March 2009
57 posts
“Jünglingfrisch
Tanzt er aus der Wolke
Auf die Marmorfelsen nieder
Jauchzet...”
– Goethe, Mahomets Gesang
“元苍方里挂瓜鸿”
– 昊
Lachman
S:
I found Lachman’s editorial to represent a poor view of his own experience. Russia compared to AIG? The US compared to a 1997-crisis country like Thailand? Japanese business conglomerates to US banks and the Treasury? These are flippant comparisons without substance; Lachman speaks of them as if they are all literally games of chess, simply played at different tournaments. But even...
I used to chant that poem of Chou about ‘ascending and descending’: it was like clouds or fog dispersing, so I could see that azure sky. I never suspected a world of brilliance double that of sun and moon would start with the year keng-shen of the Yuan-shou reign. Learning then had new knowledge with blessings pure imbued; the Way attained far-reaching care, the holy work...
Over the past year, I’ve been getting Russia flashbacks as I witness the AIG debacle as well as the collapse of Bear Sterns and a host of other financial institutions. Much like the oligarchs did in Russia, a small group of traders and executives at onetime venerable institutions have brought the U.S. and global financial systems to their knees with their reckless risk-taking — with...
Sussman explains rational for MIT's switch from... →
Games
Why men look at pornography on the internet demands no detailed explanation. But the attraction for games, especially violent games, is more difficult to explain and address. A friend recently suggested that the appropriate response to this impulse, which he considred a vice, is to exhaust it via computer games. Others that it should be redirected into the workplace. Others that the...
So if intelligence and knowledge are not enough, what is the other part of the equation? What i the other element? Intution?… I think it could be memory, the strong memory of something we all carry with us. Some things that we encounter, for some reason, we never forget. These memories inspire us to do some things in a certain way, to make a form or to write something that intelligence and...
At the top of my reading list:
Shakespeare, Richard II Cambridge Companion to Goethe The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology seven interviews with Tadao Ando Concept of the Daemonic in Goethe
Mundy | Vox Patris Caelestis (Tallis Scholars)
“I really believe it is not a helpful debate, as I see sometimes, to try to...”
– Jose Manuel Barroso
“Haben sie das Herz bewahrt
Vor Schlangen, die es heimlich neidschten?
Diesen...”
– Prometheus, Goethe
Bested, or so it seems by a Greek Lawyer and Italian management engineer, who have passed through the same hoops but with likely better grades and uncertain about the future, as I wait on graduate school and am so inhibited in my current job search, which includes also decisions on where I live. It is in general not the best time to be so unsettled; my financial situation is also not good.
“Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of...”
– Vaclav Havel, in Philadelphia
“Ein ewig Rätsel will ich bleiben, mir und anderen”
– Ludwig II
Krugman and B. DeLong argue over the Geithner plan →
Today the tour guide in this city who is from this city but left to go to a city on the other side of the world but now is back in this city selling pretzels told us that we must acknowledge and remember the past in order to forget it.
It is an interesting form of memory which conjures up the past demons, then ascribes them to the past, itself a demon of sorts, always haunting, like the unburied...
George Steiner Problem →
He has kept people interested in the world of literature… freed them from feeling guilt
Kein Gott, kein Staat, kein Vaterland – Abtreibung in Frauenhand
FT | Goldman Sachs →
2/3 of subprime morgages were rated AAA says Peter Schiff.
You have seen a hand, a foot, or perhaps a head severed from its body and lying some distance away. Such is the state a man brings himself to—as far as he is able—when he refuses to accept what befalls him, breaks away from helping others, or when he pursues self-seeking action. He becomes an outcast from the unity of Nature; though born of it, his own hand has cut him from it. Yet here is the...
Re: CSM | Evangelical Scandal
S:
Spencer is arguing a dwarfed eschatology: The tribulation for Evangelicals. He has reduced the Christian understanding of history to the narrow field of contemporary Western society, exchanged the Gospel’s message of cleaving redemption for a generational game plan, and translated the rhetoric of Revelation into an editorial column. This is word-theater, a script neither honest about...
Mathematics-Theology-Economics-Jurisprudence
Part of present indecision with regard to more structured future plans stems from an inability to find a focus, which I think stems from what may be an improper rendering of some fundamental problems regarding humans’ self interpretation of their own experience.
A fundamental question when approaching a subject is ‘What is the subject?’ And additionally ‘How does it relate...
“How so! I plunge, plunge wihout fail My blood-black sabre into your soul. That art God neither wants nor wists, It leaps to the brain from Hell’s black mists. “Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel: With Satan I have struck my deal. He chalks the signs, beats time for me, I play the death march fast and free. “I must play dark, I must play light, Till bowstrings...
The judgment day is at hand! We believe and so we conquer. We believe and so we wait. Soon our day will come. Soon we will champions, clothed in light, and all will recognize that we are the sons and followers of the One who reigns. And so we denounce all who stand in our way, all servants of Satan, all minions of evil that would divert us from our calling. It is a time of reckoning! Fire will...
CSM | Coming Evangelical Collapse →
New goal: to learn as much French as I can in the next two and a half weeks.
Some books I will be attempting this week: H. Arent, Origins of Totalitarianism Heidegger, Was Heisst Denken? P. Gottfried, Catholic Romanticism in Munich A. Tarkovski, Die Versiegelte Zeit F. Yates, Lull and Bruno: Collected Essays T. Anton, Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu
RE: Moral Problems
S:
Underlying all these events is a question about the culture and ethics of the industry. It is as if, too often, people had given up asking whether something was the right thing to do, and focused only whether it was legal and complied with the rules.
“If men were angels…” No one should want “ethical” banks. Instead it would be nice if banks tried to be...
We want to believe
What particularly intrigues Žižek is how films that seemingly resist the prevailing ideology, such as Titanic, often serve to strengthen it. It was a similar story, he suggests, in communist times when people who told seemingly subversive jokes only succeeded in spreading cynicism and indifference, which was exactly what the party nomenklatura needed to sustain their rule. A member of the ruling...
It was a moral problem
Underlying all these events is a question about the culture and ethics of the industry. It is as if, too often, people had given up asking whether something was the right thing to do, and focused only whether it was legal and complied with the rules. The industry needs to recover a sense of what is right and suitable as a key impulse for doing business.
HSBC, quoted in FT Alphaville
I can do anything because of my limitless potential or the lack of limits placed on me by others? If we ground potential in greater situational awareness, do we crush its possiblities? If we create a legal structure which is binding, do humans emerge that are less than free? Do, as the Daoist philosophers claim, the laws multiply without end?
In the second situation, the can contrasts with the...
Hope Dies Young?
C. Gasparino | Brain-Trust Bust (NY Post)
N. Roubini | Effective Insolvency
J. Robb | Bigger than a President R. Peters | Demagogues Rising
Demographic Default
“I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark should burn out...”
– Jack London (attributed)