“Bajakian talks red zone philosophy - ESPN.com” plus 3 more |
- Bajakian talks red zone philosophy - ESPN.com
- Philosophy, get hip: "The Examined Life" comes to the Herbst - San Francisco Bay Guardian
- Indies Group Takes Stand, Will Not Sip Wine From LimeWire’s Open Bar - Billboard Business News
- Buffett's Words of Wisdom - Motley Fool
| Bajakian talks red zone philosophy - ESPN.com Posted: 22 Feb 2010 10:36 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | ||||||||||||||
| Philosophy, get hip: "The Examined Life" comes to the Herbst - San Francisco Bay Guardian Posted: 22 Feb 2010 10:22 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.
In new documentary The Examined Life, eight of the most famous minds in contemporary philosophy -- Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek -- seem almost unintimidating. Detached from the props of intellectual life and presented in public setting away from rapt crowds, miked podiums, and the protective custody of academia, these philosophers appear comfortingly average, for entire milliseconds. For instance, on a sunny afternoon, post-structuralist scholar Judith Butler could almost be any other leather-jacketed San Francisco Missionite with a cool haircut ambling down Clarion Alley, perhaps en route to Thrift Town for some more leather jackets. That is, until she begins to discuss, in a slow and deliberate manner with eyes fixed intently into the middle distance, the body's morphologies as experienced by the subject. Cover blown. Examined Life director Astra Taylor will be appearing -- along with philosopher Judith Butler and activist-artist Sunaura Taylor (who appears with Butler during the segment filmed in Clarion Alley) -- at a screening of her film at the Herbst Theater on Thu/25, at 7:30 PM. The three women will participate in a discussion and Q&A session following the screening. In the last few years, Astra Taylor has become known for her documentaries about philosophy. Previously, she directed the film Zizek!. I hold Zizek! partly responsible for introducing American hipsters to the Slovenian Lacanian-Marxist with saliva glands as hyperactive as his intellect who so rapidly became for youngish creativeish urbanites a sort of Mitteleuropean Moses to Marx's Abraham. As a documentary filmmaker, Taylor is no neutral observer; she openly reveres her subjects. Though it has been criticized (A. O. Scott of the New York Times said the film was "too glamorized by its brainy stars to engage them critically"), Taylor's reverence is fine by me. These eight philosophers are inspiring people who make it their business to think their way through some of life's most difficult questions. Furthermore, I prefer to keep my philosophers on a pedestal, even when they're rambling about jazz in the back of someone's Volvo (ahem, Cornel West). To be fair, Cornel West could talk about his favorite lunch foods and I would find it interesting. 'Cerebrities' opining about anything, literally anything, makes for entertainment. In this film, the entertainment value is heightened by some particularly bathetic physical settings. Taylor aims to represent her philosophers outside of the stereotypical realm of academe, and she attempts this by filming them in public places that are both neutral to the philosophers' private lives and exist outside outside the structured environment of the workplace. In The Examined Life, Appiah is interviewed while waiting around at the Toronto airport. Hardt is filmed rowing a wooden boat, with some difficultly, on a lake in Central Park that is congested with loud, unseemly geese. And, not to be outdone, Zizek requested his segment be filmed at the dump. But, funny public settings notwithstanding, there is a discernible soapbox in each section of The Examined Life, one all eight philosophers in the film are given time to use carte blanche. Each thinker is provided an open forum to deliver decontextualized soliloquies as if at an imaginary podium in front of some metaphysical audience, and the camera eyes this dotingly. Pretentious? Yes, but forgivably so. With their contributions to their disciplines, these eight thinkers have the right to believe they have important things to say. Watching them, I am inspired to think more critically and rigorously, perhaps from a contact high off the glaring epistemological glow. In the middle of all this talking, the philosophers do experience occasional challenges in presenting their ideas in a way that make sense to listeners. This is to be expected; even if you limit the scope of the discussion, it is impossible to unpack an 'examined life' in the time it takes to watch a movie. I commend these philosophers for trying at all. I also commend them for managing to not be dull, even when in their labyrinthine monologues they've lost me completely. For those interested, I encourage you to attend the screening at the Herbst Theater. If philosophy is the enormous pharmacy we raid to cure ourselves of an unexamined existence, and if an actual philosophy class would be akin to the smallpox vaccine, then The Examined Life is the equivalent a mild herbal supplement. While this film won't heal anyone of a painfully unexamined existence, a dose of it has its benefits. Think of it as a gateway drug. A documentary may proffer only a minute, highly mediated glimpse into how a philosopher thinks, but it does have the power to ask an non-philosophizing audience to think more philosophically. Herbst Theater Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | ||||||||||||||
| Indies Group Takes Stand, Will Not Sip Wine From LimeWire’s Open Bar - Billboard Business News Posted: 22 Feb 2010 02:18 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. |
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | |||||||||||||
| Buffett's Words of Wisdom - Motley Fool Posted: 22 Feb 2010 01:07 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Recs 2When you mention Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, and value investing in the same conversation, you're likely to get everyone nodding and going along with what you say. That's because agreeing with a philosophy is the easy part. But actually understanding and applying the approach of that philosophy is another story. Aside from what he's currently buying and selling, Buffett has no investment-related secrets. If you read Graham's The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, along with everything Buffett has written, and then work on truly understanding and applying their principles to investing, you should be able to outperform the vast majority of investors. Graham sums up how to invest intelligently when he says, "Investment is most prudent when it is most businesslike." Apply that reasoning to your investment considerations, and you will already have a head start. But to elaborate on that idea, let's turn to some words of wisdom from the Oracle of Omaha himself. "I am a better investor because I am a businessman and a better businessman because I am an investor." Running a business and making an investment go hand in hand. It's that simple. You wouldn't buy a business based only on rapidly increasing profits, nor should you invest in a company on that one metric. Instead, the prudent businessperson and the intelligent investor would scrutinize the balance sheet and determine, for example, whether earnings growth has come at the expense of increased receivables as a result of poor credit policy. Furthermore, as any businessperson realizes, earnings are easily manufactured, whereas cash is real. Buffett's 1973 investment in Washington Post is a wonderful example of a businesslike approach to investing. The idea was simple. The Post owned a wonderful collection of media assets that Buffett concluded were worth about $400 million. The company, meanwhile, was selling for just $80 million. Was it a great business? Yes. Was there a satisfactory margin of safety? Yes. Case closed. "Never ask a barber if you need a haircut." Here, Buffett was alluding to investment bankers and analysts. Let's face it: These folks get paid when you buy what they're selling. To be fair, there are many excellent investment bankers and analysts who truly offer a valuable service. Buffett's illuminating point was that you already know the answer you're going to get, and it will be determined by everything but rationality. "I don't try to jump over 7-foot hurdles: I look for 1-foot hurdles that I can step over." Buffett's critical advantage over the pack is that he focuses on the boundaries of his circle of competence rather than the size of his circle -- although his is still probably bigger than most. It's illuminating that one of the most talented investment minds of our time made the bulk of his fortune through businesses such as insurance through GEICO, soft drinks through Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO), candy through See's, razor blades through Procter & Gamble's (NYSE: PG) Gillette, and a host of others that are simple to understand. "We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we will wait, we'll wait indefinitely." Buffett has always said you should never allow the stock markets to guide you, because the market is really there to serve you. One of Buffett's greatest attributes is that he can be patient about investments until the time is right, regardless of how long that time may be. In one case, Buffett waited nearly four years to make a significant move -- in 1970, he folded his partnership and made virtually no public-market investments until 1974, when the price-to-earnings ratio of the S&P went from around 20 to 7. At that point, Buffett began buying all over the place. During that time, Buffett became famous for saying, "I was selling stocks at three times earnings to buy stocks at two times earnings." The approach worked: Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A) (NYSE: BRK-B) shares rose from $40 to $420 per share from 1975 to 1980, for about a 57% annual rate of return! More recently, despite having put billions into a highly profitable purchase of Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) preferred shares, Berkshire also has been adding to existing positions in existing holdings like Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) and Becton Dickinson (NYSE: BDX). Yet even when numerous opportunities exist, waiting for a better deal is something he has successfully done time and time again. "When a management team with a reputation for brilliance joins a business with poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." A truly great business can survive with mediocre management. You should always consider that at some point, less-than-stellar management will find its way to the helm of any business.
Words to invest by
Want some smart value stock ideas? Check out Foolish commentator John Rosevear and his six value stocks for an overheated market. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | ||||||||||||||
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