“Personally I like ageing. With age comes…WISDOM” | Brad Pitt

Quote of the Day by Brad Pitt: “Personally I like ageing. With age comes…wisdom. Give me wisdom over youth any day.”

If it is true that with age comes wisdom — and who better to affirm that, than Brad Pitt? — then there’s an obverse. When you’re younger you’re less wise. You have less wisdom. Why give the vote to 16 year olds? Their brains are still developing, let alone wise. They don’t know nuffink!

On the cusp of my ninth decade, I’m inclined to agree with Brad. But “give me wisdom over youth”…. “any day”? Hmmm…. I don’t know, Brad.

There’s heaps of things about youth that are terrific. Devil-may-care, fearlessness, and lack of wisdom….

Brad’s quote reminds me of Confucius. My favourite lines, from the Confucian Analects:

三十而立

四十而不惑

五十而知天命

六十而耳顺

七十而从心所欲，不逾矩

Sānshí érlì

sìshí ér bùhuò

wǔshí ér zhī tiānmìng

liùshí ér ěrshùn

qīshí ér cóngxīnsuǒyù, bù yú jǔ

At thirty, you can stand firm; 

at forty, you’re free from doubt; 

at fifty, you know the mandate of Heaven; 

at sixty, your ear is attuned to the truth; 

at seventy, you can follow your heart's desire, without transgressing the rules.

"Certainty brings Insanity"

An Occasional Reader accused me recently of being one of the 100% certain people.  I am one of "the stupid" according to a Bertrand Russell meme this Reader helpfully included. Or I'm "the worst" according to Yeats, below.

Of all the things that I'm roooly, roooly sensitive about being accused, perhaps being a "Certaint-ist" is one of the very worst. Right up there with being accused, by AI algos of being a "Luddite". 

Yet I often quote the W.B.Yeats line from "The Second Coming", one of the few I've committed to memory: 

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity."

Clearly quote this because I see myself as "lacking conviction", even if not all. I mean, lacking conviction, as in "not certain", absolutely not 100% convinced of a thing. 

Though of course having "passionate intensity" may not be a bad thing at all. One might not be all all "the worst" for having it, so it's a nuanced thing. But that's another issue. 

I repost my post from 22nd July, 2022, "Certainty brings insanity". And republish below:

==============

From Ann Althouse [*], I learn about the three Delphic Maxims. Shouldn’t I have known about these before? 

Does not knowing the Delphic Maxims make me an ignorant 72-year old? Or does is just mean I’m following Mao Tse-Tung, who said: “Live to old age; study to old age” (活到老学到老 Huo dao lao, Xue dao lao)?

Anyway, I do like them. All three, which are:

• “Know thyself”
• “Nothing in excess”
• “Certainty brings insanity”

I like that last one, which would be my answer to one of those quizzes “what’s your favourite hate?”. 

Which I’ve always thought my “favourite hate” is: “Blind Faith”. As in W. B. Yeats from “The Second Coming”:

“The best lack all conviction, 

the worst are full of passionate intensity”. 

Like religious nutters. Who will kill themselves while murdering innocents. How can we deal with those blinded by faith? Who have no time for other ideas, who are made crazy by absolute certainty?

As we see on the far Left and the far Right.

=====================

[*] Ann Althouse, 22nd July, 2022:

That's a cute little BBC animation that I found after that Bret Stephens column — blogged here — made me think about the old aphorism "Know thyself." Stephens was talking about the "self-satisfied elite" who didn't understand the point of view of the non-elite. It made me think: How dare these people regard themselves as elite if they are self-satisfied? They are not educated if they haven't looked into the functioning of their own mind, especially if they satisfy themselves with contempt for others.

Here's Wikipedia on "Know thyself":

The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" (Greek: γνῶθι σεαυτόν, transliterated: gnōthi seauton...) is the first of three Delphic maxims inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.... The two maxims that follow "know thyself" were "nothing to excess" and "certainty brings insanity." In Latin the phrase, "know thyself", is given as nosce te ipsum or temet nosce.

"Certainty brings insanity" is the least well-known of those aphorisms. It explains a lot!

Much more at that Wikipedia link, but — here — I'll just show  you this cool painting from the 1600s, inscribed with the Latin phrase [Nosce te Ipsum. Know thyself]:

Happy Horse….

新年快乐，心想事成，万事如意！

Xīnnián kuàilè, xīn xiǎng shì chéng, wànshì rúyì

Happy New Year! May all your wishes come true! May everything go smoothly! 

The Seven Ages of Man | Shakespeare & Confucius

 Shakespeare’s take on aging and its inevitability, from As You Like It. [Link]

Jaques:  All the world's a stage, 

    And all the men and women merely players: 
    They have their exits and their entrances; 
    And one man in his time plays many parts, 
    His acts being seven ages. 

    At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. 
    And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel 
    And shining morning face, creeping like snail 
    Unwillingly to school.

    And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad 

    Made to his mistress' eyebrow. 

    Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, 
    Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, 
    Seeking the bubble reputation 
    Even in the cannon's mouth. 

    And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, 
    With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, 
    Full of wise saws and modern instances; 
    And so he plays his part. 

    The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, 
    With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, 
    His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide 
    For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, 
    Turning again toward childish treble, pipes 
    And whistles in his sound. 

    Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, 
    Is second childishness and mere oblivion, 
    Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. 

And Confucius’ take on aging and its inevitability. From The Analects

三十而立                               Sānshí érlì

四十而不惑                           Sìshí ér bùhuò 

五十而知天命                       Wǔshí ér zhī tiānmìng

六十而耳顺                           Liùshí ér ěrshùn

七十而从心所欲，不逾矩   Qīshí ér cóngxīnsuǒyù, bù yú jǔ

At thirty, one stands firm; 

at forty, one is free from doubt; 

at fifty, one knows the mandate of Heaven; 

at sixty, one's ear is attuned to the truth; 

at seventy, one can follow one's heart's desire, without transgressing the rules.

Both the above were brought to mind by the contemplations of this lady at her channel Solo Second Half, which I saw for the first time today. 

It’s Confucius who most set me straight, from 1976 when I first studied his teachings. In this case about the stages in life, nothing being permanent or forever, of accepting the change process, of accepting aging.

It helped me when I left my senior job in Austrade back in 1995. One minute I was being called “boss”, forelocks tugged, respectful deference. The next I’m just a dude. Just a common bloke.

It’s not you they ever respected and paid obeisance to; it’s the position you had. It may seem obvious (because it is), but many folks don’t get it. Not straight away. And often not till it hurts.

Note to self: the (perhaps) sad reality: neither Shakespeare nor Confucius go past 70 years old. OTOH, that could be the good thing: we’re living longer. Which is true. But do we live longer and better?

Grok Imagines. By "Grok Imagine".

 

What's the Truth? How do you find it? (Spoiler: Rigorous Inquiry)

"How do you know what the Truth is?" asks a guest at our Boxing Day Recovery Buffett. 

"Good question," I answer. 

Before launching into a confusing, half-baked answer to her question. Where I got lost in a tangle of brambles and a wilderness of weeds, about my time as an intelligence analyst in the Australian government, back in the 1980s. Where I had to make judgements about which incoming Intelligence info should be passed on up the chain -- all the way to the Prime Minister -- and which should be binned in the Classified Trash. I mean, kind of relevant to the question, but also kind of roundabout and incoherent. 

Recovered the next morning, I sent her a text saying again "good question", and that I'd not really answered it well. I wanted to add some factors. Like: 

1.  Primary Sources: Make sure you look at, delve into, Primary Sources. And.. 

2.  Many Sources: Look at the media from Left to Right; where there's intersection is more likely to be truth. As I covered years ago, here. (See the Venn Diagram at top). 

I should have added some more. Like: 

3. Read past the Headline. I've been surprised, but now no longer, at just how many friends and rellies will happily admit to reading only the headline of an article. I had one tell me, proudly!: "I only read the headlines from the Guardian". I mean: not that you'll always get nonsense by reading only the Guardian, but for sure you'll always get only one side, the far Left side, of a story. And one of the things about seeking the Truth is that it's rarely a monopoly of just one side of an argument. If you read past the headlines, there's often times when the contents of a story itself will reverse what the headline says. 

4. Social Media: We have to rely on it, at least for some of our news and for some of our Truth-seeking. But the biases are very different across the range. Reddit is way more slanted to the Dems than is YouTube, for example. The most balanced, by Pew Research results, is X, the Twitter platform that Elon Musk bought and made Free Speech its guiding light:

The most skewed is Bluesky, the X equivalent on the Left

A good topic for the first day of the New Year, is it not? How do we know what The Truth is? So therefore...

I asked my AI about this Truth business. The first two items it mentioned were exactly those I texted the Boxing Day questioner above: Primary Sources. And Many Sources. 

Here's the rest of AI's answer to my question "How can we tell the Truth about Event X?"

When two people hold conflicting views on "Event X", determining the truth requires systematic critical thinking rather than accepting one side outright.

Start by seeking primary evidence: original documents, videos, eyewitness accounts, or data directly related to X. 

Avoid relying solely on interpretations.Consult diverse, credible sources representing all perspectives—reputable news outlets, academic studies, fact-checking sites (e.g., FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes), and expert analyses. 

Look for consensus among independent verifiers; agreement across biases strengthens reliability.

Evaluate sources for credibility: Check author expertise, potential biases, and whether claims are supported by verifiable evidence, not just opinions or anecdotes.

Identify logical fallacies, emotional appeals, or selective framing in arguments. Ask: What evidence would falsify each view? Be open to updating your beliefs.

Truth about events is often probabilistic, not absolute—aim for the most justified conclusion based on available evidence. 

Recognize personal biases may cloud judgment; steelman opposing views to test them fairly.

Absolute certainty is rare, but rigorous inquiry gets closest to reality.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, we have our first and very serious, New Year's Resolution: Let us commit to "Rigorous Inquiry"!

"My best of 72 sit downs in 2025" | Dave Rubin

Dave Rubin is a ex Leftie. Now a self-described "classical liberal". AKA, kind of middlish slightly Right. So, he platforms mostly conservative voices. 

But that’s OK. 

Because the mainstream media, aka the “legacy media”, are all on the Left. We know their views. They surround us. They are the water in which we swim. The likes of CNN, MSNBC, abc, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post…. In Britain, the BBC. In Australia, the ABC. These are the media that tell us ever day what the view of the Left is. 

Above video: Dave showing us some of his best interviews of 2025.

Merry Christmas 2025

A quarter century already …

Tanintharyi, Burma. April 2016

Jing and Peter Jones in the islands of Burma's western archipelago.

What the West must learn from the collapse of Rome | Barry Strauss

 

Rome, Rome, Rome... Ahhh, Rome, the Eternal City. Except it's not and was not, Eternal. She was the centre of a flourishing empire. Then gone. Not immediately, not quickly, but... ineluctably. Slowly, then all at once. 

Is today's collapse of the West ineluctable? Feels like it sometimes, when I'm in a pessimistic mood. Then, in my optimistic mood, I think we'll wake up to the threat of bad actors who want to destroy “the West”, the most liberal, the most tolerant, the most consequential, the most inventive, the most impactful civilisation the world has seen. 

Who are those "bad actors". Who are trying to take down the West? Well, there's the Islamic World as a whole. The 57 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, who openly and repeatedly say that the West must be destroyed; that it must bow the knee to Allah and the "Religion of Peace". 

Then there's the Global South: the "BRICS" plus. That's Brazil (though not so much), Russia (very much), India (kinda), China (definitely, in its present configuration), South Africa (just generally a bad actor, though weakening). 

The video above is a summary of a talk the Triggernometry lads had with the scholar Barry Strauss. There's so much of what he says that sounds eerily similar to what's happening today. 

Cities I lived in for over a year

All of the below I lived in for on year or more. Years I lived in each (in brackets): 

Tokyo (3) >> Rome (5) >> New York (3) >> Bonn (1) >> Canberra (10) >> Pretoria (1) >> London (3) >> Sydney (3) >> Beijing (3) >> Shanghai(1) >> Hong Kong (36)

Which leaves 6 years for all the rest. 

Continents lived in: Asia, Europe, America, Africa and Oceania. 

By far the longest in Asia: 43 years and counting. 

In total, I've been to 79 countries and visited all seven continents, including Antarctica twice. Many people have visited more countries, for sure. But I wonder how many have lived in quite as many cities for that long... 

This is just for my record. 

Tanintharyi Islams, Burma, April 2016

Jing

"Inside the NEW $300M White House Ballroom" | Beyond Facts

There's been so much negative aggro over this $300 million White House Ballroom of Donald Trump's. Including that he's "destroying the White House". In fact he's adding to it, as have many presidents before. In a pretty grand way. And he's got the money from private donors, so no taxpayer money involved. 

Now I see it, it's waaay bigger and grander and more complicated and more... just more... than I ever I imagined. You can hate on Trump all you like and even decide you don't much like his gold-plated aesthetic, but really, after watching the video above one has to admit: pretty... pretty... pretty amaaayzing!

The Japanese are weird. In a weird and wonderful way

 

The Japanese are weird. In a weird and wonderful way. 

We owned a business in Japan from 2002. I had to go there often to set it up and oversee it. 

In the day, at the office, they're super buttoned up. At night? They're crazy! In a crazy and wonderful way. 

Here they are again, being crazy with the Toyota ad. They lerve baseball! Go figure. 

What a great Ad. Kinda long, but you get into it. At least it had an actual car at the end. Not like the ill-fated super-Woke Jaguar car ad of last year... 

“Super typhoon Ragasha lashes Hong Kong” | SCMP

Waterfront, Tsimshatsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong 

Sitting here in Discovery Bay, HK, 10:00 am, Super typhoon Ragasa is just to our SSE, winds pretty strong. Ragasa is a Tagalog (Philippines) word meaning “fierce and great”. 

Byron, our labradoodle, refuses to go out for a wee-wee, so we have close 👀on him…

A woman and her child were swept into the sea when they went to the rocks to “watch the waves”…

From the free article at South China Morning Post:

Hong Kong has woken up to a downpour triggered by the highest-level No 10 warning, which shut down the city, as Super Typhoon Ragasa edges as close as 100km (62 miles) south of the city.

The weather forecaster, which upgraded the No 9 signal issued at 1.40am to the hurricane warning an hour later, has said Ragasa will be closest to the city between 6am and 9am on Wednesday.

The weather has deteriorated rapidly overnight, with winds strengthening quickly and reaching hurricane force offshore and on high ground at first.

The Observatory also warns of frequent heavy squally showers, large waves crashing along the shoreline, and a significant rise in water levels. It has urged residents to stay indoors. Keep reading…

One feather, one girl. Wow! You can't stop watching...

One also has to wonder: what a thing to spend your life perfecting... 

Silos and info bubbles | Katherine Boyle

	Katherine Boyle ⁦‪@KTmBoyle‬⁩ You can forgive people for lacking the bravery to call out the truth. I've gotten over that disappointing fact of life: that the brilliant and the elite are for the most part completely devoid of courage when it comes to confronting evil. But learning that many of these people   28/8/2025, 10:03 pm

More thoughts on what I first wrote about here some years ago: bubbles and vortices. 

What is surprising to Katherine Boyle — and to me — is not so much that some people “lack bravery”. But that many simply have not heard of the opposing view. Not that they don’t want to either support or debate a particular take on an issue. . But that they’ve never even heard of that take. This is more common on the Left than the Right, for reasons I’ve noted before. 

Also:

Koestler on Closed Systems

February 17, 2024 by David Foster

The writer Arthur Koestler (‘Darkness at Noon) was a Marxist believer and a Party member when he visited the Soviet Union in 1932.  Looking back later at his younger self, he was struck by the way in which he’d had a kind of filter, a ‘mental sorting machine’, which allowed him to justify the not-so-nice things that he had seen and to fit everything into his belief about the rightness and beneficiality of Communism.  These reflections led him to thoughts on the nature of intellectually closed systems.

A closed system has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of casuistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. Read on… 

Typhoon Wipha: big tree crushes delivery driver …

	李老师不是你老师 ⁦‪@whyyoutouzhele‬⁩ 被大树砸到的外卖骑手： pic.x.com/APDBhcOxOx   21/7/2025, 10:30 am

Sent from my iPad

Super Typhoon Wipha hits Hong Kong

Knocked down our 22-yo Traveller Palms

Jogging by the Cultural Centre in Kowloon

Yikes

A number of trees also down in our Discovery Bay

Typhoon Wipha. Thai name meaning “splendour” or “radiance”. 

A rare T10 typhoon (most get up to T8 only), with a direct hit on Hong Kong. 

South China Morning Post coverage. Internet archive: Wayback machine. 

See my earlier posts on Typhoons in Hong Kong. Includes discussion of the effects on Climate change on the severity of typhoons in Asia and Hong Kong. 

• 6 August 2023
• 21 December 2023
• 25 March 2024

Reheated: "We all came off a boat...." Well, no, not really. [Reposting from 26 March 2010]

[The original post is here]

The same old friend that took me to task for living in a place (Hong Kong) which was lacking in "soul" and had "no empathy for the have nots", which I countered here , sent me the above cartoon, part of a mail-round, which had the comment "Guess we all came off a boat some time ago”. 

To be frank I found the cartoon and the comment a bit perplexing, the more so the more I thought about it.  I presume that it's meant to be a call for tolerance, for tolerance of all the immigrants who would come to Australia for a new life.  We should remember that we "all came off a boat", we were all given the opportunity in the Lucky Country and we should open our hearts to those who would just do the same today.

But then... we didn't all come off a boat, did we?  I mean what about the Aboriginals in this cartoon?  The time is 1850 and Australian Aboriginals had been in Australia for about 30 or 40 thousand years before that, all presumably born en pays, and even their ancestors came across a land bridge, so they reckon now, though some may well have had some form of canoe.

But let's not quibble on that point.

What of the meaning of the cartoon?  Is is that the Aboriginals were tolerant of the British convicts, and that therefore we should be tolerant of immigrants too?  If it is indeed true that the Aboriginals were so tolerant -- "Oh, what the hell, there's only a handful of 'em" -- then it didn't turn out too well for them, did it?  After all, caucasian Australians self-flagillate and are excoriated by Aboriginals, for having decimated the Aboriginal population and devastated their traditional way of life and culture.  That's why the Rudd government said "Sorry", after all.  So, it didn't turn out too well, did it, this tolerance for the immigrant?  The conclusion would seem to be, not tolerance but to fight.

And isn't that what the Aboriginals did anyway?  There were plenty of Aboriginals who didn't treat the "invaders", these Europeans, with the equanimity of those in the cartoon.  The Aboriginal resistance to European immigrants is now widely accepted and celebrated across the board, including by the same Left that finds in this cartoon a call for tolerance of any new immigrants.

Puzzling, no?  [or maybe I've just misread the cartoon and the drawer means us to draw exactly the conclusion that letting anyone into one's country can only have a lousy outcome?]

Myself, I have no qualms about immigrants to Australia, not for anyone from Asia, from Africa, from Europe, from anywhere really, as long as they do so according to Australian law.  

There's just one group that we should be restricting and that's Muslim immigration, for unlike any of the other waves of immigration we've had in Australia, Islamic immigration has no desire to integrate, but rather to bring Sharia to our country.  Sure there may be plenty of fine and "moderate" Muslims, but if they are pious, then they are bound to support the spread of Sharia and that's in evidence in every country with even small minorities of Muslim immigrants.