Cobb

Sufficient Divinity

What a surprise it is to find in Taleb the ends of certain of my thoughts. On the plane over here to snowy Cleveland I had a couple brainstorms. Here is the killer question that occupies me for the moment.

Wait.

First of all, let me give you Taleb's take on religion which is squarely in line with mine. He asserts that religious people deal better with incomplete information. And he also suggests that those who are normalized by non-religious rationality tend to be overconfident. I think his term is 'empistemic arrogance' which is squarely Conservative as in Oakeshott.

So the question that popped into my head some 36,000 feet over the midwestern US was "What is sufficiently divine?" As soon as I thought it, Martin Amis' 'The Janitor on Mars' came to mind. There is much I do not recall about the story and will not do it justice in my brief description, but the salient bits are as follows.

A robot lives several dozen miles beneath the surface of Mars and comes to the surface to speak to Earth. The Martians who built that robot were essentially wiped out in a war with an advanced civilization from beyond the Solar System hundreds of millions of years ago. Earth itself was considered a backwater, rather like the growth on a discarded sandwich, and in all of human evolution it has not developed to the level of intelligence of this robot, which is itself only a planet janitor. The janitor is surly and dismissive of human science and technology and answers all of the great scientific mysteries in his boredom, but to no avail because Earth is doomed to be destroyed as part of some bargain made by the loss of Mars millions of years before. There is nothing the human race can do in its appeal to this robot to secure its survival - the robot is merely following the orders of its creator, who themselves were destroyed by an even greater civilization.

Is such a robot sufficiently divine to be considered God? If it can singlehandedly save the Earth from destruction or destroy it, what obligation would humanity have to figure out how to get it to be merciful? If the robot promised to build a warp-drive transport that would take a continent's fill of human scum to some other bog in the heavens, how many virgins would you sacrifice?

The point of this argument is that it is only rational to consider the destruction of mankind to determine mankind's moral obligation to itself. The ultimate value of life and meaning on Earth is best determined in light of such thought experiments. I think that Taleb would argue that this is what religion has been doing, or attempting to do since its invention.

In that respect, it is a fair suggestion to say that man is the only creature that thinks about God and then consequently re-evaluates the meaning of his own life. It doesn't matter whether that God is 'God' or a robot janitor on Mars which is only some idiot fraction of the powers that be in our own galaxy. It matters that it is sufficiently divine such that in contemplation of it's powers and intentions we must consider the fate of our species.

Next time somebody tells you global warming isn't a religion, you have a new answer.

That irresistible dig is not my point however. My point is that intelligent people are making incredible excuses and evading that which established religion is in order to create yet another religion in the guise of not-religion. They are hamstrung by the fact that their god must be provable. They are trying to invent something non-divine which will justify their frameworks as proper for estimating the mankind's moral obligation to itself.

Their answer will inevitably be war.

Galco Saturday

The best thing about Galco's is that getting home and opening up the sodas is not anti-climatic. In case you've been under a rock (which is often a good place to be when it's raining Tiger Woods stories), you should know about Galco's Soda Pop Shop. I was made aware a couple weeks ago, and now I hear there's an NPR story. Today there was even a book signing. First to the video that hipped me to the deal.

When I found that this guy and his joint were just 15 miles away from my house, I knew that I'd be making several trips. And so this weekend was the first.

First thing was that I had to herd the cats of my family which is getting more difficult to do by the day. We managed to get everyone together by 11am from sleepovers and sleepins and take the Pasadena freeway up to North Figeuroa into Highland Park. We made a quick stop at BofA and then turned left on York and headed to Avenue 54. That's because the Estrella Taco Truck is there. Yes a taco truck. The al pastor burrito (no guac, no sour cream) is a perfect balance. Just spicy meat held together in a perfect tortilla with the right amount of sauce, onion, & cilantro. You know there are still Americans who don't know what cilantro is. I know, hard to believe.

We wheeled back down York and pulled into Galco's. A bunch of dudes were hanging out in front eating and drinking sodas. In a glance I could tell they were either YouTubers or Oxy students. But it was the second incongruous group I'd seen in this East LA style 'hood. My family of course was the first.

Inside it is as bright and cheerful as in the color drenched video. Except the florescents weren't giving the color balance you saw in the video. But the excitement of seeing candy and soda from long lost memory was just as extraordinary as you would expect. The proprietor was there, and a bunch of employees were busily restocking shelves and pointing folks in interesting directions. The photographer took a shine to my kids. I grabbed a cart and went at it.

It took me a while to figure out what Nese, the owner, was on about when he talked about CRV and the monopolization of recycling by Coke and Pepsi. But by the time I got in the store I had figured it out. As soon as I saw a bottle of BubbleUp I remembered that I used to put them in my wagon and return them to Boys Market on Crenshaw for a few pennies each. It was the market that paid me the money and got me back in the store. They sent the bottles back to the bottler who washed them and reused them. Well the accounting geniuses at Coke and Pepsi realized that if they could get a good enough deal on recycled glass, it would be cheaper for them to make new bottles than to wash and relabel the old ones, especially as you realize many of the bottles were painted. So they argued for the support of CRV and that took their rewashing factories out of the supply chain. And it took the markets out too. So now the states run the CRV programs and they get the kickback from the bottlers, not the markets. You can argue that it's just a penny or two per bottle, but those pennies add up, and none of them go to the Galcos of the world.

But going to Galco's is not about sour grapes. It's about Nugrape and Big Red and Faygo Rock&Rye and Kackapoo Joy Juice and all those old brands you thought were gone. It's about crazy flavors you never knew existed much less made into a soda. I can't even imagine a Dandelion and Burdock soda, but there it is right at eye level on the shelf.

Moreover Galco's is about experiencing the kind of long tail personal retail that is a very rare thing in this country. There's a man running that store who reminds us that quality doesn't necessarily mean rarified and overpriced. Some of my favorite business success stories are about the man who didn't do a lot of market research or focus groups on a product, but instead assumed that the customer shared his own passion. Those guys don't often make the big time, but they make the 99th percentile because they can control the details.

You wouldn't think that there are details in soda, but there absolutely are. In fact, soda is exciting again. We've all been dumbed down with the mass market sodas, because as soon as you open the top on one of these rare brands you smell it. When is the last time you appreciated the smell of a soda before you chugged it down? I'm telling you it's a new experience. Not just shopping for the stuff, which is a delight in itself, but actually drinking it down.

My new favorite soda is Curiosity Cola. It's an astonishing drink. If you've ever had an IBC or a Jones, then you know how different a good soda can be from the mainstream brands. In my book the Fentimans are up a significant notch from them. I tried it with some Captain Morgan and it's an entirely new drink. Can't wait to taste it with Jack. Next I am dying to make a cucumber martini.

Now it's just like me to become a soda snob, but instead I have this wave of sadness in the realization of how we've all been ripped off and deprived of one of life's simple pleasures. It ought to be a no-brainer to go to the store and marvel at what kinds of goods are available after the culmination of thousands of years of beverage making. But we've just been swallowing swill. Galco's selection (and they're supplying restaurants too) is waking us up to something marvelous and oh so sweet. Tell your favorite bartender to get on board. 

It doesn't stop there. Galco's has old school candy. Yes including Nikl Nip wax lips and candy cigarettes. They have Flicks, Chick O Stick and Fruit Stripe gum. They've got C Howard's Violets, Razzles, Pop Rocks and Giant Pixy Stix. It's like going back in time. 

I expect Galco's to get slashdotted, and that's cool. He's not great because he's small, but because he's great.

Next Tuesday

Americans should do well to remember Wimpy, the hamburger scarfing cadge from the Popeye cartoon. No matter what day it was, Wimpy would always be asking for money for a hamburger for which he would gladly repay you on next Tuesday. Except that he never did. Something Popeye did would always come up distracting him from the collection, and Wimpy would grow fatter and wiser. No matter how much spinach he ate, Popeye never got his money back from Wimpy.

It turns out that Popeye is like most human beings when it comes to envisioning next Tuesday. According to the Long Now Blog a neuroscientist has shown that we don't pay much attention to consequences of the far future.

..the further an event lies in the future, the less people care about it. So if offered $100 now or $500 18 months from now, many people still take the $100. The consequence is that there’s little difference between President Obama promising 18 months from now versus 18 years from now. In the human ken, both are obscured in the mists of the distant future.

Maybe this is why it pays to punish your kids now instead of, 'next time for sure'. But it also reminded me of what I just read in Gladwell's new collection of old essays. It might be that Gladwell was the one who introduced us to Taleb. I never heard about him much before he published his Black Swan book when I started listening to Bloomberg about 18 months ago. But Gladwell wrote about his contrarianess in 2002.

Taleb's 'Emperica' investment strategy is brilliant by my reckoning, primarily because it so much resembles gambling. I hate gambling but I am illogical about it. I love investing but I'm illogical about it. Investing, according to popular wisdom means collecting interest on capital, and this is how fund managers present their products to the investing public. How do you make a small fortune? Start off with a large one. Let your money work for you by parking it away and letting it gain interest. All passive voice kind of stuff organized around a mental model in our minds that's very comforting. So we expect that a successful portfolio (but let's not deconstruct 'balanced portfolio' just yet) will give us some reasonable return in steady increments over time. That's what we grok to be a 'sound investment'. That a stock investment should produce 'revenues' like a growing business, in even predictable measures along a fairly narrow confidence interval. We like the sound of stuff like 2% per year.

Empirica turns that on its head by using hedges that normally lose money during normal times but pay off wildly during unpredictably chaotic times. In other words, Empirica plays longshots. Not just longshot winners but longshot events. Except it does so without doubling down. So you just pay to play what amounts to something that pays off like a life insurance policy on somebody else's life.

You just might have to wait until next Tuesday to get your moola. We don't like the sound of that.. Maybe you get 300% in four to seven years, but on average you lose money every day.

I like that kind of investment vehicle. Especially when I hear people who sound like they get paid to sound like they know what they're talking about tell audiences that recovery is just around the corner.

What I've just discovered is that Taleb digs Oakeshott. Actually, the way Taleb put it, Oakeshott is an intellectual hero of his. That's what kind of Conservative I am people. Just in case you missed it. Epistemological Modesty.

BTW: Here is Taleb's Paper Bleed or Blow Up. (h/t The Maanga)

Download Bleedblowup

Taleb Spells it Out

A couple notes. Taleb mentions the Zingales plan debt to equity swap for unforclosed homeowners and all the wrong things Obama is doing having effectively reversed the rewards of capitalism. Again this is perfectly sensible and yet we were right about why Zingales' plan has not materialized. There are no incentives for Congress and the crew in Washington to do the right thing. Amazing.

Memphis 29, Liverpool 22

"Elvis was a hero to most."
-- Chuck D.

According to Cecil Adams, this is true. But was Elvis better? No.

This question is tangential to an N-Word conversation that never ceases, and since I recorded a YouTube on it a few years back, I'm somewhat bound to answer recurrent questions. Part of my answer, then as now, is why would you follow the sub-culture of disreputable people? I mean if Elvis stole and 'white' people loved a thief, how upset can you get about that popularity? Obviously some people want to make a point about living in Babylon - the whole country's a sty, yeah we've heard that before. Except that there in fact was a civil war and blacks didn't, by and large, have to participate in their own violent manumission. In other words, there's always a better 'white' sub-culture. There's always a bigger fish and Cobb's Rule #4: Civilization is where you put it.

Bottom line, why get mad? If you hate the people who love Elvis, then love the people who love The Beatles or Hendrix or Muddy Waters or Beethoven or Miriam Makeba. Just don't be lumping them all together. Get in where you fit in.

There's another line from another song that I find more appropriate as the days go by. What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away. And this is what goes through my head whenever I hear people hating on Elvis. He was only a hero to the people you hate the most, not most people.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

This film is so unbelievably awful that I'm glad I stole it. Well, I didn't exactly steal it. I got it for free from a friend who ripped it. I don't know how he ripped it, but I'm glad as hell he did the normal version rather than the sort where various people involved in making the film blab over it. Which reminds me to tell you that 'A Scanner Darkly' is complete hooey as a film and if it had any chance of being anything beyond the book, that chance has been ruined by Dick's daughter telling me about some character her father lived with who thought he was crawling with bugs, and thus 10 minutes of film leaves me permanently disgusted.

That's about all the time I took with Sarah Marshall because in a fraction of that I could see that the reason she left naked boy had something to do with the complete ass who was kissing people in the airport in order to 'do something' about global warming. 

I am disconnected to the Christian who wants to show pity on the poor misguided freaks who are the subject and object of this excrescence. Sorry, you'll just have to take your case directly to the saints. As for me, I'm not having it. And if the flick is rated < R, I hope I can show enough of it to my children to disgust them as well. Or maybe not. No. Wrong. You don't send your son to a whore to show him what not to do. You say, trust me, you don't want to subject your immortal soul to that sort of radioactivity. It won't kill you straight out but the cell damage is real. 

Attention all devout Muslims in defense of Hasan, I understand exactly where you think you're coming from. If I believed that American men were like this asshat, I'd want to shoot them up too. I'd sign up to exterminate the kind of cretin who lays a woman in a one night stand and then immediately bursts into tears thinking about playing Dance Dance Revolution with his former babe. If this was the substance of American culture, I'd out takfir you, Abu. But let me help you understand something, and even abet your cause. Credits. At the end of every American movie are the names of the people responsible, and if you watch enough of them, and you have the appropriate software, you can trim down your lists to an appreciable dimension. They are still Them, and most people want Them put away. 

Fortunately for all of us, Them are particularly sensitive to the blistering heat of righteous criticism, which I am exercising here. There's no need for explosives, a finely place excoriation will suffice. And really, I've already wasted too much time thinking about it. 

Art at Cobb

I'm looking for a new wallpaper for my windows desktop. I ambled across a Picaso and then went to Guernica. It reminded me that my cousin had a very large print on his wall in Brooklyn, and I suppose that says a bit about my cousin and my family. I doubt that he still has it in Madison where he's raising his family. But it also reminded me that I would be remiss in my review of Western Civilization, that thing our Improper Empire is involved in defending against errant Islamists and other enemies of liberty, if I were not to consider our arts at length. 

We already know that popular film and music are degraded, music much more than film but film nonetheless. I can't imagine that there has been a significant and serious play on Broadway since Angels in America, although I didn't even bother to see that. People die of disease. So what? But we are geniuses when it comes to graphic art and architecture. The 'design' area of Western Civ is alive and kicking, and fewer places more innovative than videogames despite their mostly awful cultural content. Movies can be visually arresting, and I tend to watch them for that quality as well as their mix of storytelling through the medium though again, most of the stories are awful. (Remind me to compare and contrast 'Gran Torino' with 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall'). 

So I'm thinking back to Picaso and his peers, and fortunately, there is a top 200 poll that I have found at the Telegraph. I figure I'll go through it. I do so in parallel to my good virtual friend Gerard over at American Digest as an effort to find Something Wonderful over here. 

One of the very first CD-ROMs I ever bought, back when they called them CD-ROMs was a collection of several hundred paintings complete with text and audio narrations on their significance. I wore that sucker down, and I wonder where it is. But there were some extraordinary images from around the world and my favorites remain clear in my mind's eye without any particular attribution. 

Today it is not completely ironically, a videogame by the name of Assassin's Creed II that impels me to jump into a little online art collection, appreciation and criticism. As part of one of that game's side quests, collecting art for one's villa is included. So I must travel to Forli, Venezia and Firenze to pick up bargains. I recognized a few of the paintings and so it piqued my curiosity. What must there be on Google artwise? Well, quite a bit.

Back in 1986 when Xerox bet one of its farms on VAX technology, we used to wonder if anybody on the planet would scan documents at higher resolutions than 600dpi. It seemed, at the time, to be out of the question. And so Eeyore and his doubtful cousins ran the day about matters of online art appreciation saying it'll never happen. At this moment in Moore's Law's run (amok it seems) isn't it odd that as GE is in the process of selling NBC to Comcast what those megalomaniacs have in mind is piping more crap like Iron Man in HD? Now I enjoy watching metal monsters spit fire at Muhajadeen as much as the next barbarian, but there's a limit. And of late I am becoming fond of mocking those who capitalize on the tastes of peasants and then later pretend that they are too big to fail. So right about now I think it most appropriate to consider what efforts there are to retain and represent some of mankind's better visual creations onto the Internet, the second greatest creation of the 20th century (behind all that's nuke). 

So it begins. 

The Day Capitalism Died

Next year I'm going to get back into the market. It has been about 9 years since I dabbled. I had a nice little pile back then and I did will with a conservative portfolio through the times of irrational exuberance, like everybody else. Except I was very skeptical as I learned about the different classes of investors and came to understand what professional traders know that day traders do not. There are indeed some rigs in the game. All that said, I've put away some money and it's time to make it work. And I'm not going to be so edgy that I need to beat 4 percent.

So I started looking at ETFs and I found RSX. No it's not a Mazda, it's a Russian fund, and it's doing damned well. I sent that googled page over to my brother Doc who is carping about unemployment. And an old idea creeped into my head. Capitalism doesn't die just because the man running the government is a socialist.

It would seem that by definition, anyone dumb enough to be a socialist is less intelligent than Adam Smith. I exaggerate socialist stupidity, but Adam Smith understood something about the greed of men, socialists only understand the greed of businessmen. Limiting the greed of businessmen but giving everything by law over to the appetites of the masses is indeed a formula for self-destruction. This is why command economies that survive restrain the masses to an extraordinary degree. It doesn't auger very well for those who start in the peasantry but are clever enough to figure out how merchants make money. Where's the incentive for them to learn? Where's the law that protects them as they do? 

Just imagine the scenario. The great leader says "Who want's to make more money than the average prole?" Mee!" The hands fly up by the millions. "OK", he says. "I'm going to pass legislation to get a program started that will get you the government pass you will need to be a part of the production for the people." Yeah, right behind the cousins of everybody who's writing the legislation. The lottery is held and a new protected class is created, just like that. Free men don't wait for government legislation and business programs to figure out how to make money with their fellow men. They scheme about it over a beer at the local pub or turn their living room into a smoke filled room or sit up late nights in the dorm or walk into Mr. Peterson's corner store and ask for work. They read the Wall Street Journal or Motley Fool. They even try out for game shows. There are a million ways to make a buck and those dreams and schemes never stop percolating. Cigarettes trade in prison, sandwiches trade on the schoolyard. Every man is a market, you merely need to find his price.

Governments will always have some role in setting rules and regulating markets. But markets are between and among men and have always been because it is our nature to trade selfishly to eventual mutual benefit. Some men are clever traders and others are fools, but they are motivated by the same thing - their very nature as human beings. That never changes no matter what the balance of power. Capitalism dies when the human spirit dies. Anybody want to take a wager on when that happens?

Happy Holidays from the Woods Family

Guess who will be hanging out with Kobe Bryant for a while?

A Skeptical Triumph Over Global Warming Fraud

I don't know exactly how long I've been skeptical of the great hoax that Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW) has proven to be, but a thoughtful researcher might check the archives of Cobb to make the point. They have always been open. Here's a classic quote from me:

My mind is made up on global warming. If it takes 100 years to move the planetary temperature up one degree, it will take 100 more years, or at least 50 to change it back. In the meantime, nothing that serious is happening. We need to focus on what people do. The Planet is fine.

I know that the ice cube analogy doesn't include land, but 17 feet of sea rising is not going to happen. Again, the fate of the Earth is not a political priority. Hurricanes don't kill six million Jews.

As it happens, I've been searching Slate's archives to find more editorial cartoons from Tony Auth who penned one with the subtitle "Obama's Believe It Or Not". The picture showed troops in Afganistan on an escalator directed by Obama. On the side of the escalator was the word 'Escalation', but at the top of the escalator was the sign 'Exit'. I think that oxymoron and the subtitle encapsulates the Obama presidency quite well - as well as the press infatuation with the idiot socialite party crashers to a state dinner at which strategic alliances with India should have been the subject of coverage.

In that search, I found a couple things to be true. After having watched about 50 cartoons, the first thing that can be said is that they are a perfect form of infotainment and are rarely reliable about anything except the simplest of public opinions. They never fail to make obvious and two dimensional, a multidimensional issue, and in that they can be a useful shorthand for the popular, conventional, unexpert and mass opinion. When applied to the matter of AGW that becomes overwhelmingly clear.

Before I show the killer example of this, I want to bring to your attention the importance of the ability for the President to articulate the policy and direction of his Administration in a similarly two dimensional way. It should be clear and continuous so that a person following that Administration gradually gets a 3d picture. In every snapshot of Obama's articulations, we get blur. We did not have that sort of evasion with GWBush. And so with that, consider the following editorial cartoon by Stuart Carlson:

It should be obvious by now that the theory of AGW is based on a fraud. The Telegraph has a very useful article by Christopher Booker that gives a clear sketch of the history and the culprits and the implications of the deception.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

As I started this essay, I thought about entitling it 'The Natural Advantage of Conservatism' but I tire of politics, and I didn't want to imply with any relish that this revelation is a big win for my political side. Politically speaking, it's going to take just as long to unwind the 'thinking' and money invested in all this green hogwash as it did ginning the whole kaboodle up in the first place. (But I am selling my chromium futures).

I simply want to be correct. And that is why I am curious and skeptical and analytical. I don't have any need to play gotcha, even though it is entertaining to have one's skepticism rewarded. But I am looking at the language of this article in the Telegraph which names the names of the culprits behind the hugely anti-scientific deception and obstruction of Mann, Briffa et al, who had previously been given the honorific of being portrayed as a literal tidal wave of truth. You don't get that kind of reportage on a daily basis. We suffer from lazy reporters and their dimbulb language, which is why people like me filter news through intelligent bloggers. It has been over 15 years since I got my news from television, and at the time it was strictly Charlie Rose and before that only the Sunday morning interview shows, and before that only the Nightly Business Report. The last time I trusted the likes of Wolf Blitzer and George Will, who were among the best TV had to offer, was 1989. I sometimes forget how unusual that makes me.

Still the point remains that people who are engaged in professional pursuits of Progressive political interest tend towards debasing their profession in search of the revolutionary while calling it Progress. Just this week I hear of a revolution in Mammography. C'mon. These things actually take time. I'm thinking that perhaps I ought to coin another rule about being wary of people who claim to be on the bleeding edge of anything.

The late Michael Crichton had the right idea. He tantalized us with the possibilities of what's next and reminded us always of human fallibility in his novels, and he was a skeptic of AGW as well in his speeches. 

PS. To Laurie David: Drop dead.

What Is Genius?

from the archives - August 2003

i think of genius as a frantic state of creativity. what genius is is a polyphonic kind of continual expression and combination of intelligences. an individual possessed of (by) genius has a desperate need to make something happen in a way that combines things that are not obvious to the outside observer. genius always draws on a big pool of knowledge but does so in a way that makes its expression appear spontaneous. a genius develops a cross-functional vocabulary through a galaxy of shortcuts. genius is about the energetic orchestration of rapidly assimilated concepts. genius reinvents a domain in its own idiom, and thus genius defies translations. intellect parses genius one step at a time trying to understand the modus operandi.

penn jillette.

as i say this i am trying to think of criminal genius and deviant genius, the controlled pathology. genius is not methodological, it is searching. perhaps genius that is pathological doesn't understand how others don't understand, and doesn't care. madness is genius that doesn't seek transforming public expression - only observation and assimilation.

henry kissinger.

a genius tries to do gravitate all meaning to his inventions. they interpret life through their twisted prisms. the genius is disabused when they try to explain too much, overloading their creation with meaning. they need another breakthrough. the genius destroys himself if he is unsuccessful.

richard pryor.

a genius must attain mastery. he perfects and re-perfects. he throws it all away and starts over. he spins off a million tangents and throws them away. a genius plays with large dangerous tools. a genius gambles using tells too subtle for the untrained eye. the genius throws himself in the garbage just to test his own genius. he pushes the limits and pretends to be immortal just to see if he can, and finally he achieves.

jackson pollack.

after the genius, if they are recognized in their own time, they change the paradigm. suddenly it all becomes obvious - the dots are connected. the elemental genius of the connection becomes commodified. the public overdoses. pretenders and hacks rip off. earlier works are scrutinized.

woody allen.

we expect that the genius knows about life. maybe they do, but they probably look at the world as if they were an alien race. ordinary comforts don't suffice. genius has no peace. thus they must simplify their own life, discipline it - or throw it into extremes. they reject the free life, they spend too much time attending to the demands of their talents.

billie holiday.

genius is hungry and predatory. its talent doesn't save until it is manifest universally. the genius aims for the globe

napoleon.

genius evokes a vast sense of loss and disintegration when it is suddenly missing. on the passing of genius it is always felt that it will take several generations to find and recover what genius has discovered. one wonders how the world would have been different were it not for the genius in our presence. we are contrite for not paying it the mind we should have, we wish we had another chance to appreciate it all over again. but it is too late.

gregory hines.