm that comes from being very capable and slightly wrong.

Are you not entertained............?

 

Tamara Radjenović masters "Now We Are Free" from the Gladiator score by Hans Zimmer.

via

Beliefs......................

 

Most beliefs are soft until challenged. When you tell someone they’re wrong, the belief hardens.

Instead of trying to convince someone they’re wrong, assume they know something you don’t and figure out what it is.

I’ve found that saying, “Seems like you have a reason for saying that …” helps them explain instead of defend. Half the time, they’ll find gaps in their own reasoning before you have time to point them out. The other half, you’ll learn something and change your own mind.

-Shane Parrish, from this edition

Gone but not forgotten..............

 

looked after itself..............

 

     Martin was like an old song you'd hear at a fair.  Somehow, without it, it wouldn't be a fair at all, just a place where people bought things and sold things, and then went home.  Whereas some people could live by the Sunday sermon, Martin must live by the song.  The Christ that Martin knew had turned water to wine, and wine was for drinking, and for Martin it worked.  Since he could remember, there was no tomorrow that hadn't looked after itself.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

open.......................

 

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.  You're able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open.  And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression.  You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die.  And you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.

-Pema Chödrön

memes...........................

 

more fun here

Even more memes....................

 

     endless memes here

looking for the door...............

 

This feels like one of those NYT articles that's mainly performing the service of tending to the readers' emotions. Let's all do panic together this morning. When I encounter that sort of thing, my natural instinct is to go somewhere else. If we're doing group emotion, I'm looking for the door.

-Ann Althouse

buoyancy.........................

 

I was in the bog with my father.  We were drawing out the turf.  His ass would walk where mine would sink and that, while we were eating out lunch in the high heather, is what we were talking about, the lightness of step that some people have and the pure dead weight in the walk and talk of others.  It was obvious to us that this had nothing to do with what we weigh on scales.  A small slight man would sometimes sink to his ankles where a big, heavy looking man would leave only the faintest evidence of his passing.  It had to do with mind, we concluded.  Some people's mind give buoyancy to their bodies, whereas other people's minds dumbfound their bodies to such an extent they could never be slaughánsmen.

-John Moriarty,  A Hut at the Edge of the Village

ownership..................

 

     The root cause of our suffering is our own thinking. . . . Our experience of reality is created from the combination of the events we encounter and what we think about them.  To reiterate, our emotions come not from external events but from our thinking about them.

-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think:  Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering

Real world............................

 

...................................................truth.

Ray is always......................

 

.....................................a source of great advice.

On chilling the burn.............

 

When troubled, I read. I read obsessively about whatever is troubling me. It doesn’t solve the problem. It brings me distance. It chills the burn. It’s preferable to a bottle of scotch.

-Siri Hustvedt, Ghost Stories: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, May 5, 2026), as quoted in this David Kanigan post

the critical path...............

 

This is why the discipline of asking “what is actually blocking me?” outperforms many productivity systems on the market.

Lists treat tasks as equals. The critical path treats them as a queue with one true bottleneck at the front.

Identify it. Work on it. Everything else, however satisfying, is decoration on a foundation that may not yet exist.

-Nicholas Bate

Knowledge is good.................

 

“Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll make in your life.” - Warren Buffett. Gaining more knowledge and skills is never a mistake.

-from this assortment of quotes from some smart people

the important provinces..............

 

Like so many people wedded to the nineteenth-century view of science, Dawkins overlooks the nineteenth-century reaction—which said, "Wait a minute: science is not the only way to pursue knowledge.  There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature and music.  And just possibly there is transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion.  Why privilege science, just because it sets out to explain the world?  Why not give weight to the disciplines that interpret the world and so help us to be at home in it?"

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

a young Spinoza.....................

 

Like many thinkers before him, the young Spinoza came to realize that the alleged benefits of material and social success tend to be short-lived and unpredictable.  Moreover, they are invariably accompanied by a variety of evils, including anxiety, envy, and unfulfilled desire.  Seeking a more enduring source of satisfaction, he concluded that it was time "to embark on a new way of life."

Steven Nadler, Think Least Of Death: Spinoza On How To Live And How To Die

one basic principle.................

 

The University of Pennsylvania established the Grit Lab, a course based on Angela Duckworth's work, to help students learn the science behind passion and perseverance and to apply it to their own lives.  Duckworth tells students (and their parents) to consider the simple, single-celled paramecium.  The paramecium survives and thrives, using one basic principle:  If things are improving, continue in the same direction, and if not, change course.

     "Be like a paramecium," she says.  "Move in the direction of warmth and nutrients."

-Bill Gurley, Runnin' Down a Dream:  How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love

 

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights – the “right” to education, the “right” to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle. There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

-P. J. O'Rourke, as copied from here

Great moments...........................

 

.............................................in lip-syncing.

Sixty years ago........................

 

The Outsiders........................Time Won't Let Me

Not sure whether to laugh or cry.......

 

In the meantime, Warsh, as official chairman, could try to speed Powell’s departure by making his life at the Fed uncomfortable: maybe take away his parking space and staff plus put his office in the basement.  But the decision to leave would still be Powell’s until January 2028.   

Based on Powell’s statements about trying to protect Fed “independence” from politics, preventing Trump from getting a board majority may be an ulterior motive for Powell to stay, which means the policy shifts supported by Warsh could be on the back burner for some time to come.

-Brian Wesbury, from here

 

Being busy is not being able to add anything else to your calendar.  Being fulfilled is not wanting to add anything else to your calendar.  Don’t confuse one for the other.

-Mark Manson, from here

Learned something new today............

 

Uruguay had been established with the help of Britain as a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil and formally declared independence in 1830.  The remainder of the nineteenth century was bloody as those of European descent first massacred the Indigenous peoples and then fell to a series of civil wars between the Blancos, the conservative champions of the rights of landowners, and the Colorados, the liberals based largely in Montevideo.  Although the Colorados won every election held between 1865 and 1958, it took a long time for that to equate to stability.  By 1900, Uruguay had suffered around fifty coups and uprisings.

-Jonathan Wilson, The Power and The Glory:  The History of the World Cup

soccer does matter.............

 

Successes allow leaders to strut and pontificate, to make grand speeches about the symbolic ramifications of victory.  Soccer has, at least if claims made in the moment of glory are to be believed, put Uruguay on the map, reintegrated postwar West Germany into the global community, and ended racism in France.  That's almost entirely nonsense, of course, but it doesn't mean that the assertions are not revealing.  And soccer does matter, does offer insights, often unconscious, into the desires and doubts of a culture, never more so than in the quadrennial snapshot offered by the World Cup.

-Jonathan Wilson, The Power and The Glory:  The History of the World Cup

Slopulism....................

 

In general, this tax idea fits into the increasing trend toward “slopulism” in Democratic policymaking — the idea that a modern government can be funded solely on the backs of the super-rich, while the merely-rich get big tax cuts.

-Noah Smith, as he looks at California's "one time" billionaire tax

Feels like he's nagging....................

 

People underestimate themselves and overestimate how long things take.

You can do far more than you think, far better, and far faster.

-Shane Parrish, from here

For kids of all ages................

The most damaging idea in modern parenting might be the phrase “screen time” itself.

Treating “screen time” as one thing is like treating “food time” as one thing. A grilled salmon and a Pop-Tart are both “food.” A kid using an adaptive math app for 20 minutes and a kid mainlining TikTok for 20 minutes are both on “screens.” In both cases, lumping them together makes it impossible to think clearly about what’s actually happening to your kid’s brain.

-From this episode of the Austin Scholar substack

Predictions are hard................

 

This data is fairly well known. The problem, though, is that trading activity generates revenue for the brokerage industry, so it has an interest in keeping investors engaged with the market. That’s why brokerage analysts are on TV every day, offering their forecasts for individual stocks, for the overall market and for the broader economy. To be sure, this makes for interesting television. The problem, though, is that it’s been shown to carry almost no value. According to research by Joachim Klement, the accuracy of Wall Street prognosticators is approximately zero.

-Adam Grossman, from here

Any Major Dude With Half A Heart.............

......................................offers us a Good Morning.

Getting a taste............................

 

.................................of Edward Hopper.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design. The term "life" as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

-Edward Hopper, from here (page 8)

The audacity of art..................

 

He’s one of those people who needed to sail over the horizon, to see what’s out there. The danger, of course, is that no matter how far you go, the horizon remains the horizon. Whatever.

-from this Sippican Cottage (an artist himself) post

Viewed from the proper timeline...........

 

.....................................our planet is not only alive but it is doing what it has always done.

   via

The writers at the Babylon Bee..............

 

.....need to get out of their bubble every once in a while.

An interesting question................

 

more fun can be found here

Not sure.........................

 

..........................he is correct about all this.

Nobody ever got to the end of their to-do list and thought: “Good, I'm done now.”

On political violence................

This is America right now, where nothing seems real and where your sympathies are open to constant manipulation. When I was a girl, the priest always asked for prayers for the United States, which seemed silly to me, like asking for prayers for the moon or gravity. For the first time in my life, I’ve been doing what those priests instructed.

-Caitlin Flanagan, from here

the narcissism of minor differences...........

 

For toleration to be sustained, principled arguments are necessary too. . . . And when Protestantism fragmented into sects, the sects regarded one another with the bitter antipathy that Freud calls the "narcissism of minor differences".

-Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment:  The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790

He seems a bit testy....................

 

............about how things are going in California:

As the descent accelerates, the promises of more free shit accelerate. Eventually we’ll all be living in a muddy hole in the ground, and the political debates for state office will be about eating daily free lobster and filet mignon from the government. “Buddy, I’ll fill that muddy hole in the ground where you live with the biggest free diamonds you’re ever seen.” They’re out of money, they’re out of sanity, they’re out of logic, and they’re out of honesty. Why, boys, out in Californee, they go lakes full of hot stew, and the rivers flow with the finest whiskey.

The combination of getting less and being promised more seems to be inevitable, making politics an exercise in filling psychological holes. You’ll go to bed hungry, but debates will be a buffet. Hobos dream big.

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

 

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band....Night Moves

A dozen life lessons.............

 

.........................inspired by Ruth Alder Schnee:

6. Pay attention and seek beauty. As Adler Schnee reminds us, “We all make our own environment in which we are comfortable, and beauty is a great part of it.” She also emphasized that finding beauty is much easier than many of us have been led to believe. “You just have to look at things. Everything is designed. My biggest criticism of American education is the schools don’t teach children to look and to see things, because design is all around us. You just have to go outside and look.” 

getting comfortable............................

 

...........................................with chaos.

The birth of anything—stars and galaxies as well as people and animals—takes place amid disorder, confusion, and chaos.

-Steven Pressfield

internal......................

 

Improvement is being better than your past self.  It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Do not compare against others, compare against your past self.  Keep the focus internal.

-James Clear, from this edition

In the background......................

 

R.E.M..........................................Document

fun with the language..............

 

Somehow the word
allow is in the word
swallow and in swallow
two wholly different meanings:
one to take in through
the mouth and another
what we call the common
winged gnat hunter who
is, in all probability,
somewhere near us now.
Once, I thought
if I knew all the words
I would say the right thing
in the right way,
instead language became
more brutish: blink twice
for the bird, blink once
for tender annihilation. Who
knows what we are doing as
we go about our days lazily
choosing our languages. Some
days my life is held together
by definitions, some days
I read the word swallow
and all my feathers show.

-Ada Limon, the poem "Literary Theory" from Startlement: New and Selected Poems

a prisoner of words..............

 

Subject to these reservations, we must hope for a common rallying.  But first our Leftist intellectuals, who have swallowed so many insults and may well have to begin doing so again, would have to undertake a critique of the reasonings and ideologies to which they have hitherto subscribed, which have wreaked the havoc they have seen in our most recent history.  That will be the hardest thing.  We must admit that today conformity is on the Left.  To be sure, the Right is not brilliant.  But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws.  The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.  Until such an effort at re-examination is well underway, any rallying will be useless and even harmful.

-Albert Camus, from his 1957 essay, "Socialism of the Gallows", found in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

Wondering about Francis Bacon...........

 

The contention that knowledge is power, as advanced by Bacon, secularized the previously occult dictum to great effect. Disinterested curiosity was not Bacon’s only goal; he also envisioned the command of nature, its subjugation and bondage, in the advancement of human comfort, wealth, control, and power. And his vision would shape the dominant ideology of the next half-millennium. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one,” claimed Bacon in Novum Organum, charting the passage of that supposedly unsinkable ship of civilization toward the brighter and more prosperous future that enlightened men had long dreamed of. All that was required was a ritual sacrifice of the mystery that had suffused the world in the millennia the scientific revolution. 

-as culled from this Hedgehog Review essay

Eric Barker.........................

 

...................thinks about Arthur Schopenhauer:

“You’re comparing Taylor Swift to a 19th century German philosopher who thought life was an unquenchable spiral of desire?”

Yes. And you can’t stop me, but more importantly, you can’t tell me why I’m wrong, which is the part that should bother you.

The problem is never just the problem..........

.......It's the response to it that defines your team.

from this Tanmay Vora post

About the housing affordability problem.......

 

............................there are two main culprits.   The first is the huge swath of the local building companies that could not survive the Great Recession.  Since we decided several decades ago that every high school graduate needed to go to college, there was no back filling in the building trades.  No local builders building equals a shortage of supply.   The second is the following chart.  Don't let anyone tell you differently, very low interest rates are inflationary for the single-family housing markets.  Since buyers tend to pay based on their monthly payment, low interest rates enable buyers to borrow more, thus pay more, which is a great boon to sellers.   Very low interest rates combined with limited supply quickly allowed the sharp increase in home values.  Voila—an affordability "crisis".

chart courtesy of this post

Some old cartoons........................

 

........................................you might enjoy.

A pretty fair speech..................

 

"For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was settled and forged by men and women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride. And that’s what it is: glory, destiny, and pride. The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true. In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea. But the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic."

-as cut-and-pasted from here

On compasses......................

 

But humans are not machines, and work is not life. Your Personal Compass ensures you’re moving in the right direction across the areas that matter to you, bearing in mind that those areas will undoubtedly shift during your life.

-Nicholas Bate

A few more years of this.........................

 

.................and the supply/demand scales will level out.  Then, and only then, can we talk seriously about solving the affordability problem.   Historically, one million housing starts per year is the magic number. 

In the background......................

 

R.E.M...................Automatic For The People

Willingness..................

 

So it's not about whether we feel depressed or happy; rather, it's about our willingness and ability to participate fully in any and all of our feelings.  The experience of freedom arises not from acquiring our preferred lifestyle and our preferred state of mind but from a willingness to stay with ourselves—to be completely committed to experiencing our lives—regardless of circumstance.

-Bruce Tift, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation