April 2012
2 posts
2 tags
Love Karma
Love is like karma. You’ll keep coming back to the same love life if you don’t evolve with every relationship. We become jaded by love because we don’t learn in it and thereby keep recreating the same problems in our relationships. We don’t understand that love is our opportunity to transform to something new. And something new, does not, by definition, love the same way....
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“Why do I once again turn to writing?
Beloved, one mustn’t ask such a...”
– From The Josephine Baker House: For Loos’s Pleasure by Fares el-Dahdah
January 2012
6 posts
2 tags
“Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”
Look...”
– Hafiz
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“The third quality that is needed for a scientist to become a public icon is...”
– Freeman Dyson, in “Wise Man”, New York Review of Books (20 October 2005) via rednude
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“When I was younger I dated older women because they knew what love is. Now that...”
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“Not enough! - It is not enough to prove something, one also has to seduce or...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, section 330
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“Sometimes people beg me to certify their understanding of the dharma. As long...”
– Kodo Sawaki, from The Zen Teaching of “Homeless” Kodo
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“People ask what are my intentions with my films— my aims. It is a difficult and...”
– Ingmar Bergman
November 2011
1 post
2 tags
October 2011
1 post
6 tags
“At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Hesse registered himself as a...”
– Some are born posthumously.
September 2011
7 posts
3 tags
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$50 million found and returned after tsunami →
One of the reasons I love Japan: “The equivalent of $50m in cash has been picked up in the disaster area and handed over to the police.” - from the article linked. How much was picked up and returned after Katrina?
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The Prison-Industrial Complex →
Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars—the majority of them nonviolent offenders—mean jobs for depressed regions and windfalls for profiteers. An article by Eric Schlosser.
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Slavery and Prisons in contemporary America
“You’re not allowed to bring into America anything that’s been made by forced labor or prisons. But in America, you can almost say…that they’ve reinvented the slave trade. They [prisoners in U.S. prisons] produce, for example, 100% of all military helmets, ammunition, belts, bullet proof vests, id tags etc., 93% of domestically produced paints, 36% of home...
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On bodyguards
”During the 1973 energy crisis driving was banned on certain weekends. King Olav could have driven legally but wanted to lead by example. So he dressed up in his skiing outfit, and boarded the railway carrying his skis on his shoulder. He was later asked how he dared to go out in public without bodyguards. He replied that “he had 4 million bodyguards” —the population of Norway...
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“Iki avoids explicitness, eloquence, and verboseness. Implicitness is another...”
– Yamamoto Yuji, An Aesthetics of Everyday Life: Modernism and a Japanese popular aesthetic ideal, “Iki”.
August 2011
1 post
1 tag
July 2011
1 post
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Being Fully Human: Formative and Transformative... →
Activities may be divided into two categories, formative and transformative.
Formative activities are any activities that by themselves leave our perception of the world unchanged. For example, watching a football game. The qualification ‘by themselves’ is inserted to remind the reader that potentially any activity given the right circumstances can become transformative. For example, going to...
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
On Friendship
The truest kind of friendship is that which exists between good men, as we have said more than once. For it is agreed that what is good or pleasant absolutely is lovable and desirable absolutely, and what is good or pleasant for a particular person is lovable and desirable for that person.
But friendship between good men rests on both grounds - the good are good and pleasant absolutely, and...
January 2011
10 posts
5 tags
On Leadership
In an era still dominated by a naive belief in scientific method [1] many people believe that if they just diligently follow a step-by-step guide on leadership, in addition to imitating what their current leaders do, that will somehow eventually result in them becoming leaders too. But that is the mindset of those who obey, not those who lead. If it leads anywhere, it is not some place new other...
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The Curious Captain
One could think of a captain that always questions the value of the destinations he sets and as a result has not traveled more than a couple of square miles.
“Yes, horizontally…but vertically? Perhaps while questioning, the ship itself turns into a submarine and, who knows, one day may turn into a plane.”
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“A lock of hair was not the biggest conquest of the Romans; it was however, one...”
– François-René de Chateaubriand, Réflexions et aphorismes, section 249, Éditions de Fallois, Paris, 1993.
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The Economics of Conversation and Art
While watching George Carlin the other day, I came across this part where he makes fun of the various seemingly pointless conversations we experience in life:
Why do we engage in such seemingly pointless exchanges? What underpins Carlin’s frustration? Let’s start with a principle.
The Principle of Reciprocity
The principle of reciprocity underpins much of human moral...
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“Nietzsche lived with his intellectual problems as with realities, he experienced...”
– It’s no surprise Lorca mentions Nietzsche as an example when he talks about duende. This quote is from R. J. Hollingdale’s Introduction (p.11-12) to Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1883-1885 by F. Nietzsche. Translated by R.J.Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1969.
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Open relationships
For those who love freedom more than they fear it.
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December 2010
7 posts
“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men...”
–
Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage (2005). Quote from Sophie Scholl, a student leader of the peaceful anti-government resistance group the White Rose in 1940s Germany. She was a biology major at the University of Munich. She was beheaded by the National Socialists in February, 1943.
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“A new species of philosophers is coming up: I venture to baptize them with a...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ‘The Free Spirit’, section 42.
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“The missing ear - ‘So long as one always lays the blame on others one...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, vol.2, section 386.
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Representation and Secrecy
If they who represent us are unwilling to disclose what they said on our behalf the only thing certain is that they no longer represent us.
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“We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the...”
– Julian Assange
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Excerpts from Julian Assange's Q&A at the Guardian
rszopa asked:
Annoying as it may be, the DDoS seems to be good publicity (if anything, it adds to your credibility). So is getting kicked out of AWS. Do you agree with this statement? Were you planning for it? Thank you for doing what you are doing.
Julian Assange answered:
Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free...
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“I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in...”
– Glenn Gould, from Glenn Gould: Music and Mind, p.64, by Geoffrey Payzant.
November 2010
18 posts
2 tags
“M…was accused of disliking everybody. ‘Not at all,’ he said....”
– Chamfort, Chamfort: Reflections on Life, Love & Society, Short Books, 2003.
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Who is wise? →
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in its article on wisdom, after summarizing the main views there are about wisdom, concludes with a rigorous definition of what it means for someone to be wise. Someone is wise if and only if he/she:
1. Has extensive factual and theoretical knowledge.
2. Knows how to live well.
3. Is successful at living well.
4. Has very few unjustified beliefs.
As...
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“Wisdom is an understanding of what is important, where this understanding...”
– Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, p. 267-9, Simon & Schuster, 1990.
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“I heartily accept the motto,—”That government is best which governs...”
– Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849.
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Parasitic States
Many states are parasitic organizations run by power hungry bureaucrats sucking the life out of their subjects. Life for most people in them is an intermittent show of unrest, inner deadness and quiet desperation interrupted by isolated sparks of creativity and genius in private enclaves where life breaks through and affirms its right to growth despite the state - not because of it.
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“Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.”
– Voltaire
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“He who has little communication with people is seldom a misanthrope. True...”
– Giacomo Leopardi, Thoughts, 1837, section 89, Hesperus Press Limited, 2002.
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Beyond Startup Equity Squabbling
It matters less how the pie is divided and more that it is made.
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Past Glories
“Philosophy, moreover, which has helped to discover and establish all these institutions, which has educated us for public affairs and made us gentle towards each other, which has distinguished between the misfortunes that are due to ignorance and those which spring from necessity, and taught us to guard against the former and to bear the latter nobly—philosophy, I say, was given to the...
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“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been...”
– Isaac Newton from Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) by Sir David Brewster (Volume II. Ch. 27). Available for free here.
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Open Relationships
Relationships with wings instead of strings.
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The Future of Banking (if done right) →
Venessa Miemis, co-producer of The Future of Money, after attending Sibos, shares her insightful reflections on what sort of innovations she would like to see in banking.