i returned home through the snow. Crossing the road i lost my footing on a patch where cars had impacted the snow into a frictionless patina, and as i was falling i reflected that knowledge presents similar problems to snow – where many have trodden, the ground is icy, one just skids along, unable to generate the friction for a proper step; and as civilization progresses, it is harder to find fresh snow, where the foot can crunch and tread; one needs to approach the matter differently, to contemplate ancient knowledge as a modern man, or modern knowledge as an ancient – either is like wearing snowshoes – there is friction, a useful strangeness. The world is strange but accumulations of research disguise this. So academics never seem to approach the matter itself – they get as far as “what Nietzsche said” or “the Leavis position” and go no further. Hence academics are constantly citing other academics – they entirely lack the innocence one needs, to see things as they are, as strange. Everything is familiar to the academic – that is to say, false. Nothing is familiar.

- Elberry

"To be a successful copywriter, you have to appeal to your prospect’s feelings and desires. Here are seven very important ones:

Fear!

Greed!

Vanity!

Lust!

Pride!

Envy!

Laziness!

Do you recognize where these came from? If you are Catholic, you probably do. They are the Seven Deadly Sins."

- direct marketing tutorial

"I don't fight. I'm too old, have had too many broken bones, have too many scars, and have too many teeth knocked out. The best I can hope to do is make a quick, clean, kill."

- Jerry Penguin

“O God, put away justice and truth for we cannot understand them and do not want them. Eternity would bore us dreadfully. Leave Thy heavens and come down to our earth of water clocks and hedges. Become our uncle. Look after Baby, amuse Grandfather, escort Madam to the Opera, help Willy with his homework, introduce Muriel to a handsome naval officer. Be interesting and weak like us, and we will love you as we love ourselves.”

- W. H. Auden

Diogenes was neither an Attic nor a Dorian, nor tutored in the schools of Salon or Lycurgus, for neither places nor laws communicate virtue. He was born in the town of Synope, at the bottom of Pontus Euxinus. When he had consulted Apollo, he forsook all the occasions of grief and trouble, he delivered himself from his fetters, and like a wise and free bird, passed through the world without fearing the tyrants, without binding himself to any particular laws, without applying himself to the administration of public affairs, without being troubled in the education of children, without being encumbered by matrimony, without toiling himself with the cultivating of the ground, without engaging himself in the carrying out of war, without trafficking merchandise by sea or land; for he laughed at all these sorts of men, and at their several stations of life as we commonly laugh at children who we observe so intent to play with trifles, until they often fight and hurt one another.

He led the life of an independent, being free from fears and anxieties. In winter seasons he did not by long fatiguing journeys approach the Babylonians, nor in the summer the Medes; but according to the season, and from the Isthmus, according to the season, and from the Isthmus to Attica again. His royal palaces were the temples, the colleges, and the sacred woods. His riches very large and secure, and not being circumscribed, were not easily subject to ambushes, they being the whole earth with all the fruits it bore, and the fountains that it affords, more excellent than the wines of Lesbos and Chios. He habituated himself also to all sorts of weather as lions do, and would not avoid the changing of the seasons, appointed by Jupiter; neither did he consider any means to secure himself from them; but accustomed himself in such a manner to all seasons, by this kind of living, so that he secured this health and strength, without any assistance from medicine, without experiencing the sharpness of the scalpel or cautery, without imploring the help of Chiron, or of Esculapius or Asclepiades, and without submitting to the prophecies of soothsayers, or to magical and superstitious purifications, or to the vanity of conjurations. At the same time that all Greece was in arms and uproar, and all the neighboring nations were at war with one another, he alone experienced it as if it were a truce with all the earth, and having overcome fighting, was without arms in the midst of armed men. Nay, even the basest of men, the tyrants and his very slanderers, had a respect for him and would not in the least hurt him, though he reproved them, objecting and lampooning their actions before their very eyes, which is a very safe and very convenient way of reproach – reminding men of peace and reason.

- Maximum of Tyre

Is it not also amusing that golf is even taken seriously as an athletic pursuit? I mean, why not pancake-flipping? Or dice? Or shooting rats at the landfill?

- James Kunstler

"We wants to wreck them. They wants to take away our precious! The one with the ears, he wants the precious back. Always watching. Always wanting the precious. We must wreck him and then the young one. They will never take our precious."

- Gollum

"Pot could be prescribed and regulated the same way that pain pills such as vicodin, oxycodone and other narcotic drugs are treated. "

Yes, it COULD be... but WHY SHOULD IT?!

I'm fucking sick and tired of hearing people say "regulate it and tax
it just like alcohol, tobacco and other drugs". Fuck that shit. Don't
regulate and tax ANY of it. Do we "regulate and tax" water, cornmeal,
eggs? Then why pot or alcohol? It is a mechanism of social control
and economic dominance. Anyone who suggests that pot (and other
drugs) be "regulated and taxed" is, in objective terms, allied with the
elites, and is an enemy of the people.

PS: darn, I neglected that word "prescribed". That's even worse.
Much worse. To suggest that a drug or substance not only be "taxed
and regulated", but be under the exclusive control of doctors?!
Again, to suggest this is to ally with the elites and take a position
decidedly in opposition to the people's interests.

- Alan2102

Russell was clever, but he was only really concerned with things that don’t matter. He didn’t love or need wisdom; he wanted a doll’s house of the mind, so he could feel himself to be surrounded by order and neat answers. Because he was an intelligent man he was not easily satisfied – it wasn’t a cheap doll’s house; but all the same, it was a doll’s house.
- Elberry

And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of the child waxed warm.

-- 2 Kings 4:34, KJV

Over the last few weeks i’ve come to feel that this will be my last life. Perhaps it’s just that, having no idea what the world will be like in 25 years, i also can’t imagine a future life. None of my past lives turned out to be at all like i’d imagined, when i used to mentally toy with the idea of reincarnation; but at least it was possible to imagine such lives. However, the feeling is strong and persistent, and it makes sense of this life: i don’t think this Elberry incarnation is meant to be a proper life, so much as a tidying up of loose ends, an epilogue to five millenia of foolery and difficulty and crazy hair. It explains why i know of three lives (four, now, as another German one is emerging from the vaults), when most people don’t even suspect they’ve lived before, let alone remember their lives.
It shouldn’t make any difference but it does; i feel relieved of a long burden, to know (or suspect, hope) this will be my last physical life. i already felt somewhat distant from my own life, but i now feel something like i did when i knew i was about to leave one of my many shitty office jobs – a gleeful irresponsibility, knowing i can say or do just about anything and it won’t matter, because i won’t be here next week. In this case, i have at least two loose ends left to tidy up, from the last life – someone to meet, and something to write. Both are things to look forward to. But after that, adios motherfucker, bon voyage.

- Elberry

An elegant study, formulated by psychologists Ellen Langer and Alia Crum at Harvard University in 2007, examined the effect of simply being told that you are doing something healthy. Eighty-four female room attendants working in various hotels were divided into two groups: one was told that cleaning hotel rooms was "good exercise" and "satisfies the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle", along with elaborate explanations of how and why; the other group did not receive this cheering information, and just carried on cleaning hotel rooms. Four weeks later, the 'informed' group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before, and showed a significant decrease in weight, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio and body mass index. Amazingly, both groups were still reporting the same amount of activity.

I believe the reality is that pulling out a credit card and ordering a book or a course is easy. Actually consuming the material and doing the work is hard. When people discover there's actual work involved, they too often reach for the credit card again to move on to the next big thing.

- Bill Hibbler

*Most kinds of .45 have unexceptional muzzle energy and are big and fat, giving fairly poor performance even against light, flexible body armour. It was the standard US military pistol round for a long time and many diehards still swear by it, but people who carry guns for a living - cops, soldiers, criminals - are mostly using other calibres these days. (Some spec-ops troops still use .45, as the bullet is subsonic and thus can be effectively silenced.)

The other major nations need the USA gone in a world facing environmental and resource depletion problems. You don't need to have studied Sun Tzu to work that out. So they have, each in their own way and in a quite natural fashion, sought to undermine the USA at every opportunity. Fortunately for them the greed and stupidity of the US elite made this a lot easier than they ever could have dreamed possible.

I believe we are now in a geo-political end game for the US as a major power, the objective is no longer solely to bring down the USA, that is a fait accompli, but to do it in such a way as to prevent collateral damage and some sort of Götterdämmerung blaze of glory spasm by the US in its death throes. This is why the Chinese and Co aren't simply blowing up big chunks of Wall Street and the Fed (although they could with tap of a keyboard. SELL. EXECUTE.) and taunting the broken dazed populace of the "last superpower" live on CNN.

- S E Pearson

This is a good point at which to ask ourselves the question – “What is the scenario that would cause maximum damage to the average PM sector investor, and at the same time funnel his resources most efficiently into the pockets of Big Money?” This is an easy one to answer – it would be a gold breakout to new highs that would trigger a wave of buy stops and lead to many chart followers and a broad swath of investors piling in. Having “lobster potted” the majority Big Money could then engineer a savage reversal and plunge and you had better believe that they have got the clout to do it – this is the game they played with copper last year.

- Clive Maund

其根在腳。發於腿。主宰於腰。形於手指。
由腳而腿而腰。

- Tai Chi Classic writing: Song of 13 Postures

I'd be surprised if there had never been a thread here about how the Enterprise was clearly not on a "peaceful mission" but a neoliberal imperialist mission. If it's peaceful, why a military ship? Why under military command? Where are the diplomats? Why does Kirk despise every diplomat he has to deal with? They often come cruising in where they're not wanted like Commodore Peary in Tokyo Harbor saying "open up your markets to our trade or else!" They're like someone who goes down the street banging on strangers' doors shouting "Achtung! Open up and be friendly!" They're just interstellar housebreakers.

My favorite is how they have this "Prime Directive" which they violate in every episode, often giving some ideological explanation for why it doesn't apply in some case. For example: "this civilization is stagnant, and the Prime Directive only applies to progressive civilizations, not stagnant ones".

So if according to their ideology a place is stagnant and not progressing, then they can interfere as much as they want. Sounds familiar.
- LATOC forum

"Blessed is he who has found his work, let him ask no other blessing."

- Thomas Carlyle

My personal "Basic Integrated Curriculum" is

Wrestling:
Sprawl
Clinch
Bodylock takedown

Striking:
Jab
Cross
Hook
Crazy Monkey guard
Low Thai kick

Grappling:
Basic Positions
Mount Escapes
Side Control Escapes
Scissor Sweep
Situp Sweep
Back Control
RNC
Arm Triangle

That's for "Self Defense". If some regular dude studies that list for a year they will be well equipped to handle 99.99999% of all unarmed encounters they will ever have. They don't have to make any decisions about breaking peoples arms. They know how to escape from bad positions and they know how to subdue someone on the ground.

- kintanon