Religious freedom, or not...............

 

............More stuff I never learned as a history major:

     In 1768, with dissenting religion continuing to grow, the Anglican establishment—both a political and religious entity—resorted to arrests.  Baptists faced the brunt of arrests.  By the time of the American Revolution, more than half the Baptist ministers in Virginia had been jailed for preaching without a license or disturbing the peace. (Some ministers responded that they had a license from "King Jesus" and recognized no other authority over their calling.) . . .

     Facing the most formidable military of the eighteenth century, and with dissenters accounting for 20 to 33 percent or more of Virginia's white population, patriot leaders realized quickly that they needed dissenters' support in the war effort. (Government documents noted, for example, the need for support from those marksmen in the heavily Presbyterian Shenandoah Valley with the extraordinarily accurate long rifles who eventually mad up the core of Daniel Morgan's riflemen at the Battle of Saratoga.)  This recognition led to a remarkable negotiation—support for the war effort being offered by dissenters in return for religious freedom.

     Dissenters' earlier pleas for some limited relief were replaced by demands for equal treatment: an end to the church tax; an end to Anglican control of marriage, orphans, and poor relief; exemption from military service for dissenting ministers.  Religious freedom was tied to the sought-after support for the war.

-John A. Ragosta, from his essay, What Does the American Revolution Mean to Me? in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding

Good luck with that.................

 

If Mamdani wants his affordability agenda to be more than a redistribution of this shrinking pie, he will need to recharge the private-sector engines of upward mobility. He can do that by confronting the occupational licensing and business regulations, land-use restrictions, and cost drivers that have made middle-class life in New York so hard to sustain.

-Michael Dresdale, from this essay

Ralph Waldo Emerson..........

 

     Emerson was a notorious freethinker, unburdened by the conventions of his time.  He was basically a walking middle finger to the dumb traditions and sheeplike thinking that held people back.  If he were alive today, he would be appalled at the educational uniformity, technological distraction, and immediate gratification that keep our most ambitious young people anesthetized and unable to find their life's meaning.  He saw a version of the problem in his own time, in fact, and wrote a long essay called "Self-Reliance" on how, in seven steps, to rebel against the psychogenic epidemic.

-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life

setting store....................

 

I have attended a good many lectures in my time.  I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability.  I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime.  But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant.

-Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers, and Other Essays

Yep....................

 

I think perhaps we have collectively been too eager to deny the relevance of 1776 to us today, too sure of our own superiority to listen to revolutionary leaders' advice about society, human nature, and government, and too quick to disparage or simply ignore the national past that began in those desperate and idealistic days 250 years ago.

-Brendan McConville, from his essay in The American Revolution at 250:  Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding

writing a different story.................

 

Not everyone who supported the Revolution would necessarily see it as an opportunity to make wide-ranging changes in society.  Dissolving the connections to Great Britain would be enough.  People go go about their business in pretty much the same way as they had before.  Of course, some changes would necessarily have to take place because the basic structure of a republic differs from that of a monarchy.  Subjects become citizens with new responsibilities that would alter the contours of society.  Men, though certainly not all of them, would have to get used to voting. . . .

If the Americans were not really operating with a tabula rasa after breaking from the British Empire, there was substantial opportunity to write a different story for the newly created United States, one that would help transform the world.  Jefferson sounded this theme throughout his political career and until his death.

-Annette Gordon-Reed from her essay "Thomas Jefferson, Optimistic Visionary", as found in The American Revolution at 250:  Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding

Henry Hazlitt wrote.............

 

"Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man".  

Per Bylund agrees and suggests we pay attention to Goodhart's Law.

via

In praise of Tim Cook......................

 

....................................and restraint:

   While there are many who compare Tim Cook to Steve Jobs and find him wanting on vision and flair, I am grateful, as an investor in Apple, for the restraint and discipline that he brought to the job. That gratitude will stay intact even if Apple's caution on AI turns out to be a mistake, since the restraint and rectitude that Cook brought to his job are management qualities that significantly undervalued. I don't teach from or write cases, but I would love to see more business school cases about CEOs like Cook who are not easily swayed by the temptation of more growth and ego-driven acquisitions. I loved the Steve Jobs movie, but I don't expect to see a Tim Cook movie anytime soon, and while that is understandable, it also explains why we will continue to have too many CEOs at companies viewing themselves as saviors, gambling shareholder money on turnarounds and rescues, when the better pathway would be acceptance and shrinkage. I believe that investors lose more money from companies trying to do too much rather than from them doing too little, and from overreaching than from underachieving.

-Aswarth Damodaran, from this essay

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

On Generative AI.................

 

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

Ultimately.....................

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

Let's talk............

 

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

Meaning........................

Again and again, people said that life was busy but not meaningful. That experiences and relationships felt meaningless. Or that they didn’t know what they were meant to do in work and life. And it’s worse for the strivers than anyone else: The richer, more technologically advanced the country, the greater the percentage of the population that answers “no” to the question “Do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning?”

Here’s why: Strivers are great at solving technical problems and answering specific, hard questions. They have been educated and trained to believe that, while the world is incredibly complicated, with enough knowledge and hard work, every problem can be solved.

The truth is, many big, complicated problems can be solved with sheer intellectual horsepower. But meaning is not one of them. “What is the meaning of my life?” is a question that cannot be answered like “How do I build an app for finding concert tickets?” or “How do I create an effective six-month weight-loss program?” Meaning is a question that must be lived, not solved with a Google search or simulated using artificial intelligence. It requires deep contemplation and a commitment to living a real life, full of unsolvable secrets, puzzling riddles, unexplainable bliss, and terrible suffering.

But in all their technical excellence, strivers trivialize their humanness by reducing life’s magnificent inscrutability to a series of complicated but solvable problems. They aren’t just living in a simulation; they are also creating the simulation they are living in.

So, if you’re a young striver, here’s what you need to know: Your life does have meaning, and you can find it. But to find it, you’ll have to think and live fundamentally differently from how you’ve been trained by school, work, media, entertainment, and culture.

-Arthur Brooks, from this edition of The Free Press

On non-forgetting...........

 

The lesson is this: the greatest part of humanity is always at risk of forgetting the best of its inheritance. Only a sustained and practiced art of memory prevents this from happening. And that is the responsibility we can’t fail to choose, if we want to keep the world from losing itself in forgetting. If we genuinely wish to see art in our own lifetimes that is really worthy of our history, then we can’t afford to pretend it isn’t immensely difficult—perhaps harder than ever—to make something truly new. But we cannot stop at anxiety. Only by going through anxiety, only by naming it, learning from it, and letting it pass into and out of us, can we survive the crushing pressure of our own traditions.

-Sam Jennings, from this essay on Harold Bloom and our literary inheritance

via

The Agenbite of Outwit ....................

 

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.  Our electronic world now calls for a unified field of global awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective consciousness demanded by electronic information movement.

-Marshall McLuhan, as culled from here

It's not about the Swiss watch...........

 

The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you're smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there's no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you'll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they'll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.

-Paul Graham, from this essay

activate our presence..................

 

Does it need to be said? We are not machines. Our lives are not data problems that can be quantitatively optimized. And the actual human ability to attend is something much more expansive and much more beautiful than a tool for filtering information or extending our time on task. True attention lies at the heart of personhood: reason, judgment, memory, curiosity, responsibility, the feeling of a summer day, the burying of our dead. All of these require and activate our presence. As for mental functions that can be measured and indexed — and ultimately bought and sold — they are precisely the kind of attention we need to escape.

-from the essay, “The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie”

thanks Rob

Likely not much better..........

 

     What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases?  Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world's evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life.  Contemplation of the lives of the philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology.

-Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography

Incentives matter...................

 

We should also heed the general lesson implicit in the injunction of Ben Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack: “If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.” This maxim is a wise guide to a great and simple precaution in life: Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.

-Charlie Munger, from his The Psychology of Human Misjudgment