Message for a society designed around desk-clearing

"If you spend all your time cleaning your desk, you'll just have clean desk. That's not enough."

-- Bill Harley

"As a consequence"

"I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment."

--John Steinbeck

{a special hat/tip to Mark P.}

Yeah, the math has always struck me too.

"When you looked around, you used to be baffled by the ratio of upright people to prone, devastated people. Sure, you understood your math was off. You knew the prone, devastated people were hidden behind locked doors, if they could help it.

But still: There seemed to be a LOT of walking, functioning, smiling, grocery-shopping, 401-K-stuffing, married, baby-having, employed, vacation-planning people in the world, compared to, you know, YOU.

It’s still hard to shake."

--Jenn Mattern

On his Nine Point Investment Plan

All bets are off for the moment, obviously. The big question this week is which one of your neighbors you should eat first when things get bad. And of course I expect some sort of zombie problem. But in normal times, the nine point list is useful.

-Scott Adams

On Leadership

This generation of political leaders is confronting a similar situation, and, so far, they have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority, to give the world any reason to believe that this country is being governed.

The American century was created by American leadership, which is scarcer than credit just about now.

-David Brooks

And he's not even Austrian..... (or: "The people who call themselves 'capitalists' these days seem to be anything but")

"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works"

--John Stuart Mill

Please note: 21st century etiquette.

"There is no socially accepted excuse for being without your cell phone. “I didn’t have my phone”: that just does not sound believable. Either you are lying or you are depressed or you have something to hide. If you receive a text, therefore, you are obliged instantaneously to reply to it, if only to confirm that you are not one of those people who can be without a phone."

--Louis Menand

On looking on the bright side

"...the evidence clearly suggests that the future will be more of a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome-style apocalypse. When you talk about zombies you're just fear-mongering."

--Louis Jeansonne

Let's boil it all down, shall we, on a question underlying most of the $50 TRILLION derivatives market

"If it takes a rocket scientist [to] explain a trade (with no universal agreement as to the explanation) and there is no performing underlying asset, it’s a Ponzi scheme."

--Anonymous, 12:43pm


{Perhaps the title of this post should have been "Goodnight and Good Luck"}

Got pitchforks?

The sight of the overclass clutching our children to their pudgy selves as human shields while shooting at each other is a shaping event. All those ancien regime aristocracies who got mobbed to death: It was ugly, but they bought their ticket in the queue on merit. Mmmphh.

--Richard Kline