Gists XV

Succo.

Quotes

“Between authority and anarchy lies argument.”

“The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg.”

[Ukraine on losing the war] “[The] Russians will come and put their dicks on our foreheads.”

“Social media is just a toilet wall.” — Stephen Fry

“They present an ideal of basketball in action — hoops as jazz, or as democracy. Everybody gets his turn.” — on the 2024 Boston Celtics

“We were on the prowl, hungry for life.” — Al Pacino

“He fired me in flight. It was a beautiful thing, like a ballet. He was all the way up in the balcony, and, as he descended the theatre’s colossal winding staircase, he routed past me on the second floor, pointed at me, and bellowed, ‘Now you’re fired’, and then continued to the lobby. He never broke stride. What a graceful way to get the axe. I almost applauded him.” — Al Pacino

Misc

• US nationwide offices are 50% full; downtown foot traffic has fallen 26% in the 52-biggest cities. A “doom loop” when workers stop going to the office, local shops close, the area seems vacant, and employers are less likely to set up.
• Billie Eilish is the youngest two-time Oscar winner and the youngest person to clean sweep all four main Grammy categories.
• The NYC 1968 sanitation union strike lasted nine days — causing the city’s first general health emergency since the 1931 polio epidemic.
• Curt Cobain wanted to call Nirvana’s third album I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.
• American Capitalism (1952) by John Kenneth Galbraith outlined the notion of “countervailing power” — that markets could not be relied upon to police themselves, but needed balance from forces such as trade unions and consumer coalitions. “Private economic power is held in check by the countervailing power of those who are subject to it. The first begets the second.”
• In India, 1.4 billion citizens have a 12-digit identity number called an Aadhaar. It’s linked to biometric information and underpins the integrated digital ecology called “the stack.”
• Babe Ruth was said to have rented out entire whorehouses on the road for a night; the ladies revived him for another round by pouring champagne over his head!
• The modern American curse of capitalism is that it makes people feel miserable without visibly immiserating them.
• Now we live in the modern world the Enlightenment produced — one of fragmented belief and broken purposes, where no God superintends the cosmos, common agreement on meaning is no longer possible, and all you can do with the moon is measure it. Enlightened, we are alone.
• The interspace — where creation of meaning from art takes place.
• Neal ElAttrache is an American orthopaedic surgeon whose clientele includes Aaron Rodgers, Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady, Shohei Ohtani, Zack Greinke, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlize Theron, Ringo Starr, Joe Burrow, Helen Hunt, Paul Reiser, Odell Beckham Jr., Leonardo DiCaprio, Rodney Dangerfield, Keanu Reeves, Travis Scott, Sean Combs, and Nicole Kidman. His brother-in-law is Sylvester Stallone.
• Saddam Hussein once had his minister of health sacked, arrested, tortured, and executed after agreeing too quickly on Hussein’s idea of stepping down. He executed the country’s leading Shia cleric — rumoured to have personally hammered a nail into the cleric’s head and setting him on fire. An honorary citizen of Detroit, having been given the key to the city after supporting a church.
• Switzerland has roughly nine million bunker spots for a population of 8.8 million people. In the 1960s, Switzerland mandated shelter space for every citizen.
• Solider of Fortune allowed recruitment ads for hitmen until 1986.
• Between 1962 and 2000, no new major class of antibiotics came to market. If the AI-created G2 family of chemicals succeeds, it will be the first new class of anti-MRSA drugs in nearly 25 years.

Attention

• A ten-year decline in reading, math, and science among 15-year-olds globally. Between 2010 and 2022 diagnoses of ADHD tripled. Between 1990 and 2020 the mean length of a top-performing pop song declined by over a minute. In 2004 screen attention was two and a half minutes; today it’s 47 seconds. Consumers attention span is less than eight seconds — less than a goldfish!
• In 1997, technology pundit Michael Goldhaber envisioned a world where attention supplanted money as the dominant currency. “If you have enough attention, you can get anything you want.”
• In English, you “pay” attention; in Spanish you “lend.”
• By paying attention to something you make it interesting.

Order of the Third Bird

• A secret international fellowship going back centuries. Members are distinguished by saffron-coloured cloth they carry/wear.
• Converges, flash-mob style, on art at museums for exactly 28 minutes — four parts of seven minutes separated by the ringing of a bell known as the Standard Protocol:

1. Encounter. Arrive at the coordinates at the designated time and wander to find the artwork, which is unnamed because you’re supposed to find it by paying attention (e.g. a painting hanging on the wall opposite the Mona Lisa).
2. Attending. Line up side-by-side (referred to as the phalanx) and, in silence, give full attention to the artwork. Analysis from study (referred to as “stadium”), interpretation, and judgement are discouraged.
3. Negation. Clear the artwork from your mind — which can include closing eyes, lying down, inspecting something else.
4. Realising. Contemplate what does the artwork needs (e.g. to be moved? children climbing on it? sung to?)
5. Dispersal. Find somewhere to write down your experience of the four phases.
6. Colloquy. Meet up a short time later and participants take turns describing their experience. Distinguishes the process from solo pursuits such as mindfulness.

• Attention as a medium — like paint, clay, or words. Attention is the difference between movement of the mind and movement of the eye.
• An imaginary journal of the so-called Esthetical Society for Transcendental and Applied Realization (now incorporating the Society of Esthetic Realizers) — or ESTAR(SER). A 750-page selection was published as In Search of the Third Bird.
• “Objectivity is a big success, but it scorches the Earth of the experiential and makes it merely ‘personal’. Why not go back to experience and not break it across the knee into objectivity and subjectivity, leaving the subjective discarded as weak?”
• Other protocols include the Vetiver Protocol (attention to fragrances); Protocol of the Sea Watch (done in water, the final step is “Resurface”); Doppler Protocol (Attending happens on the approach to the work, Negation over the shoulder while walking away); Prosphorion (one of the participants “becomes” an object of great importance that has become inaccessible).

Academic Freedom

• Professors work for the public to produce scholarship and instruction that benefits society’s store of knowledge
• The concept originated in Germany during the 19th century as Lehrfreiheit along with the idea of a research university. Protected what professors wrote and taught within (not outside) the academy — similar to First Amendment protections. The first great battle was science versus religion.
• Academic freedom is rigorously policed by professors to ensure the norms (secular, scientific, fairly tested, evidence, rational argument, citations, peer-reviewed) of academic inquiry are observed.
• Modern coddling (receiving views as hurtful or offensive, refusing to engage with objectionable works, anonymous reporting, invesigations, trial by social media) are poor conditions for the knowledge business — you may lose the argument, but you have to feel free, in the classroom, to have your say without sanction.
• The laws do not apply to academics, but rather the institutions themselves. Universities live in constant fear of being taken to court; the “lawyerisation” of higher education.
• “Tolerance is the price academics and students pay for the freedoms society has carved out for them.”

Forever Chemicals

• In 1902, 3M (then Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) was founded, but soon the mining operations flopped. An early employee invented masking tape; another Post-it notes; another Scotchgard; another N95 marks (failed bra concept).
• Fluorochemicals have their origins in the Manhattan Project, which developed one of the first safe processes for bonding carbon to fluorine. They are extremely versatile (resist oil, water and heat) and incredibly long-lasting.
• After the war, 3M hired some Manhattan Project chemists and began mass-producing fluorochemicals. 3M sold a flurochemical named PFOA to DuPont for use in Teflon.
• The flurochemical Forever chemicals gained the scientific name PFAS (PolyFluoroAlkyl Substances).
• Between 1951 and 2000, 3M produced at least 100 million pounds of PFOSs. At least 45% of US tap water is estimated to contain forever chemicals. PFOS leached out of 3M products into all of us. It is found in human blood, practically everywhere.
• 3M understood fluorochemicals has made their way into human blood in the 1980s, but purposefully held off alerting the EPA until 1998 — after which it made the costly decision to discontinue PFOS products. In 2024, the EPA stated PFOS and PFOA are likely to cause cancer and deemed them hazardous substances.
• 3M has not admitted wrongdoing or faced criminal liability for producing forever chemicals or concealing their harms.

Veil of Ignorance

• A thought experiment that asks: “Imagine you’re designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it — rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?”
• The idea is to design a better society that looks after all its people.

Constitutional Interpretation

• Textualists ask what the words literally mean.
• Originalists ask what the Framers would have them do. What the words meant to the average voter in the 18th century. In Columbia v. Heller, originalists found a right to posses a gun for self-defence in the Second Amendment, which says nothing about self-defence.
• Pragmatists look at the law’s purposes, consequences, and values.
• In the Constitution and Bill of Rights, many meanings are not fixed. “Cruel and unusual” punishment refers to what most people would find excessive — otherwise the system would lose its legitimacy.
• Free speech is protected because in a democracy, if you do not allow the losers to have their say you cannot expect them to sumbit to the winners.

Parthenon

• In 1799, Lord Elgin arrived in Constantinople. Athens had been under Ottoman role for over 300 years.
• In 1801, the Turkish authority allowed Elgin to remove fallen pieces of the temple (only a copy of a this agreement exists). Elgin’s representatives soon started bribing to allow them to cut sculptures off the building. Elgin originally planned to install them at his estate.
• In Athens, the Acropolis temple originally contained 524 friezes. Over a decade, half were removed and shipped to Britain. One ship sank, requiring an expensive salvage mission.
• In 1830, Greece became an independent state and demanded the statues returned — a request that British diplomats have constantly rejected.
• Currently housed in the British Museum, which houses over 8 million artifacts and is the most-visited tourist attraction in London. In 1993, robbers broke into the British Museum and stole a quarter-million dollars worth of Roman coins and jewellery. In 2002, a visitor stole a 2500-year-old Greek head. In 2004, 15 pieces of medieval Chinese jewellery were stolen.

Gaslighting

• The term comes from a 1944 film, Gaslight, in which a man trying to steal his wife’s jewels from the attic convinces her she’s imaging the flickering gas lamps (caused by the antagonist turning on the gas lamps in the attic to search).
• Replaces what you know to be true with something else. Attempts to make the victim feel like they are going crazy. To fundamentally undermine their targets.
• Different from brainwashing because it convinces a person to distrust their own capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood.
• The parent-child dynamic is a power imbalance that is conducive to this form of manipulation. Discounting women’s pain (e.g. endometriosis) as being “too sensitive” is another example. Accusations of gaslighting that are just differing opinions are, in itself, a form of gaslighting (“am I a gaslighter?”).
• “If the need to affirm one’s own version of reality is pretty much universal, it makes sense that a desire to attack someone’s competing version is universal, too.”

Buffet

“The greatest culinary theatre in the world.” — Chef Michel Guérard (on Les Grand Buffets)

• Les Grands Buffets in France features unlimited caviar, nine kinds of foie gras, and a hundred and eleven varieties of cheese. The only French restaurant to offer the historic pressed-duck recipe every day. It offers interest-free loans to employees — who also participate in a profit-sharing agreement.
• The writer André Borel d’Hauterive proposed a taxonomy of eaters: gastronome appreciates good food and wine and partakes reasonably; gormond prefers quality to quantity; friand has a sweet tooth; goinfre eats enthusiastically to excess; ventru makes a God of his stomach; glouton has no idea what they’ve eaten; and goulu has no idea how much they’ve eaten.
• The modern buffet started in the 17th century with Louis XIV. The first commercials buffets emerged in the 19th century. With the advent of railroads, buffets gained widespread popularity in France.
• In 1939, Sweden popularised the buffet in America with a smorgasbord at the World’s Fair. In the mid-1940s, the first all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet at the El Rancho Hotel.

Captain Cook

• Britain’s most celebrated explorer at the time of his death (1779). King George III reportedly wept. A stickler for order with a sixth sense for approaching land. Insisted his crew eat fresh fruit and sauerkraut — both good sources of vitamin C in a time where the cause of scurvy was unknown.
• Over three voyages he mapped the east coast of Australia, circumnavigated New Zealand, made the first documented crossing of the Antarctic Circle, “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands, the first known visit to South Georgia Island, and named places as varied as New Caledonia to Bristol Bay.
• In 1768, given command of H.M.S. Endeavour to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti to determine the distance between the Earth and Sun. Afterwards Cook was to open sealed orders containing the true purpose of the trip — to seek out the great continent of Terra Australia Incognita.
• In 1769, Cook spent several weeks searching before landing in New Zealand (which the British knew of from the Dutch). On the first day the British attempted to take some Māori men onto the ship to demonstrate peaceful intentions, but this was justifiably misinterpreted leading to at least four dead Māori and several wounded.
• After mapping New Zealand Cook headed to New Holland. Cook left gifts ashore at Cape York, but they remained untouched. Claimed both New Zealand and the east coast of Australia for Britain — having never sought consent from the natives.
• In 1770, commanded the Resolution and Adventure to again discover Terra Australia Incognita. Crossed and re-crossed the Antarctic circle. In Queen Charlotte Sound ten of the Adventure’s men (Cook ship was separated by fog) went ashore to gather provisions and were slain by Māoris. Returned a hero, even though he hadn’t found what he was seeking. Granted the Copley Medal — the highest honour from the Royal Society.
• In 1776, commanded the Discovery and Resolution to discover the Northwest Passage and return a Polynesian named Mai. After his second-in-command was thrown in debtor’s prison. The Resolution leaked terribly and nearly crashed in the Cape Verde Islands. The ships sailed from Cape Town to Tasmania, then back to Queen Charlotte Sound — the scene of the previous massacre.
• A Māori stole some bread; the British shot the thief and a second man; the Māori’s killed all ten British sailors and chopped up their bodies. Cook invited the local chief named Kahura on the ship, but instead of killing him had his portrait made — infuriating the crew. Cook invited King Kalaniʻōpuʻu to dine on the Resolution several times.
• The Resolution departed Hawaii but had to return after the foremast snapped. During repairs someone made off with a small boat and Cook decided to take the King hostage. While on shore a fight broke out and Cook was killed along with four crew and as many as thirty Hawaiians. As customary on the island, Cook’s body was burned.

“They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth; but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans.” — James Cook

• In his journals he laments the destruction of indigenous culture. Before his wife died, she burned his personal papers.
• If Cook hadn’t hoisted English colours it seems fair to assume that another captain would have claimed Australia for England or some other European nation.
• In 2024, on Australia Day in Melbourne, a century-old bronze statue of Cook was sawed off at the ankles.

Waterwolf

• The Netherlands (whose name means “low coutries”) lies in a delta where three major rivers — the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt — meet the North Sea. More than a quarter of the country is below sea level.
• In the 15th century, windmills pumped water out of the ground using a hydraulic mechanism known as Archimedes’ screw. Parcels of land were buffered, raised, and continuously drained to create “polders” — land suitable for farming or development. The collective action of reclaiming land drove the Protestant Reformation and encouraged freethinking.
• In 1641, a Dutch poem by Joost van den Vondel coined the term Waterwolf — a mythological predator representing the threat of water overtaking the land.
• In 1953, the North Sea Flood killed nearly 2,000 people. In 1998, a steel storm-surge barrier named the Maeslantkering was built. One of the largest moving structures ever built, it is one of modern Europe’s lesser-know marvels. It is design to withstand storms projected to occur once every 10,000 years; it has been activated just once.
• The Sea Palace, a three-story 900-person Chinese restaurant in the Ij harbour was based on a similar structure in Hong Kong and is the largest floating restaurant in Europe. On opening night in 1984, it began to sink forcing more than 100 diners to evacuate and dine al fresco on the shore (“Chinese takeout”). The building calculations did not factor in that Hong Kong people weigh less than Dutch.
• Counterintuitively, concrete makes a solid foundation (similar stability to land in calm waters) for floating structures — provided it is filled with air.
• There are currently over twenty floating neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. Houses are built for around €300,000 each. In 2019, Rotterdam built a floating solar-powered dairy farm with cheese-making facility.
• A fleet of mobile floating structures could float from office buildings, during the day, to residential areas at night.

Taiwan

• Formerly Formosa.
• Until the 17th century, when the Dutch rules the island as a colony, hardly any Chinese people lived there. The Dutch brought tens of thousands of Chinese to till the land.
• In 1662, the Dutch were ousted by a half-Japanese, half-Chinese swashbuckler named Zheng Chenggong.
• In 1895, Taiwan became a Japanese colony. Japan presented Taiwan as a model of modernity and industrialisation.
• In 1949, after the Chinese Communist victory Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan with a million of his troops and loyalists. Chiang fortified the island in hopes of ruling China once again.

C.I.A.

Link.

“And, because Washington has been insulated from the worst consequences of its mistakes, it has rarely been forced to learn from them. In the end, the C.I.A. has the power to break things, but not the skill to build them.”

• Founded in 1947 under Harry Truman. Of the CIA’s 38 Soviet analysts the following year, only 12 knew any Russian.
• Starting in 1949, a “clinical experiment” to topple communist Albania. They air-dropped dissidents (called “pixies”), but nearly every one ended catastrophically — either wiped out upon landing; burned alive; killed; or captured and tried. They were forced to radio for reinforcements “like lambs to the slaughter.”
• Saddam Hussein thought the CIA was all-knowing and mistook Bush’s lack of objection for tacit permission to invade Kuwait. While imprisoned he remarked “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?”
• Following WWII the US set out to direct politics on a global scale. It was unpopular — hence the secrecy — and difficult — hence the regular fiascoes. The puppets rarely performed as indented.
• Desperate and often destructive attempts to control processes that lay beyond the agency’s grasp. The fantasy was that US agents would embed themselves in foreign lands, but in reality it was the other way around.
• “The CIA became a new covert force of empire in an age of decolonisation.” “It interfered constantly in foreign politics, but it’s typical mode wasn’t micromanaging; it was subcontracting.”
• Over two-thirds of covert operations during the Cold War were in support of authoritarian regimes. Over half the installed leaders were subsequently assassintated or ousted. A regime-change attempt increased the odds of a clash with the US, a civil war, or a mass killing. “Washington’s interference was not only counterproductive, it also had ‘disastrous consequences’ for the people caught in its wake.”
• In a 1979 investigation into the CIA by Senator Frank Church, three of the committee’s witnesses turned up dead — one shot right before testimony, one killed by a car bomb, and one found dismembered in a barrel.

Piracy

More people have worked on the Pirates of the Caribbean films than were actual pirates of the Caribbean!

• The Golden Age of Piracy from 1650 to 1730 can be divided into three generations.
• Buccaneers of the mid 17th century plundering Spanish holdings around the Caribbean. The second generation launched from North America and plundered around the Indian Ocean in the 1690s. These had broad license (literally permission slips called “letters of marque or reprisal”) from their respective countries that deputised them to attack foreign rivals. These letters technically made them “privateers” rather than pirates. Akin to early modern venture capitalism (shares rather than wages). Dangerous, but generated the quick cash needed to launch plantation.
• Over time pirates became incompatible with London’d maritime dominance (i.e. East India Company) — one required order while the other stirred chaos. The third generation from 1716 to 1726, consisted of just 4,000 pirates and flew the iconic Jolly Roger black flag and attacked nearly everyone. There were sea-locked (i.e. unable to port) and without option fought the whole world on the way to obsoletion.
• Between 1719 to 1725 the number of pirates fell from two thousand to fewer than two hundred.
• Notorious captains include Blackbeard (sailing the Queen Anne’s Revenge); Bartholomew (Black Bart) Roberts; Captain Kidd (executed and suspended by chains, for years, over the Thames); Henry Morgan (immortalised in Captain Morgan rum), who was arrested and hauled to London, released, knighted, and returned to Jamaica as Governor!
• Pirate ships were astonishingly democratic. Captains were elected, injured received compensation, pay was in shares rather than wages (captains rarely got more than double), and shipboard constitution documents.
• There is no evidence that pirates hoarded their treasure in buried chests.
• El Draque (the Dragon) stole five tonnes of silver from the Spanish and deposited it in the Tower of London — more than all other sources combined that year. Queen Elizabeth boarded the ship and knighted Sir Francis Drake.
• The Africans sold into bondage in Virginia in 1619 (catalyst for the 1619 project) had been seized from a Portuguese slave ship by an English privateer carrying a Dutch letter of marque.
• The dollar sign ($) was originally the American symbol for the peso — the fabled “piece of eight.” Illicitly acquired Spanish silver was the predominant currency in early cash-strapped America. Doubloons are also English names for Spanish coins.

Rocks

• The deepest man-made hole — the Kola Superdeep Borehole — is only about 0.2% (7.5 miles) to the centre of the Earth.
• Under the right conditions of temperature and pressure, every stone on Earth will flow like liquid. Some rocks (serpentinite) can flow like a liquid while remaining completely solid — oozing cold out of the Earth’s crust in ultraslow motion.
• Brimstone emerges as a superheated vapour from magnetic vents and, as it cools, bypasses the liquid stage entirely. Obsidian is almost the opposite — if forms when molten rock from a volcano cools so quickly it feels solid, but is structurally still a liquid.
• Plate tectonics are the reason Earth is inhabitable. When the oceanic plate slides beneath the continental plate it carries vast amounts of water and carbon dioxide into the interior that is then released via volcanic eruptions; a planetary-scale respiratory system. Without it, Earth would have long since lost its atmosphere. Such was the fate of Mars, which has a single planet-wide plate.

Expected Value

• John von Neumann was working on the Manhattan Project when he published a book (with Oskar Morgenstern) called Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour that gave birth to game theory — which would form the basis for nuclear deterrence.
• Nate Silver defines “The River” (named after the last card in Texas Hold’em) as a community who thinks of the world in terms of Expected Value (or “+EV”). Professional gamblers often only have a narrow +EV edge (less than 1%).
• Nat Silver bet $1.8 million on NBA games over a year and only made $5,242.
• MIT couse on Poker Theory and Analytics. In poker you can call with +EV (i.e. if your chance of winning is greater than the share of your pot amount). “Fold equity” about how big to bluff. “Blockers” are cards you have that limit opponent’s winning.