Monday
Graduation Day
Alex graduated from high school yesterday. I'm not sure I've ever felt such mellow sadness. I wasn't crying or anything like that. But I was sad, no doubt about it, and if I could turn the clock back and give him another year of living at home, hanging out with his friends, and enjoying life, I would.
But alas, I guess all of us grow up, even our children. He is now working full-time (one of the fortunate youngsters who could find a real job for the summer), preparing to enter the University of Michigan in August. He's been a great kid, far better and more than I expected or deserved. In many ways, he's already a better man than I am, both in his intuitive kindness and in his calmness. He is, like Nathanael, a man in whom there is no guile.
May God continue to grace my easy-going young man.
ADD Reading Material
For the past twenty years, I've always kept my eyes opened for edifying-yet-easy reading material, the kind of fare I can read in 15-second snippets. I was delighted to see Richard Brookhiser offer his favorite options for this type of reading in a recent issue of National Review. They are: The Greek Anthology, Kerouac's Book of Haikus, and Confucius' Analects. Of those, only the Anthology greatly interests me, though the Kerouac does, too, at least a little bit (note to wife: good Father's Day presents). His description of the Anthology: it "is a collection of epigrams, covering almost two millennia and a host of subjects: epitaphs, beat-downs, propositions, laments."
Random Quotes
"CEOs in 1965 made 24 times more than the average production worker, whereas in 2009 they made 185 times more." Link.
"The 20th C was the bankruptcy of the social utopia. The 21st will be that of the technological one." Nassim Taleb.
"We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, & contrasts with enemies." Nassim Taleb.
“Libertarians value freedom as a hard core without which morally significant human action is simply not possible, but while libertarianism as such has nothing to say beyond asserting and defending individual liberty, this is not at all the same as thinking that libertarians in living out their lives are concerned with nothing other than liberty. This would be as absurd as to think that someone who insisted on the absolute necessity of water for human survival should be taken to assert that water was the only thing needed for a rich and interesting diet.” Gerard Casey.
“Shorting mankind's ingenuity isn't a smart thing to do. But ingenuity isn't wisdom. And shorting mankind's ability to absorb wisdom ”¦ well, aren't you silly if you don't?” Dylan Grice.
“In sum, monarchs look to the long run, democratic rulers to the short term.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
“In a democracy, by contrast, the government will grab as much as it can, without regard to the future. Precisely because the holders of power do not own the government, they lack the incentive to look to the long run. “A democratic ruler can use the government apparatus to his personal advantage, but he does not own it ”¦ [h]e owns the current use of government resources, but not their capital value. In distinct contrast to a king, a president will want to maximize not total government wealth (capital values and current income), but current income (regardless and at the expense of capital values)." Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
“In 1970, just 16% of Americans ages 25 to 29 had never been married; today that's true of an astonishing 55% of the age group.” Kay Hymowitz.
"One day I met a man who was sitting quite silent near Whitney, in the Thames Valley, in a very large, long, low inn that stands in those parts, or at least stood then, for whether it stands now or not depends upon the Fussyites, whose business it is to Fuss, and in their Fussing to disturb mankind." Hilaire Belloc on the origin of the State (a TDE repeat, sorry).
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Alex with his cousin, and my godson, Daniel:
