“Don’t. Do. Diagnostics. On. Healthy. Patients.”
“There. Is. Money. To. Be. Made. In. Treatment.”
“Exactly. Do a diagnostic, medicalize something into being “abnormal”, then rent-seek for further testing to “rule out” this thing that’s completely benign anyway.”
“[Do you] not believe there’s a spark of divinity in every person?”
“No.
No, there isn’t.”
“Yesterday on Twitter the governor of California, Jerry Brown, went after the president’s views on immigration, and he ended his tweet this way:
“We, the citizens of the fifth largest economy in the world, are not impressed.”
“Citizens of the economy”. That says it all. To the modern left, you’re not an American with a culture and a history and a collective identity. You’re a citizen of the economy. A cog in the machine of global capitalism. To Jerry Brown and Nancy Pelosi and their many donors, America is just another private equity scheme. Their pledge is different from yours.
“And to economy, for which it stands, indivisible, with open borders and low wages for all.””
“[Feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
“Daily reminder that under Feudalism people got basically half the year off to pursue their own hobbies and interest while under capitalism/globalism you get less than 8 weeks holiday a year and you’re population gets replaced by hostile aliens who you pay to replace you lol”
“this #metoo thing is funny because sexual harassment generally only happens to homely women. 6s at most. Men don’t dare harass real beauties. They just don’t. They do try with mediocre women because they think they have a shot just being pushy. “
“not getting the joke” is one of the fundamental forces of history. Right there with class struggle.
“Yet again we find this revolutionary concept blithely accepted by many male traditionalists. They are content to accept without argument that there exists a widespread problem of men “harassing” women, and that “something must be done about it.” My first thought would be: What did the Romans do about it? What did the Christian Church do about it? How about the Chinese or the Aztecs?
The obvious answer is that none of them did anything about it, because the concept has only recently developed within the context of the feminist movement. Is this not cause for suspicion? Why are men so quick to adopt the language of their declared enemies?”
“Does the “service dog” category exist for any other reason other than allowing white women to sneak their pets into grocery stores?”
“If the New York Times blesses you, you are our enemy, and you intend to destroy everyone like me, you intend to deny me grandchildren, you intend to to erase my culture and destroy its statues, monuments and great buildings. You intend to demonize and erase my ancestors and their great achievements from history, you intend to erase my past and deny me a future. You are planning to flatten the great buildings of my ancestors, and replace them with concrete boxes, because you hate my past.”
“Slate Star Codex recently attempted to survey co-worker sexual harassment complaints by workplace type, and reviewed existing surveys. The major result was that the more women were outnumbered by men, (engineering, mining) the less that women experienced “sexual harassment”, and the more women outnumber men (supermarket checkout chicks, actresses) the more they experience “sexual harassment”. These results were swiftly confirmed by subsequent work by other people, who also produced similar results for rape – or at least females complaining about “rape”.
But this only makes sense if incidents of men “raping” women and men “sexually harassing” women are generally female initiated, not male initiated, which is what I see in front of my nose, and what I see everyone else failing to see. All workplace sexual harassment cases of males supposedly sexually harassing females, as near to all of them as makes no difference, are female initiated: It is a fitness test. The chick is looking for a coworker with the stones to beat her and rape her.
If workplace sexual harassment is male initiated, we would expect females in predominantly male workplaces to report a lot of it, in particular we would expect engineerettes and female miners to report lots of it, because outnumbered approximately a hundred to one by males, while we would expect actresses and supermarket checkout girls to report very little of it, because they heavily outnumber male co-workers. Survey data is the exact opposite. The more that female workers outnumber male workers (and thus the thirstier the female workers) the more “sexual harassment” by every plausible measure, indicating that all cases of males sexually harassing female co-workers are actually cases of female co-workers fitness testing attractive males, as near to all of them as makes no difference.”
“Legions aren’t supposed to cross the Rubicon and the US Army isn’t supposed to operate on US soil. Similarly political parties should not be a normal feature of domestic society.”
“LOL. So this guy’s brother marries a gay black man. He is upset by this and so seven years ago he established a trust for his children that will give a pay out if they marry a white Christian of the opposite sex. This causes the Dallas News to withdraw their endorsement from him. Not any disagreement about government policy, just that they don’t like his personal financial decisions regarding his own children.”
“they’re not your children okay
they’re Dallas’s children”
“people saying jews are behind everything are ridiculous. there is no worldwide conspiracy.”
“here’s The Secret Jewish History behind literally anything you can think of….”
“Try to imagine life without timekeeping.
You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week.
Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored.
Birds are not late. A dog does not check his watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays.
Man alone measures time.
Man alone chimes to hour.
And because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures:
A fear of time running out.”
“Isaac Newton:
“I have discovered the secret of universal gravitation. This will one day let you ascend into space.”
Normies:
“Shut up virgin.”“
“Mastery does not normally cross fields.
Epistemology is the exception. Every field of inquiry involves epistemology.”
“There’s an entire field of the arts that’s missing because logic isn’t sufficiently appreciated. Namely -actual- psychology, the study of the soul, starting with enumeration of all qualia. Wikipedia has a list of biases. It does not have a list of cures for those biases. Further, it’s rather half-hearted. There’s a whole nosology of thought that’s missing because philosophers have let humans believe they’re normally rational. The Greeks had four or more words for love. English has one. People might experience love differently, but, like, who cares? It’s just fee-fees.
Oh, but it turns out qualia are the basis for all life goals, and also the foundation for all knowledge.
So, uh, oops.”
“There isn’t really a problem of induction.
There really is a problem of intentionality. How the fuck do things refer to other things?”
“Well, ok, but why? How did this mistake happen? He of course does no attempt at explaining. Because his job, the job of Pat Buchanan is to be a conservative, and the job of conservatives is not to understand a thing. The job of conservatives is, and has been for decades, to state their confusion with a tone of strong indignation. I don’t understand this! Hmm! I am angry, yes I am, this makes no sense, and that makes me angry. Join me in my indignation, oh and buy my book. Hmph!
[…] if you don’t get something, that’s a statement about the limits of your intellect rather than about the nature of the problem. If you don’t get something, the problem is with you, not with the issue. Go try and understand it, and then come back. Your indignation solves exactly nothing.“
“I believe seniority has to be accompanies by pay raises. (Maybe in US, def. in EU) which means companies hate loyal workers.”
“If you have ten loyal, conscientious workers, the advantage over having ten sullen nihilists is easily destroyed by having one truly bad hire who you can’t fire without invoking a lawsuit.
Some (enough) companies have responded by making working conditions bad enough that everyone wants to leave, then trying to entice good ones to stay on the sly.”
“So, manorial nobles offered good working conditions because if you really pissed them off they could have you executed. Work is terrible to the extent it is protected. See also: communism.”
“Sales tax approx: 7.5%.
Payroll overhead, compliance costs: 23%
Average tax burden: 30%.
Result: when a firm pays $100 to employ a worker in America, the worker can spend $52 on actual goods and services. The other $48 goes to the State or to waste.
But don’t worry guys, the State only collects about 19% of GDP in taxes! No more than a fifth of the economy!
[…] Even official economists could count up the exact number.
All goods and services bought privates vs. all goods and services bought by the government and government employees. Add in time spent on compliance * wages. Done. They’re well aware the result would be existentially horrifying, so they’ll never do it.”
“We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica at home. When I was a small boy he used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Britannica. We would be reading, say, about dinosaurs. It would be talking about the Tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, “This dinosaur is twenty-five feet high and its head is six feet across.”
My father would stop reading and say, “Now, let’s see what that means. That would mean taht if he stood in our front yard, he would be tall enough to put his head through our window up here.” (We were on the second floor.) “But his head would be too wide to fit through the window.” Everything he read to me he would translate as best he could into some reality.
It was very exciting and very, very interesting to think there were animals of such magnitude 0 and that they all died out, and that nobody knew why. I wasn’t firhgened that there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this. But I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying.”
“You’re just a faggot, and the fact that you put cock in your mouth doesn’t mean you can put words in mine”
“When you are alone, you have to believe you are right.
If ever the have-nots have not even God, then they have naught at all.”
“To the left, homosexuals being born homosexual is a sacred tenant, but criminality, impulse control, time preference and IQ? That’s all “nurture.””
“Tfw you realize Muhammad didn’t think the enemy would read his writings”
“>she was a nice girl, how could he kill her!
>he was a nice guy, how could he kill people!
maybe
just maybe
the assumptions were wrong”
“Reminder that EQ is correlated with IQ and low IQ people are violent psychopaths”
“perfect, I must have high EQ then, so there’s no problem.”
“if this girl is nice and that guy is nice,
then the parents are nice, the teachers are nice, the cops are nice, the government is nice, the media is nice, everyone and i mean everyone (except maybe those nazi fascist white nationalists) is nice. how could sad things happen to nice people! why! why why why why why!
oh.
so this is why killers are always white.”
“Taqiyyah is a distinct concept but really its not necessary. Muslims are allowed to omit things or deceive if they live in a state of tyranny or oppression (spoiler alert: any authority ruling by laws other than what Allah has revealed is by definition tyrannical and an oppressor)”
“In the recent past, in the process of studying the Western rule of law, the notions of ‘rule of law’ and ‘rule of man’ erroneously came to be seen as antagonistic… The rule of law and the rule of man are not completely opposed to one another but are complementary.”
“Can you imagine an ethnologist observing gorillas for years only to conclude that their behaviour is “wrong” and that they ought to do something else instead? How ridiculous would that be? Now consider our humanities and social studies professors who supposedly study human nature.”
“The antithesis of equality is not inequality. It is quality.”
“It’s *after* you apologize that you get in trouble. People smell weakness. They detect the difference between an action caused by principles and one driven by fear.”
“in my more imaginative moments I am convinced that the singularity was quite a while ago and the USA is a nation governed by machines, specifically cars.
they brutalize our surroundings so we spend more time indoors, only going from place to place securely in their metal bellies, seeing the world through their eyes instead of our own”
“the CDC performs a very important function, which is to render legible that which the government wishes to define as disease”
“He’s got pins for gay pride, Satan, Cthulhu, Prussia, and Communism, you know what the problem is ?”
“That we live in a postmodern sewer of nihilism with no moral center marginalizing and demonizing certain individuals & boys especially to the cult of our own socially engineered moral crusades that serve the liberal world order?”
“LOL no Nazis!”
“16th century: They promised us religious freedom and tore up the commons, slaughtered the monks and crushed the statues of our saints.
18th century: They promised us political freedom and exchanged our village councils and manor courts with a vote for a distant parliament.
19th century: They promised us financial freedom and led us into dark and noisy factories and crowded slums rife with disease and debt.
20th century: They promised us national freedom if only we would stand up to be counted for the draft, learning to bayonet our brothers.
21st century: They promised us the freedom from identity, from family and descendants, if only we gave up all that our ancestors left us.
And here we are today: with nothing left to offer and nothing left to take.”
“The questions they ask make a lot of sense:
“Where are you from and where do you stay” tells them whether you can afford a pricey hotel (income).
“How long are you staying” says about the time-frame they have to scam you.
“How long have you been here and do you know Chinese” tells them how easy you can be scammed (they know you have no experience and knowledge of the place).
Normal people will ask you more normal questions like “What do you thing of the place, the food, the people…””
“I’m not even going to pretend at this point that gun control wouldn’t prevent more school shootings. It probably would. The reason I don’t advocate gun control to save kids’ lives is that I’d be far more interested in reversing any of the trends that put kids in the frame of mind to commit mass murder. Such as:
-Forced integration that alienated all students by taking away their sense of community with people similar to themselves
-Overly long school hours that alienate kids from their families
-Homework assignments that eat into the little time kids still have to relax and center themselves
-Feminist indoctrination designed to make boys hate themselves
-Anti-white indoctrination designed to make European Americans hate themselves
-The dissolution of male-only clubs and spaces designed to give pubescent boys a constructive outlet for their raging testosterone
-The instillation of ridiculous standards of what constitutes “sexual harassment,” which alienate students by forbidding innocent forms of human contact
-The dissolution of recess and shortening of lunch breaks, which essentially destroys any chance for meaningful socialization with one’s classmates
We’ve shoved public school students into a situation where they’re forced to be around people from disparate cultures with whom they have no chance of identifying, forced them away from people they have a chance of growing to love, put them on the defensive in terms of their heritage and sex, and robbed them of any chance to form an identity that’s actually congruent with how they were born.
The gun grabber’s response to all this is to simply take away the chance to procure the weapon that leads to the ultimate and deadly catharsis. Never once do they consider that these kids kind of just need to be able to exist, breathe, and blow off steam on their own time. They are PERFECTLY FINE with living in a society where hundreds or even thousands of kids WANT to kill themselves and others, as long as they can’t get their hands on an efficient method of doing so.”
“Why is monogamy better than polyamory?”
“It doesn’t create a broad underclass of men who have nothing to lose by burning the whole thing down.”
“No, but those men create themselves, with or without monogamy.
Monogamy isn’t for everyone, and neither is polyamory. that’s the reality; no blanket statement projections or excuse inducing rationalizations necessary.”
“Monogamy may not be for everyone, but neither is civilization, and as it stands, monogamy is the life-blood of civilization.”
“When people decry racial tensions as abnormal or pathological, ask them where there have been multi-racial societies where this did not happen. If they can’t name an example, explain that something is aberrant only if it’s the exception and not the rule. That’s how pathology works.”
“FUCKING CRIMINALS and their *squints* minding their own business while consuming substances that i disapprove of”
“Oh man if ONLY they were minding their own business. Where in God’s name did the notion that drug addicts operate in perfect isolation come from, exactly? My money’s on “other drug addicts”.
“I was minding my own business!” laments the alcoholic as he veers onto the sidewalk and murders a luckless passerby”
“anarchotyranny is when the government won’t let you have drugs but also won’t do anything about actual violence”
“Libertarians, economists… people whose job/interest involves first putting things in words and only second making sense out of the world.
But you said that with “other drug addicts”.”
“There are few better guides to relaxation than watching a cat or dog getting properly comfortable. They take their sitting around doing nothing time very seriously.”
“One of the reasons Twitter is so addictive is that it’s a toy Cathedral — a purportedly neutral platform fanatically committed to the victory of one side.”
“Spotify partnered with 6 leftist activists groups to remove what they determine is hate music. Today they removed all Christian and Country music.”
“If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?”
“Even the lengths of one’s fingers are different; it is natural for men to have differing opinions.”
“A friend of mine from Texas was a missionary bush pilot in Africa for many years. He has four sons all raised in Africa under the exact same standard of parenting. Three of the sons went on to successful careers and family lives. One son became addicted to drugs and has been in and out of prison for many years. Input does not always equal output.”
“In an ‘at will’ employment arrangement between a corporation and an employee, either party can terminate the contract at any time. However, instead of a few weeks of severance, imagine what would happen if the employer was legally required to pay the employee half of his or her paycheck for 20 additional years, irrespective of anything the employee did or did not do, under penalty of imprisonment for the CEO. Suppose, additionally, that it is culturally encouraged for an employee to do this whenever even minor dissatisfaction arises. Would businesses be able to operate? Would anyone want to be a CEO? Would businesses even form, and thus would any wealth be created, given the risks associated with hiring an employee? ”
“There is no avoiding the reality that marriage has to be made attractive to men for the surrounding civilization to survive.”
“For those wondering why Indian culture has such restrictions on women and not men, restrictions on men were tried in some communities, and those communities quickly vanished and were forgotten.”
“All societies that achieved great advances and lasted for multiple centuries followed this formula with very little deviation, and it is quite remarkable how similar the nature of monogamous marriage was across seemingly diverse cultures. Societies that deviated from this were quickly replaced.”
“America is often called the land of the free, and [the land] where human liberty is valued more than elsewhere. That is, until a woman decides that the father of her children is ‘boring’ to her. After that, for the man in question, America suddenly becomes North Korea.”
“Truly unusual events and objects are hard to describe. Because they are hard to describe they aren’t virulent.”
“Little Caesars: It’s hot and it’s ready.
Me: Is it good?
Little Caesars: It’s HOT. And it’s READY.”
“The word the Greeks used for what Pandora opened is the same as their word for what Diogenes lived in.
Was Diogenes hope?”
“>Get the fuck out of my sunlight.
Yes.
Yes he was.”
“Shapiro’s hatred of Buchanan is telling.
Buchanan has been the most prophetic pundit in decades. He advocated for Trumpism 20 years before Trump. He forecast every failed war, every leftist social experiment gone wrong.
But Ben still hates him out of pure ethnic animosity.
At the end of the day, Buchanan doesn’t worship Israel. He doesn’t even hate Israel…he just thinks it’s not in America’s interests to fight their wars and get involved in their regional conflicts.
And for Ben, that alone amounts to heresy which he can never forgive.”
“ITT its 2010”
“Hi guys, it’s Futurebro here.
I just wanted to let you know that in a year, a website called reddit.com will become stupefyingly popular due to the downfall of Digg.
It will utterly destroy 4chan because they will steal all of the OC to gain karma, which will stop OC from being made, which will cause them to endlessly repost old OC as though they were beating a dead horse into dust, then they will colonize 4chan in an attempt to find new OC, and will fail to integrate into the culture, thereby changing it and becoming the greatest cancer imageboards have ever known. Four years after that, r/4chan will be the 20th most active subreddit, meaning that the user bases for both sites are 90% identical.
Enjoy.”
“A man feeling horny tries to find tiddies and is satisfied if he succeeds.
A woman feeling horny tries to fundamentally disrupt the nearest man’s life, and is satisfied if she fails.”
“I think it’s hilarious when straight girls look at drag queens and say “wow!! he can do makeup better than me!” as if it’s surprising that someone who essentially does makeup for a living is better at it than a girl from Kentucky who buys her eyeshadow from Rite-aid”
“Standard models of the economy are built on a simple relationship: When unemployment goes down, inflation eventually goes up. That relationship, dubbed the Phillips curve, has looked sickly for years. In Japan, it may be dead, a preview of what central bankers may confront everywhere.”
“Unemployment down but no inflation, hell yeah”
“THE PEOPLE HAVE MONEY AND WE AREN’T TAKING IT FROM THEM
PANIC
PANIC
THE WORLD IS ENDING
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”
“The Tesla, in effect, is a beautifully engineered toy for the conspicuous-consumption market, accessible to millionaires but beyond the reach of the commercial market. Neither it nor most other electric vehicles have any place in a competitive, free-market environment. As an indication of how economically injurious these playthings are to society on the whole, the U.K.’s National Grid estimated that Britain would need to increase its peak generating capacity by 50 per cent to meet the government’s plans for electric vehicles, the equivalent of building 10 new nuclear plants.”
“Subsidy entrepreneurs like the Musks of the world — often self-deluded true believers — should be distinguished from the Bernie Madoffs, who are fakes within real industries, and who prey primarily and illegally on private investors. The Musks are fakes in fake industries who prey primarily on taxpayers, a time-honoured practice that remains legal.”
“We have the unions, we have the gambling, and they’re the best things to have, but narcotics is the thing of the future. If we don’t get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. I mean, not now, but ten years from now.”
“What’s the matter with you? I think your brain has gone soft from all that comedy you’re playing with that young girl. Never tell anybody outside the family what you’re thinking again.”
“What are you worried about? If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Good.
Now, you can go.”
“I don’t like violence, Tom. I’m a businessman. Blood is a big expense.”
“That’s out of the question.
“Do you know my father? Men are coming here to kill him.
Do you understand?
Now help me, please.”
“Your father wouldn’t want to hear this! This is business not personal!”
“They shot my father-”
“Even the shooting of your father was business, not personal, Sonny.”
“Well then business will have to suffer, alright?”
“Fredo. You’re my older brother. And I love you.
But don’t ever take sides against the family again.”
“Women and children can be careless. But not men.”
“You’re out of the family business, that’s your punishment. You’re finished.
I’m putting you on a plane to Vegas. I want you to stay there. You understand?
Only don’t tell me you’re innocent. Because it insults my intelligence. It makes me very angry.
Now who approached you?”
“I find it very disturbing how people can casually recommend working two or three jobs as a long-term solution to life’s problems, because it demonstrates the reality that in the post-industrial west, you are no longer a citizen of a national body or a society with a clearly defined identity and culture. You are a citizen of an economy, and your life’s purpose and value is reduced to being a menial laborer in a larger body whose sole ideology is simply production for purposeless expansion. You are a cog in a machine, and exist for that purpose only to be discarded when your utility to the religion of production has exhausted itself. For fuck’s sake, your value as a person is literally measured by your economic productivity and the money that you accumulate from it.
A fucking peasant in the twelfth century has led a more meaningful life than the majority of the machinated zombies that call themselves “people” we are surrounded by today. Contemporary society is too focused on work and not focused enough on living. In prior historical epochs work was viewed as a means towards living. It is a sacrifice to be done and gotten over with in order to realize a goal. Today, it is conflated WITH living. Post-industrial society views the act of work to be the very essence of life. You work, and therefore you live. We have built the ultimate materialist society.”
“iceberg above water: we’re not sex objects okay
iceberg below water: that’s what men are”
“>You should sleep with at LEAST 25 guys before settling down, and I’ll tell you exactly why
It’s because I slept with 24 and if you’re not at least as slutty as me I’ll feel bad.”
““Men are literally impossible to hate. Not women though. Hating women is totally understandable.”
Kids say the darndest things.”
“Broward is a sneak peek into the future. Politician sheriffs who are buddy buddy with the Podestas and Abedins of the day forcing SROs and detectives to bury cases before they start so they can hide data from ever becoming statistics. Cops being fired for making too many arrests and being forced to let multiple repeat offenders go including dealers and gang bangers unless they have a warrant- probable cause only enough to detain and file a discovery, whereupon certain judges dismiss most discoveries just by reading the name. Then when the police unions hold their first no confidence vote in County history to kick those Sheriff’s out the mares and County Commissioners will come in to squash their decisions and threaten their jobs and pensions if they don’t get in line.
The info is out there. Lots of people in the system talking about what’s going down but nobody reports it or they die. They’re paving the way for using AI against us by altering the only reality AI will be able to sense. The current cutting edge of this stuff is training AIs to get the results desired, not the logical conclusion. They’re going to tell everyone AI can predict crime and come after our people based solely on not having agreeable opinions and using ERPOs to disarm and incarcerate us then bury police reports from the actual boots on the ground that do the policing. That way AI will see white terrorists under every rock and behind every tree based on Facebook while black murder and rape rates drop to nothing and the science is settled. Just wait. My paranoid technofascism predictions aren’t predictions so much as 10 year old military technology extended to its logical totalitarian application to fulfill stated PotEoZ goals.”
“WE NEED mass immigration to replace our aging workforce AND!! WE NEED abortion to STOP over population and fight climate change!”
““I’ll give you ten G’s for it as an option against $75,000 if it becomes a book,” Evans remembers telling the writer, more out of pity than excitement. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Could you make it fifteen?’ And I said, ‘How about twelve-five?’”
Without even glancing at the pages, Evans sent them to Paramount’s business department, along with a pay order, and never expected to see Puzo, much less his cockamamy novel, again. A few months later, when Puzo called and asked, “Would I be in breach of contract if I change the name of the book?,” Evans almost laughed out loud. “I had forgotten he was even writing one.” Puzo said, “I want to call it The Godfather.””
““Let’s go to bed,” Evans says, leading me through his Hollywood Regency home to his bedroom, where so many starlets have slept that, in the producer’s heyday, his housekeeper would place the name of the previous evening’s conquest beside his coffee cup on the breakfast table so that he could address her properly. Since his screening room burned down, in 2003, Evans has taken to showing films in his bedroom.”
“I never met a real, honest-to-god gangster,” Puzo added in his memoir. Neither had Coppola. “Mario told me to never meet them, never agree to, because they respected that and would stay away from you if they knew you didn’t want contact.”
“Puzo put language he’d learned from his Italian-born mother—who raised seven children by herself—into the mouth of Don Corleone, but the face he put on him was Marlon Brando’s. “I wrote a book called The Godfather,” Puzo said in a letter to Brando. “I think you’re the only actor who can play the part with that quiet force and irony the part requires.” Brando was intrigued, because he saw the project as a story not of blood and guts but “about the corporate mind.” As he said later, “The Mafia is so American! To me, a key phrase in the story is that whenever they wanted to kill somebody it was always a matter of policy. Before pulling the trigger, they told him, ‘Just business, nothing personal.’ When I read that, [Vietnam War architects Robert] McNamara, [Lyndon] Johnson, and [Dean] Rusk flashed before my eyes.””
““So next day Joe shows up with two other guys. Joe sits opposite me, one guy’s on the couch, and one guy’s sitting in the window.” Ruddy pulled out the 155-page script and gave it to the Mob boss. “He puts on his little Ben Franklin glasses, looks at it for about two minutes. ‘What does this mean—fade in?’ he asked. And I realized there was no way Joe was going to turn to page two.”
“Oh, these fucking glasses. I can’t read with them,” Colombo said, throwing the script to his lieutenant. “Here, you read it.”
“Why me?” said the lieutenant, throwing the script to the underling.
Finally, Colombo grabbed the script and slammed it on the table. “Wait a minute! Do we trust this guy?” he asked his men. Yes, they replied.
“So what the fuck do we have to read this script for?” said Colombo. He told Ruddy, “Let’s make a deal.””
“I’d rather deal with a Mob guy shaking hands on a deal than a Hollywood lawyer, who, the minute you get the contract signed, is trying to figure out how to screw you”
“When introducing one made man to another, the phrase “a friend of ours” is used, indicating that he is a member and business can be discussed openly with him. If the person being introduced is an associate or civilian to whom business should not be mentioned, the phrase “a friend of mine” is used instead.”
“Now to be effective in a course like this I have to talk about myself. If I make abstract remarks, it just sounds like so many pious words. If I talk about me, and what I’ve done, maybe it will penetrate you.”
“You have to find a style that fits you. Which means you have to take what fragments you can from other people, use them, adapt them, and become yours. You can’t copy me directly. You won’t get away with it.
I will use the analogy of painting as an example.
In painting, once you’ve learned color mixing, and form, and sketching, and so on, you study under a master, who you temporarily accept as knowing what he’s talking about. Well, there are limits as to what can be done. You know that if you copy the master’s style exactly, you will not be a great painter. You know also that if you paint in the style he did, it’s too late, the future wants a different style. Thus, I can tell you about the style I used in the past. But that won’t be the style you’ll have to have to go for the future.
You must manufacture the style which will make you a significant person.”
“Supposing I am successful and you do rise to the top. Will you please remember that what made you great is not appropriate for the next generation.
You know how to get great because after all, you were great. But the things you did may not be appropriate for the next generation.”
“You have to have background knowledge; enough to penetrate jargon.”
“What are fundamentals? Well, I have two criteria. Which are not adequate.
One: From the fundamentals, you can derive the rest of the field.
Two: They’ve been around for some time.”
“The past was less determined than historians like to make, and the future is less open-ended than you would like to believe.”
“I want to tell you another thing, a story which I’ll use several times: the story of the drunken sailor.
He staggers a couple of steps this way, he staggers a couple of steps that way, this way and that way, this way and that way. In n steps, typically, you’ll get the square root of n distance. In a hundred steps, you’ll get about ten. In ten thousand, it’ll be about a hundred. He may be right where he started, he may be further away, but that’s typical.
On the other hand if there’s a pretty girl over there, he staggers like this, back like this, over like that – he’s going to get a distance proportional to n.
If I can create in you a vision of where you are headed, you will make progress proportional to n.
If you do not have a vision, you will wander like a drunken sailor.
[…] Now you’re gonna say to me, “But Hamming, how do I know the future?”.
It doesn’t matter much, from what I’ve examined in life, what goal you set. Whether you want to march that way, that way, or that way. If you have a goal, you’ll get somewhere near it. If you don’t have a goal, you’re a drunken sailor. My problem is to make you form your goals, and to some extent, try to achieve it. To make you something important rather than just drifting.
It’s comfortable to drift through life. And a great many people when questioned closely will assert that they’re perfectly content to drift through life.
I don’t think too good an idea of that whole thing.
[…] Those who do something generally have some kind of goals and see where they’re headed, and their lives add up. Those who don’t are just a bunch of isolated events.”
“Now it’s an opinion, it’s not a fact, it’s an opinion, that most people believe that the struggle to achieve excellence is worth the struggle. Also when you look at peoples’ lives, I can tell you a story which I may repeat a couple of times, as a child I went to a movie, they were called nickelodeons in my day but we actually spent a dime.
One Saturday I went with a friend of mine, and it was one of these you laugh and laugh and laugh types. All ridiculous situations. We walked out, and he said to me, “You know, that wasn’t a very funny movie.” I thought for a while and said, you’re right. All the laughter does not make a movie funny at all.
And the same way with life. The pleasant life is not the one with the sum total of the pleasant moments. Somehow or other it’s added up very very differentl. The good life is not the one of pleasure from moment to moment, and you know it. In fact, you are well aware of it, that you cannot get up in the morning and say, “I shall be happy today”, and make it work.
The good life has to be snuck up upon. And I’m saying, an opinion, of myself and many other books, the way to do that is to take yourself and manage yourself to be the person you wish to be to achieve the goals you wish, and be more articulate than just idle drifting like a drunken sailor.
In ancient Greece, our boy Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
What I’m saying goes back that far.”
“Lastly, in a certain sense, this is a religious course. I am preaching a message, that with one life to lead, you want to do more than just get by. There are a great many religions, and I don’t want to get involved in one or the other too much, it is however an emotional matter I’m really appealing to.
It’s very frequently said that a happy life is one which has some goals achieved. Well, studying the matter over, and reading about it and talking to people, everybody pretty much agrees that it’s not the achievement of the goal that really is the best part. It’s the struggle. The struggle to success is what makes you what you will be.
Remember, at old age, you’re gonna have to live with yourself. There’s no escape living with yourself in your old age. You’re stuck. And at old age, you can’t change as much as when you were younger; consider what kind of person you wish to be in old age.
And start now, being that kind of a person.
This is what the course is all about.”
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