I Quit

 I quit cigarettes and pop yesterday. I paid for it today. Water and sleep did not help the withdrawal pains. In the end, I sold some books and ransacked my apartment for loose change. I may have just put my reckoning off to another day, but so it goes.

There was a trip to the Open Door Clinic and they took blood. Maybe I will find out what is causing the water retention.

I do need more exercise, some of what I got today.

This evening, I spent on emails about my writing. I also finished off another long post that will show up next month, and scheduled on about John Banville for tomorrow. 

Somewhere in there I ate dinner. 

Things I read today, that I thought didn't need their own post.

 Theodore Roosevelt, the Tories’ new philosopher-king (New Statesman) - oh really? I think myself an admirer of TR. but I wonder what he has to us today, let alone the English.

Some other younger Tories think likewise. Andrew O’Brien, until recently at Demos, was once an enthusiastic Thatcherite, but when George Osborne’s shrinking of the state failed to revive growth, it forced O’Brien to reconsider. In search of centre-right models for state intervention, he looks to Harold Macmillan, but admits that for today’s Conservatives, Roosevelt is “more dynamic”. Another long-time Conservative told me campaigning for leaseholders’ rights had opened his eyes to “market abuse” everywhere – by alcohol and gambling lobbies, and the alliance between big food companies and supermarkets. He too appreciates Roosevelt’s battles against concentrations of power, suggesting that the long alliance between Tories and economic liberals is at “breaking point”.

Attacks on “vested interests” often default to targeting the state, but the precedent of Roosevelt’s power struggle with corporations might help extend the attack to rent-seeking companies. Gove, who once battled the “Blob” in education, argues that the right should do the same in the private sector. In government, he denounced the big housebuilders as a “cartel”. He now singles out the tactics of private equity, and the water industry’s exploitation of weak regulation. 

This is not modern American conservatism, if it were then Trump would not be President:

 But there is a distinctively conservative aspect of Roosevelt’s idea of nationhood they seem to admire: his emphasis on character. Employers should treat their staff decently, for instance, because it bolsters the virtue of the nation. Adam Hawksbee, ex-deputy director of Onward and now working in the private sector, suggested there is a lesson for Conservatives in a speech Roosevelt gave in Syracuse, New York, in 1903, which contended that the “line of cleavage between good citizenship and bad citizenship” is moral, not material – it separates “the rich man who does well from the rich man who does ill, the poor man of good conduct from the poor man of bad conduct”. Today’s Tories might also heed what Roosevelt told that Osawatomie crowd: “Ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.”

 Prayers, Pews, and a Hail of Bullets says something true.

 But there’s one thing prayer is undeniably good for at times like these: heaving one back out of the awful, soul-annihilating sludge of yet another round of post-shooting political discourse. It fixes the mind not on one’s ever-present political opponents but on the sufferers, in a discipline of sorrow and solidarity for those whose lives have been shattered by yet another attack. Dashing to social media to fire off hot takes after a tragedy feels good because it feels like doing something. But sometimes suffering with those who suffer is the only real thing you can do.

Ah, how Cliff Notes helped in times of need (usually caused by my laziness), In Praise of CliffsNotes Study Guides in the Age of AI  

That is all you get from me tonight.

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