Jim > Recent Status Updates

Purgatory is shitsville. You're stuck with the body you had on Earth when you died. You eat nothing but coach-class airplane food. There's no booze, no jazzy intrigue, no wilt-your-will women.

This was a war fought by large and clumsy armies, where none of the senior officers had any experience of warfare on so grand a scale.

Writing over a century later, Tacitus would characterise the years of civil war and triumvirate as an era when there was ‘neither law, nor custom’. Basic institutions had broken down and were replaced with arbitrary power.

When [a died on 31 December, he hastily turned a legislative assembly into a voting assembly and elected another of his henchmen as consul for the rest of the day. Cicero joked that ‘in the consulship of Caninius nobody ate lunch. However, nothing bad occurred while he was consul – for his vigilance was so incredible that throughout his entire consulship he never went to sleep,’ but privately said that it was enough

Women aren’t the currency, lust is. It’s like the Buddha said, it’s lust, fear, or indifference with humankind.

Man has made astonishing strides recently in all things inessential. The price we’ve paid is enormous. Stuck with an infantile description of reality that cannot come to terms with death or even lesser challenges, the eternal infant must torture himself for lifetime after lifetime, probably without end.

A good many of them had died in Indian country or on the way back, more had fallen sick. The job had to be done without preparation, with inadequate supplies, poor food, no shelter against the weather. [Doniphan's men] were baying their resentment—but with a difference now. They had always beefed and bellyached, but now their complaints had a new tone, the confidence of tested men.

[Parkman's] admiration grew but at the same time he fell out of love [with the Sioux], confessing disenchantment. They told such marvelous stories—and their minds were so pointless and absurd! They looked so magisterial, so antique Roman at the council fire—and they gabbled like old women, reasoning with an illogic it would have been kind to call infantile.

[Francis Parkman] was perplexed by "this strange migration" and wondered whether mere restlessness went into it, or "a desire of shaking off restraints of law and society," or "an insane hope of a better condition of life." But with that wonder his interest in [the pioneers] reached a full stop. Manifest Destiny was taking flesh under his eyes...

[Frémont] took a frustrated spirit with him. The attitudes of a romantic hero must succeed altogether or they will be merely funny....

Greece was poor and mountainous and even an army of 20,000 had to keep moving if it intended to live off the land. This left local farmers very little to live on after so large an army had passed by, which is another reason why Greece was relatively depopulated by the Roman era.

One reason for the success of the Hellenistic kingdoms—and this book will argue that the Hellenistic kingdoms were massively successful—was that Greek rulers of Egypt, Anatolia, Persia, and points east did not try to change the peoples they ruled.

If the Greeks were gone and their monuments were dust there were still vestiges of their way of life to be found in the food, the wine and the wild flowers of the land they had inhabited and treasured.

I blame the version of capitalism which is destroying the world: you have to be a shit to survive, but your spouse and kids will hate you for turning yourself into a shit and failing to protect them from—yourself.

There’s only one real instruction. Forget the Eightfold Path if it doesn’t apply to your situation. Be one of those who travel to the Far Shore. The Buddha doesn’t give a broken alms bowl how you get there, just do it before it’s too late. There isn’t a lot of time left. That’s all I can tell you.

The pen. That is indeed, no doubt, a worthy tool; yet of little use to the laity. Those things it is needful to know are written already, and, should more ever be necessary, are there not monks to write ir?

And follow not the way of the sword for the lawyers ever defeat it with their pens, as hath been said of old; but follow the [Black] Art, and you shall deal in a matter at whose mention lawyers pale.

Would he save Malou? That would be worse. People would have to see him again with his deformed face, and, knowing him, he would be quite capable of walking about the streets like that, of taking his place again at the Cafe de Paris, of becoming a sort of living reproach.

Again, according to his habit, [Shakespeare] besprinkles the political scenes liberally with the names of off-stage personages, a complication which caused an absent-minded "King Henry" to declare in perfect pentameters that:

The Earl of Whatsisname, Lord Something Else,
Some kind of Bishop and two other guys
Capitulate against us, and are up.

A stock revival, which would always fill a gap, was vividly known as a "get-penny." But the repertory changed very rapidly, and authors were constantly called upon to turn out new plays like sausages from a machine. There was no sitting in a vacuum clasping his domed brow and waiting for the Muse to descend, in Shakespeare's busy life.

Had Jackson been a truly wild man—blustery, threatening, and senselessly violent, both in his emotions and his actions—then he would not have risen so far. Of course, he had his moments of bluster, and he made threats, and he could, at times, seem senselessly violent, but on the whole Jackson gambled only when he liked his odds, and when he had taken care to protect himself from the worst that could happen.

Partly because of his defeat at the hands of the House in 1825, partly because of his fear of the Bank, partly because of his distrust of entrenched freeholders, Jackson believed the country was being controlled by a kind of congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex in which the needs and concerns of the unconnected were secondary to mthose who were on the inside.

But how did [Jackson] transform himself from a "slobbering" young man lashing out at an unfair and largely uncaring world to become ... a cool calculator? Part of the answer lies in the fact that his ambition to succeed was matched by his intellectual capacity to realize that his anger would tend to block, not fuel, his rise.

Thank Buddha my mother had the smarts and the ruthlessness to get out long for long enough to make a pile -- and start a brothel of her own: nobody escapes the cycle of karma, not even a Buddha.

In their hygienic anonymity, [the convention delegates] form a quite distinct tribe, prompting me to ponder that perhaps Bangkok is located on some cosmic intersection where visitors from different galaxies mingle, but never communicate.

Isn't there a saying that the only thing more dangerous than a man with a gun is a nervous man with a gun? If there isn't, there should be.

Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat belt signs lit up, problems switched off.

I don't like dealing with mney transactions in poor countries. I get confused between feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and hating getting ripped off.

Chasing a nighttime mirage on a rain-swept highway has no happy ending for either the quick or the dead.