Author: Andrew
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Old Hymns
A friend I grew up with is going through a big health shock. Emergency surgery. Waiting on pathology reports. The stuff that gets shared in group texts to ask for hope and prayer. It’s really got me. He’s my age and has kids my kids ages. He is like me. I could be him. So…
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Anomie
Back in the days of yore, if you did not manage to get a job at Google in 2005 you could still buy its stock. You had at least the option of gaining from its appreciation assuming you thought it inevitable. Over the last decade and a half there have been multiple generations who succeeded…
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When do you know if it’s over?
Trump threatens withholding federal funding if Zohran Mamdani wins the NYC mayoral election. Truly insane, though very normal, behavior at this point. I just don’t see how this sort of Central Planning and authoritarianism doesn’t stop now that it’s started. When I say over, I do think that this experiment, or this chapter of the…
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Clay Pigeons
Sadie often signs this song to the kids and I just want the lyrics here. Originally, this is Blaze Foley. We’ve played his The Dawg Years vinyl many times at the house and John Prine also has a good cover it. Today, Sadie sent me a video of her playing it on the guitar to…
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Good news out of Mississippi!
“And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam”– Nina Simone A massive surge in children’s literacy in my home state! Perhaps more noticeable than how exciting that is is how grim the numbers look in other states: 41% of public school 4th graders in California cannot read at a basic level. Not good. This good news doesn’t travel far and…
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After Hurricane Helene
We’re on the anniversary of Hurricane Helene. I posted this on an old blog a few days after and wanted to bring it here. What a year, man! Hard to be grateful for deeply painful and tragic things, but the second and third order effects of that day and the first weeks and two months…
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The Revolt of the Public
and the crisis of authority in the new millennium By Martin Gurri A great read. It posed a new theory and one that seems to be aging well: “The information technologies of the 21st century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the…
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Welcome to The Continental. We Do Hope You Enjoy Your Stay.
But there is a way to live. We live as humans with an autonomy of mind. We step back in order to see the semantic system as puppeteer. And from that vantage point of critical distance, we reapply our disbelief to ALL constructed worlds of declared reality, no matter how appealing to our internal dialogs,…