Түмэн уймаж, төр засарсан он жилүүд улиран өнгөрөхөд, ном хэмээгч энэ эдийг ширээн дээрээс нэг нэгээр нь цэрэг би буудан унагаана. Харанхуй шөнө, гэрэлт өдөр ялгаа нь үгүй буудах эдгээр номноос өөрийн эрж буй эрдэнэсээ, хайж буй бурханаа олно гэсэн зүрхний үзүүр дахь итгэл дээр тулгуурлан би тэднийг буудна. Буудах буудахдаа баяр баясгалангаар дүүрэн, шантаршгүй сонирхолоор халин, тэсвэр тэвчээртэйгээр буудна. За тэгээд буудаж унагааснаас санаж байгааг энд бичие дээ.
Энэ удаагийн пост-н гол quote-г өгүүлбэрээр биш дууны үгээр илэрхийлюу.
Үзсэн кино:
Geisha
Hancock
Die Hard 4
Iron man
There will be blood
Casablanca (1942)
4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days
Incredible Hulk
V for Vindetta
Kunfu panda
Meet the Spartans
Simpsons 2007, movie
Haima
Perfect strenger
Batman begins
Batman 2
Oldboy
Rendition
April snow
La mala educacion
Vintage Point
Buena Vista Social Club
Autumn and Spring
My life as a dog/ Mitt liv som hund
A knife in the water
Imperor's new groove
Manhattan
Good thief
Seventh Seal
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
When father was away on business
Bourne Ultimatum
Transformers
Pursuit of Happiness
Maria Full of Grace
Apt Pupil
Wall-E
Any given Sunday
Geisha
Departed
Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo bay
Into the Wild
Starting out in the Evening
Mummy 3
Equilibrium
London
Katyn
Mama mia (musical)
The three burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)
Books read:
Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester R.Brown
Doha Declaration, WTO
Seven Habits of successful people
The Chinese Economy, Transitions and growth by Barry Naughton
Studies in Fiction by Bonazza/Emil Roy
С. Дулам, Монголын Аман Зохиолын Онол
Nietzsche: A philosophical Biography by Safranski
How societies choose to fail or succeed, by Jared Diamond
Why is sex fun by Jared Diamond
Digital Fortress by Dan Brown
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
Broker by John Grishnam
Eletronic Trading guide for Nasdaq
Guide to Electronic Trading by Yu Jea
The New Nasdaq Marketplace, 2007 Springer
Martin Eden by Jack London
Company Law
Law on Central Bank
Joan of Arc and the hundred years war
BadBoys’ Lifestyle
Good to great by Jim Collins
Long Tail
Edward R Tufte - The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
ANGEL AND DEMONS by Dan Brown
Never be laid to again by David Lieberman
In the Court of Public Opinion
Raising Capital – Get the money you need to grow your business
Seven habits of highly effective people
Powerful Sleep: How to sleep less and have more energy than you ever had before
Компанийн засаглалын кодекс
The unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera
By river Piedra I sat down and wept by Paulo Coelho (reread)
Maktub by Paulo Coelho
Brida by Paulo Coelho
Neuromancer
Jonathan Seagull Livingston
Vault Career Guide investment banking
Attacting wealth
Never be lied to again
Kafka on the shore by Haruki Murikami
Dynasties by David Landes
Nordic exchange rules
Global Future: Next challenge for asian business (notes were taken on the book)
Audacity of hope by Obarak Obama
Love in time of cholera
Speed reading
Судалгаа болон бусад:
241 Forex
Automated trading journal
Economic way looking at life, Nobel lecture by Gary S. Becker
BHP review 2007
Citigroup corporate & investment banking by VAULT
Doing business Overview 2008
"The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race” by Jared Diamond
Ensuring India’s offshoring future
МОНГОЛ УЛСАД ХУВИЙН ХӨРӨНГӨ ОРУУЛАЛТЫН САН БАЙГУУЛАХ
ТӨСЛИЙН ТЕХНИК, ЭДИЙН ЗАСГИЙН ҮНДЭСЛЭЛИЙГ ТОДОРХОЙЛОХ
СУДАЛГАА I
МОНГОЛ УЛСАД ХУВИЙН ХӨРӨНГӨ ОРУУЛАЛТЫН САН БАЙГУУЛАХ
ТӨСЛИЙН ТЕХНИК, ЭДИЙН ЗАСГИЙН ҮНДЭСЛЭЛИЙГ ТОДОРХОЙЛОХ
СУДАЛГАА II
Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans
Risk, Financial Crises, and Globalization: Long-Term Capital Management and the Sociology of Arbitrage by Donald MacKenzie, 2002
Financial innovation and the management and regulation of financial institutions by Robert C.Merton
BusinessWeek Jan.28
Almost all economist magazines.
С. Дулам, Монголын Аман Зохиолын Онол
check the book.
LONG TAIL
p. 52 The theory of the Long Tail can be boiled down to this: Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted googds and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
ANGEL AND DEMONS by Dan Brown
p.192: His holiness once told me that a Pope is a man torn between two worlds… the real world and the divine. He warned that any church that ignored reality would not survive to enjoy the divine.
p.197: God, grant me strength to accept those things I cannot change.
p.288: Stand tall, smile bright, and let them wonder what secret’s making you laugh.
Ward off the mental cobwebs.
Powerful Sleep:
How to sleep less and have more energy than you ever had before
I cannot over emphasize how important this is! As explained earlier, the amount
of natural sunlight that enters your eyes has a drastic effect on your temperature
body rhythm.
• When we're exposed to high intensity light, our body temperature increases, and
melatonin levels rapidly decrease.
• Exposure to natural sunlight also delays the temperature drop. This allows you
to stay awake and alert for longer periods of time.
• Lack of sunlight results in higher melatonin levels, this leads to lower body
temperature levels, feeling very sleepy, and tired through out the day.
Power Naps - The Secret to Energy With Little Sleep
If done correctly, taking regular day-time naps will give you a huge boost of
energy throughout the day. It takes about 45 minutes to enter the first deep sleep phase. If you limit your nap to 45 minutes, you will sleep mainly in Stage 2 sleep.
Having a Regular Rising Time & Sleeping Time
Never be laid to again by David Lieberman
p. 90 And while your clues to deception will let you know what kind of person you're dealing with, the following strategy will prove useful in these situations.
1. Always, if possible, get a second opinion. It's easy to do and can save you a lot of heartache.
2. Make sure the person is licensed, insured, and registered to do the actual work.
3. Have your agreement drawn up in writing. Oral contracts aren't worth the paper they're written on.
4. Ask for referrals or testimonials.
If he balks at any one of these points, you might want to take your business elsewhere. The con artist operates best when you're in the dark.
Finally, the following strategy should give you an accu-rate insight into the person's intentions. The key is to ask for the opposite of what you really want.
You asked your waiter for decaffeinated coffee and five minutes later the busboy comes by with a filled cup of coffee.
Sample question formation: "This is regular coffee, right?" If he confirms that it is, either he doesn't care enough to know for sure or it really is regular. Again, either
way, you now know that you may not be getting what you asked for. However, should he tell you that it is decaf-feinated—something he thinks you don't want—then you can be pretty sure that you're getting what you originally asked for.
p.92 You ask the waiter if there is MSG, an additive that some people are allergic to, in the salad and he tells you there isn't. He doesn't seems terribly convincing and you just want to make sure.
Sample question formation: "Okay, Albert, that's great. Just so you know I'm deathly allergic to MSG. One forkful and it's off to the hospital I go." After
p.115
. . would be helpful."
4. "You can pretend anything and master it."
5. "I understand what you're . . . saying ... it doesn't make it true."
6. "If you expected me to believe that, you wouldn't have said it."
7. "Your question is what you knew it would be, isn't it?"
8. "Your response says what you're unaware of."
9. "Do you believe that you knew what you thought?" 10. "How do you stop a thought once you get it?"
11. "Why would you believe something that's not true?"
12. "Why axe you agreeing with what you already know?"
13. "What happens when you get a thought?"
14. "The less you try the more you'll agree ..."
15. "Are you unaware of what you forgot?"
p.121
Don't ask someone to change his mind without giving him additional information. Remember that while you're talking to the person he listens with his ego—and you must accommodate it. Many people see changing their mind as a sign of weakness. He's given up and you've won.
So instead of asking him to change his mind, allow him to make a new decision based on additional information. Politicians have a penchant for this because they never want to appear wishy-washy. They rarely say that they've changed their mind on an issue—rather, they say their "position has evolved," as it were.
For example, you might say, "I can see why you said that then, but in light of the fact that [a new bit of information to justify him changing his mind], I think you owe me an explanation."
p.130
When you go into a meeting wanting it to work out, you'll overlook too many things that may make it a bad deal. You must try to remain as objective as possible—^as if you were reviewing the information for someone else. Wishful thinking, desire, and hope cannot allow you to lose sight of reality.
P.132
Emotional states are either self-induced, externally
brought on, or arise from a combination of the two. Some of the more powerful ones are: guilt, intimidation, appeal to ego, fear, curiosity, our desire to be liked, and love. If you're operating in any of these states, your judgment is likely to be impaired.
LIAR’S POKER by Michael Lewis
John Gutfreund’s now legendary comment that to succeed on the Saloman Brothers trading floor a person had to wake up each morning “ready to bite the ass of a bear.”
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Samuel Johnson.
p.22 A chaired professor of the LSE who tooka keen interest in material affairs, stared at me bug-eyed and gurgled when he heard what I was to be paid. It was twice what he earned. He was in his mid-forties and at the top of his profession. I was twenty-four years old and at the bottom of mine. There was no justice in the world and thank goodness for that.
All Quiet on the Bond Front
p.35 Solomon had been able to snatch away were worth many times their weight in gold and treated like the family china.
p.36 Bond traders and salesmen age like dogs.
He become that most revered of all species: a Big Swinging Dick.
But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.
Equities in Dallas – Just bury that lowest ofrm of human scum where it will never be seen again.
Lower than the whale shit on the bottom of the ocean. P.43 One day I was out playing the Invisible Man, feeling the warmth of the whale shit and thinking that no one in life was lower than I.
p.57 Myron Samuels described the morning following the boat ride as a “coyote morning.” After an ill-considered one-night stand you wake up and see for the first time the face of the woman you’ve slept with; your arm, is pinned to the bed by her head, and rather than wake her, like an entrapped coyote, you chew off your arm and scram.
p.62: Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off.
p.101 My product took off first, says Ranieri. “Investors started to buy the gospel according to Ranieri.” The gospel according to Ranieri was, in simple terms, “that mortgages were so cheap your teeth hurt.”
p.142: geek was both B) a person immediately out of the training program and in a disgusting larval state between trainee and man.”
p.152: Many of our French and English speculators however, honestly believed the charts contained the secrets of the market. They are aboriginal chartists.
p.175: God gave you eyes, plagiarize. Hehe
p.176: My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.
p.199 Drexel Burnham had cleared $545.5 million on revenues of $4 billion, more than Salomon brothers had made at their best.
p.200 Mortgages and junk mdade it easier to borrow money for people and companies previously thought unworthy of the funds.
p.208 From virtually zero in the 1970s, new junk bond issuance grew to $839 million 1981 to $8.5 billion in 1985, and to $12 nillion in 1987. By then junk bonds were 25 percent of the corporate bond market.
p.211: The embodiment of the take-over market is a high-strung, hyperambitious twenty six year old, employed by a large American investment bank, smiling and dialing for companies.
COLLAPSE by Jared Diamond
One of Diamonds's best. I wish I can invite him to do through study on Mongolia's current development. As far as I am concerned, we seem to take a path which Diamond specifically advise not to take in his own book. I read couple of other books by him and most of his books simply emancipating the chained mind of ours in a way that eventually think of our actions.
In Mongolia, some people are just starting to do what he wrote to us not to do in the first place. His reasons of societal collapses are as follows:
1. Human environmental impacts - deforestation, small scale mining in Mongolia, mercury usage, cyanide nitrate condemnation etc
2. Climate change - desertification, temperature rise in last 40yrs by 3 degrees in UB, and other areas in Mongolia etc(effects are interacted with the effects of human environmental impacts)
3. Dependency - especially that of food and other essential consumer goods. What if the supplier cease to provide due to political or any other reasons?
4. Religions factors play important role. Mongolia is sliding to Buddhism or more of superstition and christianity. The more radical christian groups are taking more support among the youth as I see it. Maybe I am wrong. Hope I am wrong.
5. External enemies - russian, chinese mafia or criminal groups already taking rapid expansion in Mongolian economy - which will eventually cause internal conflict between relevant groups within the country - maybe.
p.33: How much past environmental damage was unintentional and imperceptible, and how much was perversely wrought by people acting in full awareness of the consequences? For instance, what were Easter Islanders saying as they cut down the last tree on their island? It turns out that group decision-making can be undone by a whole series of factors, beginning with failure to anticipate or perceive a problem, and proceeding through conflicts of interest that leave some members of the group to pursue
goals good for themselves but bad for the rest of the group.
p.46 In the U.S. today, a company opening a new mine is required by law to buy a bond by which a separate bondholding company pledges to pay for the mine's cleanup costs in case the mining company itself goes bankrupt. But many mines have been "underbonded"
(i.e., the eventual cleanup costs have proved to exceed the value of the bond), and older mines were not required to buy such bonds at all.
p.47 For instance, in 1998, to the shock of the industry, and to politicians supporting
and supported by the industry, Montana voters passed a ballot initiative banning a problem-plagued method of gold mining termed cyanide heapleach mining and discussed further below
p.165Within our five-factor framework for understanding societal collapses, four of those factors played a role in the Anasazi collapse. There were indeed human environmental impacts of several types, especially deforestation and arroyo cutting. There was also climate change in rainfall and temperature, and its effects interacted with the effects of human environmental impacts. Internal trade with friendly trade partners did play a crucial role in the collapse: different Anasazi groups supplied food, timber, pottery, stone, and luxury goods to each other, supporting each other in an interdependent complex society, but putting the whole society at risk of collapsing. Religious and political factors apparently played an essential role in sustaining the complex society, by coordinating the exchanges of materials, and by motivating people in outlying areas to supply food, timber, and pottery to the political and religious centers. The only factor in our five-factor list for whose operation there is not convincing evidence in the case of the Anasazicollapse is external enemies. While the Anasazi did indeed attack each other
as their population grew and as the climate deteriorated, the civilizations of the U.S. Southwest were too distant from other populous societies to have been seriously threatened by any external enemies.
p.287: Small societies occupying a small island or homeland can adopt a
bottom-up approach to environmental management. Because the homeland
is small, all of its inhabitants are familiar with the entire island, know that
they are affected by developments throughout the island, and share a sense
of identity and common interests with other inhabitants. Hence everybody
realizes that they will benefit from sound environmental measures that they
and their neighbors adopt. That's bottom-up management, in which people
work together to solve their own problems.
p.351: Thus, there were many reasons why deforestation and other environmental
problems began earlier, developed over a longer time, and proceeded further
in Haiti than in the Dominican Republic. The reasons involved four of
the factors in this book's five-factor framework: differences in human environmental
impacts, in variously friendly policies or unfriendly policies of
other countries, and in responses by the societies and their leaders.
p.363: Consumerist aspirations are rampant and beyond levels that the country could support.
p.370 It is also the world's largest producer and consumer of fertilizer, accounting for 20% of world use, and for 90% of the global increase in fertilizer use since 1981, thanks to a quintupling of its own fertilizer use, now three times the world average per acre. As the second largest producer and consumer of pesticides, China accounts for 14% of the world total and has become a net exporter of pesticides.
P.430 This question of why societies end up destroying themselves through disastrous
decisions astonishes not only my UCLA undergraduates but also professional historians and archaeologists. For example, perhaps the most cited book on societal collapses is The Collapse of Complex Societies, by the archaeologist Joseph Tainter. In assessing competing explanations for ancient collapses, Tainter remained skeptical of even the possibility that they might have been due to depletion of environmental resources, because that outcome seemed a priori so unlikely to him. Here is his reasoning: "One
supposition of this view must be that these societies sit by and watch the encroaching
weakness without taking corrective actions. Here is a major difficulty. Complex societies are characterized by centralized decision-making, high information flow, great coordination of parts, formal channels of command, and pooling of resources. Much of this structure seems to have the capability, if not the designed purpose, of countering fluctuations and deficiencies in productivity. With their administrative structure, and capacity to allocate both labor and resources, dealing with adverse environmental conditions may be one of the things that complex societies do best (see, for example,
Isbell [ 1978]). It is curious that they would collapse when faced with
precisely those conditions they are equipped to circumvent.... As it becomes
apparent to the members or administrators of a complex society that
a resource base is deteriorating, it seems most reasonable to assume that some
rational steps are taken toward a resolution. The alternative assumption—
of idleness in the face of disaster—requires a leap of faith at which we may
rightly hesitate."
p.435 Politicians use the term "creeping normalcy" to refer to such slow trends
concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic congestion,
or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it's difficult to recognize that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year before, so one's baseline standard for what constitutes "normalcy" shifts gradually and imperceptibly. It may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt, that conditions used to be much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards.
p.441 Conversely, failures to solve perceived problems because of conflicts of
interest between the elite and the masses are much less likely in societies
where the elite cannot insulate themselves from the consequences of their
actions. We shall see in the final chapter that the high environmental awareness
of the Dutch (including their politicians) goes back to the fact that
much of the population—both the politicians and the masses—lives on
land lying below sea level, where only dikes stand between them and
drowning, so that foolish land planning by politicians would be at their
own personal peril.
p.472 In the year 2000 the outgoing Clinton administration
proposed mining regulations that achieved both of those goals while also
eliminating corporate self-guarantees of financial assurance. But in October
2001 a proposal by the incoming Bush administration eliminated almost all
of those proposals except for continuing to require financial assurance, a requirement
that would in any case be meaningless without a definition of
the reclamation and cleanup costs to be covered by financial assurance.
p.493It was also the case for oil companies before the Santa
Barbara Channel oil spill disaster of 1969, and for Montana mining companies
before recent cleanup laws. When government regulation is effective,
and when the public is environmentally aware, environmentally clean big
businesses may outcompete dirty ones, but the reverse is likely to be true if
government regulation is ineffective and if the public doesn't care.
p.502
In addition, deaths in the U.S. from
air pollution alone (without considering soil and water pollution) are conservatively
estimated at over 130,000 per year.
p.513"The environment has to be balanced against the economy." This quote
portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve environmental
problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environmental
problems unsolved to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts
the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of
money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing
those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run
as well. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses
after they have developed. Just think of the damage caused by agricultural
weeds and pests, non-agricultural pests like water hyacinths and zebra mussels,
the recurrent annual costs of combating those pests, the value of lost
time when we are stuck in traffic, the financial costs resulting from people
getting sick or dying from environmental toxins, cleanup costs for toxic
chemicals, the steep increase in fish prices due to depletion of fish stocks,
and the value of farmland damaged or ruined by erosion and salinization
534This dilemma reminds me of Winston Churchill's response to criticisms of
democracy: "It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government
except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
In that spirit, a lower-impact society is the most impossible scenario for our
future—except for all other conceivable scenarios.
CHINA INC.
p.8The U.S had lost 2.9 million manufacturing jobs over the previous five years.
p.9: In 2003, China’s GDP was $1.4 trillion. … GDP of $10. trillion (US) The world economy can also be measure by its own GDP; it totalled $36.4 trillion in 2003.
p.10: China’s $1.4 trillion eoconomy, in the CIA’s calculations, looks more like on ewith GDP of $6.6 trillion.
p.14: In 2004, according to the calculatins of Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, Chinese bought 7 percent of the world’ oil, a quarter of all aluminium and steel, nearly a third of the world’s iron ore and coal, and 40 percent of the world’s cement. The trend is for bigger amounts yet to come.
The discrepancy between China’s official count of 1.3 billion and western estimates of up to 1.5 billion arises from an analysis by intelligence agencies of China’s grain consumption, which far exceeds the needs of 1.3 billion people.
p.74: Since 1978, nearly 40000 state-owned industries have been shut down. From 1996 to 2001, 53 million people working in China’s state sector lost their jobs.
p.75. … while the rest of the world worries about the power of China’s best factories to kill off jobs, the Chinese themselves must worry about how competition in their own country is spiking unemployment.
p.98: In 2001, a count of the out of wedlock children produced by Shenzhen’s working women and mistresses over two decades numbered 520,000.
p.99: Recent estimates pu the number of hepatitis B sufferers at 120 million and HIV-positive Chinese at close to 1 million. The UN warns of 10 million AIDS suffers by 2010. [Not only Mongolia has these similar problems. Every country faces the problems too. It is the method which the governments fight with these problems can differ across countries and cultures.]
p.116: An estimated 400 thousand people die every year from illnesses such as lung and heart disease related to air pollution.
p.133: The communist party may wish to relegate its failures to the dustbin of history. They are going into the sale bin instead.
p.140: Nearly 17 million acres of farmland have disappeared since the mid-1990s. … in the summer of 2004, when a fall in china’s grain harvest caused the country to be a net importer of food for the first time ever. … World Bank predicts the country’s global food imports will more than double by 2020.
p.150. When told of nine-year old Shanhai company that became the world’s leader in cast aluminium wheels for cars just a few years after its founding, Parson sinsks into his chair. How can such a company find the skilled labor it needed to grow so quickly? He asks. When told further that the wheel company is now in the car business turning out tens of thousands of light trucks a year, assembled largely by recent graduates of China’s technical high schools using hand tools, he says, “I find that vision frightening.”
p.151 A 2003 survey of Illinois manufacturers found that 13 out of every 20 firms face competition from China. Of those, 84 percent stated that Chinese competition hurt their sales by an average of 17 percent that year.
p.152: One reason they cited was that the Chinese can often receive financial support at far better terms than manufacturers in Illinois. That includes government subsidies and other assistance such as loans from Chinese government banks that are offered cheaply and often with little expectation that they will be paid back.
p.154 [Washington Post]Peter Goodman and Phillip Pan note that if Wal-Mart were a nation, it would be China’s fifth largest export market, ahead of Germnay and Great Britain. Wal-Mart’s Trade with and in China accounts for 1.5 percent of that country’s gross domestic product.
p.164: Siemnes has some 45 companies operating in China, employs 30000 people there, and sold $5 billion worth of equipment in the country in 2003.
p.182: Goldman Sachs the world’s premier investment bank, predicted thath 6 million jobs would leave the US by 2014, at a cost of 150 billion in wages to Americans. A study by economist at the University of California at Berkeley predicted 14 million U.S service jobs alone could be transferred overseas within a decade. That’s 10 percent of the current American labor force.
IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION
Is the lawsuit unique, out-of-the-ordinary, or otherwise "man bites dog"?
Does the case involve sensational facts?
Does the case involve, or potentially involve, a large sum of money?
Are the parties to the suit well known or otherwise high profile?
Is it a case that will merit attention in hte regional or trade media?
Does the case make new law?
Does the case involve a new application of old law?
Is the area of the law considered "hot" bny the media right now?
Does the case have a compelling "human face"?
Is the case indicative of a trend?
Does the case have broader implications as a business story?
Is there a political or regulatory aspect that will attract interest in the case?
Does the opposing counsel have a history of publicizing his or her cases?
If the law is on your side, pound the law.
If the facts are on your side, pound the facts.
If neither is on your side, pound the table.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
p.26: They had just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, and they were not capable of living for even an sinstant without the other , or without thinking about the other, and that capacity diminished as their age increased…. That was why she did not treat him like a difficult old man but as a senile baby, and that deception was providential fore the two of them because it put them beyond the reach of pity.
p.63: At least once a week he ended the evening with a little night bird, as he called them, one of the many who sold emergency love in a transient hotel for sailors.
p.107: When the curlew sang five o’clock along with the local roosters, Dr. Juvenal Urbino commended himself body and soul to Divine Providence because he did not have a heart to live another day in his rubble-strewn homeland. But in time the affection of his family, the Sundays in the country, and the covetous attention of the unmarried women of his class mitigated the bitterness of his first impression. Little by little he grew ccustomed to the sultry heat of October, to the excessive odors, to the hasty judgements of his friends, to the We’ll see tomorrow, Doctor, don’t worry, and at last he gave in to the spell of habit. It did not take him long to invent an easy justification for his surrender. (eventually we all surrender, but the difference is who can stand the longest without giving up) This was his wolrd, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it. The first thing he did was to take possession of his father’s office. He kept in place the hard, somber English furniture made of wood that sighed in the icy cold of dawn, but he consigned to the attic the treatises on viceregal science and romantic medicine and filled the bookshelves behind their glass doors with the writings of the new French school. He took down the faded pictures, except for the one of the physician arguing with Death for the nude body of a female patient, and the Hippocratic Oath printed in Gothic letters, and he hung in their place, next to his father’s only diploma, the many diverse ones he himself had received with highest honors from various schools in Europe . He tried to impose the latest ideas at Misericordia Hospital, but this was not as easy as it had seemed in his youthful enthusiasm, for the antiquated house of health was stubborn in its attachment to atavistic superstitions, such as standing beds in pots of water to prevent disease from climbing up the legs, or requiring evening wear and chamois gloves in the operating room because it was taken for granted that elegance was an essential condition for asepsis. They could not tolerate the young newcomer’s tasting a patient’s urine to determine the presence of sugar, quoting Charcot and Trousseau as if they were his roommates, issuing severe warnings in class against themortal risks of vaccines while maintaining a suspicious faith in the recent invention of suppositories.aHe was in conflict with everything: his renovating spirit, his maniacal sense of civic duty, his slow humar in a land of immortal pranksters – everything, in fact, that constituted his most estimable virtues provoked the resentment of his older collegues and the sly jokes of the younger ones.
p.121: Dr. Juvenal Urbino listened to his mother without hearing her as he clutched the doorframe, and then he gave a half turn, trying to reach his bedroom, but he fell flat on his face in an explosion of star anise vomit. “Mother of God” shouted his mother.
p. 151: The Widow Nazaret never missed her occasional appointments with Florentino Ariza, not even during her busiest times, and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love.
p. 160 They came back with a new conception of life, bringing with them the latest trends in the world and ready to lead, he with the most recent developments in literature, music, and above all in his science. He had a subscription to Le Figaro, so he would not lose touch with reality, and another to the Revue des Deux Mondes, so that he would not lose touch with poetry. He had also arranged with his bookseller in Paris to receive works by the most widely read authors, among them Anatole France and Pierre Loti, and by those he liked best, including Rémy de Gourmont and Paul Bourget, but under no circumstances anything by Emile Zola, whom he found intolerable despite his valiant intervention in the Dreyfus affair. The same bookseller agreed to mail him the most attractive scores from the Ricordi catalogue, chamber music above all, so that he could maintain the well-deserved title earned by his father as the greatest friend of concerts in the city.
p. 167: No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich.
“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the
same thing.”
p.183: Florentino Ariza remembered a phrase from his childhood, something that
the family doctor, his godfather, had said regarding his chronic constipation: “The world is divided into those who can shit and those who cannot.” On the basis of this dogma the Doctor had elaborated an entire theory of character, which he considered more accurate than astrology. But with what he had learned over the years, Florentino Ariza stated it another way: “The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not.” He distrusted those who did not: when they strayed from the straight and narrow, it was
something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it. Those who did it often, on the other hand, lived for that alone. They felt so good that their lips were sealed as if they were tombs, because they knew that their lives depended on their discretion. They never spoke of their exploits, they confided in no one, they feigned indifference to the point where they earned the reputation of being impotent, or frigid, or above all timid fairies, as in the case of Florentino Ariza. But they took pleasure in the error because the error protected them. They formed a secret society, whose members recognized each other all over the world without need of a common language, which is why Florentino Ariza was not surprised by the girl’s reply: she was one of them, and therefore she knew htat he knew that she knew.
p.248: Then he reached the admirable decision not to go to Miss Lynch’s house at five o’clock in the afternoon. The vows of eternal love, the dream of a discreet house for her alone where he could visit her with no unexpected interruptions, their unhurried happiness for as long as they lived--everything he had promised in the blazing heat of love was canceled forever after. The last thing Miss Lynch received from him was an emerald tiara in a little box wrapped in paper from the pharmacy, so that the coachman himself thought it was an emergency prescription and handed it to her with no comment, no message, nothing in writing. Dr. Urbino never saw her again, not even by accident, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bitter tears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe. At five o’clock, instead of going to see her, he made a profound act of contrition before his confessor, and on the following Sunday he took Communion, his heart broken but his soul at peace.
THE AUDACTIY OF HOPE
The book gave me hope. I used to believe in good people so I get disproportionally stressed when their number falls by seconds as I see. The materialism is destroying the virtues in people and whatever I consider “good” is being wiped out of the earth’s surface with considerable speed.
After reading Obama, I believe in good in people. Most of the people would have good and bad in them. As Obama says in his book “No matter how wrong headed I might consider their policies to be – and no matter how much I might insist that they be held accountable for the results of such policies – I still find it possible, in talking to these men and women, to understand their motives, and to recognize in them values I share”.
I was moved by his understanding of the value of individual freedom. When I compare the states with home, we have so tilted level of competition here just because most people don’t understand that freedom comes with responsibility. Here people who pay bribes do perform and survive better and those who stick with their principles go broke in no time.
I read the whole book Mongolia in mind. During the book I made so many comparisons and some of which made me despair because I am not sure whether Mongolia will even be more advanced as states is. ...
Finally I thought of contributing $20 to Obama but when I tried I found out that he does not accept my contribution or any other foreigner’s contribution for his campaign. But my heart and soul is with you Obama!
p.56: At times our values collide because in the hands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-relience and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desidre to succeed at any ocst. More than once in our history we have seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith calcify into self-righteousnes, closedemindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism and unwillingness to acknowledge the abiolity of others to do for themselves.
p.63 Sometimes we need both cultural transformation and government action - a change in values and a change in policy - to promote the kind of society we want. ..... That is one of the things that makes me a Democrat, I suppose - this idea that our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, should express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; not just on the blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; but also through our government. Like many conservatives, I believe in the power of culture to determine both individual success and social cohesion, and I believe we ignore cultural factors at our peril. But I also believe that our government can play a role in shaping that culture for the better - or for the worse."
p.68: If we aren’t iwlling to pay a price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.
p.87: Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man’s freedom did not become another man’s tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve their liberty.
p.114: And although my own worldview and their corresponded in many ways – I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways – I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations.
p.115: The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought.
p. 146: But there’s also no denying that globalization has greatly increased economic instability for millions of ordinary Americans. To stay competitive and keep investors happy in the global marketplace, U.S –based companies have automated, downsized, outsourced, and offshored. They have held the line on wage increases, and replaced defined-benefit health and retirement plans with 401k and Health Savings Accounts that shift more cost and risk onto workers.
The result has been the emergence of what some call a “winner take all” economy, in which a rising tide doesn’t necessarily lift all boats.
p.150: Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative, and the efficient allocation of resources. (that system is lacking in Mongolia, thus at this point of time we cannot have American dream in Mongolia. If we had similar structure and system that permit individuals pursue their dreams without much pressure, then Mongolia would not be as poor as today. We have to change structurely before we inject any kind of investment into the system. Otherwise the effects will be much less with this current rotten system)
p.153: T.Rooselvelt recognized that monopoly power could restrict competition, and made “trust busting” a centerpiece of his administration. Woodrow Wilson instituted the Federal Reserve Bank, to manage the money supply and curb periodic panics in the financial markets. Federal and state governments established the first consumer laws – the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Meat inspection Act – to protect Americans from harmful products.
p.167: In other words, we can afford to do what needs to be done. What’s missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency. (maybe it is true with current Mongolian government. They only subsidize the sunset industries under umbrella of national security and finance their relatives’ businesses with our tax moneys. I am kind of ashamed of making this system survive even a minute longer by paying my taxes fully. Following rules is part of my virtues but then this shit bother me so bad when I see such bad system that trying to squeeze life out of me)
p.203: For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closedmindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.
p.206: I knew their book and shared their values and sang their song. But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, an observer among them. I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the asmae ways she was ultimately alone.
p.215: Solving these problems will require changes in government policy; it will also require changes in hearts and minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturerer’s lobby.
p.240: I choose to think about Robert instead, and the small but difficult gesture he made. If a young man like Robert can make the effort to cross the currents of habit and fear in order to do what he knows is right, then I want ot be sure that I am there to meet him on the other side and help him onto shore.
p.356: The audacity of hope. That was the best of the American spirit, I thought – having the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control – and therefore responsibility – over our own fate.
P.361: And in that place, I think about America and those who built it. This nation’s founders, who somehow rose above petty ambitions and narrow calculations to imagine a nation unfurling across a continent. And those like Lincoln and King, who ultimately laid down their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union. And all the faceless, nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and buchers, constructing lives for themselves and their children and grandchildren, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams. It is that process I wish to be a part of. My heart is filled with love for this country.
Unbearable lightness of being
p.101 Perhaps Tomas was led to surgery by a desire to know what lies hidden on the other side of Es muss sein! ; in other words, what remains of life when a person rejects what he previously considered his mission.
p.102 Then they would greet him with a bottle of champagne or slivovitz, sign for thirteen win-dows on the order slip, and chat with him for two hours, drinking his health all the while. Tomas would move on to his next flat or shop in a capital mood.
p.104 As recently as fifty years ago, this form of conquest took considerable time (weeks, even months!), and the worth of the conquered object was proportional to the time the conquest took.
… Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world. The obsession of the former is lyrical: what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled philandering. The obsession of the latter is epic, and women see nothing the least bit touching in it: the man projects no subjective ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him. This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption (redemption by disappointment).
p.108 She did not want him to study her. She wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be entered only with closed eyes. The reason she refused to get down on all fours was that in that position their bodies did not touch at all and he could observe her from a distance of several feet. She hated that distance. She wanted to merge with him. That is why, looking him straight in the eye, she insisted she had not had an orgasm even though the rug was fairly dripping with it. It's not sensual pleasure I'm after, she would say, it's happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure. In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was room for her only on the rug.
p.109 I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
p.121 Perhaps he hoped his words would ring so outrageously false that they would wake Hrubin from the dead. But the world was too ugly, and no one decided to rise up out of the grave.
p.126 If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond Es muss sein!
p.133In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact, that was exactly how Sabina had explained the meaning of her paintings to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through.
p.143 He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!
Энэ удаагийн пост-н гол quote-г өгүүлбэрээр биш дууны үгээр илэрхийлюу.
You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.
And when two lovers woo, they still say 'I love you Lauren,' On that you can rely.
No matter what the future brings, as time goes by.
Moonlight and love songs never out of date,
Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate.
Woman needs man and man must have his mate,
That no one can deny.
It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers,
As time goes by.
Үзсэн кино:
Geisha
Hancock
Die Hard 4
Iron man
There will be blood
Casablanca (1942)
4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days
Incredible Hulk
V for Vindetta
Kunfu panda
Meet the Spartans
Simpsons 2007, movie
Haima
Perfect strenger
Batman begins
Batman 2
Oldboy
Rendition
April snow
La mala educacion
Vintage Point
Buena Vista Social Club
Autumn and Spring
My life as a dog/ Mitt liv som hund
A knife in the water
Imperor's new groove
Manhattan
Good thief
Seventh Seal
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
When father was away on business
Bourne Ultimatum
Transformers
Pursuit of Happiness
Maria Full of Grace
Apt Pupil
Wall-E
Any given Sunday
Geisha
Departed
Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo bay
Into the Wild
Starting out in the Evening
Mummy 3
Equilibrium
London
Katyn
Mama mia (musical)
The three burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)
Books read:
Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester R.Brown
Doha Declaration, WTO
Seven Habits of successful people
The Chinese Economy, Transitions and growth by Barry Naughton
Studies in Fiction by Bonazza/Emil Roy
С. Дулам, Монголын Аман Зохиолын Онол
Nietzsche: A philosophical Biography by Safranski
How societies choose to fail or succeed, by Jared Diamond
Why is sex fun by Jared Diamond
Digital Fortress by Dan Brown
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
Broker by John Grishnam
Eletronic Trading guide for Nasdaq
Guide to Electronic Trading by Yu Jea
The New Nasdaq Marketplace, 2007 Springer
Martin Eden by Jack London
Company Law
Law on Central Bank
Joan of Arc and the hundred years war
BadBoys’ Lifestyle
Good to great by Jim Collins
Long Tail
Edward R Tufte - The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
ANGEL AND DEMONS by Dan Brown
Never be laid to again by David Lieberman
In the Court of Public Opinion
Raising Capital – Get the money you need to grow your business
Seven habits of highly effective people
Powerful Sleep: How to sleep less and have more energy than you ever had before
Компанийн засаглалын кодекс
The unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera
By river Piedra I sat down and wept by Paulo Coelho (reread)
Maktub by Paulo Coelho
Brida by Paulo Coelho
Neuromancer
Jonathan Seagull Livingston
Vault Career Guide investment banking
Attacting wealth
Never be lied to again
Kafka on the shore by Haruki Murikami
Dynasties by David Landes
Nordic exchange rules
Global Future: Next challenge for asian business (notes were taken on the book)
Audacity of hope by Obarak Obama
Love in time of cholera
Speed reading
Судалгаа болон бусад:
241 Forex
Automated trading journal
Economic way looking at life, Nobel lecture by Gary S. Becker
BHP review 2007
Citigroup corporate & investment banking by VAULT
Doing business Overview 2008
"The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race” by Jared Diamond
Ensuring India’s offshoring future
МОНГОЛ УЛСАД ХУВИЙН ХӨРӨНГӨ ОРУУЛАЛТЫН САН БАЙГУУЛАХ
ТӨСЛИЙН ТЕХНИК, ЭДИЙН ЗАСГИЙН ҮНДЭСЛЭЛИЙГ ТОДОРХОЙЛОХ
СУДАЛГАА I
МОНГОЛ УЛСАД ХУВИЙН ХӨРӨНГӨ ОРУУЛАЛТЫН САН БАЙГУУЛАХ
ТӨСЛИЙН ТЕХНИК, ЭДИЙН ЗАСГИЙН ҮНДЭСЛЭЛИЙГ ТОДОРХОЙЛОХ
СУДАЛГАА II
Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans
Risk, Financial Crises, and Globalization: Long-Term Capital Management and the Sociology of Arbitrage by Donald MacKenzie, 2002
Financial innovation and the management and regulation of financial institutions by Robert C.Merton
BusinessWeek Jan.28
Almost all economist magazines.
С. Дулам, Монголын Аман Зохиолын Онол
check the book.
LONG TAIL
p. 52 The theory of the Long Tail can be boiled down to this: Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted googds and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
ANGEL AND DEMONS by Dan Brown
p.192: His holiness once told me that a Pope is a man torn between two worlds… the real world and the divine. He warned that any church that ignored reality would not survive to enjoy the divine.
p.197: God, grant me strength to accept those things I cannot change.
p.288: Stand tall, smile bright, and let them wonder what secret’s making you laugh.
Ward off the mental cobwebs.
Powerful Sleep:
How to sleep less and have more energy than you ever had before
I cannot over emphasize how important this is! As explained earlier, the amount
of natural sunlight that enters your eyes has a drastic effect on your temperature
body rhythm.
• When we're exposed to high intensity light, our body temperature increases, and
melatonin levels rapidly decrease.
• Exposure to natural sunlight also delays the temperature drop. This allows you
to stay awake and alert for longer periods of time.
• Lack of sunlight results in higher melatonin levels, this leads to lower body
temperature levels, feeling very sleepy, and tired through out the day.
Power Naps - The Secret to Energy With Little Sleep
If done correctly, taking regular day-time naps will give you a huge boost of
energy throughout the day. It takes about 45 minutes to enter the first deep sleep phase. If you limit your nap to 45 minutes, you will sleep mainly in Stage 2 sleep.
Having a Regular Rising Time & Sleeping Time
Never be laid to again by David Lieberman
p. 90 And while your clues to deception will let you know what kind of person you're dealing with, the following strategy will prove useful in these situations.
1. Always, if possible, get a second opinion. It's easy to do and can save you a lot of heartache.
2. Make sure the person is licensed, insured, and registered to do the actual work.
3. Have your agreement drawn up in writing. Oral contracts aren't worth the paper they're written on.
4. Ask for referrals or testimonials.
If he balks at any one of these points, you might want to take your business elsewhere. The con artist operates best when you're in the dark.
Finally, the following strategy should give you an accu-rate insight into the person's intentions. The key is to ask for the opposite of what you really want.
You asked your waiter for decaffeinated coffee and five minutes later the busboy comes by with a filled cup of coffee.
Sample question formation: "This is regular coffee, right?" If he confirms that it is, either he doesn't care enough to know for sure or it really is regular. Again, either
way, you now know that you may not be getting what you asked for. However, should he tell you that it is decaf-feinated—something he thinks you don't want—then you can be pretty sure that you're getting what you originally asked for.
p.92 You ask the waiter if there is MSG, an additive that some people are allergic to, in the salad and he tells you there isn't. He doesn't seems terribly convincing and you just want to make sure.
Sample question formation: "Okay, Albert, that's great. Just so you know I'm deathly allergic to MSG. One forkful and it's off to the hospital I go." After
p.115
. . would be helpful."
4. "You can pretend anything and master it."
5. "I understand what you're . . . saying ... it doesn't make it true."
6. "If you expected me to believe that, you wouldn't have said it."
7. "Your question is what you knew it would be, isn't it?"
8. "Your response says what you're unaware of."
9. "Do you believe that you knew what you thought?" 10. "How do you stop a thought once you get it?"
11. "Why would you believe something that's not true?"
12. "Why axe you agreeing with what you already know?"
13. "What happens when you get a thought?"
14. "The less you try the more you'll agree ..."
15. "Are you unaware of what you forgot?"
p.121
Don't ask someone to change his mind without giving him additional information. Remember that while you're talking to the person he listens with his ego—and you must accommodate it. Many people see changing their mind as a sign of weakness. He's given up and you've won.
So instead of asking him to change his mind, allow him to make a new decision based on additional information. Politicians have a penchant for this because they never want to appear wishy-washy. They rarely say that they've changed their mind on an issue—rather, they say their "position has evolved," as it were.
For example, you might say, "I can see why you said that then, but in light of the fact that [a new bit of information to justify him changing his mind], I think you owe me an explanation."
p.130
When you go into a meeting wanting it to work out, you'll overlook too many things that may make it a bad deal. You must try to remain as objective as possible—^as if you were reviewing the information for someone else. Wishful thinking, desire, and hope cannot allow you to lose sight of reality.
P.132
Emotional states are either self-induced, externally
brought on, or arise from a combination of the two. Some of the more powerful ones are: guilt, intimidation, appeal to ego, fear, curiosity, our desire to be liked, and love. If you're operating in any of these states, your judgment is likely to be impaired.
LIAR’S POKER by Michael Lewis
John Gutfreund’s now legendary comment that to succeed on the Saloman Brothers trading floor a person had to wake up each morning “ready to bite the ass of a bear.”
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Samuel Johnson.
p.22 A chaired professor of the LSE who tooka keen interest in material affairs, stared at me bug-eyed and gurgled when he heard what I was to be paid. It was twice what he earned. He was in his mid-forties and at the top of his profession. I was twenty-four years old and at the bottom of mine. There was no justice in the world and thank goodness for that.
All Quiet on the Bond Front
p.35 Solomon had been able to snatch away were worth many times their weight in gold and treated like the family china.
p.36 Bond traders and salesmen age like dogs.
He become that most revered of all species: a Big Swinging Dick.
But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.
Equities in Dallas – Just bury that lowest ofrm of human scum where it will never be seen again.
Lower than the whale shit on the bottom of the ocean. P.43 One day I was out playing the Invisible Man, feeling the warmth of the whale shit and thinking that no one in life was lower than I.
p.57 Myron Samuels described the morning following the boat ride as a “coyote morning.” After an ill-considered one-night stand you wake up and see for the first time the face of the woman you’ve slept with; your arm, is pinned to the bed by her head, and rather than wake her, like an entrapped coyote, you chew off your arm and scram.
p.62: Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off.
p.101 My product took off first, says Ranieri. “Investors started to buy the gospel according to Ranieri.” The gospel according to Ranieri was, in simple terms, “that mortgages were so cheap your teeth hurt.”
p.142: geek was both B) a person immediately out of the training program and in a disgusting larval state between trainee and man.”
p.152: Many of our French and English speculators however, honestly believed the charts contained the secrets of the market. They are aboriginal chartists.
p.175: God gave you eyes, plagiarize. Hehe
p.176: My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.
p.199 Drexel Burnham had cleared $545.5 million on revenues of $4 billion, more than Salomon brothers had made at their best.
p.200 Mortgages and junk mdade it easier to borrow money for people and companies previously thought unworthy of the funds.
p.208 From virtually zero in the 1970s, new junk bond issuance grew to $839 million 1981 to $8.5 billion in 1985, and to $12 nillion in 1987. By then junk bonds were 25 percent of the corporate bond market.
p.211: The embodiment of the take-over market is a high-strung, hyperambitious twenty six year old, employed by a large American investment bank, smiling and dialing for companies.
COLLAPSE by Jared Diamond
One of Diamonds's best. I wish I can invite him to do through study on Mongolia's current development. As far as I am concerned, we seem to take a path which Diamond specifically advise not to take in his own book. I read couple of other books by him and most of his books simply emancipating the chained mind of ours in a way that eventually think of our actions.
In Mongolia, some people are just starting to do what he wrote to us not to do in the first place. His reasons of societal collapses are as follows:
1. Human environmental impacts - deforestation, small scale mining in Mongolia, mercury usage, cyanide nitrate condemnation etc
2. Climate change - desertification, temperature rise in last 40yrs by 3 degrees in UB, and other areas in Mongolia etc(effects are interacted with the effects of human environmental impacts)
3. Dependency - especially that of food and other essential consumer goods. What if the supplier cease to provide due to political or any other reasons?
4. Religions factors play important role. Mongolia is sliding to Buddhism or more of superstition and christianity. The more radical christian groups are taking more support among the youth as I see it. Maybe I am wrong. Hope I am wrong.
5. External enemies - russian, chinese mafia or criminal groups already taking rapid expansion in Mongolian economy - which will eventually cause internal conflict between relevant groups within the country - maybe.
p.33: How much past environmental damage was unintentional and imperceptible, and how much was perversely wrought by people acting in full awareness of the consequences? For instance, what were Easter Islanders saying as they cut down the last tree on their island? It turns out that group decision-making can be undone by a whole series of factors, beginning with failure to anticipate or perceive a problem, and proceeding through conflicts of interest that leave some members of the group to pursue
goals good for themselves but bad for the rest of the group.
p.46 In the U.S. today, a company opening a new mine is required by law to buy a bond by which a separate bondholding company pledges to pay for the mine's cleanup costs in case the mining company itself goes bankrupt. But many mines have been "underbonded"
(i.e., the eventual cleanup costs have proved to exceed the value of the bond), and older mines were not required to buy such bonds at all.
p.47 For instance, in 1998, to the shock of the industry, and to politicians supporting
and supported by the industry, Montana voters passed a ballot initiative banning a problem-plagued method of gold mining termed cyanide heapleach mining and discussed further below
p.165Within our five-factor framework for understanding societal collapses, four of those factors played a role in the Anasazi collapse. There were indeed human environmental impacts of several types, especially deforestation and arroyo cutting. There was also climate change in rainfall and temperature, and its effects interacted with the effects of human environmental impacts. Internal trade with friendly trade partners did play a crucial role in the collapse: different Anasazi groups supplied food, timber, pottery, stone, and luxury goods to each other, supporting each other in an interdependent complex society, but putting the whole society at risk of collapsing. Religious and political factors apparently played an essential role in sustaining the complex society, by coordinating the exchanges of materials, and by motivating people in outlying areas to supply food, timber, and pottery to the political and religious centers. The only factor in our five-factor list for whose operation there is not convincing evidence in the case of the Anasazicollapse is external enemies. While the Anasazi did indeed attack each other
as their population grew and as the climate deteriorated, the civilizations of the U.S. Southwest were too distant from other populous societies to have been seriously threatened by any external enemies.
p.287: Small societies occupying a small island or homeland can adopt a
bottom-up approach to environmental management. Because the homeland
is small, all of its inhabitants are familiar with the entire island, know that
they are affected by developments throughout the island, and share a sense
of identity and common interests with other inhabitants. Hence everybody
realizes that they will benefit from sound environmental measures that they
and their neighbors adopt. That's bottom-up management, in which people
work together to solve their own problems.
p.351: Thus, there were many reasons why deforestation and other environmental
problems began earlier, developed over a longer time, and proceeded further
in Haiti than in the Dominican Republic. The reasons involved four of
the factors in this book's five-factor framework: differences in human environmental
impacts, in variously friendly policies or unfriendly policies of
other countries, and in responses by the societies and their leaders.
p.363: Consumerist aspirations are rampant and beyond levels that the country could support.
p.370 It is also the world's largest producer and consumer of fertilizer, accounting for 20% of world use, and for 90% of the global increase in fertilizer use since 1981, thanks to a quintupling of its own fertilizer use, now three times the world average per acre. As the second largest producer and consumer of pesticides, China accounts for 14% of the world total and has become a net exporter of pesticides.
P.430 This question of why societies end up destroying themselves through disastrous
decisions astonishes not only my UCLA undergraduates but also professional historians and archaeologists. For example, perhaps the most cited book on societal collapses is The Collapse of Complex Societies, by the archaeologist Joseph Tainter. In assessing competing explanations for ancient collapses, Tainter remained skeptical of even the possibility that they might have been due to depletion of environmental resources, because that outcome seemed a priori so unlikely to him. Here is his reasoning: "One
supposition of this view must be that these societies sit by and watch the encroaching
weakness without taking corrective actions. Here is a major difficulty. Complex societies are characterized by centralized decision-making, high information flow, great coordination of parts, formal channels of command, and pooling of resources. Much of this structure seems to have the capability, if not the designed purpose, of countering fluctuations and deficiencies in productivity. With their administrative structure, and capacity to allocate both labor and resources, dealing with adverse environmental conditions may be one of the things that complex societies do best (see, for example,
Isbell [ 1978]). It is curious that they would collapse when faced with
precisely those conditions they are equipped to circumvent.... As it becomes
apparent to the members or administrators of a complex society that
a resource base is deteriorating, it seems most reasonable to assume that some
rational steps are taken toward a resolution. The alternative assumption—
of idleness in the face of disaster—requires a leap of faith at which we may
rightly hesitate."
p.435 Politicians use the term "creeping normalcy" to refer to such slow trends
concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic congestion,
or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it's difficult to recognize that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year before, so one's baseline standard for what constitutes "normalcy" shifts gradually and imperceptibly. It may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt, that conditions used to be much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards.
p.441 Conversely, failures to solve perceived problems because of conflicts of
interest between the elite and the masses are much less likely in societies
where the elite cannot insulate themselves from the consequences of their
actions. We shall see in the final chapter that the high environmental awareness
of the Dutch (including their politicians) goes back to the fact that
much of the population—both the politicians and the masses—lives on
land lying below sea level, where only dikes stand between them and
drowning, so that foolish land planning by politicians would be at their
own personal peril.
p.472 In the year 2000 the outgoing Clinton administration
proposed mining regulations that achieved both of those goals while also
eliminating corporate self-guarantees of financial assurance. But in October
2001 a proposal by the incoming Bush administration eliminated almost all
of those proposals except for continuing to require financial assurance, a requirement
that would in any case be meaningless without a definition of
the reclamation and cleanup costs to be covered by financial assurance.
p.493It was also the case for oil companies before the Santa
Barbara Channel oil spill disaster of 1969, and for Montana mining companies
before recent cleanup laws. When government regulation is effective,
and when the public is environmentally aware, environmentally clean big
businesses may outcompete dirty ones, but the reverse is likely to be true if
government regulation is ineffective and if the public doesn't care.
p.502
In addition, deaths in the U.S. from
air pollution alone (without considering soil and water pollution) are conservatively
estimated at over 130,000 per year.
p.513"The environment has to be balanced against the economy." This quote
portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve environmental
problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environmental
problems unsolved to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts
the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of
money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing
those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run
as well. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses
after they have developed. Just think of the damage caused by agricultural
weeds and pests, non-agricultural pests like water hyacinths and zebra mussels,
the recurrent annual costs of combating those pests, the value of lost
time when we are stuck in traffic, the financial costs resulting from people
getting sick or dying from environmental toxins, cleanup costs for toxic
chemicals, the steep increase in fish prices due to depletion of fish stocks,
and the value of farmland damaged or ruined by erosion and salinization
534This dilemma reminds me of Winston Churchill's response to criticisms of
democracy: "It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government
except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
In that spirit, a lower-impact society is the most impossible scenario for our
future—except for all other conceivable scenarios.
CHINA INC.
p.8The U.S had lost 2.9 million manufacturing jobs over the previous five years.
p.9: In 2003, China’s GDP was $1.4 trillion. … GDP of $10. trillion (US) The world economy can also be measure by its own GDP; it totalled $36.4 trillion in 2003.
p.10: China’s $1.4 trillion eoconomy, in the CIA’s calculations, looks more like on ewith GDP of $6.6 trillion.
p.14: In 2004, according to the calculatins of Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, Chinese bought 7 percent of the world’ oil, a quarter of all aluminium and steel, nearly a third of the world’s iron ore and coal, and 40 percent of the world’s cement. The trend is for bigger amounts yet to come.
The discrepancy between China’s official count of 1.3 billion and western estimates of up to 1.5 billion arises from an analysis by intelligence agencies of China’s grain consumption, which far exceeds the needs of 1.3 billion people.
p.74: Since 1978, nearly 40000 state-owned industries have been shut down. From 1996 to 2001, 53 million people working in China’s state sector lost their jobs.
p.75. … while the rest of the world worries about the power of China’s best factories to kill off jobs, the Chinese themselves must worry about how competition in their own country is spiking unemployment.
p.98: In 2001, a count of the out of wedlock children produced by Shenzhen’s working women and mistresses over two decades numbered 520,000.
p.99: Recent estimates pu the number of hepatitis B sufferers at 120 million and HIV-positive Chinese at close to 1 million. The UN warns of 10 million AIDS suffers by 2010. [Not only Mongolia has these similar problems. Every country faces the problems too. It is the method which the governments fight with these problems can differ across countries and cultures.]
p.116: An estimated 400 thousand people die every year from illnesses such as lung and heart disease related to air pollution.
p.133: The communist party may wish to relegate its failures to the dustbin of history. They are going into the sale bin instead.
p.140: Nearly 17 million acres of farmland have disappeared since the mid-1990s. … in the summer of 2004, when a fall in china’s grain harvest caused the country to be a net importer of food for the first time ever. … World Bank predicts the country’s global food imports will more than double by 2020.
p.150. When told of nine-year old Shanhai company that became the world’s leader in cast aluminium wheels for cars just a few years after its founding, Parson sinsks into his chair. How can such a company find the skilled labor it needed to grow so quickly? He asks. When told further that the wheel company is now in the car business turning out tens of thousands of light trucks a year, assembled largely by recent graduates of China’s technical high schools using hand tools, he says, “I find that vision frightening.”
p.151 A 2003 survey of Illinois manufacturers found that 13 out of every 20 firms face competition from China. Of those, 84 percent stated that Chinese competition hurt their sales by an average of 17 percent that year.
p.152: One reason they cited was that the Chinese can often receive financial support at far better terms than manufacturers in Illinois. That includes government subsidies and other assistance such as loans from Chinese government banks that are offered cheaply and often with little expectation that they will be paid back.
p.154 [Washington Post]Peter Goodman and Phillip Pan note that if Wal-Mart were a nation, it would be China’s fifth largest export market, ahead of Germnay and Great Britain. Wal-Mart’s Trade with and in China accounts for 1.5 percent of that country’s gross domestic product.
p.164: Siemnes has some 45 companies operating in China, employs 30000 people there, and sold $5 billion worth of equipment in the country in 2003.
p.182: Goldman Sachs the world’s premier investment bank, predicted thath 6 million jobs would leave the US by 2014, at a cost of 150 billion in wages to Americans. A study by economist at the University of California at Berkeley predicted 14 million U.S service jobs alone could be transferred overseas within a decade. That’s 10 percent of the current American labor force.
IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION
Is the lawsuit unique, out-of-the-ordinary, or otherwise "man bites dog"?
Does the case involve sensational facts?
Does the case involve, or potentially involve, a large sum of money?
Are the parties to the suit well known or otherwise high profile?
Is it a case that will merit attention in hte regional or trade media?
Does the case make new law?
Does the case involve a new application of old law?
Is the area of the law considered "hot" bny the media right now?
Does the case have a compelling "human face"?
Is the case indicative of a trend?
Does the case have broader implications as a business story?
Is there a political or regulatory aspect that will attract interest in the case?
Does the opposing counsel have a history of publicizing his or her cases?
If the law is on your side, pound the law.
If the facts are on your side, pound the facts.
If neither is on your side, pound the table.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
p.26: They had just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, and they were not capable of living for even an sinstant without the other , or without thinking about the other, and that capacity diminished as their age increased…. That was why she did not treat him like a difficult old man but as a senile baby, and that deception was providential fore the two of them because it put them beyond the reach of pity.
p.63: At least once a week he ended the evening with a little night bird, as he called them, one of the many who sold emergency love in a transient hotel for sailors.
p.107: When the curlew sang five o’clock along with the local roosters, Dr. Juvenal Urbino commended himself body and soul to Divine Providence because he did not have a heart to live another day in his rubble-strewn homeland. But in time the affection of his family, the Sundays in the country, and the covetous attention of the unmarried women of his class mitigated the bitterness of his first impression. Little by little he grew ccustomed to the sultry heat of October, to the excessive odors, to the hasty judgements of his friends, to the We’ll see tomorrow, Doctor, don’t worry, and at last he gave in to the spell of habit. It did not take him long to invent an easy justification for his surrender. (eventually we all surrender, but the difference is who can stand the longest without giving up) This was his wolrd, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it. The first thing he did was to take possession of his father’s office. He kept in place the hard, somber English furniture made of wood that sighed in the icy cold of dawn, but he consigned to the attic the treatises on viceregal science and romantic medicine and filled the bookshelves behind their glass doors with the writings of the new French school. He took down the faded pictures, except for the one of the physician arguing with Death for the nude body of a female patient, and the Hippocratic Oath printed in Gothic letters, and he hung in their place, next to his father’s only diploma, the many diverse ones he himself had received with highest honors from various schools in Europe . He tried to impose the latest ideas at Misericordia Hospital, but this was not as easy as it had seemed in his youthful enthusiasm, for the antiquated house of health was stubborn in its attachment to atavistic superstitions, such as standing beds in pots of water to prevent disease from climbing up the legs, or requiring evening wear and chamois gloves in the operating room because it was taken for granted that elegance was an essential condition for asepsis. They could not tolerate the young newcomer’s tasting a patient’s urine to determine the presence of sugar, quoting Charcot and Trousseau as if they were his roommates, issuing severe warnings in class against themortal risks of vaccines while maintaining a suspicious faith in the recent invention of suppositories.aHe was in conflict with everything: his renovating spirit, his maniacal sense of civic duty, his slow humar in a land of immortal pranksters – everything, in fact, that constituted his most estimable virtues provoked the resentment of his older collegues and the sly jokes of the younger ones.
p.121: Dr. Juvenal Urbino listened to his mother without hearing her as he clutched the doorframe, and then he gave a half turn, trying to reach his bedroom, but he fell flat on his face in an explosion of star anise vomit. “Mother of God” shouted his mother.
p. 151: The Widow Nazaret never missed her occasional appointments with Florentino Ariza, not even during her busiest times, and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love.
p. 160 They came back with a new conception of life, bringing with them the latest trends in the world and ready to lead, he with the most recent developments in literature, music, and above all in his science. He had a subscription to Le Figaro, so he would not lose touch with reality, and another to the Revue des Deux Mondes, so that he would not lose touch with poetry. He had also arranged with his bookseller in Paris to receive works by the most widely read authors, among them Anatole France and Pierre Loti, and by those he liked best, including Rémy de Gourmont and Paul Bourget, but under no circumstances anything by Emile Zola, whom he found intolerable despite his valiant intervention in the Dreyfus affair. The same bookseller agreed to mail him the most attractive scores from the Ricordi catalogue, chamber music above all, so that he could maintain the well-deserved title earned by his father as the greatest friend of concerts in the city.
p. 167: No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich.
“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the
same thing.”
p.183: Florentino Ariza remembered a phrase from his childhood, something that
the family doctor, his godfather, had said regarding his chronic constipation: “The world is divided into those who can shit and those who cannot.” On the basis of this dogma the Doctor had elaborated an entire theory of character, which he considered more accurate than astrology. But with what he had learned over the years, Florentino Ariza stated it another way: “The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not.” He distrusted those who did not: when they strayed from the straight and narrow, it was
something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it. Those who did it often, on the other hand, lived for that alone. They felt so good that their lips were sealed as if they were tombs, because they knew that their lives depended on their discretion. They never spoke of their exploits, they confided in no one, they feigned indifference to the point where they earned the reputation of being impotent, or frigid, or above all timid fairies, as in the case of Florentino Ariza. But they took pleasure in the error because the error protected them. They formed a secret society, whose members recognized each other all over the world without need of a common language, which is why Florentino Ariza was not surprised by the girl’s reply: she was one of them, and therefore she knew htat he knew that she knew.
p.248: Then he reached the admirable decision not to go to Miss Lynch’s house at five o’clock in the afternoon. The vows of eternal love, the dream of a discreet house for her alone where he could visit her with no unexpected interruptions, their unhurried happiness for as long as they lived--everything he had promised in the blazing heat of love was canceled forever after. The last thing Miss Lynch received from him was an emerald tiara in a little box wrapped in paper from the pharmacy, so that the coachman himself thought it was an emergency prescription and handed it to her with no comment, no message, nothing in writing. Dr. Urbino never saw her again, not even by accident, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bitter tears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe. At five o’clock, instead of going to see her, he made a profound act of contrition before his confessor, and on the following Sunday he took Communion, his heart broken but his soul at peace.
THE AUDACTIY OF HOPE
The book gave me hope. I used to believe in good people so I get disproportionally stressed when their number falls by seconds as I see. The materialism is destroying the virtues in people and whatever I consider “good” is being wiped out of the earth’s surface with considerable speed.
After reading Obama, I believe in good in people. Most of the people would have good and bad in them. As Obama says in his book “No matter how wrong headed I might consider their policies to be – and no matter how much I might insist that they be held accountable for the results of such policies – I still find it possible, in talking to these men and women, to understand their motives, and to recognize in them values I share”.
I was moved by his understanding of the value of individual freedom. When I compare the states with home, we have so tilted level of competition here just because most people don’t understand that freedom comes with responsibility. Here people who pay bribes do perform and survive better and those who stick with their principles go broke in no time.
I read the whole book Mongolia in mind. During the book I made so many comparisons and some of which made me despair because I am not sure whether Mongolia will even be more advanced as states is. ...
Finally I thought of contributing $20 to Obama but when I tried I found out that he does not accept my contribution or any other foreigner’s contribution for his campaign. But my heart and soul is with you Obama!
p.56: At times our values collide because in the hands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-relience and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desidre to succeed at any ocst. More than once in our history we have seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith calcify into self-righteousnes, closedemindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism and unwillingness to acknowledge the abiolity of others to do for themselves.
p.63 Sometimes we need both cultural transformation and government action - a change in values and a change in policy - to promote the kind of society we want. ..... That is one of the things that makes me a Democrat, I suppose - this idea that our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, should express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; not just on the blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; but also through our government. Like many conservatives, I believe in the power of culture to determine both individual success and social cohesion, and I believe we ignore cultural factors at our peril. But I also believe that our government can play a role in shaping that culture for the better - or for the worse."
p.68: If we aren’t iwlling to pay a price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.
p.87: Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man’s freedom did not become another man’s tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve their liberty.
p.114: And although my own worldview and their corresponded in many ways – I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways – I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations.
p.115: The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought.
p. 146: But there’s also no denying that globalization has greatly increased economic instability for millions of ordinary Americans. To stay competitive and keep investors happy in the global marketplace, U.S –based companies have automated, downsized, outsourced, and offshored. They have held the line on wage increases, and replaced defined-benefit health and retirement plans with 401k and Health Savings Accounts that shift more cost and risk onto workers.
The result has been the emergence of what some call a “winner take all” economy, in which a rising tide doesn’t necessarily lift all boats.
p.150: Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative, and the efficient allocation of resources. (that system is lacking in Mongolia, thus at this point of time we cannot have American dream in Mongolia. If we had similar structure and system that permit individuals pursue their dreams without much pressure, then Mongolia would not be as poor as today. We have to change structurely before we inject any kind of investment into the system. Otherwise the effects will be much less with this current rotten system)
p.153: T.Rooselvelt recognized that monopoly power could restrict competition, and made “trust busting” a centerpiece of his administration. Woodrow Wilson instituted the Federal Reserve Bank, to manage the money supply and curb periodic panics in the financial markets. Federal and state governments established the first consumer laws – the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Meat inspection Act – to protect Americans from harmful products.
p.167: In other words, we can afford to do what needs to be done. What’s missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency. (maybe it is true with current Mongolian government. They only subsidize the sunset industries under umbrella of national security and finance their relatives’ businesses with our tax moneys. I am kind of ashamed of making this system survive even a minute longer by paying my taxes fully. Following rules is part of my virtues but then this shit bother me so bad when I see such bad system that trying to squeeze life out of me)
p.203: For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closedmindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.
p.206: I knew their book and shared their values and sang their song. But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, an observer among them. I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the asmae ways she was ultimately alone.
p.215: Solving these problems will require changes in government policy; it will also require changes in hearts and minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturerer’s lobby.
p.240: I choose to think about Robert instead, and the small but difficult gesture he made. If a young man like Robert can make the effort to cross the currents of habit and fear in order to do what he knows is right, then I want ot be sure that I am there to meet him on the other side and help him onto shore.
p.356: The audacity of hope. That was the best of the American spirit, I thought – having the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control – and therefore responsibility – over our own fate.
P.361: And in that place, I think about America and those who built it. This nation’s founders, who somehow rose above petty ambitions and narrow calculations to imagine a nation unfurling across a continent. And those like Lincoln and King, who ultimately laid down their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union. And all the faceless, nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and buchers, constructing lives for themselves and their children and grandchildren, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams. It is that process I wish to be a part of. My heart is filled with love for this country.
Unbearable lightness of being
p.101 Perhaps Tomas was led to surgery by a desire to know what lies hidden on the other side of Es muss sein! ; in other words, what remains of life when a person rejects what he previously considered his mission.
p.102 Then they would greet him with a bottle of champagne or slivovitz, sign for thirteen win-dows on the order slip, and chat with him for two hours, drinking his health all the while. Tomas would move on to his next flat or shop in a capital mood.
p.104 As recently as fifty years ago, this form of conquest took considerable time (weeks, even months!), and the worth of the conquered object was proportional to the time the conquest took.
… Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world. The obsession of the former is lyrical: what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled philandering. The obsession of the latter is epic, and women see nothing the least bit touching in it: the man projects no subjective ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him. This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption (redemption by disappointment).
p.108 She did not want him to study her. She wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be entered only with closed eyes. The reason she refused to get down on all fours was that in that position their bodies did not touch at all and he could observe her from a distance of several feet. She hated that distance. She wanted to merge with him. That is why, looking him straight in the eye, she insisted she had not had an orgasm even though the rug was fairly dripping with it. It's not sensual pleasure I'm after, she would say, it's happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure. In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was room for her only on the rug.
p.109 I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
p.121 Perhaps he hoped his words would ring so outrageously false that they would wake Hrubin from the dead. But the world was too ugly, and no one decided to rise up out of the grave.
p.126 If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond Es muss sein!
p.133In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact, that was exactly how Sabina had explained the meaning of her paintings to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through.
p.143 He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!
3 comments:
Hello!
I’m a big fan of Paulo Coelho! You will love this! He’s the first best-selling author to be distributing for free his works on his blog:
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Have a nice day!
Aart
hedii zavandaa amjuuldag bainaa.
u rock mate
www.mglaus.com
"Collapse"-iin comment ih taalagdsan boloi.
Havar halit end tendees ni garchiglaj bsan bolovch duusgaagui, mongolchuud bugdeeree unshmaar nom sanagdsan; sorosiin sangaas mgl hel ruu orchuulj bgaam bilee.
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