February 2009
26 posts
“Internet conversation generally is only a few decades old. So we’ve...”
– Paul Graham
Now that I have apparently passed the most difficult test in what is apparently the most difficult place to take it in Germany, I am at a loss as to what to do with myself, or whether it was worth it to jump through the hoops — perhaps something I should have done in Japan, although much of the techniques I have learned — for instance how to switch any passive construction to any other...
The Decline and Fall of Agilists →
Enthusiasm and Economics
Fundamental problem, ‘prop up,’ and relative to the correct supposition that the problem and underpinnings of the problem are not simply bad products (which we know and should have known for some time) but a lack of enthusiasm about the products.
This is a problem with the entire financial system. The worth of any product is some combination of aggregate enthusiasm, which was once...
“If deficit countries blame surplus countries for the crisis, they may just wait...”
– Andy Xie
I am God. There is not God. And thus I compete with him. The life is this, that I also wish, and thus I come not hither. I write because I like, I like what I write, and I find more fools to battle. They that would rage, against me in spades, together we’d meet in the middle. I muck in the dirt, I find new worth, the old and the specter of time. And under the dirt, is the greatest of worth...
S and I have been engaged in a private discussion on this Nietzsche passage:
Where faith is needed. — Nothing is rarer among moralists and saints than honesty. Perhaps they say the contrary, perhaps they even believe it. For when a faith is more useful, more effective, and more persuasive than conscious hypocrisy, then hypocrisy soon turns instinctively into innocence: first principle for the...
A central theme of the test was homeschooling and detailed the experience of several persons from a religious sect who were placed in jail for refusing to enlist their children in public education. Whether or not I pass to some extent depends on the grader’s sympathy for my argument from personal experience that homeschooling does not necessarily damage a person’s chances for higher...
Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland. Der Eichenbaum wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft - es war ein Traum.
Das küßte mich auch deutsch und sprach auf deutsch (man glaubt es kaum, wie gut es klang) das Wort: “Ich liebe dich” - es war ein Traum.
Heine
Telegraph | China worries about US Debt Float →
Several curious features of my new living situation: ketchup on broccoli, pan-fried pizza, and no heat.
Taleb | Limits of Statistics →
This weekend took me unexpectedly to the Bavarian countryside, including a visit to what might be Germany’s center of Marian pilgrimage. I return to work.
“At the age of twenty Turner planned to paint a subject from the Apocalypse...”
– John Berger, About Looking
“There is something desperate about the way economists are clinging to their...”
– Niall Ferguson
Tired of bad news about the financial markets?... →
“According to sources who attended meetings with him, [Larry] Summers traveled to...”
– David Goldman
I confess it simply. I do not want resolution. I do not care for resolution. I do not try to bring things together. I am an artist. I am a man of the stars, under the stars, a man of the dance, of love, of sweethearts and dreams, and eagles and soaring.
What do you know of this? What is the point of this? Why your stare? Your skepticism? I know that you do not know, and all you know is that you...
Language Studies
Uncertain about the future direction and status of language studies. I am currently in the university theoretically preparing for an exam that would allow me to study in the local language in the universities here, an accomplishment for which I have no special wish, as I am not sure what is to gained by this. Nonetheless, I plan to attempt this test at the end of next month. My language studies...
What are you Europe? What are you? Fulfilled yearnings or yearnings that can never be fulfilled? A toilet or a bank, in which deposits are made, but never returned, recycled, to make the air safe and the people sedate? What is your freedom? Your fraternity? All men come to be brothers in your ghettos, and languish, until they are granted more fantasies, separated by glass, rubber, and post-mortem...
The great novelists I read as a child and a young man defined Europe in terms not of its Christian faith but of the yearning of its individuals. It was because there heroes were struggling to free themselves to express their creativty, and make their dreams come true that their novels spoke to my heart.
Orhan Pamuk
The book’s true subject and wellspring: It is the jealousy, anger, and...