keyholez

a veritable H of Ls

Another On Power quote, noted down four months ago:

In 1814 the France of the departments seemed to the Duc d’Angoulême a much easier country to govern than the France of the old provinces, “which was a veritable hedgehog of liberties.”

a hell of a compliment

George Saunders can “convert his sorrow about mankind into exquisite comedies of disappointment.”

I don’t care. This is the best thing.

“ There certainly are times when it’s appropriate to experience cognitive dissonance between your self-image and something you want, but most people seem to cast that net far too widely. There is no contradiction, and there should be no cognitive dissonance, between loving and hating the same person, or between being a submissive feminist who wants alpha males, or between being a rationalist engaged on a quest of desperate importance who reads anime fanfiction, etcetera. But most people try to conform so narrowly and so unimaginatively to their own self-image that there is little point in reading anything else they say, because it is all predictable once you know what “role” they’re trying to play in their own minds. And among people who are unusually good at not conforming to their own images, their blogs often make for good reading because it is often surprising reading.

— EY

“

Examined in the light of science, human behavior looks to be susceptible of many improvements which would increase individual happiness and advance the progress of the species. It is far from being the case, to take some of the commonest examples, that the family dietary is well balanced and intelligent care taken of the body. How infinitely fair and healthy men could be, would they but cease to be the slaves of habit and the playthings of chance! And what a welter of a world is this in which children who were conceived in inadvertence grow like wild grasses, in which towns are spread as greedy speculators direct, like blind animals sprawling in their own excrement!

I pity the man who has never experienced the noble temptation to play the gardener to this disorder, to build Cities of the Sun, which shall be peopled by a nobler race. But there is in these visions a danger. Men whose stock of knowledge is small find them intoxicating and may be readily convinced by them that the happiness of a continent requires the complete suppression of fermented liquors, or, worse still, the extermination of an entire race whose blood is deemed impure.

Only a man who has himself gone in search of truth knows how deceptive is the blaze of evidence with which a proposition may suddenly dazzle his eyes; the light soon fails, and then the hunt is on again. The entire field of knowledge would have to be covered to measure how few discoveries are sufficiently well grounded to justify a man in basing on them any actions which affected the whole of human society; or to appreciate as well the difficulty of reconciling the often discrepant indications furnished by independent branches of learning.

— Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power, p. 393-4.

is it out of line

to wonder whether stupid people can experience love?

“ Due to a mistranslation, Soviet reports on Enrico Fermi claimed that his work [on creating a nuclear chain reaction] was performed in a converted “pumpkin field” instead of a “squash court”…

— Wikipedia via Kottke. Russia! Also: pumpkin cloud?

these sorts of stories are still out there

Welcome to Biscayne Landing:

Instead of a bustling new community, there are just the two towers with 373 condominiums. Where the retail town center was planned, weeds have sprouted amid mountains of dirt. Forget the promised pool and the spa. Only a hole was dug, and now it’s filled with mucky water. Plus, there’s the smell from the old landfill and the Miami-Dade sewage treatment plant next door.

A loan that helped to finance this development sits in a securitized pool alongside loans backed by:

a Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas;
an Atlantic City casino, currently in foreclosure; and
an empty office building in Greenwich, Connecticut, originally intended for occupation by a hedge fund.

Remember ugly America?

“ Risk appetite is back, so it is time to worry about the improbable again. Risk Management Solutions, a catastrophe-modeling firm, is certainly thinking outside the atmosphere. In a 17-page report, it estimates a repeat of the 1908 Tunguska event — when a comet or asteroid exploded above Siberia — could cause 3.2 million deaths and $1.2 trillion in damages if it occurred over New York. Its advice to insurers: “Having a portfolio concentrated in [a] single city creates a greater probability of ruin for an impact than a well distributed portfolio.

— WSJ, “Heard on the Street”. I am not overly impressed by the conclusion drawn.

“

Q. Do you believe the conspiracy theories about 9/11?

A. Every theory about 9/11 is a conspiracy theory.

— Ran Prieur, “9/11 FAQ” (courtesy of Mortgagez). (Next sentence: “The dominant theory says that it was a conspiracy of Islamic extremists acting independently…”)