“I explained that to May,” Verhofstadt said. “I said, You have a problem, you try to solve it. We on the Continent are different. We need first a concept. If we have a concept, then we are going to try and put every problem that we have inside that concept.”

“There are two kinds of European nations,” Kristian Jensen, the Danish Finance Minister, said last year, referring to Britain’s situation. “There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.”


EU folks talking to/about the UK on Brexit (in The New Yorker)

I'm just an aging political officer.  Coffee is fuel, travel is opportunity.

In response to an old friend

All information is imperfect.

Jacob Bronowski 

He admitted the possibility of a central intelligent cause, while being unable to identify that cause, or understand why its designs should be brought to fulfillment in such roundabout and often terrible ways.

Julian Barnes, Arthur & George

You don't need to be a deer to know to stay off the highway.


Heard on the Equator

The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.

 Dag Hammarskjöld

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Niels Bohr

Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know; nor any people so confident, as those who entertain us with fables.

Michel de Montaigne

There isn’t anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can’t believe it.


Mark Twain, as quoted in The Consciousness Deniers, Galen Strawson (NYRB, March 13, 2018)

Retracing your steps can help you remember what you were looking for.  Your memory of a thought is married to the place in which it first occurred to you.

Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

Everybody has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.


Mike Tyson, as quoted by Avishai Margalit in the NYRB.

Such as only meddle with things subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best they can: but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture?

Michel de Montaigne 

For Kevin

Death wipes everything away
Except for the living.
We are each a world.
And all there will ever be.


Caught in the ether.  

We're an information economy.... it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.  Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified...

William Gibson,  Johnny Mnemonic

Our utmost endeavors cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.

Michel de Montaigne 

Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they are.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Natural Teleology

Natural teleology would mean that the universe is rationally governed in more than one way—not only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads toward certain outcomes—notably, the existence of living, and ultimately conscious, organisms.

Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos


See also:  http://everythingrum.blogspot.com/2018/01/if-there-was-cosmological-design-what.html
 

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.... A satisfying explanation would show that the realization of these possibilities was not vanishingly improbable but a significant likelihood given the laws of nature and the composition of the universe.

Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

Most people don’t like righteousness in others. They can be quite righteous about it.

Louis Menand, The New Yorker (January 8, 2018)