I have probably just completed the most taxing event of my life so far. I woke up at 10:30 am on Friday and wandered about my apartment till 8:00 pm when I went to Kroger for food. I went home, ate and left my apartment at 1:00 am on Saturday. I spent until 11:30 am collecting aluminium cans from the streets of Toledo. Exercise doesn’t really cover the level of exertion put forth. It was more like the movie Tigerland were all the recruits are sent to a simulated hell-hole before moving on to the real one in Vietnam. Fortunately no one shot at me.
Poetry
Here is some poetry I enjoyed out of A Concise History of Australia.
“The night too quickly passes
And we are growing old,
So let us fill our glasses
And toast the Days of Gold;
When finds of wondrous treasure
Set all the South ablaze,
And you and I were faithful mates
All through the Roaring Days.”
“Out on the wastes of the Never Never-
That’s where the dead men lie!
There where the heat-waves dance forever-
That’s where the dead men lie!”
“And I think still of men in green
On the Soputa track,
With fifteen spitting tommy-guns
To keep the jungle back.”
I bring you music.
I am thinking of starting a company “for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage but no one to know what it is.” Anyone is welcome to contribute funds to this worthy endeavour.
Easy Investing for the Quesy
Natural gas. Buy some.
Gold maybe a good inflation hedge but it is probably halfway up the hill towards ecstasy so probably not a great move.
Pepsico hasn’t recovered as much as some. Pepsico is too big to get rich off of even if up it goes. Let there be options was not one of God’s opening sallies as far as I know. Still, it may apply here.
Palladium, a friendly, quasi-precious, quasi-industrial metal that I think should do better than gold.
Anything China as long as it’s not too expensive. What is not too expensive? Dear reader, that is for you to decide. That way you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.
Boom
Like falling from a great height.
Like going down the rabbit hole.
Like pulling the tail of a snoozing, scaled smokestack.
“I hear a coughin from the coffin as he slides back the lid.”
Boo!
All Walls Forbidding Insanity Must Fall
A wave of offal sent courtesy of this joke known to some as life has happened to land on me feet. So my grandma died and I was fired for questionable reasons. I’m biased, still questionable I say. I was super pissed as they would say in Comic Party. About losing the jewel that was my grandma I remain so about the job not so much. How much can one care about a job that paid between $100 and $215 a week? I never knew on which end the pay would be for the next week anyway. My plans haven’t really been changed only accelerated. I intend to buy a car by the end of the week to haul scrap metal. I went to a coin shop to sell my collection to build up the war chest. The silver came in line with what was expected but a 1950s proof set my father had given me two weeks ago brought about something almost akin to a miracle. Based on the silver I thought it would be worth $10 or maybe up to $30 something if the proof set had some collectable value beyond that. They offered me $420. I took the money and ran. I think I’ll love cruising the streets at night. Since I have almost no obligations I might travel some during the summer. I want to go to Arizona in search of gold and madness. What will the future bring?
The Online Market for the Masses
Well, I’ve been having some fun on Ebay recently. I won a bid on some small gold tokens. If they are truly as advertised I got a deal but if not I lost five bucks so no sweat. I think I might buy a lot of books this way. It’s one of those things that I’ve known about for a very long time but never took advantage of. I get paid tomorrow so I will once again have some cash. It’s never even close to enough. I don’t even really have money for food and I’m sick of it. Yes, I do buy books over food so suck it.
Pay Me in Silver
I offer the elusive silver panda for your consideration. I bought one from the year 2006 for $20 today from F & J Coins. I admit it. I’m a bit of a precious metal fan. I also sold a quarter I found while cashiering for around $3 so I’m proud of that. If that doesn’t qualify as arbitrage I don’t know what does. I just started, but I think buying bullion will be a good way to save since it isn’t as liquid as cash and is thus harder for me to blow. Plus I think the coins look very cool and shiny indeed. All around a victory for the forces of light.
Artwork
I love this painting by George Elgar Hicks. It’s universal across time. People will wait in line a very long time for a check.
These two are from Mr. Atomic of Toledo. A lot of his work borders on trippy. I have a fondness for it especially since he’s a home boy. Technically he is really they but oh well.
Philosophy
I’m going to talking about something other than money, yay! “Just as bad money drives out good” my brain has dug up philosophy to replace cash. That sounds cruel to philosophy but honestly I just love that phrase.
I have to say that I’m not particular impressed by the philosophical arguments for God. I’m not convinced that existence is perfect while nonexistence is imperfect. Why must there be an infinite God to replace an infinite causational series is beyond me. In this case the one infinite with consciousness seems more unlikely than the one without. I can’t assign probabilities to the possibilities that are before me but surely the additional qualifier of conscious makes God less likely. I’m agnostic but from this way of looking at things I move towards there being no God.
On a different note I’m fascinated by the idea of senses. What is it like to feel an electric field like a shark or to experience echo location? It would be the most amazing thing in the world to see into another mind. If one could read minds would that person be overwhelmed by the alieness? Would the mere act of looking result in a new mind? How long would separateness persist in this sci-fi world?
I present a few quotes.
In his 1949 speech, “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?”, Russell expressed his difficulty over whether to call himself an atheist or an agnostic:
As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
—Bertrand Russell, Collected Papers, vol. 11, p. 91Though he would later question God’s existence, he fully accepted the ontological argument during his undergraduate years:
For two or three years…I was a Hegelian. I remember the exact moment during my fourth year [in 1894] when I became one. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco, and was going back with it along Trinity Lane, when I suddenly threw it up in the air and exclaimed: “Great God in Boots! – the ontological argument is sound!”
—Bertrand Russell, Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, pg. 60This quote has been used by many theologians over the years, such as by Louis Pojman in his Philosophy of Religion, who wish for readers to believe that even a well-known atheist-philosopher supported this particular argument for God’s existence. However, elsewhere in his autobiography, Russell also mentions:
About two years later, I became convinced that there is no life after death, but I still believed in God, because the “First Cause” argument appeared to be irrefutable. At the age of eighteen, however, shortly before I went to Cambridge, I read Mill’s Autobiography, where I found a sentence to the effect that his father taught him the question “Who made me?” cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question “Who made God?” This led me to abandon the “First Cause” argument, and to become an atheist.
—Bertrand Russell, Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, pg. 36Russell made an influential analysis of the omphalos hypothesis enunciated by Philip Henry Gosse—that any argument suggesting that the world was created as if it were already in motion could just as easily make it a few minutes old as a few thousand years:
There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.
—Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, 1921, pp. 159–60; cf. Philosophy, Norton, 1927, p. 7, where Russell acknowledges Gosse’s paternity of this anti-evolutionary argument.
