......................Don't give the government a power that you would not like your worst political enemy to wield.
Tuesday, March 11, 2025
buying in.........................
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules, and rewards.
Monday, March 10, 2025
Oracle.....................
In the center of the forest,
there is an unlikely stone that remembers when the mountains were new.
there is an unlikely stone that remembers when the mountains were new.
It waits in a circle of moss like the pupil of a green eye.
You kneel and ask it a wordless question.
It answers.
"Cherish exactly who you are. For there can never be another."
-Jarod K. Anderson, from Love Notes from the Hollow Tree
Life its ownself..........................
It’s a constant reminder that character isn’t tested only by poverty and hardship, but equally—and perhaps even more dangerously—by success.
-Rob Henderson, from here
On the importance of positioning.............
While most people understand that reputation matters, few recognize how it functions as a strategic asset that either unlocks opportunities or leaves you perpetually trapped. The mechanics of this process mirror an unlikely source of wisdom: the game of billiards.
A master billiards player approaches the table with dual vision. While amateurs focus solely on pocketing the immediate shot, professionals focus on how the current shot positions them for the next one. This deceptively simple insight—that present moves determine future options—perfectly captures how reputations function in our interconnected world.
-Farnam Street, from this week's episode
very few things.............................
What counts for most people in investing is not how much they know, but rather how realistically the define what they don't know. An investor needs to do very few things right as long as he or she avoids big mistakes.
If you have to start a week...............
Sunday, March 9, 2025
One can only hope....................
Yet even as the national party drifts off the reservation, there are hopeful signs of growing anti-woke pushback in the Democrats’ modern heartlands – namely, in America’s big cities.
-Joel Kotkin, from here
Democrats focusing on effective big city governance would be a major upgrade. Just saying.
a sensitivity........................
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
-Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, as cut-and-pasted from here
Let it go.....................
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
a sacred instrument...................
For myself, therefore, I desire to declare that the principle that will govern me in the high duty to which my country calls me is a strict adherence to the letter and spirit of the Constitution as it was designed by those who framed it. Looking back to it as a sacred instrument carefully and not easily framed; remembering that it was throughout a work of concession and compromise; viewing it as limited to national objects; regarding it as leaving to the people and the States all power not explicitly parted with, I shall endeavor to preserve, protect, and defend it by anxiously referring to its provision for direction in every action. To matters of domestic concernment which it has intrusted to the Federal Government and to such as relate to our intercourse with foreign nations I shall zealously devote myself; beyond those limits I shall never pass.
-Martin Van Buren, from his 1837 Inaugural Address
timing..............................
If you trap the moment before its ripe
The tears of repentance youll certainly wipe
But if once you let the ripe moment go
You can never wipe off the tears of woe
The tears of repentance youll certainly wipe
But if once you let the ripe moment go
You can never wipe off the tears of woe
Saturday, March 8, 2025
When luxury is a problem.....................
Net Zero is dead. Keir Starmer must in whatever way he can to sway his backbenchers and the chattering class, put NZ into the side of the road. That might mean sacking energy secretary Ed Milliband. Deindustrialisation must stop. Windmills, solar energy and happy thoughts cannot build a submarine, artillery shell factory or a bunch of anti-missile batteries. And screwing the British economy to make a tiny dent in C02 emissions so we feel all virtuous is a luxury belief. Luxuries are out.
-from this Samizdata episode
smarts..................................
I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.
talking without speaking...........
One of the problems he had with living alone was all the talking to himself, talking without speaking and occasionally deluding himself into thinking that he was actually talking to someone else.
-Richard Price, Lazarus Man
Eternity......................
He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
Friday, March 7, 2025
a bad habit..............
. . . their judgment was based more upon blind wishing that upon any sound prediction; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.
take the measure.........................
The fatal flaw in deism is thus not rational at all, but emotional. Pure reason is unappealing because it is bloodless. Ceremonies stripped of sacred mystery lose their emotional force, because celebrants need to defer to a higher power in order to consummate their instinct for tribal loyalty. In times of danger and tragedy especially, unreasoning ceremony is everything. There is no substitute for surrender to an infallible and benevolent being, the commitment called salvation. And no substitute for formal recognition of an immortal life force, the leap of faith called transcendence. It follows that most people would very much like science to prove the existence of God but not to take the measure of His capacity.
-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
avoid the anxious middle..............
Spend a handful of hours a day going fast. Crush a gym session. Do deep work on a project you care about. Spend the rest of the day going slow. Take walks. Read books. Get a long dinner with friends. Either way, avoid the anxious middle where you never truly relax or truly move forward.
-Charles Miller, as quoted here
forgetting..............................
"We all want to dissolve," the old Zen monk in red bobble cap and thin glasses tells me, with a wry chuckle, as he greets me in the chill mountains behind Los Angeles, three hundred miles south of Big Sur, where I've come at the end of December. "We all need the experience of forgetting who we are. I think that's what love is: forgetting who you are."
He flashes a crooked grin. "Forgetting who you are is such a delicious experience. And so frightening."
-Pico Iyer, Aflame
their eternal calm...................
To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Chapter III in his essay Nature
spare......................
There's an elephant in the room here that can't be tidied away, of course, which is that the consequences of any given choice might be vastly more sever for some people than for others. . . . But for most of us, if we're being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate the potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves of making a bold choice.
-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals
trade-offs.....................................
Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs—because there will always be trade-offs—and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.
-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals
Thursday, March 6, 2025
story telling.....................
Your job is not just to act, but to tell a fascinating story of how you did so, and inspire others to do it. Make great adventures, but tell greater stories.
-Derek Sivers, How To Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion
Thinking on paper........................
196. May a warning light start flashing whenever executives talk about how hard they work.
197. Pick a different country each year and focus on learning about its history, culture, and government.
198. New bias comes through more in what is not covered than in what is said.
199. A major advantage is the ability to attract followers in times of crisis. A major virtue is deserving those followers.
200. Have frequent reviews to make sure the "incrementals" are running in the right direction.
201. At certain points, it is not unusual to find that a good 60 to 80 percent of top management doesn't know what the hell is going on.
-Michael Wade, as snipped from here
a contest of opinion.......................
During the contest of opinion through which we have past, the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely, and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the constitution all will of course arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All too will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind, let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things.
-Thomas Jefferson, as excerpted from his March 4, 1801 Inaugural Address. We would do well to remember the nastiness of the 1800 presidential election. This was not a polite contest between friends.
Rob knows...........................
Here's a bottle and an honest friend!
What wad ye wish for maire, man?
Wha kens, before his life may end,
What his share may be of care, man.
What wad ye wish for maire, man?
Wha kens, before his life may end,
What his share may be of care, man.
Then catch the moments as they fly,
And use them as ye ought, man:-
Believe me, happiness is shy,
And comes not aye when sought, man.
-Robert Burns, A Bottle and An Honest Friend
insuring........................
Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.
thanks David
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