“PEOPLE TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE BUT WE IGNORE IT BECAUSE WE WANT THEM TO BE WHO WE WANT THEM TO BE.”
“MAKE IT SIMPLE AND SIGNIFICANT.”
“I DON’T BELIEVE IN FATE. I CREATE MY OWN OPPORTUNITIES.”
“IF YOU DON’T LIKE WHAT’S BEING SAID, CHANGE THE CONVERSATION.”
“YOU’RE GOOD. GET BETTER. STOP ASKING FOR THINGS.”
This is from James Altucher’s article here.
I came home to a cat, her white paws delicately dancing past the typewriter, mine.
Tucked inside the typewriter was a sheet, long dead, with the words I wrote by hand:
“Place yourself in circumstances of want, and ask yourself, “is this what I fear?”
by Associated Press Thursday, June 27th 2019
The beginning:
“Every Cuban has the right to a salary increase,” said Dariel Tejeda, a 28-year-old tour guide. “The country and all the state workers have needed this for a long time.”
and the end:
Ending the dual-currency system is expected to lead to the eventual removal of subsidies and bankruptcy of dozens, even hundreds of state enterprises and the loss of many thousands of public sector jobs. With lower or no subsidies, state companies would be forced to raise prices. For that reason, a state salary increase has long been seen as a key precursor to monetary unification in Cuba.
Do you live in the city?
Or are you from a rural area?
One person’s perspective on how where you live informs how you feel about guns.
Gun control is a political issue because America is a nation whose population is very split between rural and urban areas. Most other nations don’t have this kind of heterogeneity in their population – they are either mostly rural, or mostly urban.
As it happens, life experiences and environment relating directly to gun usage heavily influences opinions on guns.
It turns out that it’s not political affiliation that determines gun opinions, it’s whether you live in a rural area.
Pro-gun-control liberals who move into rural areas often end up owning guns and significantly softening their stance on guns once they gain experience with them.
About a hundred years ago, guns were not a political issue in the US. Most everyone owned a gun, or had a close family member who owned guns. Most people lived in rural areas. It was just a necessary tool because there were no police nearby and sometimes you had problems with wild animals. You were on your own.
The lived-experience “facts” staring people in the face in each area vary wildly. In rural areas, of course you own guns. You need them. Of course they are dangerous – that’s the point: it’s a tool intended to make you dangerous against wild animals and occasional criminals.
None of that applies to the lived experience of living in the city.
In the city, the main thing you run into is other people. Some of them are occasionally annoying or have poor impulse control. You don’t need to shoot them, you just walk away. But if they have a gun, you might be in trouble.
Here are some excerpts from this excellent article on The Art of Decision Making.
In “War and Peace,” Tolstoy writes that, while an armchair general may imagine himself “analyzing some campaign on a map” and then issuing orders, a real general never finds himself at “the beginning of some event”; instead, he is perpetually situated in the middle of a series of events, each a link in an endless chain of causation.
“Can it be that I allowed Napolean to get as far as Moscow?” Tolstoy’s General Kutuzov wonders.
“When was it decided? Was it yesterday, when I sent Platov the order to retreat, or was it the evening before, when I dozed off and told Bennigsen to give the orders? Or still earlier?”
For Tolstoy, the tendency of big decisions to make themselves was one of the great mysteries of existence. It suggested that the stories we tell about our lives are inadequate to their real complexity.
We first ask ourselves what we value, then seek to maximize that value.
We choose how we change.
The problem is that you don’t actually want to listen to classical music. You want to want to. Aspiring, Callard thinks, is a common human activity.
If we couldn’t aspire to changes that we struggle to describe, we’d be trapped within the ideas that we already.
To aspire, Callard writes, is to judge one’s present-day self by the standards of a future self who doesn’t yet exist.
In the Chinese diet, milk and cheese, the well-recognized sources of calcium and phosphorus, are not used. A typical Chinese dish, which is called ‘sweet-sour-spareribs,’ was analyzed as a possible source of these elements.
From this research:
“Sweet-sour-spareribs” was often consumed by a woman after she gave birth.
The vinegar extracted huge amounts of calcium from the bones, giving the mother a much-needed source of calcium as she nursed her child.
From Marks Daily Apple
“A serious and good philosophical work could be entirely of jokes.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
The setup is that I think I know everything. The punchline is that I’m totally ignorant.
Seventy-five million deaths shocks my bones.
Why didn’t I learn this number, earlier? Why do I still know nothing about anything?
That one night in 1991 inflation rose prices of goods some 200%.
Economic collapse and inflation ensued.
But how would they afford to eat? Afford to pay rent?
People just like you and me lost their homes. Their life’s savings vanished into thin air as a byproduct of this man’s ambition.
Women and children begged for rubles or worked as prostitutes and a lucky man would be paid with 13 barrels of sunflower oil or with some another commodity.
Rampant
starvation and
death and
rented coffins
heroin from Afghanistan and East Asia
widespread alcoholism
I can only begin to comprehend the Russian people’s desire for stability. How could anybody forget that?
Excerpts below from the Nuclear Files Org.
13 February 1950
U.S.A., Pacific Ocean- A B-36 which developed serious mechanical difficulties on a simulated combat mission, dropped a nuclear weapon from 8,000 ft. over the Pacific Ocean before crashing.
Luckily only the weapon’s explosive material detonated.
Nothing is known of attempts to recover the nuclear weapon and presumably it is still in the ocean.
(The Defence Monitor Vol.X No.5 1981 Washington D.C. “The National Times” 15th March 1981)
1959: San Fernando Valley, California, U.S.A.
“Radioactive genes were slowly and deliberately released into the air after a serious accident in a reactor just north of the populous San Fernando Valley.”
(Sources “From under the Rug” F.O.E. La Trobe University Vic.)
In addition to providing Gold with secrets on the American atomic project, Fuchs also passed detailed information about the hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Union. Some experts estimate that Fuchs’ intelligence enabled the Soviets to develop and test their own atomic bomb one to two years earlier than otherwise expected.
Read more here: https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/klaus-fuchs
Those in paradise were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.
(From the dystopian novel We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1924)
Deep in the vast forests of Russia’s Ural mountains lies the forbidden city of Ozersk. Behind guarded gates and barbed wire fences stands a beautiful enigma – a hypnotic place that seems to exist in a different dimension.
Codenamed City 40, Ozersk was the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme after the second world war. For decades, this city of 100,000 people did not appear on any maps, and its inhabitants’ identities were erased from the Soviet census.
From this well written article on the closed city of Ozersk (озёрск) whose title really tells you something: “Grave Yard Earth – Inside City 40 Ozersk – Russian – Deadly Secret Nuclear
“how can you help a normal adult learn a new language quickly, easily and effectively?
Now this is a really, really important question in today’s world.
We have massive challenges with environment. We have massive challenges with social dislocation, with wars, all sorts of things going on and if we can’t communication we’re really going to have difficulty solving these problems. So we need to be able to speak each other’s languages, this is really really important.
The question is how you do that.
Well it’s actually really easy.
You look around for people who can already do it, you look for situations where it’s already working, and then you identify the principles and apply them.
It’s called modelling and I’ve been looking at language learning and modelling language learning for about fifteen to twenty years now.
And my conclusion, my observation from this is
is that any adult can learn a second language to fluency
inside six months.
Now when I say this, most people think I’m crazy, that this is not possible.
So let me remind everybody of the history of human progress, it’s all about expanding our limits.”
