Of the original stories that Tolkien wrote for his nascent mythology, the first real attempt at depth as well as breadth was The Fall of Gondolin, most likely begun in 1916. From there, the story took on an unwieldy and unpredictable life of its own, like many of Tolkien’s writings. Tolkien’s wife, Edith, wrote out the story sometime in 1917 after he had first written it, and Tolkien offered a version of it as a public essay in 1920 at Exeter College, Oxford. The story appeared as one of the most drawn-out of Tolkien’s Lost Tales (the first version of the larger mythology that would one day become The Silmarillion); in slightly different form in the 1926 “Sketch of the Mythology”; in yet again slightly different form in the 1930 Quenta Noldorinwa; and, finally, in 1950 and 1951, as Tolkien was trying to write the history of the ages preceding the now completed but yet unpublished The Lord of the Rings. The final 1951 version ended up, more or less, in the 1977 Silmarillion.
— Read on www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/two-tolkiens-one-better-world/
Monthly Archives: April 2019
Searching for Deeper Common Ground | wgvu
Today, guests from the Hauenstein Center join us to talk about the event Searching for Deeper Common Ground as part of the center’s Common Ground
— Read on www.wgvunews.org/post/searching-deeper-common-ground
Controversial Colorado gun bill becomes law, 11 sheriffs willing to choose jail over enforcement – CNN
Colorado’s controversial “red flag” bill was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis on Friday, with more than half of the state’s counties declaring opposition to it and many sheriffs promising not to enforce it at all.
— Read on www.cnn.com/2019/04/12/us/colorado-red-flag-gun-laws/index.html
Very proud of the Park Country Sheriff for being a true hero.
3 Up, 3 Down (Softly)
Elon Musk catches a lot of grief, and to be fair, much of it is well-deserved. But if there is one of his endeavors for which I am an unequivocal fanboy and for which he is performing an unqualified good, it’s SpaceX. Where various NASA contractors have dumped almost $12 billion for the Space Launch System and haven’t even a single flight to show for it, Musk and Co. spent a mere $500 million of private money (no, that’s not much in terms of rocket development) and came up with the Falcon Heavy, currently the world’s most powerful launch vehicle. Tonight, it made it’s second successful flight, launching a commercial payload into orbit, while successfully landing all three booster stages, two at Cape Canaveral and one on a barge at sea. Bravo to Elon, bravo to everybody at SpaceX, and bravo to the private sector, which now runs rings around government sponsored space programs. More, please.
The old nativist superstition: the sky is falling and the ship of state is too full
The very unattractive and irrational “aoc”
Amigo this is the old, old idea (Socialist/Marxist) that entrepreneurial skill and business acumen count for nothing. Essentially all property is theft and inequality of condition is immoral. “Billionaires need no more spiritual defense from me. But AOC’s presumption that all the very rich do is take, take, take because they are narcissistic and dishonest at their core is an idea based in rage, not in reason.” Wedgewood and Boulton became prosperous because of hard work, use of new technology and effective marketing campaigns. Just today I was saying that I may not love Trump but one has to give him credit for being an effective and successful business leader and promoter. It is a mistake to merely envy or hate (but it is easy to do). The essence of anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred is based on envy. One should not hate those who are successful but emulate them or at least learn from them. I am no genius myself but smart enough to recognize genuine talent and genius when I see it. And I do not hate those greater than I -I admire them especially when they are good, generous and kind.
“I was alive”
Walter White from Breaking Bad famously said – “I was alive”. What essentially drove him to build that Drug Empire was entrepreneurship, that excitement of feeling alive. It was not about providing for family. Being alive is about being in direct contact with reality — absorbing and processing external signals. It demands constant awareness – processing stimuli, gauging situations, and adapting accordingly. In that sense, being alive is also a lot about being human. What separates us from animals, at least most of us, is that ability to not just instinctively react, but instead employ higher levels of cognition. Having that widespread opportunity to employ higher levels of thinking through individual ownership and responsibility deserves some acknowledgement. For most human history, this was a privilege reserved for the few.
Being alive is quintessential Americana; few civilizations have managed to formally encode this at scale into a political Constitution and broader social fabric. Devising a layered framework to limit the collective while defending individual volition at this scale is unique, because arguments for such a framework run counter to intuition.
Channeling essential English liberties and the Scottish Enlightenment, American Framers executed something different in terms of impact and scale. They made a well-reasoned argument for Federalism and achieved democratic consensus. A sufficiently intricate argument was framed, communicated to the broader population, and executed as an institutional change. Selling an idea this sophisticated is not easy – usually complex ideas find agreements within a limited minority and then the results motivate slow widespread adoption. But the American framers abstracted the underlying principles of the existing society to a higher level – to that of a union of states and drove mass consensus from there. Being able to execute something like this without corrupting those core ideas through demagoguery or personal agendas is uncommon. In fact, popular support of ideas which refuse to pander to baser instincts is an unusually rare phenomenon.
There is an interesting scientific aspect to this. Being part of a collective is comforting. Whether it’s politics, sports or music, we tend to seek out that tribal identity. It’s probably our hunter gatherer instincts, constantly pushing us to belong. In that sense, American institutions elevated the overall social order by channeling the tribalism as a check. To paraphrase F.A. Hayek — ‘man got civilized in spite of his best efforts’.
James Madison quite presciently stated in defense of Federalism — ” the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority”. Instead of enforcing compliance through centralized mechanisms, American framers accepted reality as it exists and attempted to work within those constraints. It simply grounded republicanism in a more realistic understanding of human nature.
While many societies enforced conformity through top-down control and directed purpose, American framers showed unusual practical prudence. They allowed civil society, order and purposes to emerge through peaceful coexistence. From that perspective, American Federalism created a framework of incentives favorable to formation of civil society. A society where individual volition can survive, where coexistence was the path of least resistance, and more importantly an individual could feel alive.
Even though at a more basic level, riding motorcycle is also a lot about being alive, and probably more about staying alive too. For starters, you are always in touch with the realities of the environment. You’re expected to be responsible for your own safety. You’re not protected by the collective, their seat belts, or air bags. You must be aware of the lifted truck with no visibility or minivan with a driver busily sifting through the critical social media reels. You need to simply adapt your path to steer clear of them, or any other potential threats, social media driven or otherwise. But the flip side is, when you are riding, all the other travails blend into the background. So plugged in to that sublime present, there are no cognitive resources to think about an uncertain future, or that disappointing past. In that sense, you feel alive, but in a different mode of engaging with reality.
We should be grateful for our splendid ancient free heritage
Virgil: Forgotten American Founder ~ The Imaginative Conservative
Would it be an unlicensed trespass of the imagination to conceive that on the night preceding the day of which you now commemorate the fiftieth anniversary—on the night preceding that thirtieth of April, 1789, when from the balcony of your city hall the chancellor of the State of New York administered to George Washington the solemn oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States, and to the best of his ability to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States–that in the visions of the night the guardian angel of the Father of our Country had appeared before him, in the venerated form of his mother, and, to cheer and encourage him in the performance of the momentous and solemn duties that he was about to assume, had delivered to him a suit of celestial armor–a helmet, consisting of the principles of piety, of justice, of honor, of benevolence, with which from his earliest infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the presence of all his brethren; a spear, studded with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence; a sword, the same with which he had led the armies of his country through the war of freedom to the summit of the triumphal arch of independence; a corselet…of long experience and habitual intercourse in peace and war with the world of mankind, his contemporaries of the human race, in all their stages of civilization; and, last of all, the Constitution of the United States, a shield, embossed by heavenly hands with the future history of his country?
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/10/virgil-forgotten-american-founder.html
Surprised by Faith: My Moroccan Odyssey ~ The Imaginative Conservative
Though I was officially enrolled at the University of Notre Dame, I spent the entire 1987-1988 school year—my sophomore year of college—at our sister school in Austria, the University of Innsbruck. I arrived in Austria in July of 1987, and I departed in July of 1988. During the academic year there, fall semester ended on the last day of January, and spring semester didn’t begin until March 1. A full month of exploration is just too close to heaven for a twenty-year-old. The possibilities seemed endless: a journey to the northern reaches of Scandinavia; a brave excursion into the mysterious depths of the Soviet Union; or a crossing into the old, palimpsest recesses of the Near East of the Roman empire.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/03/surprised-faith-bradley-birzer.html
Spirit of Cecilia 
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