Geoff's Miscellany

This is funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29jdVA8fBfw

NN Taleb delineates some features of true wealth. What do you think, is anything missing?

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In the past 100 years, the world has experienced three major technological revolutions with respect to human industriousness and communication:

1. Mass availability of automobiles for personal travel.
2. Mass telecommunications for mass one-way messages via television/radio and telephone calls.
3. Mass availability of personal computers.

Instead, we’re in this bizarre circumstance wherein traveling to a central location (because it came first) is the primary work mindset and telecommunications and computers are used to make employees more aware of their work bureaucracy from home.

The Hitter is a good song about adventure, loss, memory, and compromise. It’s hard to to listen to several times consecutively when I periodically remember it.

I hope you enjoy it.

This song will obviously improve your quality of life or I wouldn't have posted it.

I've never watched the video, this is best played in the background.

Never compromise on love. It’s the only thing that isn’t bullshit.

Chateau Heartiste

The quote above is from the now-defunct blog Chateau Heartiste. It was mostly about how to get laid. As distasteful as that is, there are lots of magazines, books (ancient and modern), seminars, and poems about this. I found it in like 2008 when thinking about existentialism and love and doing some google searches. Since then, I rediscovered the site while working as a research assistant on a project examining 3rd wave feminism. The chateau, due to the author's preference for spending private time with the fairer sex, had discovered the ugly underbelly of a feminist society. And as a near-nihilist (he wasn't totally, see the above quote), he managed to view the sociology of sexuality from a perspective geared almost entirely toward cause and effect. His insights were eloquently and inappropriately put, but they were accurate frequently. All of that is to say, his posts over the years gave modern vendors of BS several reasons to suspend his blog. But it wasn't until he posted the what you find below, that his blog was taken from him:

When I was in college, I went to a mewithoutYou concert and the band played this song for, if I remember what they said properly, the first time. That version used to be posted online. Seems to be gone. But it's a great song

If I had written it back in the days when I wrote a lot of poetry, I'd have probably included some lines about Amnon, Absalom, Joab, Jonathan, and Saul. But it's not my song. Nevertheless, it is a marvelous work of art. There's a weird thing with the timeline of David's life in the song, but that's okay. It's worth a listen and then ten more. I hope you enjoy it.

In response to efforts of the American leaders in the United Methodist Church to influence Africa's Methodists to reject the Biblical teaching on homosexual marraige, they did not budge:

I thank God for His precious Word to us, and I thank him for you, my dear sisters and brothers in Christ.
As the General Coordinator of UMC Africa Initiative I greet you on behalf of all its members and leaders. We want to thank the  Renewal and Reform Coalition within the United Methodist Church for the invitation to address you at this important breakfast meeting.
As I understand it, the plans before us seek to find a lasting solution to the long debate over our church’s sexual ethics, its teachings on marriage, and it[s] ordination standards.
This debate and the numerous acts of defiance have brought the United Methodist Church to a crossroads (Jeremiah 6:16).
One plan invites the people called United Methodists to take a road in opposition to the Bible and two thousand years of Christian teachings. Going down that road would divide the church. Those advocating for the One Church Plan would have us take that road.
Another road invites us to reaffirm Christian teachings rooted in Scripture and the church’s rich traditions...