Long-term consistency beats short-term intensity.

It’s interesting, raising a child, because he has the family that I didn’t have, that I wish I had had. And I’m so happy he does, and it gives me such joy to give him a healthy family. That’s the number one most important thing to me.

China is now a more common destination for African scholars studying abroad than either the US or UK.

This looks like a fascinating paper on the way that residents of small towns in Nigeria refuse polio vaccination as a way of negotiating with the government for better local services.

All of humanity’s problems come from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.

The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth–indeed, their disbelief in its existence–leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.

At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.

We made its interface a custom binary protocol. We built an extremely rudimentary web interface that drove the protocol. Then we had candidates find flaws in the trading system.

A young life spent playing video games can lead to a middle age without marketable skills or connections.

Watts published a luminous book entitled The Wisdom of Insecurity that ought to be required reading for every high school senior.

The counterculture light was so bright it began to attract moths (people who sadly were not intellectually or spiritually prepared to meaningfully assimilate transformative multi-dimensional data streams from hyperspace) and stinging stink bugs (the thugs that invariably invade every utopia) in such great numbers that they eventually crowded out the butterflies (the educated middle class truth-seekers who switched on the light in the first place). That's an oversimplification, of course, but it's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite. In America, the relatively finite psychedelic culture was shoved aside by the burgeoning boogie culture, whose drugs of choice were booze, speed, and cocaine; and whose goal was not to attain spiritual bliss, deeper understanding, or an end to war and repression but rather to get thoroughly fucked up.

We humans have always defined ourselves by narration. What's happening today is that we're allowing multi-national corporations to tell our stories for us. The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform.

Even the most open-ended games tend to offer a sense of progress and direction, completion and commitment. In other words, they make people happy—or at least happier, serving as a buffer between the player and despair. Video games, you might say, offer a sort of universal basic income for the soul.

…average immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to the population of that source country.

So, as long as you aren’t a Consumer Sucka, commuting to work in a bank-financed gas-powered racing sofa and borrowing money for furniture and appliances to outfit that last spare room in your suburban mansion, recessions are a great thing. Housing and profitable investments become cheaper, insanity and speculation is reset, and people actually start living more frugally again, getting back to the roots of what living a good life really means.

In succinct terms, recessions are caused when a bunch of people lose confidence all at once.

You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.

You know, the matrix says, ‘Pick an identity and stick with it. Because I want to sell you some beer and shampoo and I need you to stick with what you are so I’ll know how to market it to you.’ Drag is the opposite. Drag says, 'Identity is a joke.'