“Capitalism can be good, proper, brutal fun, the biggest schoolyard game in the world.” Indeed. Schoolyard. “What do you think she would be like in bed?” “I’ve nevr met her.” “How would that matter?” So telling.
Category: uncategorized
Aug 15 2025
from “Losing Earth” by Nathaniel Rich
from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news “The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate …
Aug 05 2025
John Kerry on Trump (on Bill Maher)
“Trump responds more to his Twitter ‘likes’ than his briefing books and the Constitution of the United States.” (And that was about his first term.) “He has the maturity of an 8-year-old boy and the insecurity of a teenage girl.”
Jul 28 2025
Nietzsche on natural death
“Under certain conditions, it is improper to live any longer. Continued vegetation in cowardly dependence upon physicians and prescription, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, should entail the profound contempt of humanity.” Nietzsche “Natural death is death under the most contemptible conditions. It is involuntary death, death at the …
Jul 26 2025
A brilliant observation by Kierkegaard from 1838
“People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of expression as compensation.” Kierkegaard (1838)
Jun 30 2025
The Psychosis of Jocks
And another thing (from Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes): the guy who considered his football game to be far more important than knowing whether or not his girlfriend was pregnant. Not unusual. Most men worship football. Guys, especially jocks—you have been brainwashed. It’s a fucking GAME. A game of tag with a game of catch. To see …
Jun 29 2025
“just kidding around” / “just a joke”
Jodi Picoult’s excellent novel, Nineteen Minutes, got me thinking, yet again, about when people (most often males) claim they were “just kidding around” or that it was “just a joke”, what they really mean is “I don’t want to be held accountable for what I just did.” And it’s appalling that such immaturity persists well …
Jun 23 2025
Mountainhead (on Crave)
Maybe I’ve just been naïve, but I found this movie very frightening. It gets a bit silly about 1.5 hours in, but otherwise … Via ‘new’ tech that exacerbates to the nth degree everything that’s horrifying about AI and apps that enable fake pictures, videos, and text/news—essentially, lying—it shows the concentration of power in the …
Jun 18 2025
The trade war
You know, I’m confused about this whole trade war thing. Better a trade war than a nuclear war, for sure, but … Isn’t it good for a country to reduce its dependence on other countries? Isn’t it good to reduce one’s deficit, to balance the budget? If the States doesn’t want to buy as much …
fiction
