While poking around for a reliable, powerful, bicycle tire pump to keep my mid-sized mountain bike tires up to around 65 psi, I found the following. Comments enabled for anyone who has a pump to recommend. The reviewer is recommending this device.
Reviewed in Canada on July 15, 2019
You'll enjoy it. If you don't, you are not MavPhil material.
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:
Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.
Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.
The last three horrible years make my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:
And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
This is no longer true. We are no longer the "land of the free." You are not free if you cannot express your thoughtful and heart-felt opinions without fear of reprisal. Step out of line and you will be destroyed, if not physically, then politically and economically. Examples are legion. Here is one of an increasing many.
Still and all, we have much something to be grateful for. But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, what remains of our liberty, and our "sweet land of liberty." Patriots are waking up to the depredations of 'Woke' and there is reason to be hopeful. So be of good cheer, do your bit, and long live the Republic! Never give up, never give in, fight hard, and fight to win. There are a lot of us and we can win if we hang together which, to paraphrase a Founder, beats hanging separately.
Amazing what one can dredge up from the vasty deeps of cyberspace!
Long-time reader Dave Bagwill wrote to tell me that he tried to contact his old professor at Cal State, Hayward, Elizabeth Wolgast, but was too late. "She was a very fine woman with a penetrating intellect and a warm heart," Dave recalls. From Wolgast's obituary:
Elizabeth H. Wolgast
Feb 27, 1929 - Oct 13, 2020
Elizabeth Wolgast, died October 13 from complications following a stroke on October 1: she was 91. Elizabeth was born in Dunellen, NJ in February 1929. In 1936 her family moved to a farm outside Philadelphia run by her mother (a degreed nutritionist) while her father worked in business. She studied water-color painting as a young woman which became a life-long passion for her. She met her husband, Richard, at a drawing class at Cornell University and they married in 1949. Elizabeth went on to earn a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Washington and had a long, distinguished career teaching at the Cal State University at Hayward. She was a trailblazer in her profession being the first tenured female professor in that department. She was still the only one there when she retired. She enjoyed visiting professorships at Dartmouth College, Cambridge (England), West Point, and Abo (Finland). She authored four philosophy texts and numerous journal articles.
Read the rest. Here is her PhilPapers page.
I just now ordered a used copy of Wolgast's Paradoxes of Knowledge for a paltry $8.34. You may wish to spring for a new copy for a mere 529 semolians.
We best honor a philosopher by reading his work and thinking his thoughts, sympathetically, but critically.
As a general rule, you should never buy a book you haven't read. (That sounds like a bit of a paradox itself.) But the Wolgast volume appeared under the Cornell imprint, so it is probably worth reading in part if not in toto. I sense that it will be heavily Wittgensteinian. But a little Wittgenstein never hurt anybody.
Time was, when I had space for books but no money. Now it is the other way around. I may have to buy a bigger house. Without books would life be worth living?
In these trying times, we who value high culture need to build vast private libraries that cannot be easily marauded by the totalitarian agents of leftist destruction. We also need to lay in righteous supplies of Pb to protect them.
Theme music: It's Too Late, She's Gone
What follows is from my first weblog, and is dated 4 May 2004. The photo was taken this morning by Dennis Murray, fellow aficionado of strenuous pursuits.
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Time was, when running was my exercise, the daily bread of my cardiovascular system. But then the injuries came: chondromalacia patellae in both knees, shin splints, plantar fasciitis, you name it. So I took up the bike, and eventually the mountain bike. Now I run just once a week, on Sunday mornings, for about 75 minutes. The other days I either hike or ride the mountain bike, mostly the latter. I like to be on the road before sunrise, and catch old Sol as he rises over the magnificent and mysterious Superstition Mountains. There is nothing like greeting the sun as he greets the mountains, bathing them in the serene light of daybreak. It is an appropriate moment for gratitude, gratitude for another day on which to bang my head against the riddle of existence. Riding into the rising sun, I sometimes recall Nietzsche’s words from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “O you overrich star, what would you be except for those for whom you shine?”
The beauty of the mountain bike is that you can get off the roads, away from cars and people, and onto trails and jeep tracks. I’d rather dodge rattlesnakes than cars any day. I have even been known to strike out cross-country across open desert. I’ve got kevlar-reinforced tires, with thick tubes, and a strip of plastic betwixt tube and tire as prophylaxis against cactus spines and other impregnators. No need for slime, and no flats for going on two years. My bike is an old Trek 930, a modest mid-range hard-tail – having been called a hard-ass, I suppose this is appropriate – with front-end suspension. As every Thoreauvian knows, one doesn’t have to spend a lot of money to have fun and live well.
Still, nothing in my experience beats running for the endorphin kick. ‘Endorphin’ is a contraction of ‘endogenous morphine.’ The adjective means originating from within, in this case, from within the brain. You know what morphine is. The brain of a body under athletic stress seems to produce these endorphins the existence of which, I understand, is more scientific postulation than verified fact. Endorphins manifest themselves at the level of consciousness in rather delightful sensations. When conditions are auspicious, and I am about 45-50 minutes into a run, I enter a phase wherein I apperceive myself as merely riding in my body as a pure spectator of a pure spectacle. I become a transcendental onlooker, and the world becomes George Santayana’s realm of essence.
“I become a transparent eyeball: I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.”)
We are heading east on U.S. 60 in the direction of Superior, AZ. Picketpost Mountain looms on the horizon. Mike Valle is driving the motorcycle; your humble correspondent rides shotgun.
A philosopher sympathetic to my views asked me this question a year or two ago. I said that I used to, but no longer.
Now why might that be despite an enlarged readership in a time of increasing political anger? One possible explanation is that we are now so 'siloed' into our positions that we read only our own.
Speaking of silos, a Mormon friend of a non-Mormon friend of mine purchased an old ICBM silo in Arizona. Now that's one serious prepper. Moderate in all things, including moderation, I keep my prepping within the bounds of sense. And I read everything. Nihil humanum, et cetera.
Companion post: Word of the Day: Oubliette
With Brian B. and Mike V. at Los Locos Gringos, my favorite local Mexican eatery. There is nothing better than a good meal and good conversation with like-minded friends. After Mike sped away on his iron horse, Brian and I spent the rest of the afternoon playing chess at Gecko Espresso. Mike, on the right, is one sharp-dressed man these days. Me? I am still of the '60s sartorially speaking.
I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyper-kineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:
Dolce far niente
Sweet to do nothing
which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.
So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking.
Without a sizeable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.
