The Isles of Greece : Lord Byron

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THE isles of Greece! the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,---
Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.The Scian and the Teian muse,
The hero's harp, the lover's lute,
Have found the fame your shores refuse;
Their place of birth alone is mute
To sounds which echo further west
Than your sires' "Islands of the Blest."The mountains look on Marathon---
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.A king sat on the rocky brow
Which looks on sea-born Salamis;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
And men in nations;---all were his!
He counted them at break of day---
And when the sun set, where were they?And where are they? and where art thou,
My country? On thy voiceless shore
The heroic lay is tuneless now---
The heroic bosom beats no more!
And must thy lyre, so long divine,
Degenerate into hands like mine?'Tis something, in the dearth of fame,
Though link'd among a fetter'd race,
To feel at least a patriot's shame,
Even as I sing, suffuse my face;
For what is left the poet here?
For Greeks a blush---for Greece a tear.Must we but weep o'er days more blest?
Must we but blush?---Our fathers bled.
Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae.What, silent still, and silent all?
Ah! no; the voices of the dead
Sound like a distant torrent's fall,
And answer, "Let one living head,
But one arise,---we come, we come!"
'Tis but the living who are dumb.In vain---in vain: strike other chords;
Fill high the cup of Samian wine!
Leave battles to the Turkish hordes,
And shed the blood of Scio's vine!
Hark! rising to the ignoble call---
How answers each bold bacchanal!You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet,
Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone?
Of two such lessons, why forget
The nobler and the manlier one?
You have the letters Cadmus gave---
Think ye he meant them for a slave?Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
We will not think of themes like these!
It made Anacreon's song divine;
He served---but served Polycrates---
A tyrant; but our masters then
Were still, at least, our countrymen.The tyrant of the Chersonese
Was freedom's best and bravest friend;
That tyrant was Miltiades!
Oh! that the present hour would lend
Another despot of the kind!
Such chains as his were sure to bind.Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
On Suli's rock, and Parga's shore,
Exists the remnant of a line
Such as the Doric mothers bore;
And there, perhaps, some seed is sown,
The Heracleidan blood might own.Trust not for freedom to the Franks---
They have a king who buys and sells:
In native swords and native ranks,
The only hope of courage dwells:
But Turkish force and Latin fraud
Would break your shield, however broad.Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
Our virgins dance beneath the shade---
I see their glorious black eyes shine;
But, gazing on each glowing maid,
My own the burning tear-drop laves,
To think such breasts must suckle slaves.Place me on Sunium's marble steep---
Where nothing, save the waves and I,
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep:
There, swan-like, let me sing and die;
A land of slaves shall ne'er be mine---
Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!

Natural Gas Prices

This graph is taken from the U.S. Energy Information website "Weekly Natural Gas Update"(www.eia.gov/naturalgas/weekly) and shows the decline in natural gas spot prices over the past two or so years.

Oil Spill - Gulf of Mexico

I venture to say that this disaster that is both the work of nature and man will provide a turning-point for the world. Understandably, you may consider my position an exaggeration - 'its just a nasty oil spill'. What we are witness to, live, is the largest energy disaster (I am mindful of Chernobyl - 26 April 1986)in our history, occurring on the coastline of the world's largest economy and hegemon. Do not underestimate this. The culprits in this case are even more shadowy than the world shaking villains of the past.

The images of the disaster, disfigured landscapes and oil-coated marine life have being awash through the pages of the media channels and we are covered in a slick of these images. To the children of the world watching on, trying to comprehend what they are seeing, what shall they make of it? How does this fit into the world? What can we impute from it? Those that caused the problem do not know how to fix it.

The President of the United States has ramped up his dialogue on this catastrophic addiction to carbon energy. There are answers but they do not have the one critical economic unit that is the key to oil – its relative cost.

The word addiction is used in a broader rather than medical sense, as we may call a person addicted to exercise. Extending the use of this word, the world has a problem with addiction to oil, and the weaning process, the drying out of the world economy from it's 'opioid' will hold much pain.

Double Dip - Human Nature to Avert

Just a few months ago it was 'deal fever' all over again and this fear of a double of dip recession was present but not causing a great deal of concern. Until of course the dreadful month of May was followed by surprisingly weak unemployment figures from the US (sans those for employed temporarily for the US census). We were all hopeful until Hungary sounded a possible beginning to the Eastern European debt crisis. 

Trichet commented that the debt situation in Hungary is exaggerated and not comparable to Greece. (addit : 15 Mar 2012 - he was probably right!)

There is enormous concern in the world about a double dip recession and this has caused significant volatility in financial markets. If the S&P 500 falls below its key 1040 support level there may well be another leg down.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has embarked upon a number of disastrous policy that have become stuff-ups. Firstly, he shelved the Emissions Trading Scheme that was a major platform for his election campaign. His problems have continued with his surprise introduction of the Resources Super Profit Tax (RSPT) which he revealed unexpectedly to the market and without industry consultation. This has caused uncertainty in the Australian mining sector and introduced a world-wide concern that Australia is country in which there is sovereign risk when making large mining investmenta given the government could act in such a unilateral way.

The fall in Euro has its benefits, with countries like Germany able to sell their goods overseas at more competitive prices. A stronger Germany will stabalise Europe. However, the issues of sovereign debt default in European and now Eastern European countries is creating uncertainty in markets.

The US jobless (non-farm payrolls) released on the 4th of June with only a small rise in new jobs after taking out the temporary effect of citizens employed for the US census.

The concern now is a double dip recession may be a looming, if the the strength of the US economy shows signs of losing its momentum.

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick (Vintage 2007)

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Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the East reverenced in their statue devil; - Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred White Whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. (pp 202-3)

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Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world - page 1.

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Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian (p. 27)

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the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness - Preachers story of Jonah in the tilted cabin. (p. 48) 

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because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some part of you must be cold,for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is, merely by contrast. - (p. 59)

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have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear. (p. 195)

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Paul Keating

"PK said when he was out of office he planned to have an answering machine with the message: 'You have reached the office of ex-prime minister Paul Keating. Now f$&* off and leave me alone',"

"He said Murdoch is a hard bastard and you need a strategy for dealing with him."

"On Murdoch, he told TB: 'He's a big bad bastard, and the only way you can deal with him is to make sure he thinks you can be a big bad bastard too. You can do deals with him, without ever saying a deal is done. But the only thing he cares about is his business and the only language he respects is strength'."

Albert Einstein

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Stephen Jay Gould

An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendent teeth.

Warren Buffett

‘Something bad will happen, but you could go back at anytime in the last 100 years and say the same thing… you can freeze yourself out indefinitely.’
“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.”
"When someone with experience proposes a deal to someone with money, too often the fellow with money ends up with the experience, and the fellow with experience ends up with the money.”

General Stuff

Age and Treachery Will Aways Overcome Youth and Ability - 93 year old businessman

Correlation does not necessarily imply causation - Statistics

Play for more than you can afford to lose and you will learn the game - Winston Churchill

What can I do to get out of this position? Once you are in this position you cannot get out! - Kung Fu Master (A good lesson for chess players - defeat at times can be postponed but not avoided).

Woody Allen

80% of success is showing up

New Testament

Book of James

"The tongue is a small part of the body, and yet it boasts of great things. Behold, how great a forest is set aflame by such a small fire."

General Business Quotes

Bernard Baruch, the wealthiest Wall Street financier of the early 1900s, once said: "Nobody ever owned a Park Avenue mansion by being bearish."

Jonathan Sumption - called the cleverest man in England: "I think if you can earn a large sum of money in a field...then more power to your elbows". "I think that people who earn a lot of money in a free market, without any kind of dishonesty or unfair dealing are basically entitiled to".

Thomas Hardy

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to a happy doing; or reply “Here” to a body’s cry of “Where?” till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of human progress, these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesised, or even conceived as possible.

“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in the Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.

William Shakespeare

Macbeth

This great play explores lust for power, through the tempted ambitions of Macbeth, persuaded through his certain weaknesses in character by the manipulative and equally lustful Lady Macbeth. The husband-wife co-dependency and dynamic is one of enormous clarity.

It follows a typical pattern of a Shakespearean Tragedy. The natural order is upset by an action. A state on disorder and

Further more, themes of fate - through the double meaning of words, the poverty of human experience - through the futility of struggle and the darkness of human nature are examined. Within the thoughts of Macbeth, I see a man who understands the devastating consequences of his actions, even before he has acted, but like an gambler, is compelled to act by a fierce ambitions.

The three weird sisters merely act to augment the drives that are within him. I suspect he had thought of becoming king well before he met the sisters, and his initially shock and retraction from their suggestion is evidence of his thoughts.

The armed head, in the second witch encounter, warning Macbeth about McDuff, may in fact be his own severed head. This ghoulish proposition has merit.

"So foul and fair a day I have not seen" Macbeth I.3

We are introduced to Macbeth. His comment relates to so much - military victory on a day of bad weather, military victory at the cost of bloodshed. The ambiguity of the play is introduction - nothing is what is seems.

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, Creeps into this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools, The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle, Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,that struts and frets his our upon the stage,And then is heard of no-more: It is a tale,Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing". - Macbeth V.5

The philosophical musings of Macbeth as the world caves in. Soon after this he abandons his deeper understanding as one last flare of power lust takes hold before he is ultimately slain, and order is returned to Scotland.

The Tragedy of Hamlet - Prince of Denmark

This play is interesting for the exploration of human experience through the thoughts, internal suffering and perpetual inaction of one man - Hamlet. Haunted by the ghost of his father, Hamlet plunges into depression as he struggles with the pain of rectifying the wrongs that have occurred.

"There are more things on heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" - Hamlet, Act I Scene V

"I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space" - Hamlet Act II Scene II

"I have of late, - but wherefore I know not, - lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, - why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! And yet, to me, what is this quintessance of dust?" - Hamlet, Act II Scene II

Othello - The Moor of Venice

This play explores themes of jealosy, deception and betrayal through the twisted manipulations of Iago

"Good name in man and woman, dear lord, is immediate jewel of their souls; Who steals my purse steals trash; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed". - Iago, Act III Scene III

"O, beware, my lord, of Jealosy; It is the green eyed monster with doth mock the meat it feeds on: that cuckold lives in bliss who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger; " - Iago, Act III Scene III

"Men's natures wrangle with inferior things, though great ones are their object. 'Tis even so; For let our finger ache, and it endues our other healthful members even to that sense of pain;" - Iago, Act III Scene IV

Romeo and Juliet

Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?

What's in a name? that which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet;

There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls,Doing more murders in this loathsome world,Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none.

The Merchant of Venice

If to do were as easy as to know what were good todo, chapels had been churches and poor men'scottages princes' palaces. It is a good divine thatfollows his own instructions: I can easier teachtwenty what were good to be done, than be one of thetwenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain maydevise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leapso'er a cold decree: such a hare is madness theyouth, to skip o'er the meshes of good counsel thecripple.

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

This play explores themes of absolute power through the autocrat Julius Caeser, Complex integrity and betrayal through Marcus Brutus and the power of oratory in political landscapes through Mark Antony. There are many further layers to this most satisfying read, in particular I note Brutus touching relationship with his wife, she empathising with his pain and he with hers.

"Men at some time are masters of their fate: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves". - Cassius, Act I Scene II

"Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: Such men are dangerous". - Caeser Act I Scene II - But then Caesar goes on to be complacent about other warning signs from the seer and his wife.

"So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much; He is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music: Seldom he smiles; and smiles in such a sort, As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit, That could be moved to smile at any thing. Such men as he be never at heart's easeWhiles they behold a greater than themselves;And therefore are they very dangerous." Caeser I.2 . Provides a rich insight into the psychology of Cassius - a dangerous psychology according to Caeser.

Two Gentlemen of Verona

"Poor wounded name! my bosom as a bed Shall lodge thee till thy wound be thoroughly heal'd" I.2

Jean Paul Satre

I was in the municipal park just now. The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just underneath my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root. Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things, the methods of using them, the feeble landmarks which men have traced on their surface.

If anybody had asked me what existence was, I should have replied in good faith that it was nothing, just an empty form which attached itself to external things, without changing anything in their nature.

And then all of a sudden, there it was, as clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost it’s harmless appearance as an abstract category: it was the very stuff on things, that root was steeped in existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass on the lawn, all that had vanished; the diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, in disorder – naked with a frightening obscene nakedness.

Albert Camus

What is a rebel? A man who says no – but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.

When Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, says that he puts his love above God and would willingly go to Hell in order to be reunited with the woman he loves, he is prompted not only by his youth and his humiliation but by the consuming experience of a whole lifetime.

Metaphysical rebellion is the means by which a man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation.

The only truly serious philisophical problem is suicide.

Frank Herbert - Dune

What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises – no matter the mood. Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for fighting.

Gurney Halleck (Page 48)

Knowing where the trap is – that is the first step to evading it.

Duke Leto Atreites

The Mind commands the Body and it obeys. The Mind orders itself and meets resistance.

Bene Gesserit Sister Jessica Quoting St Augustine

The whole theory of warfare is calculated risk

Duke Leto Atreites

When god hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature’s wants to direct him to that place

Kynes (Page 150)

Human’s live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place, and destroy the person.

Thufir Hawat

One should never presume one is the sole object of a hunt

Fremen

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

Princess Irulan

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing……..maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged

They were still at the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be a plane where no other human relations mattered.

The truth is that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes in.

But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.

Tender is the night

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!’

Thomas Parke D’Invilliers

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded relations of men.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Peter Singer

Precautionary Principle in Relation to Climate Change

The precautionary principle suggests that even in the absence of complete information, we should be prepared to incur reasonable costs to avoid a significant chance of a disastrous outcome.

From a collective standpoint that takes everyone’s interests into account, it would be best if all countries with high levels of emissions made significant reductions in the amount of greenhouse gases the produce. But from the standpoint of an individual nation, this is not necessarily the best possible outcome, for the national costs associated with reducing greenhouse gas emissions could outweigh the national benefits.

The Myth of Ownership

Ownership is not a natural relationship between a person and a thing. It is a social convention, and in societies with a legal system, it is defined by the law.

The seventeenth century philosopher John Locke argued that we gain a right to property by ‘mixing our labour’ with natural objects, as long as we leave ‘enough and as good’ for others.

The best justification of a right to private property is that we will all be better off if we recognise such a right. But if it is the common good that justifies the recognition of a right to private property, then the common good can set limits to that right.

Social Capital

Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has estimated the proportion of income in wealthy countries that is the result of social capital – including technology and organisational and government skills – rather than individual effort. Given the enormous differences between the average incomes in rich and poor countries which cannot be explained by the differences in effort he suggests that social capital is responsible for at least 90 per cent of income in wealthy societies.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the view that the right action is that which is expected to have the best consequences for all those affected by our actions, now and in the future. Typically, utilitarians focus on consequences like pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, or the satisfaction and frustration of preferences. They seek to maximise the net surplus of the good consequences, after subtracting the bad ones. Individual rights have, at most, a derivative role to play in utilitarian thinking.

Offence

From the standpoint of public reason, the fact of offence is the issue, not how well grounded the offence might be. Although John Stuart Mill and other defenders of freedom have argued that mere offence should not, in the absence of more specific harm, be a ground for infringing individual liberty. Once we grant that a risk of offence to some justifies restricting the liberty of others, we have introduced a sweeping argument for prohibiting any kind of behaviour, public or private. What offends people is not fixed. People can learn to be more tolerant, and that is a better solution than restricting the liberty of others.

Public Reason

Some will think that public reason is a quant relic of enlightenment ideas about reason and progress, properly rejected in the post-modern world in which we now live. They will say it is naïve to believe than anyone decides anything on the basis of reason, and will deny that there is any basis for privileging reason and argument above religious faith, or belief in which doctors, or oracles, or any other way in which people might reach decisions about what we do. But those who say this do not fully think out the alternatives. There are methods of reaching decisions that we use every day, and would not want to do without. We do not want police to go before courts saying that they need no evidence that the accused committed the crimes of which he is accused, because they have faith that he did, and faith needs no evidence to support it. We want physicians who have studied what does or does not help sick people – and if we consult alternative healers, we look for evidence that their therapies work. If we abandon the assumption that reason, evidence and argument can lead to better decisions, more innocent people will be jailed and more sick people will die. So those who want public justification to fit within the same broad framework are not imposing some narrow, sectional set of standards on the debate. They are seeking standards of argument that everyone uses all the time.

Ethical Thinking

When we think ethically, we should do so from an impartial perspective, from which we recognise that our own wants and desires are no more significant that the wants and desire of anyone else. To base judgments about the rights and wrongs of an action on the impact it will have on the welfare of those affected by it is to base ethics on something that is real and tangible.

John Stuart Mill

On Liberty, the finest defence of individual liberty against government interference in the English language, was written by the liberal utilitarian John Stuart Mill. In opposition to conservatives who wanted to use the power of the state to stamp out prostitution, sodomy and suicide, Mill urged that the state should restrain individual liberty only to prevent harm to others. It was, in his view, wrong for the state to interfere with an individual ‘for the good of the individual’, whether physical or moral. For a century after the publication of On Liberty, conservatives in both Britain and the United States resisted Mill’s view, defending laws that restricted individual liberty in circumstances that could not be show to cause harm to others – for instance, laws that intruded into the bedrooms of consenting homosexuals, that made prostitution illegal, or that restricted the access of adults to sexually explicit films, books and magazines.

Hobbesian World

In Hobbesian world in which a dominant nation is liable to attack and overthrow weak governments that are not to its liking, the most sensible response for a government that fears it may be attacked is to obtain nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible. Only then can it deter an attack by threatening to inflict intolerable losses on the dominant nation or its allies. Overwhelming military superiority is less significant when the militarily inferior nation possesses and is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Bush’s Use of Good and Evil

Bush’s tendency to see the world in terms of good and evil is especially striking. He has spoken about evil in 319 separate speeches, or about 30 percent of all the speeches he gave between the time he took office and 16 June 2003. In these speeches he uses the word ‘evil’ as a noun fare more than he uses it as an adjective – 914 noun uses as against 182 adjective uses. Only twenty-four times, in all of these occasions on which Bush talks of evil, does he use it as an adjective to describe what people do, that is, to judge acts or deeds. This suggests that Bush is not thinking about evil deeds, nearly as often as he is thinking about evil as a thing, or a force, something that has a real existence apart from the cruel, callous, brutal and selfish acts of which human beings are capable. His readiness to talk about evil in this manner raises the question of what meaning evil can have in a secular modern world.

Immanuel Kant

Kant advocated a system in which the states would give u, to a world federation, a monopoly on the use of force. The world federation would possess the moral authority of a body that established by mutual agreement, and reached its decision in an impartial manner.

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand

Through free competition in the marketplace, the self interested strivings of individuals contribute to the common good.