One of the sacred tenets of Pat’s moral code was that it’s unacceptable to let a hangover interfere with one’s duties and commitments.

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He was one of those rare individuals who can’t be bought at any price. Although he had no quals about making a boatload of money if it happened to mesh with his master plan, Pat was impervious to greed. His belief that other things in life too priority over amassing wealth never faltered. But if Tillman was uncommonly resistant to the temptations of the baser human appetites, and was thereby well defended against attempts by others to manipulate him into doing their bidding with such enticements, he found it nearly impossible to resist appeals to his sense of decency and justice. Paradoxically, this latter trait would ultimately prove to be his downfall.

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My job is challenging, enjoyable, and strokes my vanity enough to fool me into thinking it’s important.

---

My moods at this point, with the exception of constant loneliness & guilt associated with my separation from Marie, vary depending on how I’m doing at my tasks. Blow the land navigation, feel bad for a few hours; do something to help someone or get my marching calls correctly, feel good for a few hours.

---

I’m somewhat put off by the lack of letters from my friends at home… No question I am overly sensitive, but… It’s funny, these last 6-7 years I’ve noticed some of my close friends putting governors on our relationship. In most cases it is I who calls, I who sets up dinner, I who makes the effort. Why this is the case is not exactly clear… I care about my friends openly and unselfishly and–though I realize I’m sounding like a woman–am bothered by their apparent lack of interest.

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Kevin and I are forced to yell and swear as opposed to recommend and suggest… Perhaps I’m not as good a leader as I think.

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Everything has to do with time in battalion, time of rank–no comment on ability, aptitude, skill… I bring up “rule break” only because I want someone to do this for us. Realize we are not normal privates, break the fucking rules, and put us in a position to add value. Fuck this place.

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Are you the new guy in Second Platoon? My name is Pat Tillman. Relax, this stuff will pass. It’ll be over soon. Nice to meet you.

---

 

• Check for ceiling fans
• Check for lights tied to switches
• Check ceiling height
• Note that carpet, while desirable, may be worse than hardwood + rug because of previous tenant’s dirt
• Check for pull-up bar readiness
• See during day, specifically to understand natural light

Mercy was just a word. I never thought I needed it. Not as much as other people do.

---

I revolted against goodness. Thought it had deceived me. Thought I could do better than others. Didn’t need what made life sweet for them. I’m not who I thought I was. Am I a good person? Even want to be? Or just seem like one so people will like me?

---

 

 

HERE

“When you are in pain you have to stay in the pain to see what it has to teach you.”
“In those moments of pain you can either be broken or broken open. To be broken you get calloused over. To be broken open, you make yourself even more vulnerable even though it’s a hard time.”

A period of rupture and repair is how people grow.

 

It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.

---

Chronology is one method only and not the best.

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Every man assumes that what is valuable to himself must be coveted by others.

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sent me cowering inside a shed of excuses.

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I suppose it was surrender. Who is strong enough to escape their fate? Who can avoid what they must become?

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No man believes what he does not feel to be true.

(more…)

Lose an hour in the morning and you search for it all day.

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Love is thing of heart. Or love is like this sake: night of joy, yes, but in cold morning, headache, sick stomach. A man should love concubine, so when love dies he say, “Goodbye,” easy and no injury. Marriage is different: marriage is matter of head… rank… business… bloodline.

---

“Twould bend company rules on private trade, aye, but the trees what survive cruel winds are those what do bend, eh, are they not?”
“A tidy metaphor does not make a wrong thing right.”

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Tain’t good intentions what paves the road to hell: it’s self-justifyin’s.

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Two hours pass at the speed of one but exhaust Jacob like four

(more…)

Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?

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I understood why his father did not let him fight in front of the others. How could any ordinary man take pride in his own skill when there was this in the world?

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You shall do wrong unto others and others shall do wrong unto you. And these opposing wrongs will become your chains. The wrongs you have done unto others will be bound to you in the form of guilt, and the wrongs that others have done unto you in the form of indignation. The teachings of Jesus are there to free you from both. To free you from your guilt through atonement and from your indignation through forgiveness. Only once you have freed yourself from both of these chains may you begin to live your life with love in your heart and serenity in your step.

---

Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious. For time is a mountain and upon seeing its steep incline, the idle will lie down among the lilies of the field and hope that someone passes by with a pitcher of lemonade. What the worthy endeavor  requires is planning, effort, attentiveness, and the willingness to clean up.

---

For what is kindness but the performance of an act that is both beneficial to another and unrequired? There is no kindness in paying a bill. There is no kindness in getting up at dawn to slop the pigs, or milk the cows, or gather eggs from the henhouse. For that matter, there is no kindness in making dinner, or in cleaning the kitchen after your father heads upstairs without so much as a word of thanks.

There is no kindess in lathcing the doors and turning out the light, or in picking up the clothes from the bathrrom floor in order to put them in the hamper. There is no kindness in taking care of a household because your only sister had the good sense to get herself married and move to Pensacola.

Nope, I said to myself while climbing into bed and switching off the light, there is no kindness in any of that.

For kindness begins where necessity ends.

(more…)

I would win and be doing interviews and then I’d come home to my hotel and be completely alone.

Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children. A gambler’s actual wealth varies wildly.

---

The code that Morse devised for his telegraph was relatively good because the most common letter, E, is represented with the shortest code, a single dot. Uncommon letters, like Z, have longer codes with multiple dots and dashes. This makes most messages more concise than they were in some of the early telegraphic codes. This principle, and many more subtle ones, figures in today’s codes for compressing digital pictures, audio, and video.

---

Assuming you wanted your spouse to bring home Shamu, you wouldn’t just say, “Pick up Shamu!” You would need a good explanation. The more improbable the message, the less “compressible” it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon’s point: the essence of a message is its improbability.

---

Collectively, the world’s investors own 100% of all the world’s stock. That means that the average return of all the world’s investors has to be identical to the average return of the stock market as a whole. It can’t be otherwise.

Even more clearly, the average return of passive investors is equal to the average stock market return.

Subtract the return of passive investors from the whole. This leaves the return of the active investors … Collectively, active investors must do no better or worse than the passive investors.

Active investing is therefore a zero-sum game. The only way for one active investor to do better than average is for another active investor to do worse than average. You can’t squirm out of this conclusion by imagining that the active investors’ profits come at the expense of those wimpy passive investors who settle for the average return. The average return of the passive investors is exactly the same as that of the active investors, for the reason just outlined.

---

Take Shannon’s pipe dream of turning a dollar into $2,048. You buy a stock for $1. It doubles every year for eleven years (100 percent annual return!) and then you sell it for $2,048. That triggers capital gains tax on the $2,047 profit. At a 20 percent tax rate, you’d owe the government $409. This leaves you $1,639. That is the same as getting a 96 percent return, tax-free, for eleven years. The tax knocks only 4 percentage points off the pretax compound return rate.

Suppose instead that you run the same dollar into $2,048 through a lot of trading. You realize profit each year, so you have to pay capital taxes each year. The first year, you go from $1 to $2 and owe tax on the $1 profit. For simplicity, pretend that the short-term tax rate is also 20 percent (it’s generally higher). Then you pay the government 20 cents and end the first year with $1.80 rather than $2.00.

This means that you are not doubling your money but increasing it by a factor of 1.8 – after taxes. At the end of eleven years you will have not 2^11 but 1.8^11. That comes to about $683. That’s less than half what the buy-and-hold investor is left with after taxes.

(more…)