Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the num...
And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But...
A pinch of mother is worth a pack of shaman.
We are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That’s what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we h...
Was fighting the war on a level where it might actually mean something, might have some use, might be a matter of changing people’s souls in their pure existence outside the world, where they might be...
The party was a hierarchy; you started at the bottom and moved up one step at a time—school board, city council, state assembly—and then if you had demonstrated lockstep team loyalty, the powers at th...
She keeps a shrine to Sol Invictus in her room, performs the pratahsamdhya ceremony, the salute to the sun, every morning
Nonviolent civil resistance of various soft kinds is demonstrably more successful than violent resistance when it comes to actually achieving the stated goals of the resistance and changing things for...
Indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing son...
Good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.
Capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid
You always know economists are in deep shit when they start talking about trust and value. Usually when you say fundamentals to them they’re like interest rates and price of gold.
Why? Yes, why? I mean there’s two kinds of activities here, there’s the exploration of Mars and then there’s the life support for that exploration. And here you’ve been completely immersed in the life...
Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting?The reason is simple...
When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth’s climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trad...
When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. T...
When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk...
What does it mean to love the past? Each day disappears into nothingness, and we must live every moment of our lives in the present. The present is the whole of reality. But human beings are more than...
We have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine.
We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is h...