We are all dependent on others. The question is whether we are dependent on people we know, and they on us—in ways that foster family and community, build habits of restraint and dignity, and instill in us responsibility and a sense of obligation—or we are dependent on distant, neutral, universal systems of benefits that help provide for our material wants without connecting us to any local and immediate nexus of care and obligation. It is not dependence per se, which is a universal fact of human life, but dependence without mutual obligation, that corrupts the soul. Such technocratic provision enables precisely the illusion of independence from the people around us and from the requirements of any moral code they might uphold. It is corrosive not because it instills a true sense of dependence but because it inspires a false sense of independence and so frees us from the sorts of moral habits of mutual obligation that alone can make us free.

For the source, see here.

Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher, who is rational and modest, has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power, which produces any single effect in the universe. It is confessed, that the utmost effort of human reason is to reduce the principles, productive of natural phenomena, to a greater simplicity, and to resolve the many particular effects into a few general causes, by means of reasonings from analogy, experience, and observation. But as to the causes of these general causes, we should in vain attempt their discovery; nor shall we ever be able to satisfy ourselves, by any particular explication of them. These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry. Elasticity, gravity, cohesion of parts, communication of motion by impulse; these are probably the ultimate causes and principles which we shall ever discover in nature; and we may esteem ourselves sufficiently happy, if, by accurate enquiry and reasoning, we can trace up the particular phenomena to, or near to, these general principles. The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

What begins to happens in an addiction is that the addiction actually takes on the character of a person, an extremely wicked person, who is whispering in your ear all the time ‘you know, I’m really helping you. Don’t you enjoy this? Don’t you feel better? You’re in control. You could stop any time you want.’ Yet all of that is from the father of lies.

1. Christians must do what the Bible commands.
2. There are laws which would involve preventing us from doing what the Bible commands (like those which obstruct the exercise of our religion).
3. Christians may not do what the Bible prohibits.
4. There are laws which would involve us doing things the Bible prohibits (those which require Christians to perform abortions or conduct homosexual unions, for example).
5. The Bible neither commands Christians to own firearms nor prohibits them from doing so.
6. Because the Bible neither commands us to own firearms nor prohibits us from doing so, there’s not an official Christian position on it, so there is no conceivable gun policy which could encroach on an essential life practice of the Christian faith.
7. For the same reason, it’s conceivable that two societies could chose different paths on the issue of firearms without either being necessarily less biblically informed.

I’ve seen many books in the past few years that I would put in the category “Really good stuff, but I’m not sure it was book worthy.” These are books that might have been excellent sermons or terrific blog posts or could have been a wonderful long article, but a stand alone book they feel underwhelming.

This aligns well with the things Seth Godin says in his article on tracts and manifestos. Sometimes we just stretch content to thin for its own good (you know who you are, Peter Jackson).

How did we get to an America where half of the adult population isn’t married and somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent of the population don’t get married for the first time until they’re approaching retirement? It’s a complicated story involving, among other factors, the rise of almost-universal higher education, the delay of marriage, urbanization, the invention of no-fault divorce, the legitimization of cohabitation, the increasing cost of raising children, and the creation of a government entitlement system to do for the elderly childless what grown children did for their parents through the millennia.

But all of these causes are particular. Looming beneath them are two deep shifts. The first is the waning of religion in American life. As Joel Kotkin notes in a recent report titled “The Rise of Post-Familialism,” one of the commonalities between all of the major world religions is that they elevate family and kinship to a central place in human existence. Secularism tends toward agnosticism about the family. This distinction has real-world consequences. Take any cohort of Americans—by race, income, education—and then sort them by religious belief. The more devout they are, the higher their rates of marriage and the more children they have.

Yes, Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer. It made its name selling books and DVDs and so many other physical goods. But somewhere along the way, as the company worked to build new technologies that would make it easier to run its vast retail operation, Bezos and the rest of the braintrust realized that if Amazon and its partners needed new technology, so did the rest of the world. The result was the Elastic Compute Cloud and various other Amazon Web Services that would make it easier for anyone to run their own operations — whatever those operatons might be. This is how Brown explains why Amazon — of all companies — created the Elastic Compute Cloud, an internet service that has completely changed the face of computing since it debuted a little over six years ago, providing instant access not to an online store or a search engine or an e-mail account, but to a virtually unlimited collection of computing power.

One more bit of genius here:

Jeff (the CEO)  feels that low margins promote customer loyalty and — frankly — inhibit competition. I don’t know what Amazon’s margins are right now, but there are some significant forces on its side.

Read the full-text here.

• Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don’t expect much to come of the process.
• Understand that a non-fiction book is a souvenir, just a vessel for the ideas themselves. You don’t want the ideas to get stuck in the book… you want them to spread. Which means that you shouldn’t hoard the idea! The more you give away, the better you will do.
• The book publishing is an organized hobby, not a business. The return on equity and return on time for authors and for publishers is horrendous. If you’re doing it for the money, you’re going to be disappointed. On the other hand, a book gives you leverage to spread an idea and a brand far and wide. There’s a worldview that’s quite common that says that people who write books know what they are talking about and that a book confers some sort of authority.
• The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you’ll need later down the road.
• Don’t market to everybody. Obsess about a little subset of the market–that subset that you have permission to talk with, that subset where you have credibility, and most important, that subset where people just can’t live without your book.
• Most books that sell by the truckload sell by the caseload. In other words, sell to organizations that buy for their members/staff.
• If you’ve got the patience, bookstore signings and talking to book clubs by phone are the two lowest-paid but most guaranteed to work methods you have for promoting a really really good book. If you do it 200 times a year, it will pay.
• Bryan Stevenson, a professor at NYU, spent years honing his stump speech and it all came together with a TED talk he gave two weeks ago. In just a few days online, he has reached more than a quarter of a million people–he doesn’t use a book, he uses himself to spread the idea.

Feb 24, 1791

My Dear Sir,

Unless the Divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise, in opposing that execrable villany which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils; but if God be for you who can be against you. Are all of them together stronger than God? Oh be not weary of well-doing. Go on in the name of God, and in the power of His might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it. That He who has guided you from your youth up may continue to strengthen you in this and all things, is the prayer of,

Dear Sir,
Your affectionate servant,
John Wesley

Robert Isaac Wilberforce & Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce vol. I (London, John Murray: 1838), p. 297.