Just Arrived

 

From Jung to Manson

 A Large Regular keeps adding to my book list.

Another Biz Film

 

Everyday Question

What is The Man Who Never Sleeps doing?

By the way, don't miss negotiation fundamentals.

[Photo by Walter Ma at Unsplash]

Where You Will Find Gems

I never leave empty-handed whenever I visit A Layman's Blog and Stephen Landry's Blog.

On My List (Definitely!)

 

The Style of Naming

Serpentine Sheldon Serpentine is my favorite blog name.

Mitigating Chaos, however, points us to what may be the greatest podcast name.

The Man Knows Music

 Cultural Offering has Dire Straits with "Telegraph Road."

I am embarrassed to say this is the first I've heard of it.

Wally Bock on Thought Leadership

 Check out a very well-read author, Wally Bock.

This is very good news for those of us who followed Wally's blog for years.

Classic

 

Secession Doesn't Cut It

 

Some issues were settled in 1865.

[Photo by Jeff Secrest at Unsplash]

Perfectly Understandable

 

A Few Books That Changed My Life

 

• The Holy Bible
• The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
• Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
• Life with a Star by Jiri Weil
• Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
• The Warden by Anthony Trollope
• Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• Fortunes of War by Olivia Manning
• The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
• The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madson, and John Jay
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• Six Crises by Richard Nixon
• The Forest Ranger by Herbert Kaufman
• Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy
• Silent Missions by Vernon A. Walters
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
• The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• Churchill by Lord Moran
• The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• The Insurgents by Fred Kaplan
• Lincoln and His Generals by T. Harry Williams
• The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John LeCarré
• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
• The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
• Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe
• Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
• I, Claudius by Robert Graves
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman
• The Wall by John Hersey
• Chronicles of Wasted Time by Malcolm Muggeridge

Big Day

 

Hmm

 

Slow and Silent

The best work is often slow and silent. 

The goal is set, the path determined, and the material assembled.

And, as much as possible, interruptions are reduced and confined.

Another point: you have to keep from getting in front of yourself. Don't jump ahead. Restrict your creativity to the areas in which it is needed and when it is needed.

Beware of excitement since it often is merely an interruption in disguise.

Step by step. Relentless.

Happy Easter!

[Photo by Bruno van der Kraan at Unsplash]

Soundtrack

 

Captain MacWhirr

It is your imaginative supervisor who is touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please; but every ship Captain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace. It was, in truth, as impossible for him to take a flight of fancy as it would be for a watchmaker to put together a chronometer with nothing except a two-pound hammer and a whip-saw in the way of tools. Yet the uninteresting lives of men so entirely given to the actuality of the bare existence have their mysterious side.

- From Typhoon by Joseph Conrad

Let's Call It "The Dictator"

Yes, Studebaker once had a car named The Dictator.

They changed the name to Commander after 1937.

Good move.

Deportations and the Courts

 Law professor Jonathan Turley gives an update and a possible new tone.

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo is a community for writers.

If your novel seems to be blocked, this may be the solution.

[Photo by Florian Klauer at Unsplash]

In the Pipeline

 

"The Genuine That Lingers"

You will remember the little as well as the big.

My Substack post has the details.

[Photo by Kilyan Sockalingum at Unsplash]

Great Film. Great Story. Great Soundtrack.

 

Just Arrived

Wild Times on Campus

 

Dictatorship of Virtue

 City Journal: Remembering Richard Bernstein's warning about campuses in the 1990s.

Modern Technology: Mind the Gaps

The more I learn about technology and its systems, the more skeptical I become of assumptions about the glorious wisdom those systems will produce.

We need to look for the gaps.

And yes, there are gaps.

Recommendation: Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future by Margaret Heffernan

[Photo by Bruno Figueiredo at Unsplash]

Adios

 Commentary magazine: Meir Y. Soloveichik on "What to Do with a Bad Guest."

Check Your Systems

Unfortunately, most warning systems do not warn us that they can no longer warn us.

- Charles Perrow

Ocean

 

Bad Managers and Their Enablers

 

My Substack column asks, "Would you keep an embezzler on your payroll?"

[Photo by Getty Images for Unsplash+]

Drafts

 The first draft was okay. 

No, it was average, but the second draft was much better.

 No, it was trash. 

The third draft seemed to be on mark until I reviewed it again while waiting to go into a meeting and found it had the wrong tone.

Perhaps.

No, tone wasn't the problem. The overall direction was a wrong turn. Had to go.

And so I wrote another draft, this time in long-hand, and that began to click.

Until it didn't, and yet each time I was learning and finally, later that evening, I had a draft that made sense.

I think.

Style Flashback

 

What is Lurking?

 

An odd but important question for any organization is "What are we failing to address right now which, down the road, may strike us as a major oversight?"

A few items I've seen were:

• The primary assumption regarding the desirability of a program turned out to be false.
• The time estimates for a key stage were grossly inaccurate.
• An organizational ally was a vigorous adversary.
• The sales team was understaffed.
• The sales pitch was directed at the wrong organizational level.

First Paragraph

 The year began with a day so warm and fine that only the calendar said January. There would be few pleasant moments in 1862, but New Year's Day in Washington, D.C. was one of them. Everyone was out enjoying the sunshine that morning - women in demure bonnets, men wishing they had left their overcoats at home, children dodging and shouting. The dusty streets of the half-built city were filled with people making their way toward the White House, where, by tradition, the president threw open the doors on the first day of each year.

- From Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year by David Von Drehle

Find Something Beautiful Today

[Photo by Jakob Køhn at Unsplash]

Back By Popular Demand

 

Zach Yadegari

 Jonathan Turley notes the continuing problem with college admissions.

First Paragraph

About no other American have so many words been written as about Abraham Lincoln. Jay Monaghan's Lincoln Bibliography requires 1,079 pages merely to list the books and pamphlets published before 1939, when even the experts lost count. On library shelves the multi-volumed biographies by Nicolay and Hay, Sandburg, and Randall and Current stand cover to cover with Lincoln Never Smoked a Cigarette and Abraham Lincoln on the Coming of the Caterpillar Tractor. Every February sees a fresh flood of Lincoln Day oratory and verse.

- From Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era by David Donald (published in 1961.)

[Photo by Kelli Dougal at Unsplash]

Arizona Family

 

Saturday Morning (Perhaps)

The morning will be busy:

Helping my wife, who is recovering from an operation. 

Getting a haircut. 

Dropping by the bookstore mentioned in my recent Substack essay. 

Writing a new essay. 

Working on a novel.

Reading and more reading.

My goal, of course, will be to do what is important and to postpone the rest. As a result, with the exception of the first two items, all of the others are definite possibilities.

[Photo by Jon Tyson at Unsplash]

Consistent Excellence

 A Layman's Blog has been on a roll.

And I'm Afraid He's Right

 Cultural Offering has a prediction.

Rock Star Good

 Nicholas Bate gives us a reminder of a topic he knows well.

Mass Fatherlessness

 

On My List

 

Alert to the Oppression

"Judge no words before the clerks have checked

In their card index by whom they were spoken."

- From the poem "Child of Europe" written by Czeslaw Milosz in 1946

See "The Ambassador of Dreams" by Gary Saul Morson, The New Criterion, April 2025.

Work Habits

 Civil War historian and novelist Shelby Foote often wrote with an old-fashioned dip pen while dressed in his pajamas. 

Both Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill liked to dictate letters, one letter immediately after another. 

Churchill used ACTION THIS DAY stickers to spur responses to his queries and directives.

Joseph Stalin was an insomniac. Many an officer in the Kremlin got little sleep due to the fear that the phone on his desk might ring at two in the morning.

Benito Mussolini kept an encyclopedia in his office so he could brush up on arcane subjects and impress visitors of his vast knowledge. [Mussolini also had a large office which required that visitors cross a vast space before reaching him.]

Charles de Gaulle, while president of France, often spent weekends in a house that did not have a telephone. Its guardhouse, however, had a phone. Staff needed to consider if they wanted the old man to walk out to the guardhouse to take a call.

Novelist Joseph Heller kept three-by-five cards in his wallet so if he thought of a good idea or line, he could jot it down. He also thought that having the last line of a novel in mind during the writing process helped, but that was not always the case. He kept a card with "I am a cow" during the writing of one novel and never used it.

William Faulkner said, "My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey."

Are AI Fears Groundless?

 

City Journal: Brian Chau believes the fears of Artificial Intelligence are groundless because:

The history of innovation offers reason to doubt the safetyists. Every major research field in history has eventually reached a point of diminishing returns, where useful discoveries become increasingly rare. The pattern holds across disciplines—physics, chemistry, and economics—and is visible at a more granular scale, too, from antibiotics to railroads to CPUs. Initial bursts of progress taper off as fields mature, following an economic pattern known as the “S-Curve.”

Execupundit note: I am not assured by this analysis. It strikes me as comparing apples with oranges. "Every major research field in history" does not possess the characteristics of AI.

Let us proceed with the correct assumption that Brian knows far more about the subject than I do. 

What am I missing?

[Photo by Cash Macanaya at Unsplash+]

Bookstore Priorities

Cultural Offering reveals "the scholar's order of search" in a used bookstore.

Bravo!

Timely and Very Interesting

 

Flashback

 

A Zen Mode Day

Back soon.

[Photo by Ray Wyman Jr. at Unsplash]

Every Job Can Be Exciting

 

Used Bookstores Are a Key Part of Your Community

 

Having been asked by some very wise people to address this topic, here's a post on "The Charm of Used Bookstores."

[Photo by Getty Images for Unsplash+]

Ignoring the Lords of Martha's Vineyard

 UnHerd magazine: Edward Luttwak on "Tariffs Will Awaken the American Dream." An excerpt:

"It was only small-minded people, fixated on the hourly-wage data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who noticed that industrial workers who made $30 an hour working on assembly lines did not in fact become foreign-exchange traders earning $3,000 an hour. When their competition-hit factories shut down, rather, they were much more likely to turn up as shopping mall security guards paid $10 an hour."

The Extraordinary Usha Vance

The Free Press has a detailed article on Second Lady Usha Vance, described as "The most impressive person in the job since Abigail Adams."

First Paragraph

The Trans-Siberian Railway is a steel belt that binds two continents. Its nearly 6,000 miles of track link Moscow to Vladivostok; connecting lines run across Europe and down Asia's eastern edge. For more than a century, the Trans-Siberian has attracted travelers who want to journey through some of the world's most remote, and sometimes beautiful, territory: the Ural Mountains, the shores of Lake Baikal, the stunning isolation of the Russian steppe. But when it was completed in 1904, the Trans-Siberian Railway was the stuff of imperial dreams and geopolitical nightmares.

- From The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World by Hal Brands

[Just arrived last night: It looks very good.]

Old School Alumni

Many thanks to Ray, Kurt, Stephen, Chris, serpentinesheldonserpentine, as well as freiherr-von-naarenburg for your kind comments about my Old School post.

We are Old School alumni and will make a difference.

[Photo by Thomas Griggs at Unsplash]

Re-Industrialization

Re-industrialization + reduced immigration require many more "shop" classes in schools and lots of new industrial colleges in lieu of the present mass-production of "social science" graduates for whom ever-more municipal, county, state and federal desk jobs must be provided.

- Edward Luttwak, whose 1993 book, The Endangered American Dream, is worth a re-examination

Apple's Rules for Success

 A Large Regular has Apple's Rules for Success and they're very good.

The idea of putting them on the back of the employee badges is brilliant.

Find Something Beautiful Today

[Photo by Bree Anne at Unsplash]

Previn and Williams

 

The Great Clarification

 

I've written one Substack post that has attracted a much larger audience than any of the others.

It's time to revisit "The Great Clarification."

[Photo by Getty Images at Unsplash+]

Making the Case Against Social Media

Caution: Very disturbing. 

France's White Hydrogen Windfall

 Forbes: A major clean energy discovery in France. 

A "little" story that may turn out to be huge.

Social

 Take a few minutes to read and ponder a post at The Hammock Papers.

When you get to the end and realize where it is from, the power will be multiplied.

Short Stories from The Man Who Never Sleeps

You can find it on Amazon.

Rick Georges, RIP

 

I am very sad to report that Rick Georges, The Future Lawyer, blogger, poet, author, and a dear friend, has passed away.

May his wife and family be comforted in this difficult time.

Back By Popular Demand

 

"The Artful Dodgers of Organizations"

My new Substack post is up.

It addresses how people work around as well as within organizations.

[Photo by Ashley Batz at Unsplash]

Greatest Plate Ever

 

A Large Regular found this.

Life's Element

My wife drives a 2003 Honda Element. She loves it. Likes its height plus the fact that the floor is so low that it's easier to get our old dog up and into it.

It's going in today for a paint job.

A super-basic car. I've tried to persuade her to trade it in, but she's not negotiating.

Galapagos Green.

The Eurasian Century

 The new book by Hal Brands. Commentary review here.

On my list.

A Variation of the Marie Kondo Question

A key question of anti-clutter consultant Mari Kondo is whether an item "sparks joy."

I am using a variation: Will completing this task, however minor, spark joy?

The Power of Bellow

 "And all this will continue. It will simply continue. Another six billion years before the sun explodes. Six billion years of human life! It lames the heart to contemplate such a figure. Six billion years! What will become of us? Of the other species, yes, and of us? How will we ever make it? And when we have to abandon the earth, and leave this solar system for another, what a moving-day that will be. But by then humankind will have become very different. Evolution continues. Olaf Stapleton reckoned that each individual in future ages would be living thousands of years. The future person, a colossal figure, a beautiful green color, with a hand that had evolved into a kit of extraordinary instruments, tools strong and subtle, thumb and forefinger capable of exerting thousands of pounds of pressure. Each mind belonging to a marvelous analytical collective, thinking out its mathematics, its physics as part of a sublime whole. A race of semi-immortal giants, our green descendants, dear kin and brethren, inevitably containing still some of our bitter peculiarities as well as powers of spirit. The scientific revolution was only three hundred years old. Give it a million, give it a billion more. And God? Still hidden, even from this powerful mental brotherhood, still out of reach?"

- From Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow, which was published in 1970. 

Bellow is the only novelist to win three National Book Awards [The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet.] 

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift.

Next on my re-read list will be either Herzog or Ravelstein.

They Knew How to Start TV Dramas in the Sixties

 

He Was Doc Holliday

 Cultural Offering called it: the best Val Kilmer movie of all time.

Perfect casting.

An Evergreen Topic: What's Happened to the Liberal Arts?

 

Many Thanks!

I am heartened by the responses to my "Old School" Substack post.

Will it be easy to turn things around? Nope. But few turn-arounds are easy.

Keep in Mind

 "If you treat everyone as though they are hurting, you will be treating the majority of people in the proper manner." 

- Zig Ziglar

Seneca Gets Screen Time

 

The minute I saw this trailer, I began wondering what Rick Georges - FutureLawyer, poet, author of the book below - and thus a Seneca fan - will think of it.

What Happened to Black Swan Europa?

It's a pity that Black Swan Europa is no longer posting.

A good blog about the madness in Europe is needed right now.

[Photo by Stephen Meslin at Unsplash]

Williamson and Ravikant on Human Nature

 

A Site to Watch

 Monitoring the Future.

Interesting findings on what's happening with the new generation.

Hans

 

Is It Time for Old School?

My latest Substack is up.

Click here to read its lapidary prose. 

Never Have So Many Owed So Much to So Few

Stephen Landry's Blog has the story of an RAF hero.

One of the few who saved us all.

Richard Chamberlain (aka Dr. Kildare), RIP

 

Bluesky

 Commentary magazine: James B. Meigs on "Bluesky: The Online Cone of Silence."

Maintaining the Paths. Protecting the Crops.

Every day, the jungle tries to take over. The more we keep it at bay, the happier we are.

But every single day, it keeps trying.

That's the nature of jungles.

Some Treasures are Cheap

While sorting through a shelf of books in my house, I came across two old ones I'd received from a cousin at a birthday party years ago. She'd bought them at a used bookstore, but I knew then what I know now: I will never get rid of them.

The price of a gift means so little.

[By the way, the books were Bleak House by Charles Dickens and The Poetry of Oscar Wilde. Great stuff.]

Find Something Beautiful Today

 

[Photo by Fadhil Abhimantra at Unsplash]

Zinger

"Santayana took to teaching as a swan to ping-pong."

- Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography

A Visit to a Bank Branch

Two increasingly common features:

Very few tellers. You're supposed to be banking online, get it?

And they're getting rid of safety deposit boxes. 

The home safe business must be booming.

We've gone a long way from the "Open a savings account and get a free radio" days.

A few more years and people will be used to a lower level of personal service. 

The younger ones will not have experienced a time when there were six or seven teller windows.

I mentioned to a bank officer that they might want to consider the potential downsides of the change.

He was puzzled.

And I didn't even get a radio.

On My List

 

I really really really wanted one of these in the Sixties.

Reading and Enjoying

 

It starts with George Washington. 

I believe that Joseph Epstein is our greatest living essayist.

Back By Popular Demand: "The Lady of Shalott"

 

Black-and-White Films

 I know some young people who do not watch black-and-white films. 

I believe they miss the fact that color sometimes detracts from the story. 

"To Kill a Mockingbird" would not have the same emotional impact if it had been filmed in color.

Can you imagine refraining from seeing these black-and-white films?

Citizen Kane; Witness for the Prosecution; The Caine Mutiny; The Longest Day; 12 Angry Men; High Noon; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; The Maltese Falcon; The 39 Steps; Psycho; Casablanca; Lost Horizon; A Tale of Two Cities; David Copperfield; Sunset Boulevard; The Third Man; Double Indemnity; The Grapes of Wrath; The Battle of Algiers; Some Like It Hot; Oliver Twist; The Last Picture Show; It's a Wonderful Life; Harvey; Strangers on a Train; The Train; Touch of Evil; Paths of Glory; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; The Apartment; Dr. Strangelove; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Stagecoach; Stalag 17; The Manchurian Candidate; Inherit the Wind; Judgment at Nuremberg; Key Largo; Sherlock Jr.; On the Waterfront.

The Scent of Orange Blossoms

 

This is the time of the year when my Phoenix neighborhood savors the scent of orange blossoms. 

The entire block was once an orange grove, and enough trees remain for seasonal aroma flashbacks. We still have and use the irrigation canals that stem from the much larger canals that weave throughout the Valley of the Sun. Many of those were initially dug by a long-departed tribe of Indians.

Just the other day, I was noticing the number of out-of-state license plates: Alaska, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Oregon, Washington, Florida and, of course, refugees from California. We are still in the snowbird season, but most of them will have left by the arrival of June.

Summer is for character-building and population reduction. If we didn't have the heat, there'd be around three million more people here because winters in Phoenix are very nice.

[Photo by Max at Unsplash]

The Culture and Music Man

 Kurt Harden deserves a radio station.

His is a life well-lived.

From One Who Knows

 "Notice that when you are sure, your writing is more precise."

- Nicholas Bate

Bullet Dodger

Prayers and healing vibrations are being sent to the Stoic of South Florida.

The FutureLawyer has some good news and here's hoping it gets even better.

First Paragraph

 It is night on the Palatine Hill, a historic height in the heart of Rome. Imagine yourself alone there after the tourists go home and the guards lock the gates. Even during the day, the Palatine is quiet compared with the crowded sites in the valleys below. At night, alone and given an eerie nocturnal run of the place, could you rouse imperial ghosts?

- From Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine by Barry Strauss

Citizens of the Virtual World, Disunite!

 A Substack post with the flavor of our times.

Read it now. You can always scroll later.

To Be a Good Novelist

 "Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

- William Faulkner in The Paris Review

You Know You Want One

 

Meetings and Tiberius

Part of the morning will be spent in meetings and the rest will be devoted to studying revisionary histories of Tiberius.

That's business too, I promise.

As my clients know, I often approach issues from different directions.

On My List

 

The Three Choices in Life

A Large Regular has Naval Ravikant's Three Choices in Life.

Excellent.

Sublime Courage

 The Claremont Review of Books in 2024: Gary Saul Morson on the bravery of the Soviet dissidents. An excerpt:

Bukovsky managed to do so by using his imagination. “I set myself the task of constructing a castle in every detail…. I carefully cut each individual stone,” planned the tapestries in all detail, invited guests, and browsed through old books. “I even knew what was inside those books. I could even read them.” The castle preserved Bukovsky’s sanity because “it saved me from apathy, from indifference to living,” and from the emptiness that annihilates the self. 

"Gold Diggers of 1935"

 

Watched a clip of the dance scene from the end of the new version of "Snow White" and wondered if the spirit of Busby Berkeley is spinning.

An EdTech Tragedy

 Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch look at a UN report on the harm done around the world due to the closing of schools during Covid.

Crank It Up

 

Read Boldly

 

Gurgle

 The Free Press: "The Luxurious Death Rattle of the Great American Magazine."

Life Skills 101

 

Substack: Our schools need a program that teaches success.

On My List

 

One of the Most Interesting Commentators Out There

 Tablet: Michael Lind on "Why Tariffs Are Good."

Find Something Beautiful Today

 

[Photo by Michael Kroul at Unsplash]

Man With a Movie Camera

 

The not-so-good old days in the Soviet Union. 

Made in 1929.

First Paragraph

 In November 1932, fourteen years after it was put in place, Germany's first parliamentary democracy found itself mired in its deepest crisis. The election on 6 November - the second that year - proved disastrous for the moderate parties that constituted the Weimar Republic. A full third of the workforce was unemployed, more than five million people in all, and many of those still in work had been hit with punishing wage cuts. The economy was at rock bottom, and political culture had taken a cutthroat turn. On the streets of Germany's cities, the situation frequently erupted into violent conflicts that left hundreds dead. Senior politicians, businessmen and journalists spoke in hushed tones of a civil war.

- From The Gravediggers: The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic by Rudiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son"

And while we're on a Lewis Carroll roll, let's not overlook "Jabberwocky."

[Photo by Simon Berger at Unsplash]

"In my youth," said his father, " I took to the law,"

 

Start the weekend right with "Father William."

[Photo by Ritchie Valens at Unsplash]

Mrs. Chirac

 

The Little Things Can Be Very Big

Singapore has a surplus of $55 billion a year whereas France has a deficit of around the same number. What are these numbers really telling us? If you realize that there are only 6 million people living in Singapore compared to 60 million people in France, it's clear that the performance of the individual carries much more weight in Singapore. The Singaporean surplus becomes much more significant when you take into account that it has been reached by only 6 million people, with no oil, no gas, no natural resources and very little land.

- From Move Up: Why Some Cultures Advance While Others Don't by Clotaire Rapaille and Andres Roemer

"De Staercke hit on an essential element of leadership - the determination to achieve tempered by humility." - Donald Rumsfeld

"What one needs in life are the pessimism of intelligence and the optimism of will."

- Ambassador Andre de Staercke

Yes

 

First Paragraph

 "Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down - from high flat temples - in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan."

- From The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Waiting for the Chainsaw

Jon Gabriel on why we need more DOGE if we're going to shrink the national debt.

Well Done

 

A Serious Novelist

 One of my plans over the next twelve months is to re-read several Saul Bellow novels, starting with Mr. Sammler's Planet. It is about an elderly Holocaust survivor's life in New York City. Here's the first paragraph:

Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers. In a way it did not matter much to a man of seventy-plus, and at leisure. You had to be a crank to insist on being right. Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear and out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.

A Starlink Deal

FutureLawyer, the stoic tech wizard and poet who lives with his wife and parrots in southern Florida where he practices law when he isn't buying smartwatches, gives a learned update on Starllink.

He's convinced me. It's now on my to-do list.

Live Not by Lies

 

Presidential Management Styles

 From FDR through Trump, we've seen a variety of presidential management styles.

Trump's may be a unique blend.

My latest Substack post has the details.

[Photo by Getty Images for Unsplash+]

On a Roll in Newark

 Visit A Layman's Blog and you will be happier and wiser.

There must be something about Newark, Ohio that produces great bloggers.

In addition to Steve Layman's blog, Cultural Offering, The Hammock Papers are also excellent.

Snake Charmer

 FutureLawyer, who is also a poet, notes a major societal problem.

Crank It Up

 

Life Often Resembles the 1936 Olympics

 Stephen Landry has a moving account of when Luz Long wrote to Jesse Owens.

The Survivability Onion

Cultural Offering has an excellent review of your levels of personal protection.

Remember, if it comes down to you, don't act like you're in an English boxing match. 

Turn into the Tasmanian Devil.

[Photo by Michael Jerrard at Unsplash]