Insights, Snippets, Quotes, Epiphanies & All That Sort of Things

[Parsifal]

"households whose income is less than 50% of the national median" is not the usual definition of poverty.  That's mere claptrap,  since it suggests that by definition half of the households in a country live in poverty.

By definition half of households have income less than the median ifself.  It is not true that half of the households have income less than half of the median.

What the statistic tells us is that in the US households with children are poorer than households without children

[Florestan]

The only problem is that they don't state what they mean by "poverty": what income and what household properties (eg, number of rooms, household appliances, cars, computers, mobile phones, running water, power etc) qualifies as such. I'm pretty sure that a "poor household" in the US would be rather "low middle class" in Romania. 

[Florestan]

I don't think you're thinking through some of the details here. Of course, corporations could never become as bad as the government can at its worse (ex. North Korea). But:
1- people only take low-paying corporate jobs because they need a job
2- you can leave, sure, but you face a) possibly losing health insurance that you may never get back; b) possibly long-term unemployment; c) likely the only jobs out there are more corporate or restaurant jobs, with the same indoctrination.

If indoctrination (which anyway you can always ignore) pays your bills and your health I don't see what's wrong with it. Trust me, you wouldn't want to know what real, government enforced, secret police backed-up indoctrination means.

[ibanezmonster]

Jealous of whose country?

Romania!!!!! They took 'urr #1!!!!!

I think the main reason for this is all of the young parents. Not sure why so many 15 year olds have kids.

[snyprrr]

The more you chase something, the more it runs?

[Florestan]

Romania!!!!! They took 'urr #1!!!!!

Greg, where does that statistics come from?

[kishnevi]

By definition half of households have income less than the median ifself.  It is not true that half of the households have income less than half of the median.

What the statistic tells us is that in the US households with children are poorer than households without children

Yes, thanks for the correction.  This is what comes when you post at the end of a long day.   My brain somehow read that as "half of households have income less than the median income".

[Wakefield]

http://www.youtube.com/v/PCrH7LL5KT8

Translation:

http://faculty.uca.edu/rnovy/Borges--Borges&I.htm

... the translator omits the word "etymologies" between "maps" and "eighteenth-century typography".

[Wakefield]

... and this one, the first poem by Kavafis that I knew:

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

[kishnevi]

... and this one, the first poem by Kavafis that I knew:

I first encountered him in high school, when we read Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  The Gods Abandon Antony is the poem that most impressed itself on my memory.

[Florestan]

... and this one, the first poem by Kavafis that I knew:

A great one, a classic.

[Geo Dude]

A great one, a classic.

Great, indeed!

[Wakefield]

Yesterday I did read this paragraph 83 from Nietzsche's The Joyful Wisdom and I instantaneously recalled some discussions on board (f.i., Romantic v/s HIP approach):

83. Translations. — One can estimate the amount of the historical sense which an age possesses by the way in which it makes translations and seeks to embody in itself past periods and literatures. The French of Corneille, and even the French of the Revolution, appropriated Roman antiquity in a manner for which we would no longer have the courage — owing to our superior historical sense. And Roman antiquity itself: how violently, and at the same time how naively, did it lay its hand on everything excellent and elevated belonging to the older Grecian antiquity! How they translated these writings into the Roman present! How they wiped away intentionally and unconcernedly the wing-dust of the butterfly moment! It is thus that Horace now and then translated Alcaeus or Archilochus, it is thus that Propertius translated Callimachus and Philetas (poets of equal rank with Theocritus, if we be allowed to judge): of what consequence was it to them that the actual creator experienced this and that, and had inscribed the indication thereof in his poem! — as poets they were averse to the antiquarian, inquisitive spirit which precedes the historical sense; as poets they did not respect those essentially personal traits and names, nor anything peculiar to city, coast, or century, such as its costume and mask, but at once put the present and the Roman in its place. They seem to us to ask- "Should we not make the old new for ourselves, and adjust ourselves to it? Should we not be allowed to inspire this dead body with our soul? for it is dead indeed: how loathsome is everything dead'"— They did not know the pleasure of the historical sense; the past and the alien was painful to them, and as Romans it was an incitement to a Roman conquest. In fact, they conquered when they translated, -not only in that they omitted the historical: they added also allusions to the present; above all, they struck out the name of the poet and put their own in its place-not with the feeling of theft, but with the very best conscience of the imperium Romanum.

[kishnevi]

When governments take leave of their senses, it's the sane who get locked up.

A stray quotation from the Jewish-German journalist Ludwig Borne (ne Loeb Baruch), found in Emancipation by Michael Goldfarb

[Wakefield]

From the extra material of the blu-ray of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent.

If we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death, our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfilment.

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

-- Stanley Kubrick

[Wakefield]

Read on Wikipedia this afternoon:

L'Académie française, also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution, it was restored in 1803 by Napoleon Bonaparte. It is the oldest of the five académies of the Institut de France.

The Académie française has forty seats, each of which is assigned a separate number. Candidates make their applications for a specific seat, not to the Académie in general: if several seats are vacant, a candidate may apply separately for each. Since a newly-elected member is required to eulogize his predecessor in his installation ceremony, it is not uncommon that potential candidates refuse to apply for particular seats because they dislike the predecessors so much that even an enormous exercise in tact will not suffice.

Members are known as les immortels (the immortals) because of the motto, À l'immortalité ("To immortality"), that appears on the official seal of the charter granted by Cardinal Richelieu.

Many notable French writers have not become members of the Académie française. In 1855, the writer, Arsène Houssaye, devised the expression, "forty-first seat", for deserving individuals who were never elected to the Académie, either because their candidacies were rejected, because they were never candidates, or because they died before appropriate vacancies arose. Notable figures in French literature who never became academicians include: Descartes, Molière, Pascal, De La Rochefoucauld, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Chénier, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas (father), Gautier, Flaubert, Stendhal, Nerval, Maupassant, Baudelaire, Émile Zola, Daudet, Jules Verne, Marcel Proust, Gide, Giraudoux, Sartre, Camus, among others.

[Xenophanes]

"Confronted with the succession of scientific hypotheses, some minds are surprised that anyone could find inspiration today in metaphysical principles acknowledged by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and rooted in the oldest intellectual heritage of the race. My reply is that the telephone and the radio do not prevent man from still having two arms, two legs and two lungs, or from falling in love and seeking happiness as did his faraway ancestors."

--Jacques Maritain

I also like aphorisms. That's one of the attractions of the Presocratic Philosophers.

My current favorite is: Life is hard, then you die.

Another is from Michael Flanders: Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not.  In another form, that's attributed to Harry Truman.

[ibanezmonster]

My current favorite is: Life is hard, then you die.

The most true. Probably most people have thought of this before discovering any type of saying like this.

[kishnevi]

I also like aphorisms. That's one of the attractions of the Presocratic Philosophers.

My current favorite is: Life is hard, then you die.

My favorite variant is "Life is a beach from which you dive."

[Karl Henning]

Another is from Michael Flanders: Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not.  In another form, that's attributed to Harry Truman.

My favorite variant of that is from George Burns: The most important thing to succeed in show business is sincerity. And if you can fake that, you've got it made.