Chris Liss

In Portugal, they’re very fond of these soggy, overripe persimmons, and I’ve gotten hooked on them. Problem is every time you bring them home from the farmer’s market, they get crushed in the bag and spill out everywhere. Had no choice but to eat three of them just now, mixed in with yogurt. They are the size of large apples. But I had no choice.

Just hate putting the 25KG ones in the luggage View quoted note →

I’ll offer you a running challenge I really believe everyone should try. I failed it today, but I succeeded last week. Do two miles (no walking, no stopping) in *more* than 24 minutes, preferably on an empty stomach, no music, no podcasts. Also, press start on your watch and don’t look until you’re done. I made it in 24:05 last Monday, but today I blew it and finished at 23:53. I have a theory that if you push yourself when running, you will eventually get faster, but there is also resistance. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But if you go slow enough and sustain it, at a pace that requires no real exertion, you build stamina without resistance. And that moves up the baseline from say walking to jogging slowly. Think of it like your favorite commodity making higher lows, starting from a higher base.

Often I wake up and see no way I can get anything useful or difficult done. It’s like I’m paralyzed into doomscrolling and thinking and theorizing, and doing anything is impossible, just too daunting. It’s like Xeno’s Paradox, to move one foot, you have to move six inches, and to move six inches you have to move three, and to move three you have to move 1.5, and so on. There are an infinite number of steps you’d have to take, so you can never cross the chasm from thought into action. And then I put on my running shoes and walk out the door. There is no bridge from the mind into the world of action except action. To refute Xeno’s paradox you could argue the limit as the denominator heads to infinity is zero, or you can just take a step.

One might argue — wait, you can break the rules if there’s sufficient urgency to do so? So force-vaccinating people and locking them down was cool because of the scary *pandemic*? No! If you break the rules, you had better be correct. There was no science to justify lockdowns, no precedent to quarantining healthy people, no double-blind placebo controlled studies for ANY vaccine let alone this novel mRNA product that turned out not even to stop the spread. And in breaking the rules you MUST do so in the least invasive, most judicious way possible, e.g, extracting Maduro, not destroying Iraq. But how do we know in advance? Well, we knew the science was fake in advance, and the measures were extreme, unprecedented and unsupported by evidence. But to some extent, we really don’t know in advance. The mark of a great leader is to know when to break the rules and when not to, and if you break them, only break them to the minimum extent necessary. But if we don’t know, and we can’t formulate a rule how do we know if the action is justified? We don’t. Being a leader requires taking a chance sometimes, and if you get something wrong, error correcting quickly and decisively, something that did not happen with Covid. It would be great if there were just a rule book you could follow in all cases and we could consult it to see whether something applied or not. But I’m talking about cases in which the book in on fire, and in any event, no book can contain the complexity of real life. View quoted note →