SplendorQuest.com

I don’t go to the doctor very often. I don’t get sick much, and, even when I do, I’m not always willing to make time to do anything about it. I work very hard, and all I want to do is work, and I don’t want to have to take time to slow down even when my body really needs to slow down.

In consequence, I am the perfect stooge for the ObamaCare scheme that Americans seem hell-bent on ramming down each other’s throats. Welfare scams only work when there are people willing to produce wealth long after it has become obvious that working hard is for suckers — when all the clued-in people have already jumped on the gravy train.

In the case of socialized medicine, the clued-in people will discover more and more things wrong with their health. Why not? It will be people like me — who don’t get sick and who refuse to let illness keep us from working — who will be footing the bill.

And that’s just the way things are in the welfare-state we have made of this once-free country. Working women defer motherhood so welfare moms can pop out kid after kid, each one endowed at (more…)

When I moved to Chandler, Arizona, 16 years ago, I was informed that, not only would I be expected to participate in the community’s curbside recycling program, but that enforcement officers would come around at random to inspect the special blue trash barrels to make sure they were not being used to dispose of yard waste or other forbidden items.

This seemed funny to me at the time — so outrageously offensive as to be comical. I thought about updating Homer with a tale about Ulysses versus the Recyclops.

It’s not so funny to me now. For one thing, the idea of a government functionary trespassing on private property to pass judgement on one’s trash is the kind of intrusion that should drive any American to thoughts of armed rebellion. And for another, things have gotten quite a bit worse since then.

By now there is no outrage too comically absurd for some government functionary — as humorless a specimen of humanity as has ever existed — to attempt to ram down your throat.

Consider these as examples:

• The State of Michigan is attempting to forbid a mom from hosting neighborhood kids at her home before school. Why? Because she is providing day-care without a license.
• In (more…)

[This is not for the book, except as context. This is an essay I wrote in the mid-1990s, an attempt to explain to libertarians, especially various flavors of devotees of Ayn Rand, why the idea of a minimal state must always fail — just as the minimal state as envisioned in 1789 is failing right now. The argument holds up well, I think — though I am by now less lean-look’d a prophet. It’s just that no one wants to hear it… –GSS]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries (more…)

I’ve known for more than a year that I want to write a book about what we’re getting wrong.

As a species, that is.

Through all of human history.

Surely that’s a man-sized ambition — and perhaps also a new high-water mark for the abstract concept denoted by the word “hubris.”

That’s as may be. In truth, this is an undertaking I would rather not undertake. For one thing, I’m busy and, in consequence, I’m physically tired much of the time. For another, this is less a thankless job than it is a task for which I can reasonably expect to be punished. Not officially punished, one may hope, but it seems likely that I will be derided, hectored or hounded as I proceed with this project. I don’t shun that sort of thing, not ever, but it’s not something I actively court.

But none of that matters. The ideas I want to talk about drive me wild — in the best of all possible senses. I abhor every form of the claim of unchosen duty, and yet I feel that I must go through all this, that I cannot live in peace, much less die in peace, until I have transcribed every bit of everything (more…)

…prepare yourself for the asshole cops…

Just think: If you just keep voting for more and more government, eventually the nanny-state might find a way to stuff you back up into your mammy’s womb. Or, failing that, they’ll exterminate you and everyone you know and love. Either way, the world will finally be rid of the pestilence of pesky humanity.

Black humor? No shit. But at least you don’t have to wonder who’s the asswipe now…

[This is me in February of 2004. It’s fun for me to read now, because we were selling a lot then, and — like a lot of folks — the next year, 2005, was my best year so far. I didn’t plan to follow that up with three years of drought, but some days the bear eats you. This year started out with five more months of drought, and yet we’re going to finish 2009 somewhere between $8 and $10 million in gross volume. We’re surfing a 90-day pipeline of around $100K in GCI, and I’m working very hard to pump that up to $250K. If we can get there, we’ll actually have a business.

But: I’m not selling success as a matter of dollars and cents. That matters to me, but not as much as Splendor does, not as much as integrity and follow-through and a comprehensive commitment not just to the good but to getting better — all the time. I have an essay aborning in me about everything I have learned about sales in the last ten years, but even that’s not as much as I want to do — as much as I want to have done. I (more…)

[This is me, from 09/10/2006. –GSS]

 
Cathy and I watched The Path to 9/11 on television tonight. I had forgotten that we were in Metro New York for the Turn of the Millennium. My father lives in Connecticut, and we went there that year for New Year’s Day. The photo you see is my son crawling all over a bronze statue of a stock broker in Liberty Park, directly across from what was then the Merrill Lynch Building — on December 30, 1999. I lived in Manhattan for ten years, from 1976 to 1986. For quite a few of those years, I worked just across from Liberty Park, in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. At the other end of that little brick park was the southeast entrance to the World Trade Center complex. I worked insane hours in those days, and, very often, when I got out of work, I would go sit at this tiny circular plaza plopped down between the Twin Towers. Not quite pre-dawn, still full dark, but completely deserted — and to be completely alone in New York City is an accomplishment. I would throw my head back and look up at the towers, the fourth movement (more…)

This is me looking back on looking back on a Labor Day a long time ago. The first extract was written on Labor Day, 2005, as the City of New Orleans was demonstrating for all of us that dependence on government is a fatal error. The second extract was written a year or two before that. And the Labor Day I am talking about there must have been eleven or twelve years ago. Even so, every bit of this is perfectly apposite to the world we live in now — more is the pity.

This is me from elsewhen. I think about this every year at Labor Day. I spent much of the weekend working on business planning issues, macro, micro and meta. I remember from the days when I had a job how much I relished long weekends, because I could build so much on vast tracts of uninterrupted time. I did a bunch of money work last week, but my weekend was virtually my own — to fill with the work that too often takes a back seat to money work. Off and on we had Fox News on in the office, and the whining, pissing and moaning was an (more…)

“Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world.”Charles Eames

“You gotta pick your battles”.-Mom

There are dragons at the drawbridge, there are demons inside the fortress. The goal is to understand which dragons are the threat and which demons must be purged.

Physical safety is mandatory. Health is a priority: Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual health. Health, safety, and security must be maintained or created, the rest is going to depend on personality, time, desire. You gotta pick your battles, although, once health is attained the rest is simply a matter of balance.

I can’t do anything unless I’m brutally honest with myself about what is going on. What must be done? What should be done? What could be done? What can’t be done? How will it affect the balance in my life? Can I answer these questions honestly? If not, who can help me find the truth?

Then, you have to get to work. Every day. Wake up ready, get something accomplished, go to bed satisfied. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Adjust as necessary, find the truth always, get something accomplished every day.

I’m not sure the method is as important as the (more…)

Quoted from Mark Alexander’s wonderful Richard Mitchell web site:

 
When Benjamin Franklin was hardly more than a boy, but clearly a comer, he decided to achieve moral perfection. As guides in this enterprise, he chose Jesus and Socrates. One of his self-assigned rules for daily behavior was nothing more than this: "Imitate Jesus and Socrates."

I suspect that few would disagree. Even most militant atheists admire Jesus, while assuming, of course, that they admire him for the right reasons. Even those who have no philosophy and want none admire Socrates, although exactly why, they can not say. And very few, I think, would tell the young Franklin that he ought to have made some different choices: Alexander, for instance, or Francis Bacon.

Jesus, just now, has no shortage of would-be imitators, although they do seem to disagree among themselves as to how he ought to be imitated. But the imitators of Socrates, if any there be, are hard to find. For one thing, if they are more or less accurately imitating him, they will not organize themselves into Socrates clubs and pronounce their views. If we want to talk with them, we will have to seek them out; and, unless we ourselves become, to (more…)