daydreaming

Think of a place I would go.
To where the sycamore grow.
I’m daydreaming
And oh, if you knew what it meant to me
To be where the air was so clear.
Oh, if you knew what it meant to me.
Anywhere but here.
-- Nona Marie Invie / Marshall LaCount (Dark Dark Dark) 2010

american face dust

Change is the thing; that is what we do.
Change is the change that's changing you.

The day that you melt will shine; we'll have a good time.
-- The Seven Fields of Aphelion / Tobacco (Black Moth Super Rainbow) 2009

contact

Une météorite m'a transpercé le cœur
Vous, sur la terre, vous avez des docteurs

Il me faut une transfusion de mercure
J'en ai tant perdu par cette blessure

Ôtez-moi ma combinaison spatiale
Retirez-moi cette poussière sidérale

Comprenez-moi il me faut à tout prix
Rejoindre mon amour dans la galaxie

-- Serge Gainsbourg (1967)

Circles

from Essays: First Series
Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.

ESSAY X _Circles
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world....
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens....
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees....

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)

why planning fails

Why do these plans fail? The simple answer is because that’s not the way the world works.  Life on Earth is not so rational that it lends itself to simpleminded, heavy-handed intervention of the naïve social engineer. Bridges are designed. So are houses. And particle accelerators. Economies are not. Neither are real languages. Customs. Markets. Love. Marriages. Children. Or any of the other really important things in life.

-- Bill Bonner, The Daily Reckoning (March 6, 2013)

central planning fails

Aristotelian logic came to dominate Western thought after the Renaissance. It was essentially a forerunner of positivism — which is supposedly based on objective conditions and scientific reasoning. “Give me the facts,” says the positivist, confidently. “Let me apply my rational brain to them. I will come up with a solution!”  This is fine, if you are building the Eiffel Tower or organizing the next church supper. But positivism falls apart when it is applied to schemes that go beyond the reach of the “herald’s cry.”  That’s what Aristotle said. He thought only a small community could work at all. Because only in a small community would all the people share more or less the same information and interests.

In a large community, you can’t know things in the same direct, personal way. So it’s hard for people to work together in the same way.  In a large community, you have no idea who made your sausage or what they put in it. You have to rely on “facts” that are no longer verifiable by direct observation or personal acquaintance.  Instead, the central planners’ facts usually are nothing more than statistical mush, wishful thinking or theoretical claptrap — like Weapons of Mass Destruction, the unemployment rate and the Übermensch.  Large-scale planning fails because the facts upon which it is built are unreliable, frequently completely bogus.  And it fails because people don’t really want it.

-- Bill Bonner, The Daily Reckoning (March 6, 2013)