You shouldn't commit suicide because you're afraid of dying.
Stamouli, Nektaria, and Steinhauser, Gabriele, quoting European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. "Race to Sway Greeks Begins" The Wall Street Journal., Tuesday, June 30, 2015, A1, Accessed on June 30, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-warns-greeks-that-no-vote-in-referendum-would-lead-to-euro-exit-1435612657
The prospect of consolidation poses high stakes for the Obama administration, whose signature domestic policy legacy is the 2010 health-care law. Some aspects of the health law were designed to increase insurance-industry competition, including marketplaces for health coverage and the creation of new nonprofit cooperative health plans around the country.
But the law also includes provisions that may have helped inspire consolidation, at least indirectly. For instance, it requires insurers to spend a certain percentage of premiums on health care, which adds to the pressure to trim administrative costs,—a benefit insurers are likely to seek from merging.
A Wall Street Journal analysis from earlier this month found some combinations of the top health insurers could damp competition in certain markets around the country.
Kendall, Brent, and Mathews, Anna Wilde. "New Gauge for Health-Insurer Deals" The Wall Street Journal., Monday, June 29, 2015, B1, Accessed on June 29, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/doj-girds-for-strict-scrutiny-of-health-insurer-mergers-1435524588
En aquel tiempo yo tenía veinte añosy estaba loco.Había perdido un paíspero había ganado un sueño.Y si tenía ese sueñolo demás no importaba.Ni trabajar ni rezarni estudiar en la madrugadajunto a los perros románticos.Y el sueño vivía en el vacío de mi espíritu.Una habitación de madera,en penumbras,en uno de los pulmones del trópico.Y a veces me volvía dentro de míy visitaba el sueño: estatua eternizadaen pensamientos líquidos,un gusano blanco retorciéndoseen el amor.Un amor desbocado.Un sueño dentro de otro sueño.Y la pesadilla me decía: crecerás.Dejarás atrás las imágenes del dolor y del laberintoy olvidarás.Pero en aquel tiempo crecer hubiera sido un crimen.Estoy aquí, dije, con los perros románticosy aquí me voy a quedar.
Bolaño, Roberto. The Romantic Dogs "Los perros románticos" New York: New Directions Books, 2006, 2.
Those whose bodies are in good condition are able to withstand heat and cold; and so, likewise, those whose souls are in the right condition can bear anger, and grief, and immoderate joy, and all other emotions.
Epictetus, and Gill, Christopher, ed., and Hard, Robin, trans. The Discourses of Epictetus. London: Everyman: 1995, 314
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| His body needed a crutch, his mind did not |
Many South Koreans also enjoy mokbang, online “eating broadcasts” that live-stream ordinary people gorging on heaps of takeout food. Viewers, sometimes in the thousands, interact with their favourite eaters in real-time, messaging them and sending online donations. The most entertaining noodle-slurpers can earn up to $1,000 in a three-hour stint. Some are obese teenagers; others are petite women. Dieting viewers say the appeal is vicarious gluttony; for the lonely, it is company. Though ever more South Koreans live alone, eating alone remains taboo (shikgu, Korean for family, means “mouths to feed”).
The Economist. "The food-show craze." June 27, 2015, Accessed June 26, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21656240-epicurean-entertainment-luring-korean-men-kitchen-food-show-craze?frsc=dg%7Ca
It always seemed that you'd take me off to some place where an enormous, man-sized evil spider lived and we'd gaze at him for the rest of our lives and be afraid of him. That's how we'd spend our mutual love.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 593.
Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God's just wrath against us for the folly of tolerating-wickedness in our midst, the People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.
Sodomite Suppression Act, Penal Code Section 39, (b), Accessed on June 24, 2015, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/15-0008%20%28Sodomy%29_0.pdf
Prisoners with time on their hands read books.
Perlstein, Rick. "Ignorant Good Will" The Nation, June 17, 2015, Accessed on June 23, 2015, http://www.thenation.com/article/210161/ignorant-good-will
Few expected that both [Jurassic World and Inside Out] could perform so well simultaneously. It was the first time ever that two movies grossed more than $70 million on the same weekend, according to Rentrak.
Fritz, Ben. " 'Inside Out' Called a Winner, Even at No. 2" The Wall Street Journal., Monday, June 22, 2015, B4, Accessed on June 22, http://www.wsj.com/articles/jurassic-world-inside-out-both-draw-crowds-1434910581
Better for us, perhaps, it might appear,
Were there all harmony, all virtue here;
That never air or ocean felt the wind;
That never passion discomposed the mind:
But ALL subsists by elemental strife;
And passions are the elements of life.
The general ORDER, since the whole began,
Is kept in Nature, and is kept in Man.
Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, "An Essay on Man." New York: Signet Classics, 2003, 91
To come back to the question, the wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle. Not, as Epicurus put it in the same letter, 'for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains,' but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose sick bed he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands. Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake. Things will end as they began; he has secured a friend who is going to come to his aid if captivity threatens: at the first clank of a chain that friend will disappear. These are what are commonly called fair-weather friendships. A person adopted as a friend for the sake of his usefulness will be cultivated only for so long as he is useful. This explains the crowd of friends that clusters about successful men and the lonely atmosphere about the ruined - their friends running away when it comes to the testing point; it explains the countless scandalous instances of people deserting or betraying others out of fear for themselves. The ending inevitably matches the beginning: a person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so. If there is anything in a particular friendship that attracts a man other than the friendship itself, the attraction of some reward or other will counterbalance that of the friendship. What is my object in making a friend? To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal. There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship - you might say it was friendship gone mad. Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity? Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people's hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without hope, too, that the affection will be mutual. How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?
Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. "Letter IX." London: Penguin Books, 2004, 49-50.
The prospect of lower rates tends to buoy shares of companies that are viewed by investors as all-or-nothing bets, by pushing down returns on fixed-income investments and other alternatives.
Strumpf, Dan. "Nasdaq Hits a High As Fed Provides Lift." The Wall Street Journal. Friday, June 19, 2015, C1, Accessed on June 19, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-stock-futures-edge-higher-1434629919
Also joining the race on the Republican side was Donald Trump, a property tycoon with impressive hair. A spokeswoman for the Democrats sneered that he adds "some much needed seriousness to the GOP field."
[...]
Allergan, the maker of Botox, agreed to buy Kythera, which produces a treatment to reduce double-chins, for $2.1 billion. The acquisition should be completed by the end of the year, provided the deal has no unexpected wrinkles.
[...]
Colt, a gunmaker that made its name with the first mass-produced revolveers in the 19th century, filed for bankruptcy protection. The company still makes weapons for America's armed forces, but it lost a big contract in 2013 and has since piled up debts. After it restructures, Colt insists, it will be back with a bang.
The Economist. "The world this week." June 20th-26th, 2015, Accessed via The Economist app on June18, 2015.
By the end of the fifth century, the Macedonian court was sufficiently Hellenized to have become the "off-off Broadway" of Greek tragedy: Euripides ended his career by producing his plays for Macedonian audiences. Some elite Macedonian social customs were, however, still regarded as typically "barbarous" by the Greeks - notably the Macedonian symposium, at which heavily armed men downed mass quantities of undiluted wine (wine was always mixed with water in a proper Greek symposium). The impression of barbarism was not reduced when, as sometimes happened, drunken arguments escalated into murderous violence.
Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015, 267.
“[W]hat Nietzsche loved most was music.” He “found the mundane work of politics and nationalist conquest, with its tribalism and moral pretensions, thoroughly distasteful. Instead, he considered the creative work of artists, writers, and musicians, as well as scientists, of paramount importance.”
"Hear Friedrich Nietzsche’s Classical Piano Compositions: They’re Aphoristic Like His Philosophy." Open Culture, June 11, 2015, Accessed on June 16th, 2015, http://www.openculture.com/2015/06/hear-friedrich-nietzsche-classical-piano-compositions.html
Today marks an admission of defeat for independent monetary policy in Zimbabwe, as the bank starts "demonetising" Zimbabwe dollars in exchange for American ones, at a rate of $1 per Z$35 quadrillion.
"100 trillion to none: bye-bye Zimbabwe dollar," The Economist Espresso App, June 15, 2015.
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| Makin' it drizzle. |
Keep your splendid silent sun,
Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet by the woods,
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your cornfields and orchards,
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum;
Give me faces and streets - give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!
Give me interminable eyes - give me women - give me comrades and lovers by the thousand!
Let me see new ones every day - let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
Give me such shows - give me the streets of Manhattan!
Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching - give me the sound of the trumpets and drums!
(The soldiers in companies or regiments - some starting away, flush'd and reckless,
Some, their time up, returning with thinn'd ranks, young, yet very old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)
Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships!
O such life for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!
The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the torchlight procession!
The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons following;
People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants,
Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now,
The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even the sight of the wounded,)
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus,
Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass, "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun." New York: The Modern Library, 1993, 391-92.
Do not waste the remainder of your life in thoughts about others, when you do not refer your thoughts to some object of common utility. For you lose the opportunity of doing something else when you have such thoughts as these. What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away from the observation of our own ruling power. We ought then to check in the series of our thoughts everything that is without a purpose and useless, but most of all the overcurious and the malignant; and a man should use himself to think of those things only about which if one should suddenly ask, What are you thinking about? With perfect openness you might immediately answer, this or that; so that from your words it should be plain that everything in you is simple and benevolent, as befits a social animal, one that is unconcerned with pleasure, sensual enjoyments, rivalry, envy, suspicion, or any other thoughts that you would blush to admit.
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1997, 14.
The great misfortune is there's no time.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 446.
The federalist features of the system had the effect of increasing trust and widening social networks. The organization of the Council provided new avenues for the identification and gainful employment of expertise. Ostracism dampened the most dangerous aspects of elite rivalry, without reducing socially valuable forms of elite competition. And so we can begin to fill in Herodotus' somewhat telegraphic statement about why, in the era after the end of the tyranny, Athens rose to greater prominence in the Greek world.
Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015, 175
The fifth installment of the [Grand Theft Auto] franchise generated more than $1 billion in sales in its first three days of release in 2013. By comparison, it took the 2012 Hollywood blockbuster “The Avengers” three weeks to reach that box-office milestone.
Needleman, Sarah E. "Take-Two Boss Looks to Keep 'Grand Theft Auto' Fresh." The Wall Street Journal., Accessed on June 10, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/take-two-boss-looks-to-keep-grand-theft-auto-fresh-1433884113That is impressive.
The palace bureaucracies were no more. With no royal accounts to record, the technology of writing was lost.
Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 126.
By the eighth century, Greece was growing rapidly; there were more people and more wealth. Higher quality of luxury goods were, once again, being produced by Greek artisans. Athenian potters were, for example, now capable of turning out huge vases, beautifully decorated in the Geometric style and used in elaborate funerary rites by prominent families with enough surplus wealth to expend some part of it for dramatic public display. Literacy returned to Greece, after the alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenicians - the dynamic, trade-oriented city-state culture centered in what is now Lebanon. The Greeks modified the Phoenician alphabet by adding vowels; the Greeks' writing system would eventually be adopted and adapted to a wide variety of purposes by Etruscans, Romans - and us. Unlike the Bronze Age, when literate scribes used an arcane writing system to keep palace accounts, the new alphabet-based Greek literacy was used widely by creative writers and political innovators: by poets, lawmakers, and later by historians, philosophers, scientists, traders, and many others.
Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 132.
Dow Theory holds that any lasting rally to new highs in the Dow Jones Industrial Average must be accompanied by a new high in the Dow Jones Transportation Average - the 20-stock index that tracks some of the largest U.S. airlines, railroads and trucking companies. When the transport average lags behind, it can presage broader stock declines.
Driebusch, Corrie. "Dow Theory Hints at Fall for Stocks." The Wall Street Journal., Monday, June 8, 2015, C1, Accessed on June 8, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/dow-theory-has-investors-skittish-on-markets-next-leg-1433713438
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
Eliot, T.S. "Preludes." The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1980, 13.
I drown without fear, without crying out, or accusing god, but as one who knows that what is born must likewise die. For I am not eternal, but a man; a part of the whole, as an hour is of the day. Like an hour, I must come and, like an hour, I must pass away.
Epictetus, and Gill, Christopher, ed., and Hard, Robin, trans. The Discourses of Epictetus. London: Everyman: 1995, 84
Tellus of Athens did not shop at Walmart.
Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 77.
Historically, all complex societies have been characterized by economic inequality. Yet when wealth and income are distributed extremely inequitably, such that society is bimodally segmented into a tiny elite of the very wealthy and a great mass of individuals living at subsistence, there is correspondingly little room for sustained economic growth. It is only with the emergence of a substantial and stable middle class of people living well above the level of subsistence, and therefore willing and able to purchase goods unnecessary for their mere survival, that societal consumption becomes a driver of economic growth.
Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 89.
Bond yields rise as their prices fall.
Zeng, Men. "Bund, Treasury Yields Hit New 2015 Highs." The Wall Street Journal., Thursday, June 4, 2015, C1, Accessed on June 4, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-government-bonds-german-bunds-hit-by-draghi-comments-1433340164
As a committed Wall Street Journal reader I expect to find this sentence, or a variation on it, every time I begin a story about bonds. It's like a Where's Waldo? of my daily reading. Indeed, this simple law of finance appears over 100,000 times within the pages of the Journal. The exact articulation appears seventeen times.
If a great nation doesn't believe that the truth resides in it alone (in it alone, to the exclusion of all other nations), if it doesn't believe that it alone is capable and chosen to resurrect and save everyone through its own history, then it immediately ceases to be a great nation and is at once transformed merely into ethnographic material. A genuinely great nation can never be content to play a secondary role in human history, not even a primary role; it must necessarily and exclusively be first. A nation which loses this faith can no longer be a nation.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 265-66.
Companies are spending an increasing amount of time and energy beefing up their regulatory filings to meet disclosure requirements. The average 10K is getting longer—about 42,000 words in 2013, up from roughly 30,000 words in 2000. By comparison, the text of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has 32,000 words.
The finance department at GE, as well as Athenahealth Inc. and Abercrombie & Fitch Co., among others, spend several weeks every quarter updating filings to comply with securities rules, which they say is a costly undertaking.
Athenahealth, a provider of electronic health records, has three full-time employees to help with the increased disclosure requirements, said Karl Stubelis, chief accounting officer and controller of the Watertown, Mass., company. That’s up from just one two years ago.
Some companies wonder whether investors benefit from the additional information. Their question: How much is too much?
Monga, Vipal and Chasan, Emily. "The 109,894-Word Annual Report." The Wall Street Journal., Tuesday, June 2, 2015, B1, Accessed on June 2, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-109-894-word-annual-report-1433203762
It took the great F. Scott Fitzgerald only 48,884 words to tell the story of how Jay Gatsby came to be shot in the back. Today I read that it takes a public company an average of 41,911 words to shoot itself in the foot with the burdensome annual preparation of often unnecessary financial reporting. Their faces were plastered on billboards and car-stickers with slogans such as al-Assad ila al-abad (Assad for eternity).
"Stones that speak." The Economist. May 30th - June 5th, 2015, Accessed on June 1, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21652254-syrias-famous-ruined-roman-city-has-meant-many-things-many-people-stones-speak
