Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

  • Profound day today. Profound. Just profound. Sometimes you have or learn an idea

    Profound day today. Profound. Just profound. Sometimes you have or learn an idea and the entire world becomes dramatically simplified in the matter of a few moments. I love these moments. They are worth the weeks, months and years you put into them.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-17 00:39:00 UTC

  • sometimes… I just gotta think for three or four days… Always seems like I’m

    sometimes… I just gotta think for three or four days… Always seems like I’m not getting anything done. But in the end, I seem to always figure it out… sigh.

    Philosophy as a street-craftsman.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-17 00:21:00 UTC

  • LATECOMER: THE KILLING (series) Binge watching the Killing series. Takes place i

    LATECOMER: THE KILLING (series)

    Binge watching the Killing series. Takes place in Seattle. It really is beautiful. Funny tho: the location scouts work pretty hard at finding skeevy sections of Seattle. Because there really aren’t any. Seattle never had mass immigration or underclass industrialization. And where the hell do they find the black people? There aren’t any black people in seattle? It’s the second whitest city in america. They have a murder in Discovery Park, then shoot the scene in what I think is Issaquah? They get the light right (it’s blue grey in seattle all the time). The camera work is excellent. I keep saying “fk, I wouldn’t have thought of that, that’s good.”

    The directing is excellent. I love long shots. The use of long shots rather than filler dialog lets actors actually act rather than wrestle with crap lines.

    But what gets me is how good the casting is. The casting is awesome. It’s interesting. So the combination of long shots and good casting is just – I don’t know, it’s more than refreshing. It’s satisfying – elegant even.

    I really don’t understand why casting is so bad in some movies and series. Casting is a discipline. A craft. It isn’t rocket science. But it certainly isn’t intuitive. Actors should not pitch to amateurs. It’s insulting And I see movie after movie with terrible casting. I wish I understood the process better but you know, it’s really frustrating to watch a series die because of weak casting.

    Anyway, I can’t watch most series – too exasperating. This one is up in my top five. It’s a work of art. Not just Because Seattle is home, but because like Seattle, it’s elegant and smart.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 15:24:00 UTC

  • I miss my guys. 🙁 (Sniffle)

    I miss my guys. 🙁 (Sniffle)


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 12:58:00 UTC

  • Dear God. Thank you for smart, strong, stubborn, women. Otherwise life would jus

    Dear God. Thank you for smart, strong, stubborn, women. Otherwise life would just not be all that interesting. 😉


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 10:26:00 UTC

  • If I haven’t been riding on a motorcycle in many years, do I need a lighter star

    If I haven’t been riding on a motorcycle in many years, do I need a lighter starter bike, or do I just go with a 600-750 bike out of the gate, and trade up after a year?

    Remember. I drive like a grandmother. OK? No open road. No racing. Pure urban street stuff. Naked bikes. The luxury of feeling present in society, of easy social interaction in the city, and easy parking (particularly here in Europe).

    Thanks.

    ( Josh Brantley ? )


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-11 07:35:00 UTC

  • A PLACE IN THE NATURAL ARISTOCRACY I consider myself a warrior – a physical, com

    A PLACE IN THE NATURAL ARISTOCRACY

    I consider myself a warrior – a physical, commercial and intellectual competitor. I have no desire to participate in an effete, affluent, managerial aristocracy. But I desire that others do, so that I need not. I prefer to have a leader who takes care of leadership duties. I just prefer to choose my leader from the best available. I prefer to choose a leader who is better than I.

    The upper class – the perpetuating nobility – the natural aristocracy – produce families of consistent quality, as long as they demonstrate retention of their position by commercial, military, and intellectual performance.

    This family scope is a very different burden from that of the individual warrior, who wishes to achieve his greatest personal possibilities. It is a very different thing to seek to build a noble family, from that which it is to seek to build great arts, great sciences, great commerce.

    So the philosophy of aristocracy does not require that all of us seek the status of intergenerational familial nobility. But instead, that we pursue our excellences – only one of which is intergenerational familial nobility.

    To be a great thinker, artist, tradesman, investor, warrior, scientist, does not require that my siblings do. Only that I have the will to demonstrated excellence – aristocracy – myself.

    If I succeed and reproduce with others of the same ilk, then over time, perhaps my genes can participate in the natural aristocracy of families. And that is the greatest aspiration I care to dream of. Because it is the greatest aspiration that is possible for me to act upon.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-11 07:11:00 UTC

  • PROGRESS: I DID IT. (SHOCKED) It’s been an interesting week. I couldn’t write mu

    PROGRESS: I DID IT. (SHOCKED)

    It’s been an interesting week. I couldn’t write much because of all the asthma therapy, but I did read and think quite a bit, while struggling with ‘correcting’ Hoppe’s apriorism.

    But damn. I did it. I really did it. I’ll bet it takes me less than six months to get it all into digestible form with enough examples that I can communicate the concepts to at least those with scientific rather than rational frames of language.

    But, whether it takes me one month or six, if I simply state that **the problem of information absence or loss that affects the logic of physics, mathematics, and language never occurs in statements of demonstrated action – the logic of action and by consequence, the logic of cooperation***, then that is all that needs to be stated. Actions by definition and necessity correspond to reality. They are a bridge between imagination and reality. A test of correspondence. They are the only test of correspondence with reality. Human actions are, because of shared intentionality, and the biomechanical similarities between all men, universally open to subjective testing. Even if cognitive abilities differ dramatically – perhaps logarithmically – demonstrated actions do not. Since cognitive abilities can be expressed as functions consisting of a hierarchy of more simplistic operations each of which is reducible to perceptible form, then the problem of cognition is always reducible to more simplistic form, and the difference between lesser and greater minds is merely the scope of the function (network) that is testable at any given time. (This corresponds with what we know of neurological processes: aggregation)

    If we take (a) the reduction of information into perceptible form (instrumentalism), (b) subjective testing when stated as action (operations), (c) cooperation via shared intentionality and the consequential prohibition on free riding / imposed costs / involuntary transfer (ethics), then we are done.

    By ‘done’ I mean that all logical fields, categories, names, words, relations, causality, ethical action and deduction, can be united into a single consistent framework of instrumentation whose only differences are the choice of which properties we wish to inspect, and which we can and must ignore, for the purpose of testing internal consistency of statements where we are not cognitively able to construct sets without the help of such instrumentation, given the limits of our short term memory, and the composition of our intuition (thinking) as a perpetual and recursive search engine.

    COMMUNITY HELP ON ONE ISSUE OF TERMINOLOGY

    I need to ask the community to help me with the choice of terminology, or I need to at least articulate the point of view for each term, under the general category of free riding. We only free ride by the imposition of costs without contribution to production. So free riding may contribute to confusion even if its anthropologically, and in context of the problem of cooperation, the most precise term.

    THE PROBLEM OF NASH EQUILIBRIUM IN THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTY

    (I am trying to solve the problem of eliminating demand for the state, while preserving the greatest liberty, and requiring that all exchanges remain voluntary, productive, and …)

    The issue for any polity then is to control the population (distribution of abilities) such that the Nash equilibrium is actually possible and productive. This seems to be the threshold problem that primitive trust societies can’t get beyond.

    Monogamous Marriage is a Nash equilibrium problem. And Pareto efficient optimums are a Nash problems. But since we cannot test the aggregates meaningfully against any constant, all we can do is rely upon volition.

    Eh….

    ENGLISH: GETTING IT MOSTLY RIGHT

    If I were to say that the english got it mostly right. And that if we had evolved the multi-house system of private government for the provision of investments in the commons by adding a house of labor, retained the common law as inviolable by the government, allowed the church to evolve into social insurer, and NOT adopted the Napoleonic/Rothschildian credit-state and total war, then I am not sure that we would have gone very wrong. In fact, we were very close. One of the arguments that I’ve kept running across is that the agrarian and industrial revolutions happened so fast, that we could not evolve our institutions as organically as we had in the past. And that while conservative institutions are ‘scientific’ (proven by experience) they require time to evolve, and the disruption caused by the rapid economic progress overwhelmed our prior conservatism.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-11 06:46:00 UTC

  • I never feel lonely or alone in Kiev. I sometimes feel it in Seattle. I always f

    I never feel lonely or alone in Kiev. I sometimes feel it in Seattle. I always feel alone or lonely in east coast US cities. I wish I understood why…. I cant even speak the damned language. It’s something about how friendly and approachable people are.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-10 11:29:00 UTC

  • MAGIC OF HUMAN BEINGS This is how you earn your place among the gods

    http://digg.com/video/youre-going-to-love-this-polish-street-musicianTHE MAGIC OF HUMAN BEINGS

    This is how you earn your place among the gods….


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-09 14:36:00 UTC