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

Jim Hall & Pat Metheny..............an album

 

Can we end this nonsense this year....?

 

Interesting times........................

 

more fun here

When luxury is a problem.....................

 

Net Zero is dead. Keir Starmer must in whatever way he can to sway his backbenchers and the chattering class, put NZ into the side of the road. That might mean sacking energy secretary Ed Milliband. Deindustrialisation must stop. Windmills, solar energy and happy thoughts cannot build a submarine, artillery shell factory or a bunch of anti-missile batteries. And screwing the British economy to make a tiny dent in C02 emissions so we feel all virtuous is a luxury belief. Luxuries are out.

-from this Samizdata episode

On the wrong side of history...................

 

...........................or, predictions are hard.

And 13 more.........................

 

3, Chase Challenge, Not Comfort.

smarts..................................

 

I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them.  And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.

-Henry J. Kaiser

Mastery........................

 

Anyone who can make you angry becomes your master.

-attributed to Epictetus

talking without speaking...........

 

     One of the problems he had with living alone was all the talking to himself, talking without speaking and occasionally deluding himself into thinking that he was actually talking to someone else.

-Richard Price, Lazarus Man

Eternity......................

 

He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.

-William Blake

a bad habit..............

 

. . . their judgment was based more upon blind wishing that upon any sound prediction; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.

-Thucydides

take the measure.........................

 

     The fatal flaw in deism is thus not rational at all, but emotional.  Pure reason is unappealing because it is bloodless.  Ceremonies stripped of sacred mystery lose their emotional force, because celebrants need to defer to a higher power in order to consummate their instinct for tribal loyalty.  In times of danger and tragedy especially, unreasoning ceremony is everything.  There is no substitute for surrender to an infallible and benevolent being, the commitment called salvation.  And no substitute for formal recognition of an immortal life force, the leap of faith called transcendence.  It follows that most people would very much like science to prove the existence of God but not to take the measure of His capacity.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

avoid the anxious middle..............

 

Spend a handful of hours a day going fast. Crush a gym session. Do deep work on a project you care about. Spend the rest of the day going slow. Take walks. Read books. Get a long dinner with friends. Either way, avoid the anxious middle where you never truly relax or truly move forward.

-Charles Miller, as quoted here

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

Billboard Hot 100: Frankie Valli...My Eyes Adored You

 

forgetting..............................

 

"We all want to dissolve," the old Zen monk in red bobble cap and thin glasses tells me, with a wry chuckle, as he greets me in the chill mountains behind Los Angeles, three hundred miles south of Big Sur, where I've come at the end of December.  "We all need the experience of forgetting who we are.  I think that's what love is: forgetting who you are."

     He flashes a crooked grin.  "Forgetting who you are is such a delicious experience.  And so frightening."

-Pico Iyer,  Aflame

their eternal calm...................

 

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.  The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again.  In their eternal calm, he finds himself.  The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.  We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Chapter III in his essay Nature

spare......................

 

      There's an elephant in the room here that can't be tidied away, of course, which is that the consequences of any given choice might be vastly more sever for some people than for others. . . . But for most of us, if we're being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate the potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves of making a bold choice.

-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals

trade-offs.....................................

 

       Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it.  Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation.  Freedom to examine the trade-offs—because there will always be trade-offs—and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.

-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals

The assault.................................

 

....................................on the status quo.

On thinking..................................

 

.................................................in ink.