Cultural Offering
“Simon-Thomas is particularly excited about research emerging on the physiology of well-being. As this has historically been studied through a lens of disfunction, focusing on mental health conditions, challenges, and observed limitations within the bodies and brains of individuals experiencing struggle, we do not yet know as much about the positive impacts of traits like robustness and vitality.”
“Simon-Thomas is interested in developing a stronger understanding of mechanisms and processes in the body and brain that underly positive mental health function. To begin, she is looking at physiological markers and pathways in the brain that function in a way indicative of strong mental health, resilience, and potential for wellness.”
This crossed my mind at a recent community event where the effects of the drug were on full display.
One of the greatest memories I have of my father (at least parenting memories) was when he said to me: “That boy is no longer welcome in our house.” It was said once, although a couple of other times there were subtle hints. I understood him completely and that was that.
I can’t tell you how many times this has saved me.
Same with this:
“Optimize for sleeping at night, not maximizing a spreadsheet.”
And don’t miss Part 2.
“Bot þe man wolde me nat abandone þer, ne suffre me to passen forþ. I miȝt nat flee, for hys companiouns, of whom þer were a gret nombre, beſet me aboute, and heelden me faſt þat I ne scholde nat ascapen.”
Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G major. Happy Telemann Tuesday.
“The launch of Ask Intel follows changes to the company’s support model that include removing inbound public phone numbers for support in most countries and directing customers and partners to initiate cases online. Intel has also ended direct support interactions through certain social media platforms, consolidating engagement around web-based case systems and community channels.”
A lot of words to describe the coming frustration.
“Imagine a single policy change that could lower food prices, free up land for construction or conservation, improve the environment, cut greenhouse-gas emissions, and reduce fuel costs.”
Jame Meigs at City Journal:
“But the RFS program fails on its own terms. For example, EPA rules effectively require that automotive gasoline sold in the U.S. contain 10 percent ethanol. But that addition doesn’t increase the nation’s gasoline supply by 10 percent. The amount of energy contained in a gallon of ethanol, it turns out, is only slightly higher than the fossil-fuel energy needed to grow and process the corn that produces that ethanol.”
Read on. Henry came over for dinner last night. When he arrived, he pulled out his notebook to make a list for the week before things got too busy. Who says they don’t pay attention.
Call McConnell’s office.
“Chrissy Lawler saw her social life dry up awhile back. There were fewer invitations. Snarky comments about her behavior. A good friend told her that she no longer wanted to hang out.”
“When Lawler asked what was wrong, she was surprised by the answer. You’re not that fun anymore—you leave early to go to bed, she says her friends told her.
‘I was devastated,’ says Lawler, who is 38 and lives in Las Vegas. 'People turned away from me because I prioritized my sleep.’”
She lives my dream. When we go to a party, my wife usually eyes me at around 9:00 p.m. If I am across the room, I commonly do a stretch and suggest that we need to get going. Badge of honor.
“Chicken thighs are proof of God’s love for us.”
Thanks, Rob. I have never read Jim Harrison and walked away feeling worse for it.
(via freiherr-von-naarenburg)
“It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.”
Joe Sobran
“We all know the feeling. You’re on Zoom, meeting with colleagues or catching up with a friend or trying to nail a job interview, when it happens: a freeze, garbled audio, a blank screen.”
Ha ha. Our team was interviewing yesterday…in one of our meeting rooms. No glitching.
During a recent interview, the candidate expressed to me how nice it was to be interviewing in person. He could have just been saying that, but we hired him away from a remote job. He comes to the office every day and seems to like it.
We even talk in the hallway. No glitching.
(via freiherr-von-naarenburg)
First day of Lent and six and one-half weeks before Easter. Day of penitence indeed. This was not an Ash Wednesday photo because I would have been in the congregation rather than in the picture.
My memory is that he worked Ash Wednesday alone.
He accepted plenty of penitence.
God bless him. “Not at'all…”
Never a word, but plenty of wine. One of my heroes.
“The Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with better AI tools, turned into a breakthrough for workers like Koh. Remote working became common. Résumés could be written with native-level English proficiency. In recent years, video-filtering software has allowed IT workers to mask their identity.”
“The PRx arm received a debit card loaded with $80 monthly for up to 12 months. The card was valid to purchase eligible fresh, frozen, or canned fruits, vegetables, and legumes from grocery retailers. Both arms received diabetes self-management educational materials.”
Didn’t work. Occasionally, we’ll get this kind of idea pitched to us (the other is art therapy). I am a big believer in both fresh produce and art BUT these are things that an individual needs personally seek out. Not everything - not even most things - can be managed by a third party.
Everyone who reads this likely understands. Individual responsibility.
The important part is articulating it when someone in your community explains that people just need access to fresh produce or whatever cause of the day is.
“But Christ was also a tiger, the denouncer of a narrow and loveless piety, the scourge of the merely moral, the enemy of every religious tradition of his day, no matter how sacred, that did not serve the Kingdom as he saw it and embodied it in all its wildness and beauty.”
“I expected I would go through some digital withdrawal, and that happened. Dozens of times, I felt an involuntary urge to reach for my phone: to check the time, to take a picture, to see if the snow had canceled my flight, to look up ‘upma’ before ladling some onto my plate, to order Valentine’s Day flowers, to find out what I was missing and who was trying to reach me. It felt unnatural not to be scrolling while waiting for a session to begin.”
Find ways to leave your phone behind. I quit taking my phone to dinner with my wife. I try to leave it behind on Sundays. I need to ignore it more often.
Sad to hear of the passing of Robert Duvall. It brings back a rush of memories from a summer...
- From being a Chinese dissident who fled China for America at age 25, to watching his daughter Alysa Liu taking home an Olympic GOLD for #TeamUSA. This is that proud father, Arthur Liu. 🇺🇸🥇⛸️ pic.twitter.com/13XkXbJ0JQ — Asian American (@AsianAmericanUS) February 21, 2026ALTView on Twitter
- cosmonautroger:
Vivian Maier
“He goes to his office on his central Virginia farm at 7 a.m., fueled by the same brand of coffee, and writes until 11 a.m., five days a week. It’s a routine he started four decades ago as a young lawyer, writing before his actual workday began. Grisham, now 70 years old, still finds the morning hours his most productive.”
“Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.”—Antonin Scalia
(via in-my-minds-eye-2349)
“Auf Gott will ich mich stets verlassen.” Composed when Telemann was 19 years old.
Happy Telemann Tuesday.
R.I.P. Robert Duvall.
Spent yesterday with the Next Generation Real Intelligence Unit. It was day three of unbroken superhero identification. I have no doubt that today will be day four.
Superheros still call their uncles.
“Music activates your whole brain at once—dopamine floods for pleasure, endorphins ease pain, and it sharpens focus while cutting anxiety. It’s legit therapy: lifelong listening builds cognitive reserve, helping delay decline and support conditions like Parkinson’s.”
Klaudyna Żołnierek performs Robert de Visée’s Prelude in A Minor. Make it a Lute Monday.
Nicholas Bate on Parkinson’s Law.
The best maintenance of an organization usually involves pruning for growth.
- Sad to hear of the passing of Robert Duvall. It brings back a rush of memories from a summer...
- From being a Chinese dissident who fled China for America at age 25, to watching his daughter Alysa Liu taking home an Olympic GOLD for #TeamUSA. This is that proud father, Arthur Liu. 🇺🇸🥇⛸️ pic.twitter.com/13XkXbJ0JQ — Asian American (@AsianAmericanUS) February 21, 2026ALTView on Twitter
- cosmonautroger:
Vivian Maier
We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society
God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do
Some days, I’m not sure we’re going to make it.
Great to see my Congressman, Troy Balderson, on Victor Davis Hanson’s show.
At one point in the exchange, he noted that he had checked with the CDC and the death rate for humans remains at 100%.
Undertakers are full of such knowledge.
I think this about The Alan Parsons Project I Robot.
Michael Franks doesn’t get enough attention.
B'wana-He No Home
Cook your own food.
“Coffee makers are smart. Doorbells are smart. Thermostats, scales, toothbrushes, refrigerators, and even trash cans are now smart. Today it is a hollow compliment applied to almost anything that moves, sells, or flatters our self-image. A toddler who stacks two blocks is “so smart!” An adult who can parallel-park receives the same adjective.”
“When everything is smart, nothing is.”
Amen.
I now seek out “dumb” appliances and tools. The smart tools anticipation of my needs is sorely lacking; I prefer to do my own anticipation.
The destruction of language continues.
- Sad to hear of the passing of Robert Duvall. It brings back a rush of memories from a summer...
- From being a Chinese dissident who fled China for America at age 25, to watching his daughter Alysa Liu taking home an Olympic GOLD for #TeamUSA. This is that proud father, Arthur Liu. 🇺🇸🥇⛸️ pic.twitter.com/13XkXbJ0JQ — Asian American (@AsianAmericanUS) February 21, 2026ALTView on Twitter
- cosmonautroger:
Vivian Maier
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.— Roger Scruton
Right here.
“Epstein retails banal opinions as if they are sage reflections (‘I think religion plays a major positive role in many lives’) and tarot-and-crystals-adjacent woo ('The soul I describe as the dark matter of the brain’), as if he is reporting from the front line of science. The temptation is to chalk this up to 'the banality of evil’. But it illustrates something else worth paying attention to: the vacuousness of the international business elite.”
(via freiherr-von-naarenburg)
“This year, the nation’s 250th anniversary, Mount Vernon is edging toward completion of a multiyear, $50 million project—aided by new technologies, new research and newly resurfaced documents—that is reversing inaccuracies in the bedroom where he really slept, the study where he and Rochambeau likely plotted their strategy for Yorktown, and the rest of the mansion.”
Maybe when this is complete:
“Washington’s personal study is still a work in progress. Its furnishings—a mahogany secretary, a replica of his ‘uncommon’ barrel-backed chair whose seat revolves 360 degrees (the original is in Mount Vernon’s museum), and a large wood cabinet holding more than 1,200 rare books and pamphlets—will soon be joined by a replica of a globe he purchased on becoming president. Next year, the room will get its proper wallpaper.”
“The federal level has long been more complicated, but at the state level, Republican-led states still tend to enact “Reaganite” policies of limited government and free enterprise, while Democrat-led states tend to enact special-interest-oriented regulations and spending programs.”
Migration patterns among states:
“New York, for example, is losing fully one percent of its population to other states every year, on average. At the other extreme, Idaho, South Carolina, Montana, and Delaware are growing by more than one percent of their population moving in from other states, on average per year.
The only Democratic-leaning states in the top 10 are Delaware and Maine, and the only Republican-leaning states in the bottom 10 are Louisiana and Alaska. When we look at these exceptions, unusual levels of freedom stand out. Louisiana is quite low on freedom for its region, #31 overall according to the Ruger-Sorens index of economic and personal freedom. The only Deep South state worse than Louisiana is its neighbor, Mississippi (#40). Mississippi, not coincidentally, was the only other Deep South state to experience net domestic out-migration over that five-year period (–0.15 percent per year).”
Michael Wade has a fine list of books students should read in high school or college.
“The question both companies are now racing to answer is just how elastic consumer demand is in the obesity market. Lower prices are clearly unlocking growth in demand, especially in the cash-pay market. As Novo Nordisk Chief Financial Officer Karsten Munk Knudsen argued in an interview this week, this isn’t a price war, so much as a search for the price points that open the floodgates of access.”
I heard a pretty convincing case that, at $255 per month, it would make sense for employers to open up GLP1-agonist drugs for weight loss. The Trump Rx prices look to range from $299 to $499 per month, depending on strength.
Article here.
- Sad to hear of the passing of Robert Duvall. It brings back a rush of memories from a summer...
- From being a Chinese dissident who fled China for America at age 25, to watching his daughter Alysa Liu taking home an Olympic GOLD for #TeamUSA. This is that proud father, Arthur Liu. 🇺🇸🥇⛸️ pic.twitter.com/13XkXbJ0JQ — Asian American (@AsianAmericanUS) February 21, 2026ALTView on Twitter
- cosmonautroger:
Vivian Maier
Still the greatest protest sign ever. Occupy Vancouver. 2011. Take that, AI.
More common sense here.
Obviously.
“Once the report has identified the problem, they go on to mention the only solutions anyone ever mentions. The government has to step in with retraining and handouts for these benighted souls flummoxed by ChatGPT. One can’t help but notice that a lot of those job descriptions are more or less either government jobs, or private sector jobs made necessary only by government regulation. Retraining? Handouts? It’s a maladaptive snake eating itself, and turtles all the way down.”
Sippican Cottage studies the threat of AI…without Clippy’s assistance.
A sleeper among greatest hits albums.
Happy Saturday.
“For four decades, American students have been taking misconceived ‘rhetoric and composition’ classes, which now are almost completely under the ideological control of the woke. We need to fix that so we can return to a republic of vigorous, fair, thoughtful, and productive discussion.”
Bring back debate! And not that horrific spreading debate. Real exchanges and clash of ideas.
- Sad to hear of the passing of Robert Duvall. It brings back a rush of memories from a summer...
- From being a Chinese dissident who fled China for America at age 25, to watching his daughter Alysa Liu taking home an Olympic GOLD for #TeamUSA. This is that proud father, Arthur Liu. 🇺🇸🥇⛸️ pic.twitter.com/13XkXbJ0JQ — Asian American (@AsianAmericanUS) February 21, 2026ALTView on Twitter
- cosmonautroger:
Vivian Maier
Well worth your time.
(via freiherr-von-naarenburg)
“And diet and exercise do enough good that if they were available in pill form, everyone would be gobbling them.”
True.
“Aging researchers talk about lifespan, but they also talk about ‘health span’ – the years when people are able to get around, feel good, and enjoy life. Right now centenarians are the fastest growing age cohort in some nations, but they’re generally pretty frail by comparison to middle-aged adults. An intervention that just extended old age would be economically ruinous, and really not much fun for the beneficiaries. (Like Jonathan Swift’s Struldbrugs, who lived very long lives but aged all the while, with unfortunate results.)”
Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Roger Kimball’s post (and responses) here.
I have been a regular reader of The Wall Street Journal since the fall of 1983. The editorial page of the newspaper, under Robert Bartley, served as another university for me.
The newspaper was always different from every other paper. There were even tutorials written on how one should read The Wall Street Journal. The entire paper was a pleasure to consume.
That continued until the past few years - I blame editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, without having done the research work to properly lay blame.
But the decline has been noticeable on both the news and editorial sides of the house.
I am now reduced to playing silly games with the paper each morning. I open to the main site and try to identify the idiot reporters from Politico, The Washington Post, or the Financial Times, simply by the article headline. The articles themselves are barely readable and completely predictable. Next, I hop over to the editorial page to check on the latest hang-wringing and half measures. “What does Alan Blinder or Rahm Emanuel have for me today?” I wonder. “What caution should I exercise now?” “How should I be disappointed in the right policy executed in the not-quite-right way?” “Has Peggy Noonan retired?”
The decline is real and disappointing.
Given my current opinion of The Wall Street Journal and its Editorial Board, they would need to provide me with examples of those they consider to be innocent. No examples were provided.
Update: Take a look at the examples. This is why it has become the first duty of the modern reader to clarify terms, evidence, and sources.
“In central Cameroon, every year since 1994, community health workers had gone door to door to treat every person with a dose of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin — enough to kill all the worms and all the larvae. The drug distribution relied on about $115 million a year from the United States Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has shut down.”
My first reaction to this was to wonder why we were paying for this since 1994.
Telemann’s – Cello Sonata in D Major from 1728 - nearly 300 years old.
You know what day it is. Fill the world with Telemann today.
(Source: youtube.com)
“He asked me to state precisely what the problem was and he wrote down exactly what I said. Then he asked what the conditions for its solution were. I replied that I didn’t know what he meant by that question. His response was, ‘If you don’t know what conditions have to be satisfied for a solution to be reached, how do you know when you’ve solved the problem? I told him I’d never thought of approaching a problem that way and he replied, 'Then you’d better start. I’ll work though this one with you this time, but don’t expect me to do your problem solving for you because that’s your job, not mine.”
Every few years, we should all read Arthur Elliott’s study in management, MacGregor.
“Both of these articles cover the same announcement, but they produce two very different impressions. The Quartz article strongly implies that Amazon is firing people because it can now offload their work to AI. (I mean: look at the Andy Jassey quote they included in the sub-head, they clearly wanted readers to believe AI caused these job losses.)”
Rob has some excellent thoughts on his parents…and got me thinking about the performative ritual of public coffee drinking.
I don’t think I ever saw my father or mother drink a single thing in the car. I believe my father missed the entire bottled-water phenomenon. When he finished mowing the lawn, he would usually drink a Little Kings on the porch.
When adults were adults.
Amen, brother. Also, read 200 Reasons Why I’m Here:
“I’m not here to watch life happen, I’m here to make it happen.”
Happy Monday. Best sure to read his story.
“The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a Rutgers University-affiliated research organization, published a comprehensive report in May 2024 documenting what it calls the ‘Singham Network’—a web of nonprofits, fiscal sponsors, and alternative media outlets that share funding, personnel, and messaging.⁸”
Ugh.
“The cabin is not the cottage. They may be similar, but they are not the same. The cottage is for warm weather. The cabin is for cold weather.”
Amen. That’s Michigan fall. Michigan winter is another thing entirely.
Love the cabin bookshelf:
Very strange orb in the sky this afternoon. Bright, and even gives off heat.
- Sad to hear of the passing of Robert Duvall. It brings back a rush of memories from a summer...
- by George Snr Inness
- From being a Chinese dissident who fled China for America at age 25, to watching his daughter Alysa Liu taking home an Olympic GOLD for #TeamUSA. This is that proud father, Arthur Liu. 🇺🇸🥇⛸️ pic.twitter.com/13XkXbJ0JQ — Asian American (@AsianAmericanUS) February 21, 2026ALTView on Twitter