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On Twitter, people think in phrases. On Facebook, people think in full sentences. Users can rise to the level of an essay on a blog. A website challenges its owner to create an organic whole. Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally democratic and populist. There is no entrance criteria, no need to construct cohesive thought, not enough content to contain quality. The writer can just blurt out any half-baked impulse that comes to mind. Witness POTUS.

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  • Cross country in high school. For the camaraderie, discipline, and knowledge.
  • Start reading The Economist in 9th grade. Why? Because it's well written. Clear writing is clear thinking. You become what you read. You learn to read, you learn to follow clear, sometimes complex thought. By learning to follow it, you learn to perform it. Clean up your vocabulary, clean up your language, then your thought follows.
  • Read The Economist because of its financial bent. Marx was right. In the end, politics and history are about finance, trade, and means to fund power. Read it because of it's internationalist perspective. It's not all just about 3.5% of the world's population.
  • Study much more dilligently. When you're a student is the one time in life that your primary responsibility is to improve yourself. At no other point in life will anyone care. For most of us, being a full time student is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Without mathematics, you can know nothing about physics. Without physics, you can know nothing of the universe. Without  biology, you can know nothing of how your body works or how it came to be or the place of life in the universe. Without chemistry you cannot know that chemistry is the basis of all life. Without humanities, you cannot the richness of the human experience, across the ages, across cultures, and across time. Without Classical Humanities, you cannot know why and how we humans in the West think the way we do and how it is different from the rest of the world. Without education, people are nothing but cattle in a consumerist feed lot.

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Thought from one of my last runs, months ago. The silly bumper stickers are wrong: Freedom really is free. Freedom is a state of mind. I'm always hearing that we're the Land of the Free, as we sink deeper and deeper into debt and addiction. Despite all our declarations of freedom, we're not free.

What isn't free.....is often very expensive....is Justice.

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"The essential thing is action. Action has three stages: the decision born of thought, the order or preparation for execution, and the execution itself All three stages are governed by the will. The will is rooted in character, and for the man of action character is of more critical importance than intellect. Intellect without will is worthless, will without intellect is dangerous."
—Hans von Seeckt