Justice Stephen Breyer in Conversation with Historian Douglas Brinkley - May 30th, 2025

 

 

"I read something that moved me a lot not very long ago. I was reading something by Chesterton, and he was talking about one of the Brontes,... or Jane Eyre that she wrote.He said if you want to know what that is like, you go and you look out at the city-I think he was looking at London-and he said, you know, you see all those houses now, even at the end of the 19th century, and they look all as if they're the same. And you think all of those people are out there, going to work, and they're all the same. But, he says,what Bronte tells you is they are not the same. Each one of those persons and each one of those houses and each one of those families is different, and they each have a story to tell. Each of those stories involves something about human passion. Each of those stories involves a man, a woman, chil- dren, families, work, lives. And you get that sense out of the book. So sometimes I have found literature very helpful as a way out of the tower." 

Stephen G. Breyer 

Confirmation Hearings for Stephen G. Breyer to be an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong, 2d Sess 89 (July 13, 1994) (Miller Reporting transcript).

It makes no odds into what seeming deserts the poet is born. Though all his neighbors pronounce it a Sahara, it will be a paradise to him; for the desert which we see is the result of the barrenness of our experience.—Journal, 6 May 1854

RUNAWAY TRAIN: "THAT IS GOLD" (THOREAU, MARX AND KONCHALOVSKI)

RUNAWAY TRAIN (ANDREI KONCHALOVSKI (1985)): THAT IS GOLD: El blog pretende publicar, principalmente, traducciones al español de textos y poemas de Henry David Thoreau y referencias a trabajos sobre dicho autor.

 

 The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of money, but the amount of development we get out of it. 

—Journal, 26 November 1860 

This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once. 

—Walden 

Who will not confess that the necessity to get money has helped to ripen some of his schemes?

 —Journal, 6 February 1852 

If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.

 —"Life without Principle" 

Marx, contemporáneo de Thoreau, dice en los Manuscritos económico-filosóficos (redactados en 1844): 

“La demanda de hombres regula necesariamente la producción de hombres, como ocurre con cualquier otra mercancía” 

Se refiere a los hombres “mercancía” 

Y también al oro, que es tal no por su naturaleza física sino social 

A ambos, pero en otros términos, se refiere también Jon Voight en el film de Andrei Konchalovski: “That is gold”

ARVO PÄRT: ESTONIAN LULLABY (25-11-2025)

"LA GRATITUD ES UNA ENFERMEDAD QUE PADECEN LOS PERROS"

 

'Txantxangorri' el pastor y su perro

Los campos de Urbia han quedado huérfanos de uno de sus pastores más infatigables, José Luis Uribetxeberria, 'Txantxangorri', como le conocía todo el mundo. Tras casi dos días de búsqueda, el cuerpo sin vida de José Luis Uribetxeberria fue hallado ayer, sobre las once de la mañana, en los alrededores del monte Artzanburu. Los Servicios de Emergencias de la Ertzaintza encontraron el cadáver sepultado bajo la nieve, cerca de donde localizaron a su perro y su inseparable rebaño de ovejas el viernes por la tarde.

Su perro y el rebaño fueron localizados el viernes por la tarde por la dotación de un helicóptero de la Ertzaintza, en los alrededores del monte Artzanburu. 

Según ha podido saber EITB, el perro les ha marcado a los rescatistas la zona en la que se encontraba el pastor. El cuerpo estaba bajo la nieve.

 

La gratitud es cara

Gibbon

La gratitud es un lastre

Diderot

La gratitud es una enfermedad que padecen los perros

Stalin 

 

7. Puedes escuchar que "la verdad no existe". Tampoco esta, entonces

8. Defiende la verdad con los medios a tu alcance. Llegado el caso, como Galileo.Sin la verdad nada se mueve: el grado cero de la "vida"

9. Acepta, como verdad provisional, que los fracasos pasados, presentes y futuros forman parte del mundo humano. Solo los políticos los niegan e ignoran siempre

10. Sé agradecido. El agradecimiento es una salvación posible y provisional del mundo

 

 

“Haz que tu perro guardián vigile para ladrar al ladrón

Haz que el coraje por la vida sea tu comandante en jefe

Haz de la tronera tu defensa, haz que suene la alarma,

Haz que la bala y la fecha muestren quién dispara

De esta forma logró el título de primer poblador permanente. En 1694 fue aprobada una ley “para que cualquier habitante que desertara de una ciudad por miedo a los Indios perdiera por ello todos sus derechos allí”. Pero ahora, en todo caso, como he observado frecuentemente, un hombre puede desertar de los territorios fértiles de la verdad y la justicia, que son las mejores tierras del Estado, por miedo de enemigos mucho más insignificantes, sin perder por ello ninguno de sus derechos civiles. Y ni siquiera, las propias ciudades son concedidas a desertores, y el Parlamento de Massachusetts, como a veces me inclino a considerarlo, no es sino un campo de desertores en sí mismo”.

Henry David Thoreau (Fragmento de "A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers", Sunday)

(Traducción Guillermo Ruiz)

GENEROSA LUZ (21-22/11/2025)

 

If there is nothing new on earth, still there is some thing new in the heavens.

We have always a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types in this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth.

HDT 

(Diario 17/11/1837) 

Si no hay nada nuevo sobre la tierra, todavía hay algo nuevo en el firmamento.Siempre tenemos un recurso en los cielos.Ellos giran constantemente una página nueva para ser vista.El viento graba los caracteres en este fondo azul, y el que interroga puede leer siempre una nueva verdad.

 

 

 

Generosa luz

 ¿Qué importa cuanto no es azul o rosa,

pequeño violeta o rojo suave?

¡Ay, lo que pasará, tal vuelo de ave,

conmueve la mirada más ansiosa;

lo que no volverá!...Tan nimia cosa

como el rubor de un rostro, que se sabe

que se habrá de olvidar, con la más grave 

emoción sella el alma.¡Oh generosa

luz del olvido y de la muerte: sombra

que da el volumen lírico a la vida,

nimiedad por la que el vivir asombra!

 

Di, en lo que ya no volverá ¿no anida

el porvenir más grato? ¿No se nombra

con lo que muere toda nuestra vida?

FP 

 

There are many ways of feeling one’s pulse. In a healthy state the constant experience is a pleasurable sensation or sentiment. For instance, in such a state I find myself in perfect connection with nature, and the perception, or remembrance even, of any natural phenomena is attended with a gentle pleasurable excitement. Prevailing sights and sounds make the impression of beauty and music on me. But in sickness all is deranged. I had yesterday a kink in my back and a general cold, and as usual it amounted to a cessation of life. I lost for the time my rapport or relation to nature. Sympathy with nature is an evidence of perfect health. You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind. The cheaper your amusements, the safer and saner. 

They who think much of theatres, operas, and the like, are beside themselves. Each man’s necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of; though he converses only with moles and fungi and disgraces his relatives, it is no matter if he knows what is steel to his flint.

HDT

Diario, 18 de noviembre de 1857 

("los muertos perfuman el porvenir, el alba;

algo nos guía, algo nos descubre la esperanza;

sí, todo existe en la noche;

todo entra en la noche, diariamente, con esperanza"

FP) 

HUMOR (8-04-2024+20-11-2025; "NADIE PUEDE BURLAR A LA NATURALEZA")

 

 

HUMOR (13-02-2016+8-04-2024; "NADIE PUEDE BURLAR A LA NATURALEZA"): HUMOR     Para el pensador, todas las instituciones humanas, como toda imperfección, vistas desde el punto de la ecuanimidad, son ...

 

 

Para el pensador, todas las instituciones humanas, como toda imperfección, vistas desde el punto de la ecuanimidad, son legítimas materias de humor.

HDT

(Thomas Carlyle y sus obras)

Thoreau fue en buena medida un bromista de un humor tranquilo. Una vez vendó las patas de las gallinas de Mrs Emerson, pues esta buena mujer había sido seriamente disgustada porque invadieron las flores del jardín familiar. Creo que Mrs Emerson inventó la noción de poner guantes a sus gallinas, y Thoreau siguió sus instrucciones al pie de la letra, y entonces salió y su risa se mostró.

An “old Concordian” in “Thoreau gloving Mrs Emerson’s hens” in The Minneapolis Tribune, ca. 1890, as quoted in Walter Harding`s Thoreau : Man of Concord

 

 

Uno de los aforismos del libro “Más árboles que ramas”:

“La selección cultural ha favorecido el sentido del humor para poder soportar el absurdo radical de nuestra existencia”

[279]

¿No debería decir?: “la selección cultural ha favorecido el sentido del humor para poder disfrutar del sentido del humor incluso en condiciones adversas (pero no demasiado adversas)”

 

 

Usted y otros han sido siempre disidentes y han plantado cara al poder, pero siempre con humor socarrón. ¿Es un salvavidas ante toda la presión y represión que ha sufrido desde niño?

Es lo que debería ser. Desde que tengo uso de razón, todo lo que me rodeaba se contradecía con la idea del mundo que yo tenía en la cabeza. Sólo el humor tiene esa especie de poder de subvertir esas contradicciones y curar las heridas.

¿Qué más cosas le hacen reír?

Cualquier cosa que la realidad nos depara, la política me suele hace reír. De hecho, para ir bien, tendríamos que estar riéndonos a carcajadas cada día.

 

(AI WEIWEI) 

AI AND "REALISM IN POLITICS" (II)

 

La mayoría de los teóricos sociales de los siglos XIX y XX parten del supuesto naturalista de que los hombres están determinados causalmente, que son individualmente débiles y potencialmente omniscientes, que tan solo el conocimiento desvelará de forma progresiva su melancolía y su absoluta dependencia con respecto a una red de factores causales identificables, que el resto es megalomanía y engaño.Esta yerma doctrina no está basada en la observación o experiencia del comportamiento humano ni en el experimento social o en cualquier método empírico, sino en una vasta analogía con el resto de la naturaleza.Los estadistas de más éxito en la historia de la humanidad por lo general han asumido, lo supieran o no, lo opuesto: que los individuos eran en ocasiones fuertes (porque eso piensan de sí mismos y de sus principales oponentes), en gran parte ignorantes (ignorantes de la mayoría de los factores con los que se veían obligados a tratar, que eran asumidos sin que hubiera una conciencia de ello y con los que se trataba casi en la oscuridad) y, dentro de algunos límites,libres.Mientras los supuestos contrarios sean defendidos  por aquellos que creen en las reformas radicales en nombre-falsamente invocado- de la ciencia y la razón y de la observación pura de la naturaleza, los hombres seguirán siendo víctimas de teorías y abstracciones que son una forma de idolatría -y de sacrificio humano- más fría y más destructiva que las ilusiones y engaños inteligibles de anteriores generaciones, y por la que las generaciones futuras, con incredulidad e ira, condenarán justificadamente a nuestra época.

Isaiah Berlin (Realism in politics. Traducción Clara Morán Calvo-Sotelo) 

 

Grok Conversation

Replying to @ruiz_zapatero

• This post features an artistic overlay of Alexander Herzen's 19th-century quote critiquing authoritarian system-builders on Ambrogio Lorenzetti's 1339 fresco "Allegory of Good Government," visually linking medieval ideals of just rule to warnings against oppressive expertise.
• As part of a thread by Spanish lawyer Guillermo Ruiz Zapatero, it follows references to Lorenzetti's utopian Siena imagery and Manuel García-Pelayo's analysis of political myths, forming a meditation on freedom versus tyranny amid 2025's global political shifts.
• Herzen's line, from his exile writings and echoed in Isaiah Berlin's essays, underscores a liberal insight: true societal progress demands creators untainted by carceral mindsets  

TRUMP’S DILEMMA: TO BAILOUT OR NOT TO BAILOUT THE AI BUBBLE

JustDario 

Clearly, the major cause of concern lies in the overvaluation of all stocks tied to the AI bubble, starting from Nvidia, which drove the vast majority of the stock market gains for quite some time. Back in January, in “THE REAL ERA OF AI BEGINS, THE ONE OF THE AI CHARLATANS ENDS“, I warned about how the direction taken by US companies towards putting all their efforts into overbuilding a massive data center infrastructure, while ignoring the importance of software and data quality in the development of AI, would ultimately yield very little if not negligible returns despite the biblical amount of money being invested and planned to be invested in such an effort. Back at that time, investors did not immediately dismiss the huge DeepSeek breakthrough in achieving what the likes of OpenAI did with a fraction of the cost, but it did not last long, and after the April stock market rout, the euphoria was back in charge.

Acknowledging that China’s approach to building AI was the right one would have thrown a wrench into the whole narrative that allowed the likes of Nvidia and OpenAI to achieve unimaginable valuations. As a consequence, everyone on the western side of the world spent an incredible amount of resources to hide the truth and convince the investor audience of the opposite. All I am describing was corroborated by the biggest revenue round-tripping scheme among mega-cap companies ever orchestrated. A scheme that is still being called by the milder term “circular financing” that nobody dares to deny anymore. The ultimate result of all this reckless behavior, which, let’s be honest, had the sole purpose of inflating public and private companies’ valuations as much as possible, was what I described in: “THE DATA CENTERS FRENZY WILL BE REMEMBERED AS THE LARGEST WASTE OF CAPITAL IN HISTORY“

 Currently, the US government has almost $1 trillion of resources in the US TGA account. Do you think they will keep this money out of the market, watching the bubble collapse, or, like the Biden administration did twice, will they be willing to drain the US TGA account all the way down to zero in an ultimate effort to support the stock market and avoid the burst of the bubble as long as possible (ideally till US midterm elections)?

 

Politically speaking, spending public money to socialize losses of a sector that has already set itself on a path doomed to fail, that will require immense energy resources to run, and that will ultimately cause severe employment problems, won’t bode well with voters. The ultimate proof of how wrong US companies’ approach to building AI has been is demonstrated by 80% of the startups in the US currently using open source Chinese models to build their tech, not US ones (“China is quietly upstaging America with its open models“).

 

The dilemma the US administration is currently facing—to bailout or not to bailout its prominent AI players—will have to be resolved sooner or later. In my opinion, the greater the market correction caused by the bubble deflating, the greater the pressure on the US administration to do something, especially when stock losses start significantly impacting retirement savings. But for sure, whatever they will be doing will only bring temporary relief, compounding the problems in the future caused by the never-ending misplacement of capital caused by public bailouts of companies that instead should be let fail, allowing the system to cleanse and to put itself back on a more stable and sustainable footing upon which it can resume sustainably growing in the long run.

Unbearable lightness of the AI bubble

Satyajit Das 

The AI investment bubble is much bigger than those around dot-coms or sub-prime assets in the 2000s. Many aspects—from the technology to its finances—are not squaring up

 

Capital expenditure on AI is expected to total up to $5-7 trillion by 2030. It has added around 40 percent or a full percentage point to 2025 US growth. AI companies accounts for 80 percent of US stock returns. AI startup valuations based on the latest round of funding were $2.30 trillion, up from $1.69 trillion in 2024, and up from $469 billion in 2020. But AI’s capacity to generate cash and returns on the large required investment remains questionable. 

 

 Revenues would have to grow over 20 times from the current $15-20 billion a year to cover the current investment in land, building, rapidly depreciating chips, and power and water. Revenues totalling more than $1 trillion may be required to earn an adequate return. Microsoft’s Windows and Office, among the world’s most used software, generates less than $100 billion in commercial and consumer revenue. Less than 3 percent of its 800 million users currently pay to use ChatGPT.

 

In the first half of 2025, OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT, generated $4.3 billion in revenue, but spent $2 billion on sales and marketing and nearly $2.5 billion on stock-based compensation, posting an operating loss of $7.8 billion.

 

AI investment may be 17 times that of the 2000 dot-com and four times the 2008 sub-prime housing bubble. Rather than equity, it is funded by debt with the amount tied to AI totalling around $1.2 trillion, 14 percent of all investment-grade debt.

Investors have convinced themselves that the greater risk is underinvesting, not overinvesting. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos hails it a “good kind of bubble”, arguing that the money spent will bring long-term returns and deliver gigantic benefits to society—the tech-bro’s persistent bromide. But the share of used fibre-optic capacity is around 50 percent and the average global network use is 26 percent. When that boom ended, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and Amazon fell 65, 80, 88 percent, and 94 percent, respectively, taking 16, 5, 14 and 7 years to recover their 2000 peaks.

Consensual hallucinations notwithstanding, it would be surprising if the ending is different this time.