Most of the houses in my neighborhood are white-light houses, and I have to admit they are lovely, but I was raised in a colored-light family, and I am raising Tom and Jack to be colored-light men, too. They do not take a lot of convincing on this. Boys are naturally colored lighters.
- Michael Kelly. "The Nine Days of Tom and Jack," Washington Post, December 12, 2001
[It was a sad day in the life of the nation and journalism when Michael Kelly passed away.]
Althouse has a clip of Mike Rowe talking to Joe Rogan about a #2 pencil.
I have never encountered a discussion of a #2 pencil that I didn't like.
We have had a Gang of Thieves infesting this Town since you left it. The thursday after you went away Shaw and James went into the woods and in the day time the best saddle was stolen out of the Barn closset. The same Night mr Cary had his best Horse stolen and mr Smith who lives on mrs Rows place had his taken the same night and last Sunday morning James came Running in to inform me that his Stables had been attempted, and his Lock broken, but being doubly secured the villan could not effect his purpose. He tried the Coach house door and split of a peice of the door, but could not get the Bar out. He went on to mr Adams's at Milton and stole his Horse. A Traveller lodged at Marches Tavern on saturday night, who got up in the Night Rob'd the House of various articles of wearing Apparal and made of. We Suppose that he was the person who attempted our stables and that he belongs to a Gang. They are in pursuit of him.
- Abigail Adams to John Adams on "Decbr 4th 1792" - taken from My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, edited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor
[The town was Quincy, Massachusetts.]
I wrote this post several years ago and it is now an Execupundit tradition:
To the modernist claim that scientific and scholarly knowledge seeks objectivity by distancing itself from the emotions, Plato would probably have replied that such a separation of knowledge from feeling cannot yield anything like true knowledge. Certainly, reason must free itself from the thrall of the passions, but not from the exquisite and essential subtlety of the feeling/valuing component of the mind, a component which is an absolutely necessary part of authentic human reason.
- Jacob Needleman, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders
Ants are among the most warlike of creatures. Their foreign policy has been described as "restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they probably would end the world in a week."
- Bert Hollbroder and Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration, quoted in Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman
In 1918, Isaac Imes, my great uncle, served with the Marines in France during World War I.
In 2024, I am reading the diary he wrote while in the trenches.
Life can be a Twilight Zone episode.
"A 2011 investigation by the American Bar Association found there were roughly ten times as many association-accredited law school graduates who identified as Native American in their college and professional documents as there were Native American lawyers identified by the U.S. Census. Digging deeper into the sources of this discrepancy, the bar association concluded that a distressingly high number of those who professionally identified as Native American seemed to have no substantive ties to any specific Indigenous tribe or culture, no apparent ancestor on the Dawes Rolls, and so on - just like [Senator Elizabeth] Warren."
- Musa Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Don't hold your breath awaiting any accountability for these ruses.
Amber Noel on "The Ministry of Matchmaking."
This is a good idea. I am planning a Substack essay on the subject.
I started reading this book today. Very thought-provoking. Deserves a wide audience.
We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, etc.
- Rejection slip from a Chinese economics journal, quoted in the Financial Times
Nudged by Cultural Offering and Jim Harrison, I am taking a Shakespeare Pledge.
I pledge that between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I will read at least two of Shakespeare's plays.
Will you join me?
Remember when a justification for diversity programs was that they would produce viewpoint diversity?
My Substack essay on the loss of farming culture is up.
Core message: We need values-based family farms as a counterbalance to the cities.
[BTW: My goal is to have 110 subscribers by the end of the month. Subscriptions are free. Paid subscriptions, of course, are appreciated, honored, and worshiped.]
[Photo by Scott Spencer Pugh at Unsplash]
[Photo by Ray Shrewsbury at Unsplash.]
It's difficult to see the picture when you're inside the frame.
- R. S. Trapp
The debate is on.
There is the standard pumpkin pie: a true essential for Thanksgiving.
But then things become trickier: pecan, apple, chocolate cream, cherry, lemon, coconut cream, and some more exotic flavors such as Key Lime.
And that brings to mind the highly debatable question of rankings:
City Journal has an article on the latest knife attacks in New York City and the nitwitted policies that facilitated them.
An excerpt:
The answer is simple: bad policies. In 2020, New York State’s bail and discovery reforms took effect. The bail reform made it so that nearly all accused criminals in the state would be released pretrial rather than held in detention, and it did so while strengthening the prohibition on judges considering public-safety risk when making release decisions. The discovery reform amounted to a massive unfunded compliance burden on prosecutors, which has led to skyrocketing dismissal rates. The following year, Alvin Bragg, who campaigned on promises to cut incarceration, bring fewer cases, and enact broad non-prosecution policies, was elected as Manhattan D.A.
After Babel: Katherine Johnson Martinko explores "How Parents Can Fight Back Against the Digital Deluge of Life."
An excerpt:
"It wasn't just about watching him It was about being alert to his little bids for connection, the frequent times when he looked over to make eye contact or wave or smile at me. He wanted to know I was present, mentally as well as physically. He needed to know that he was more important than my phone."
My Substack essay on how Elon and Vivek can keep the DOGE from going astray is up.
Please read, share, and consider subscribing.
There may be a territory between physical courage and moral courage.
I am exploring the subject in a new workshop that will be rolled out this month.
The initial question is whether that territory exists.
[Photo by Tycho Attsma at Unsplash]
Kindness, thy name is Nicholas Bate, an Oxford-based deep-thinking consultant and author who is a constant inspiration.
[Photo by Nikita Ti at Unsplash]
Cultural Offering has the video. It is amazing.
I thought I had a fair number of books. Not so.
When it comes to book collecting, I am a towering castle of sloth.
The New Criterion: Douglas Murray dissects the "banality of evil" argument that Hannah Arendt made in Eichmann in Jerusalem. An excerpt:
Yet scholarship since Arendt’s book has not just countered her interpretation but should in fact have buried it. In 2011, the historian and philosopher Bettina Stangneth brought out a book in Germany titled Eichmann vor Jerusalem (the English edition, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, came out in 2014). It is a devastating work, most of all for the reputation of Hannah Arendt. For it shows beyond any doubt how, for the few days she attended the trial, Arendt was actually fooled by Eichmann. He played her. For Eichmann—
contra Arendt’s claim—not only knew what he was doing, but was even deeply, sincerely proud of it.
Article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on November 1, 2024:
"Where Are the White Students?"
Subtitle: "Their numbers are dropping faster than any other group's."
Could it be that the atmosphere at many colleges is not a welcoming one?
[Photo of Arizona's state bird, the Cactus Wren, by Carol Lee at Unsplash]
Wolfe insists that writers replace the hoary old saw “write what you know” with “write about what you find,” since in fact few people know much of anything until and unless they go out and learn it. His advice — or better, exhortation, was: leave the house, gather information, and apply reportorial techniques to fiction; i.e. invent stories that explain the real world. Don’t think of fiction as fantasy; far from it. The whole enterprise stands or falls based on your story’s plausibility, which is to say, its conformity to observed reality. Bonfire of the Vanities was so successful because everyone who knows anything about New York knew that the portrait was dead-on accurate.
"Sometimes you need a weirdo to tell you that things have gotten weird. Your normal friends, neighbors, and coworkers won't tell you."
- Aaron Kunin, professor of English, Pomona College, quoted in "When a Department Self-Destructs" by Emma Pettit in The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2024
A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.
- Marty Allen
You can find some very troubling things when you look beneath the surface of:
"Being so long in the lowest form, I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. I got into my bones the essential structure of the basic British sentence, which is a noble thing. Naturally, I am in favor of teaching boys English, and then I would allow the clever ones to learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat."
- Winston Churchill
Because I was in a strange place, and was undisturbed, and I didn't plan on making great progress, and the temperature was right, the lighting was great, and an assortment of ideas suddenly decided to come together, the decision to jot down notes in a shoe shop while my wife shopped for shoes was one of my most productive decisions in weeks.
We'll have to do this more often.
My current projects include a very interesting workshop for a nonprofit, an important proposal for an outfit in D.C., a book project, and coaching assignments.
And a leaf blower for my desk.
The best time of the year.
Oh yes! Today I am meeting with an old rogue of an attorney who has retired in Fountain Hills, Arizona. He has violated the Never Retire Rule but will be forgiven.
Novelist and scholar Jerry Pournelle created the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
He began by noting that there are two groups in organizations.
The first is dedicated to achieving the goals of the organization.
The second is dedicated to the organization itself.
The Iron Law is that "in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization."
[Photo by the blowup at Unsplash]
My new Substack column is up. This one's on intergenerational lingo.
The light overcomes the heavy;
the still overcomes the frantic.
The wise never forget their dignity;
though surrounded by dazzling sights,
they remain calm and unmoved.
- Lao Tzu
New York Post: Martin Gurri on the great clarification. An excerpt:
In the last four years, the progressive establishment, centered around the Biden administration and the federal bureaucracy but including the news media, academia, Hollywood and most of our dominant institutions, erected structures of control without precedent in American history.
I later found out that the English, who don't have nearly as much ground to cover, tend to view the American approach to highway travel as somewhere between baffling and pathological. A couple of years after I got out of college, some English friends of mine were given a ride from northern Spain to Paris by an American we all knew, and to their astonishment he drove straight through without stopping. They came to the conclusion that he was suffering from a latent death wish. I informed them that our mutual friend had merely driven from northern Spain to Paris the way any red-blooded American boy would drive from northern Spain to Paris: he made good time.
- Calvin Trillin, Travels with Alice
My new Substack column is up on conquering stage fright.
Check it out and - shameless plug - spread the word.
As a child I lived in Lewis Carroll's house in Guilford. My father, whom I adored, was a Gaelic-speaking highlander, a classical scholar, and a bigoted agnostic. One day he discovered that I had started going to church secretly.
- From Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy
Michael Shellenberger on Californians finally get serious about crime.
He wrote "Clockers" - one of the most powerful novels of our time. It's on my re-read list.
Here's my most recent post on Viewpoint Diversity and Freedom of Expression.
My goal is to get at least 100 Substack subscribers by December 31.
Free subscribers, of course, are welcome but one of the advantages of a paid subscription is my posts never go behind a paywall.
[And paid subscribers are highly honored.]
FYI: A very interesting post on Stage Fright is in the pipeline.
Against that meager start, Bezos would tell investors he projected $74 million in sales by 2000 if things went moderately well, and $114 million in sales if they went much better than expected. (Actual net sales in 2000: $1.64 billion.) Bezos also predicted the company would be moderately profitable by that time (net loss in 2000: $1.4 billion). He wanted to value the fledgling firm at $6 million - an aggressive valuation that he had seemingly picked out of thin air. And he told investors the same thing he told his parents: the company had a 70 percent chance of failing.
- From The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
The Washington Examiner: How the Harris campaign plowed through 1 billion dollars.
My Substack on Viewpoint Diversity on Campus is out.
Please check it out and spread the word!
[Photo by Chris Yoder]
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu grew up in a peripheral region of France, the son of a postal worker and a homemaker. His origins led him to be dismissed and looked down on in many of his early encounters with elite institutions. These encounters inculcated a sense of alienation and resentment toward mainstream elites that persisted throughout Bourdieu's life in spite of his later success. He emerged as a pugilistic public intellectual, and one of the most trenchant analysts of the ways that elites and elite aspirants jockeyed for status, influence, wealth, and power. His work exposed and catalogued the ways elites reproduced and justified their social position (and the inequalities entailed thereby) - often while claiming to be altruistic or pursuing the "greater good." Bourdieu's work plays an important role in shaping the arguments of this book. It will therefore be useful to highlight a few core elements of his thought to set the stage for what follows.
- From We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi
The question is: Who will be Trump's Harry Hopkins?
Or his Daniel Patrick Moynihan?
Quillette: Claire Lehmann on "The Revenge of the Silent Male Voter." An excerpt:
If we take a macro perspective, we see that such young men have never known a culture in which males are not routinely described as "problematic," "toxic," or "oppressive." Going to university, and working at modern companies, they live in a world of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies - many of which promote an insidious and pervasive form of anti-male discrimination. Yet to talk about it in public invites social ostracism. To criticize DEI is to risk being called a Nazi.
In the early 1970s, an industrious advertising executive named Julie Ray became fascinated with an unconventional public-school program for gifted children in Houston, Texas. Her son was among the first students enrolled in what would later be called the Vanguard program, which stoked creativity and independence in its students and nurtured expansive, outside-the-box thinking. Ray grew so enamored with the curriculum and the community of enthusiastic teachers and parents that she set out to research similar schools around the state with an eye toward writing a book about Texas's fledgling gifted-education movement.
- From The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
President Trump's win in both the Electoral College and the popular vote represents far more than a victory over Kamala Harris.
It is a victory over a biased news media, a government that is far too cozy with Big Tech and hostile to the First Amendment, a bureaucracy that tells us that obviously porous borders are secure, and a smug elite that pulls off behind-the-scenes stunts and thinks we'll believe whatever oh-so-smoothly-worded press releases they happen to issue.
Their plan was to push Joe Biden aside and win by nominating a pliable and untested candidate who was Not Donald Trump.
They overlooked Trump's secret, the reason why a huge and diverse coalition decided to back him:
He's Not One of Them.
I have no clear information on how the presidential election will turn out, but I'd dearly love to see these simple changes in the future:
Cal Newport has some wise advice to reduce stress on Election Day:
[Photo by Enes Gundogdu at Unsplash]
One of the great but largely uncovered scandals of our time.
In the name of accountability, the names of the charlatans who pushed the so-called improvements should be publicized.
Commentary magazine in September 2024:
John Podhoretz gives a review of our crazy presidential elections. An excerpt:
But I would argue that nearly every presidential race in my lifetime—I’m 63, and so this is the 16th I’ve been alive for—was the most unprecedented in American history up to that moment. I can think of only three—1984, 1988, and 1996—that have followed relatively conventional patterns and whose outcomes viewed from a historical remove appear to have been set even before the candidates began to contest against each other.
A team is not simply the sum total of its members. It is also the extra pluses and minuses that occur when those people are working together. All of us have known great individual performers who are terrible when they have to work together.
The combination, be it for good or bad, is always a different creature.
Never forget that.
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My new Substack post on an extraordinary fire chief is up.
Check it out and spread the word.
And remember: Prevent harm - Survive - Be nice.
Jonathan Turley weighs in on a possible prosecution of Trump for his remarks about Liz Cheney.
The Free Press: Larissa Phillips describes an attitude change while living in upstate New York. An excerpt:
But nothing is constant, even political feelings. By the time Biden announced his candidacy, I’d been living upstate for 10 years. A decade of farming had made me less aloof, because farming entails emergencies, and so often my neighbors were there to help. It’s hard to care where someone stands on politics when they race to your house to save a dying lamb. When their wife helps search for your runaway dogs. When they deliver and stack 50 hay bales within hours of your asking for it, and afterward make pleasant chitchat. This is the gift of living in a rural area: I keep finding reasons to see my political adversaries as human.
The following issues deserve more news coverage and more debate:
A group of people are chatting on a terrace. Most of them are fit and attractive. The conversation flows smoothly. There is some bantering about a vacation spot in Italy.
Unless particularly astute in such matters, most individuals would not be able to identify which members of the party are human and which are "artificials" - expensive robots that can pass as humans under most circumstances. It can be risky to make such distinctions since there are human + robot couples as well as human + human ones and no one wants to give offense.
This practice started in Japan in 2035 and quickly spread to much of the rest of the world.
I believe our society will reach this stage.
As my wife dealt with the hordes of trick or treaters, the dog and I watched "Clarkson's Farm" in an adjoining room.
I got the better part of that deal.
