sunday school

The life you live molds you into the person that lives it.

complaint box

The health obsessions of others are tiresome.

go

Self-suppression is as important as self-expression if there is to be self-realization.  To create one's self by losing one's self is the mightiest path.

scotch

The glance and smile
More at the eyes than lips,
More in the cheeks than
Centered, sets me off.

Sets me thinking of
What else could be so,
Some better and more
Domineering way.

But then I let my mind
Play out the reel. And,
I'd rather be real with you
Than have my fantasies.

While

An even keel, honesty, and a straightforward presentation, in court at least, can be very effectively punctuated by one or two momentary bursts of outrage.  When justified, of course.

simple

Ryan, Bloomberg, Obama - the sort of guys I like in politics.

Triantis

It is an anthropomorphic fallacy that anything is better than "death" for a non-living entity, such as a corporation.  A company should be willing to pay a certain amount to avoid liquidation, but not more.

accretion of pleasure

Some living, social connections grow organically, but appear as steel.  This is not fakery, but camouflage, and the difference between the two could not be more important.

Marshall

The second tier of the founding fathers, in particular, were seeking honor.  The American revolution would not have succeeded without this.

sale!

I occasionally toy with an idea - plainly false but interesting as an experiment - that the prominence of a thing accurately and automatically indicates its importance.  That, as a result, consumption really is the great pursuit of mankind and that the most important thing I thought today was "chicken on rice" because that was the message that flashed the largest and brightest past my view as I walked in.

objectively cornered

There are any number of situations in which no further movement is appropriate without more facts.  A key move of strategy is to avoid such situations.

Cain and Abel

Is the problem suffering or is the problem consciousness?  It depends on which came first, or more precisely which is emergent.  It may seem grotesque to suggest that a reduction in either suffering or consciousness is equally humane, but in fact we know this and it is why we put televisions in hospital rooms.

But the deeper point is exactly deeper: if consciousness rose up, in the course of time, out of an unconscious, primeval past, then suffering is simply part of the conscious experiencing of what was always there.  The solution, in this case, is to reduce the kind of experiencing that is taken as suffering.  Consciousness-altering.  To be sure, to the extent this primary response is limited, a secondary response - reducing the environmental predicates of suffering - is appropriate.  But consciousness-altering remains the first response, both in sequence and in importance.

If, on the other hand, an unsuffering consciousness was first, and suffering arrives as a corruption of that prior state, then the priority is exactly the reverse.

Eastern and Western religions.

after TR

Courtesy and courage are the mark of a man.

middlemarch

All roads bend: even the straightest path clings to a declining earth.

not enough sleep

In which I make bad advertising for a hypothetical bankruptcy practice:

"Rely on Smith & Jones LLP: when only the best business failure will do."

now

To tackle a project, what's called for is aggresive cooperation.

Grant

Noisy malcontents: "there are always more of them before they are counted."

oaken

There is little use to sweetness in a man.

Quinlan

More Americans should understand the Mexican war, and just what a long and continuing history we have of being a rotten neighbor.

not a speck of cereal

I walk down the sidewalk and pass, sitting out among the trash to be taken away, a large and lavishly framed cross stitch of a cat atop a vine covered wall, on which the inscription: "In memory of beloved Pearly, 1986-1991."

And I wonder: which died first?  The love for this pet, the tolerance for the cross stitch memorial, or the owner? 

Pitiful, really, and a reminder of Morris's Gates of Heaven, which is one of those treatments that transcends its subject. 

And that pitiful, beautiful name!  Pearly.  Only a cat lover would name a cat...that.

in a state

A word that glows, in its different but connected meanings, like an ember: state.

West Point

That Lincoln can so write seems only a facet of that wonderful man, and therefore not a wonder in itself.  But that Grant can write, and so write, is a thing of wonder and humbles his reader.

between two chairs

My honor is my fidelity?

with

All relationships, even the best ones, are costly, bulky and nettlesome.  Have them anyway.

we

There is a wildness to loving,
A zoology of two, a fertile zone
Of diatomaceous space that
Teems by our embrace.

iron

To survive, most people will do anything.

iron

Combat is a sacrifice of even the victorious soldier.

more

That is to say, it should be a functional illusion.

proposition

Rational movement is the result of calibrated imbalance.

worlds collide

Here I am with my phone, on hold with Singapore Airlines.  Their hold music is Johnny Cash, but with pan pipes added in.  The mental fuses pop.

casus belli

Worth reflection: we feel conflicts have to be about something.

state's rights

Procedure is the first refuge of the scoundrel, even if patriotism is the last.

More seriously, there's a running question of whether the American Civil War was over slavery or state's rights.  But it is a foolish question.  The Lincoln-Douglas gets at it plainly: the rights of states are nothing but the field of action over which the slavery issue moves.  At any point, the winning side will want to limit the impedance of the field to its prevailing movement, while the other side seeks to increase the difficulty of the terrain.

encampment

One of the many lessons of the American Civil War is that reason and right are no match for economic interest and regional unity...until violence commences.  If and when violence does commence, the side with the better part of reason and right has an edge.

Congressional Globe

Rereading the Lincoln-Douglas debates is an education in the limits of any man, even Lincoln, and - moreso - in the limits of public discourse.  Over thirty hours of intellegent, intensive discourse - even that much of it - only get you so far.

Asbury Park

People will take their pleasure and not make sense.  They just will.  It is what most people do.

living

Little is deserved, much is gotten.

clap

The pathways of elaborate ignorance are ample, pleasurable, heavy trod.  And down them ride all enemies and most wealth.

yesterday

There is a lifelong dance between your will and your native capacity, to the tune of your situation.  If you have the will of Fred Astaire but your capacity is not Ginger Rogers, you get nowhere by pretending otherwise.  You have to adjust.  Fred would.

Joseph Story

What everybody understands, even though it is disturbing, is that the taking of great pleasure from something is usually in maw of being consumed by that something.

slouch

A pattern of casual sex is usually a sign of boredom borne of personal limitations.  By casual I mean neither extramarital, nor fascinated, nor passionate, but truely and sadly casual.