Basel Quotes

We’re all broken. We all have cracks. It’s not about making it through life in one piece it’s about narrowing the gap between the fissures so we don’t shatter.” Ted Basel to Jo Nehr in my next "Surrender" story

I hope you left your modesty at the door because if you didn’t, it will only get in the way of what I have planned for you tonight." Ted Basel to Jo Nehr in my next "Surrender" story.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher. His writing included critiques of religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive style and displaying a fondness for aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. Nietzsche began his career as a philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems, which would plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of a serious mental illness, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn

...he was seething suddenly with remorse, because of having done what he'd done and because he hadn't done more. Seething with outrage too, about "Basel" more than anything--as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he'd got wrong, as much by what he'd been making up as by what he was reporting. It was the two in combination that were particularly galling, especially where the line was thin and everything was given the most distorted meaning.

Between May 2003 and June 2004, while the CPA was in operation, Basel was in charge of all the cash flights and said he never lost a single dollar. All of the cash that arrived at the Baghdad airport got to its destination downtown, he insisted. “Absolutely, all the money I guarded got to where it was supposed to go,” Basel said, emphatically.

(Basel Accords) to set capital ratios. Under these guidelines, the

La Torino, la începutul crizei sale, Nietzsche se năpustea fără întrerupere către oglindă, se privea, se întorcea, se privea în ea din nou. în trenul care-l ducea la Basel, singurul lucru pe care-l cerea stăruitor era tot o oglindă. Numai ştia cine era, se căuta, şi el, cel atît de legat de ideea păstrării propriei identităţi, atît de avid de sine, nu maidispunea, ca să se regăsească, decît de cel mai grosolan, de cel mai jalnic dintre mijloace.

In 1988 bankers from around the world met in Basel, Switzerland, to agree on international banking regulations, and published a 30-page agreement (known as Basel I). Sixteen years later, the Basel II accord was an order of magnitude larger, at 347 pages, and Basel III was twice as long as its predecessor.

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence co-operative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.” Carroll Quigley

Ted Basel to Jo Nehr, in Required Surrender, He kissed her shoulder. “Forget the rest of the world while you’re here with me. It’s only you and I because no one else matters.” He fisted a hand her hair and the firm tugged got her blood singing. “I’ll never judge you. Everything you do, you do for me. For my pleasure, remember that.

IN 1959, Oppenheimer attended a conference in Rheinfelden, West Germany, sponsored by the Congress on Cultural Freedom. He and twenty other world-renowned intellectuals gathered in the luxurious Saliner Hotel on the banks of the Rhine near Basel to discuss the fate of the Western industrialized world. Safe in this cloistered environment, Oppenheimer broke his silence on nuclear weapons and spoke with uncharacteristic clarity about how they were seen and valued in American society. “What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life,” he asked, but “which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?

One sunny day, when Jung was twelve, he was traversing the Münsterplatz in Basel, admiring the sun shining on the newly restored glazed roof tiles of the cathedral. He then felt the approach of a terrible, sinful thought, which he pushed away. He was in a state of anguish for several days. Finally, after convincing himself that it was God who wanted him to think this thought, just as it had been God who had wanted Adam and Eve to sin, he let himself contemplate it, and saw God on his throne unleashing an almighty turd on the cathedral, shattering its new roof and smashing the cathedral. With this, Jung felt a sense of bliss and relief such as he had never experienced before. He felt that it was an experience of the "direct living God, who stands omnipotent and free above the Bible and Church." He felt alone before God, and that his real responsibility commenced then.

Well Basel hadn't eaten all day and I assumed that you hadn't either, so I thought you might be hungry too. Besides I am no War Lord, no dictator, no terrorist, no militia group. I am a single mom, this is what I do. This......is what I do. I mean I don't normally dodge bullets or tie people up or any of those things. I am a mom and you know what? Sometimes that job is harder than any job that is out there. So do you want to food or not?! Piper, Diamonds in the Sea

I zoned out while staring at the bright jade beads that clung to her neck on a twist of thick silver. They looked expensive. Probably a gift after one of Tobias’s infidelities. I wanted that timeline: tennis bracelet for the bartender at King Size, a Mercedes-Benz S-Class for the stripper in Basel, an Oscar de la Renta gown after the stewardess over the Atlantic – or more likely Claire had a contract drawn up demanding a cheque be deposited in her personal bank account for each indiscretion.

Even so, little separation between the soteriological and the humanitarian motifs was in evidence during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The missionaries persisted in the pre-Enlightenment tradition of the indissoluble unity of “evangelization” and “humanization” (cf van der Linde 1973), of “service to the soul” and “service to the body” (Nergaard 1988:34–40), of proclaiming the gospel and spreading a “beneficent civilization” (Rennstich 1982a, 1982b). For Blumhardt of the Basel Mission this clearly included “reparation for injustice committed by Europeans, so that to some extent the thousand bleeding wounds could be healed which were caused by the Europeans since centuries through their most dirty greediness and most cruel deceitfulness” (quoted by Rennstich 1982a:95; cf 1982b:546). And Henry Venn, famous General Secretary of the British CMS, urged missionaries to take their stand between the oppressor and the oppressed, between the tyranny of the system and the morally and physically threatened masses of the people to whom they went (cf Rennstich 1982b:545).

You really don’t believe that anything can have a value of its own beyond what function it serves for human beings?” Resaint said. “Value to who?” Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a planet in some remote galaxy—a lush, seething, glittering planet covered with stratospheric waterfalls, great land-sponges bouncing through the valleys, corals budding in perfect niveous hexagons, humming lichens glued to pink crystals, prismatic jellyfish breaching from the rivers, titanic lilies relying on tornadoes to spread their pollen—a planet full of complex, interconnected life but devoid of consciousness. “Are you telling me that, if an asteroid smashed into this planet and reduced every inch of its surface to dust, nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?” “But the universe is bloody huge—stuff like that must happen every minute. You can’t go on strike over it. Honestly it sounds to me to like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles. Well, it does. If you’re this worried about species extinction, wait until you hear about the heat death of the universe.” “I would be upset about the heat death of the universe too if human beings were accelerating the rate of it by a hundred times or more.” “And if a species’ position with respect to us doesn’t matter— you know, those amoebae they found that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, if they’re just as important as Chiu Chiu or my parents’ dog, even though nobody ever gets anywhere near them—if distance in space doesn’t matter, why should distance in time? If we don’t care about whether their lives overlap with our lives, why even worry about whether they exist simultaneously with us? Your favorite wasp—Adelo-midgy-midgy—” “Adelognathus marginatum—” “It did exist. It always will have existed. Extinction can’t take that away. It went through its nasty little routine over and over again for millions and millions of years. The show was a big success. So why is it important that it’s still running at the same time you are? Isn’t that centering the whole thing on human beings, which is exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing? I mean, for that matter—reality is all just numbers anyway, right? I mean underneath? That’s what people say now. So why are you so down on the scans? Hacks aside. Why is it so crucial that these animals exist right now in an ostensibly meat-based format, just because we do? My point is you talk about extinction as if you’re taking this enlightened post-human View from Nowhere but if we really get down to it you’re definitely taking a View from Karin Resaint two arms two legs one head born Basel Switzerland year of our lord two-thousand-and-when-ever.” But Resaint wasn’t listening anymore.

Ostholm’s managerial compass at Astra had been consistent for twenty-four years. Once, he spotted a distraught person, possibly Swiss, at Basel airport. When he walked up to him, he learnt that the young man had failed in his job interview at a pharmaceutical company. The researcher had an idea of preventing acid secretion in the stomach by shutting down proton pumps. After Ostholm showed interest, right there at the airport, the man drew a diagram to explain the idea. Ostholm asked if he had a molecule in mind. Convinced by the man’s reply, he instantly wrote him an offer letter and invited him to Stockholm. Astra was already working on anti-ulcers and the drug that Ostholm’s offer letter propelled was the multi-billion-dollar anti-ulcer drug Omeprazole which turned around Astra’s fortunes. If Ostholm sensed a scientist’s passion, he would brook no barrier to his/her support.

The growth of international bureaucracies with power to determine many aspects of people’s lives is a dominant feature of our age. Even the European Union is increasingly powerless, as it merely transmits to its member states rules set at higher levels. Food standards, for example, are decided by a United Nations body called the Codex Alimentarius. The rules of the banking industry are set by a committee based in Basel in Switzerland. Financial regulation is set by the Financial Stability Board in Paris. I bet you have not heard of the World Forum for the Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations, a subsidiary of the UN. Even the weather is to be controlled by Leviathan in the future. In an interview in 2012, Christiana Figueres, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said she and her colleagues were inspiring government, private sector and civil society to make the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken: ‘The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation.’ Yet

Aveam un prieten de studenţie, a cărui familie locuia la Schaffhausen. Vrând să-l vizitez odată de la Basel - era în 1896, după moartea tatălui meu -, mama mi-a spus : <> Asta am şi făcut, iar când am intrat în casă, am văzut pe scări o fată, de vreo paisprezece ani, cu codiţe. Am ştiut pe loc : Iat-o pe soţia mea! Am fost puternic zguduit; căci, deşi n-o văzusem decât un moment scurt, ştiusem imediat cu o certitudine absolută că urma să-mi devină soţie. Îmi mai amintesc şi astăzi exact că îndată după aceea i-am spus asta prietenului meu. Bineînţeles, n-a făcut decât să râdă de mine. I-am replicat : <> Când, şase ani mai târziu, am cerut-o în căsătorie pe Emma Rauschenbach, am fost şi eu mai întâi refuzat, la fel ca bunicul meu la vremea lui. Dar, spre deosebire de el, eu n-aveam nici cârciumă familiară în care să mă refugiez, nici chelneriţă atrăgătoare, nici nu eram profesor titular cu o sarcină clar conturată şi promiţătoare în faţa mea, ci un simplu medic secundar cu un viitor nebulos. De ce să fiu scutit de dezamăgiri în le meilleur des mondes possibles? - după cum a adăugat nr. 2. După câteva săptămâni, foaia s-a întors însă, şi <>-ul s-a transformat într-un <>, iar astfel personalitatea mea nr.1 s-a afirmat. A devenit, în ceea ce mă priveşte, un <> spus vieţii, iar nr. 2 a dispărut pentru unsprezece ani din mintea mea.

The radial patterning of Protestantism allows us to use a county’s proximity to Wittenberg to isolate—in a statistical sense—that part of the variation in Protestantism that we know is due to a county’s proximity to Wittenberg and not to greater literacy or other factors. In a sense, we can think of this as an experiment in which different counties were experimentally assigned different dosages of Protestantism to test for its effects. Distance from Wittenberg allows us to figure out how big that experimental dosage was. Then, we can see if this “assigned” dosage of Protestantism is still associated with greater literacy and more schools. If it is, we can infer from this natural experiment that Protestantism did indeed cause greater literacy.16 The results of this statistical razzle-dazzle are striking. Not only do Prussian counties closer to Wittenberg have higher shares of Protestants, but those additional Protestants are associated with greater literacy and more schools. This indicates that the wave of Protestantism created by the Reformation raised literacy and schooling rates in its wake. Despite Prussia’s having a high average literacy rate in 1871, counties made up entirely of Protestants had literacy rates nearly 20 percentile points higher than those that were all Catholic.18 FIGURE P.2. The percentage of Protestants in Prussian counties in 1871.17 The map highlights some German cities, including the epicenter of the Reformation, Wittenberg, and Mainz, the charter town where Johannes Gutenberg produced his eponymous printing press. These same patterns can be spotted elsewhere in 19th-century Europe—and today—in missionized regions around the globe. In 19th-century Switzerland, other aftershocks of the Reformation have been detected in a battery of cognitive tests given to Swiss army recruits. Young men from all-Protestant districts were not only 11 percentile points more likely to be “high performers” on reading tests compared to those from all-Catholic districts, but this advantage bled over into their scores in math, history, and writing. These relationships hold even when a district’s population density, fertility, and economic complexity are kept constant. As in Prussia, the closer a community was to one of the two epicenters of the Swiss Reformation—Zurich or Geneva—the more Protestants it had in the 19th century. Notably, proximity to other Swiss cities, such as Bern and Basel, doesn’t reveal this relationship. As is the case in Prussia, this setup allows us to finger Protestantism as driving the spread of greater literacy as well as the smaller improvements in writing and math abilities.

Jung was at first put off by Gross’ ideas about sexual liberation, believing that sexual repression was necessary for civilization. Yet Gross’ charisma soon overcame Jung’s antipathy, and the proper Swiss came to feel that the anarchic Gross was like a twin brother. He spent hours with him, taking time away from his other patients, and the two fell to analyzing each other. On one occasion, as with his first conversation with Freud, Jung and Gross talked for twelve hours straight. Gross introduced Jung to the ideas he absorbed in Schwabing’s cafés16 and amidst the sun worshippers on Monte Verità, among them paganism and the notion of an ancient matriarchal society, that had been advocated by Johann Bachofen, like Jung a Baseler. The rather straight-laced Jung found himself questioning his whole attitude to life, society, marriage, and the family;

New challenges beyond navigation have spawned new conventions and institutions in the Rhine and Danube basins. A separate International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine (ICPR) was set up in 1950 as a permanent intergovernmental body among the co-riparian states. But the ICPR began fighting pollution of the Rhine in earnest only after a 1986 accident at a Basel plant. For a long time, industrial and domestic wastewater flowed untreated into the Rhine, earning it the sobriquet, “the Sewer of Europe.” The Basel accident spewed thirty tons of herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, and dyes into the river, turning a large stretch of it red and destroying some fish species.

dacă vreţi să aflaţi tot. - Dacă crezi că e necesar... - Este. Mai ales dacă vreţi să ştiţi ce trebuie să căutaţi în acele interceptări, replică Burckhardt, şi dacă vreţi să vă faceţi o idee a necazurilor pe care povestea asta le poate aduce Elveţiei. - Dă-i înainte. - Bine. Pe 26 iunie 1940, la patru săptămâni după capitularea forţelor armate belgiene, regele lor, ajuns prizonier al Wermachtului german, i-a trimis un mesaj personal lui Hitler prin care îl informa că, anterior izbucnirii războiului, a fost efectuat un transport masiv de aur aparţinând regatului belgian către Banque de France din Paris, pentru siguranţă. După informaţiile sale, aurul fusese depus într-o ascunzătoare din vecinătatea oraşului Bordeaux. Scrisoarea continua prin a-l în cunoştinţa pe Hitler că el, Leopold al IlI-lea, ar fi foarte recunoscător dacă Hitler ar putea face ceva în sensul returnării aurului către proprietarul de drept. Până aici, toate bune. Mai întâi, cât de mare era acea cantitate de aur belgian? Şi cine îl controla? Conform armistiţiului din 22 iunie 1940 dintre Franţa şi Germania, s-a convenit ca guvernul mareşalului Petain s.l exercite de la Vichy toate prerogativele administrării civile asupra îiu regii Franţe, inclusiv asupra teritoriilor de peste mări, deci şi asupra Acest ordin a fost dat de Roosevelt în Ordonanţa Executivă nr. 8785 (vezi Paul Erdman, ţtviss-American Economic Relations, Basel, Tubingen, 1959, p. Băncii Franţei. In consecinţă, în urma ordinelor lui Hitler, Berlinul a trimis celor din Vichy un mesaj urgent prin care solicitau detalii asupra aurului belgian. Răspunsul a venit imediat şi a depăşit evaluările nemţilor. După cei din Vichy, cantitatea de aur în discuţie se ridica la... Burckhardt se opri, scoase din geantă un dosar, îl deschise şi citi: - 4 944 de lăzi conţinând, în total, 221 730 kilograme de aur pur. În plus, Franţa mai deţinea 57 000 kilograme ale Băncii Naţionale a Poloniei şi 10 000 kilograme ale băncilor naţionale ale Luxemburgului, Lituaniei, Letoniei, Norvegiei şi Cehoslovaciei. Burckhardt închise dosarul. - Problema era că nici un gram din toată această masă enormă de aur nu se mai afla în Franţa. Cu patru zile înainte ca Franţa să capituleze, toată cantitatea de aur - plus cel aparţinând Franţei - fusese încărcată în portul Brest la bordul a două crucişătoare care, ulterior, au dispărut în Atlantic. Planul iniţial, încheiat în urma unei înţelegeri

Say Bank A is holding $10 million in A-minus-rated IBM bonds. It goes to Bank B and makes a deal: we’ll pay you $50,000 a year for five years and in exchange, you agree to pay us $10 million if IBM defaults sometime in the next five years—which of course it won’t, since IBM never defaults. If Bank B agrees, Bank A can then go to the Basel regulators and say, “Hey, we’re insured if something goes wrong with our IBM holdings. So don’t count that as money we have at risk. Let us lend a higher percentage of our capital, now that we’re insured.” It’s a win-win. Bank B makes, basically, a free $250,000. Bank A, meanwhile, gets to lend out another few million more dollars, since its $10 million in IBM bonds is no longer counted as at-risk capital. That was the way it was supposed to work. But two developments helped turn the CDS from a semisensible way for banks to insure themselves against risk into an explosive tool for turbo leverage across the planet. One is that no regulations were created to make sure that at least one of the two parties in the CDS had some kind of stake in the underlying bond. The so-called naked default swap allowed Bank A to take out insurance with Bank B not only on its own IBM holdings, but on, say, the soon-to-be-worthless America Online stock Bank X has in its portfolio. This is sort of like allowing people to buy life insurance on total strangers with late-stage lung cancer—total insanity. The other factor was that there were no regulations that dictated that Bank B had to have any money at all before it offered to sell this CDS insurance.

Our other big debate involved the “bogey,” the capital level we would force banks to meet in a worst-case scenario. We all agreed we needed a new measuring stick that emphasized common equity, despite the legal and logistical hurdles of establishing new capital rules in just two months. The last set of international rules, known as Basel II, had taken nearly a decade to finalize.

To criminals imprisoned in the Basel jail, Barth preached that the first Christian community was composed on Golgotha: “They crucified him with the criminals.” Which is more amazing, to find Jesus in such bad company, or to find the criminals in such good company? … Like Jesus, these two criminals had been arrested …, locked up and sentenced. … And now they hang on their crosses with him and find themselves in solidarity and fellowship with him. They are linked in a common bondage never again to be broken … a point of no return for them as for him. There remained only the shameful, pain stricken present and the future of their approaching death.

The Bible itself has a hundred theologies. (Karl Barth, January 27, 1959 to English Colloquia in Basel)

On Monday 9 October 1734 some 240 to 270 people left Zurich on three boats in order to reach Basel and then Rotterdam by traveling down the Rhine. Later

So, he eagerly drove from Basel to Bayreuth before the festival began to watch the last rehearsals of The Ring Cycle. As he watched, it hit him like Odin's bowel movement: the opera was shit.

the conclusion the Congress released the Basel Declaration, stating, “The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law

One of the most comical witch-prosecutions took place in 1474 against a diabolical rooster who had been so presumptuous as to lay an egg. The poor creature was solemnly tried, whereupon he was condemned to die at the stake and publicly burned by order of the authorities of the good city of Basel.

The basis of the Basel missionaries is to build the moral character of the converts.

The basis of the basel missionaries to build a moral character of the convert.

Addictions, he thought, turning right, toward Seven Dials’ name-sake obelisk, started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were, his therapist in Basel had said, less intelligent than goldfish.

Tot ce era strain ma deprima peste masura. Mi-am revenit complet din intunecarea aceasta a intii abia cand am ajuns in Elvetia, La Basel; tin minte ca acum: era seara si m-a trezit din toropeala zbieratul unui magar, in piata. Magarul m-a impresionat grozav, mi-a facut, nu stiu de ce, o nespusa placere si toate in creierul meu s-au limpezit dintr-o data.

Where the river flows, trade flows Basel

In previous years, they might have spent hours in the cellar, on their feet, never seeing the time go by nor feeling their legs, and they would go back upstairs at closing time enthralled, radiant, a bit drunk, and there were more and more of them who, when they got back to Paris or Basel, would tell those around them, 'I only ever buy my books in Meribel now, once a year; obviously I've had to change my suitcase (my car / my leisure time / my life)' . . . .

The best thing about having had all that done, aside from getting a new mouth, was that he’d gotten to see a little bit of Basel, going out for the treatments. Otherwise, he’d stayed in the clinic, per his agreement.

...his paintings often show people reading; those who read find themselves in a world that is invisible for others. Observing people reading means become aware of the existence of imperceptible internal worlds.

Vienna's reputation as a city of luxury, merrymaking and indulgence actually lies much further in the past, in the time of the Babenbergs at whose courts the Minnesinger were prestigious guests, similar to publicity-seeking pop stars of today. the half-censorious, half-envious comments of foreigners often reflect the ambivalence that so many have felt about a city that was both seductive and dangerous. Such was indeed how Grillparzer described the city he loved and hated in his "Farewell to Vienna"(1843) though he had more in mind than simply the temptations of the flesh. But if Vienna was insidiously threatening under its hedonistic surface for a Grillparzer, others have simply regarded it as cheerfully, even shamelessly, immoral. 'lhe humanist scholar Enea Silvio Piccolomini, private secretary to Friedrich III and subsequently elected Pope Pius II, expressed his astonishment at the sexual freedom of the Viennese in a letter to a fellow humanist in Basel written in 1450: "'lhe number of whores is very great, and wives seem disinclined to confine their affections to a single man; knights frequently visit the wives of burghers. 'lhe men put out some wine for them and leave the house. Many girls marry without the permission of their fathers and widows don't observe the year of mourning." 'the local equivalent of the Roman cicisbeo is an enduring feature of Viennese society, and the present author remembers a respectable middle-class intellectual (now dead) who habitually went on holiday with both wife and mistress in tow. Irregular liaisons are celebrated in a Viennese joke about two men who meet for the first time at a party. By way of conversation one says to the other: "You see those two attractive ladies chatting to each other over there? Well, the brunette is my wife and the blonde is my mistress." "that's funny," says his new friend; "I was just about to say the same thing, only the other way round." In Biedermeier Vienna (1815-48), menages d trois seem not to have been uncommon, since the gallant who became a friend of the family was officially known as the Hausfreund. 'the ambiguous status of such a Hausfreund features in a Wienerlied written in 1856 by the usually non-risque Johann Baptist Moser. It con-terns a certain Herr von Hecht, who is evidently a very good friend of the family of the narrator. 'lhe first six lines of the song innocently praise the latter's wife, who is so delightful and companionable that "his sky is always blue"; but the next six relate how she imported a "friend", Herr von Hecht, and did so "immediately after the wedding". This friend loves the children so much "they could be his own." And indeed, the younger one looks remarkably like Herr von Hecht, who has promised that the boy will inherit from him, "which can't be bad, eh?" the faux-naivete with which this apparently commonplace situation is described seems to have delighted Moser's public-the song was immensely popular then and is still sung today.

Le plus beau printemps du monde, l'été le plus torride s'éteint après tout un jour, et c'est le raisonnable automne, l'hiver sans hypocrisie.

The conflict of perspectives and competing wills that is the true reality is obscured and flattened out by the social imposition of a common standpoint, in language, thought, morality, and politics, which presents itself as simply or cosmically true by concealing its true sources. The inquiry into the geneology of these ruling ideas is therefore a vital part of their unmasking. The proposed geneology of Christian morality, as the expression not of universal love but of the slave revolt of the base against the noble, motivated by fear, hatred, and envy, is Nietzsche’s most famous thesis, expounded in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Geneology of Morals. . . . He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and recklessness that distinguishes the strong individual. The height of self-realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare. For this reason, Nietzsche was not a democrat. Already at the time of writing The Birth of Tragedy, he defended slavery as a condition of the possibility of great cultural achievement by the few, as in ancient Athens. And he defended its modern counterpart, the economic oppression of the masses, for the same reason. He opposed shortening the workday from twelve hours to eleven when it was proposed in Basel, he approved of child labor, and he opposed the educational groups for workers. When in 1871 he heard the false rumor that the Paris communards had pillaged the Louvre, he called it ‘the worst day of my life.’ Equality meant nothing to him; he believed it would inevitably push everything down to the lowest common denominator, that of the ‘democratic herd animal.’ Life, he insisted, is tragic; it is necessary to choose between justice and aesthetic perfection. And in his latest writings he expressed fantasies of annihilation, with ‘degenerates’ being got rid of to make room for the highest type of man.

A famous instance of this kind of abuse comes from Basel in 1529, when a mob carried a crucifix from the church, through the streets, and into the marketplace, tossing it onto a bonfire while a particularly zealous citizen exclaimed, “If you are God, help yourself; if you are man, then bleed!

A sailing vessel on the Rhine! My imagination took wings. If, instead of this swiftly flowing river, all of Alsace were a lake, we would have sailing boats and great steamers. Then Basel would be a port; it would be almost as good as living by the sea. Then everything would be different, and we would live in another time and in another world.

He thought of his therapist. If she were here, he told himself, she’d remind him that this situation, however complexly threatening or dangerous, was external, hence entirely preferable to the one he’d been in when he’d arrived in Basel, a situation both internal and seemingly inescapable. “Do not internalize the threat. When you do, the system floods with adrenaline, cortisol. Crippling you.

The Basel missionaries focuses on moral education for character building.

The similarities in the physiological characteristics of Leopardi and Nietzsche are especially remarkable. The same sensitivity toward weather and seasons, toward place and environment, are found in both. Leopardi feels the slightest change in the thermometer and barometer. He could create only during the summer; he traveled about, always looking for the most suitable location for his creative activity. Nietzsche expresses himself about such peculiarities of his nature in the following manner: “Now after long practice, when I observe the effects of climatic and meteorological nature upon myself, as upon a very delicate and reliable instrument, and after a short journey, perhaps from Turin to Milan, calculate the change in the degree of humidity calculated physiologically in myself, then I look with horror at the sinister fact that my life until the last ten years, the most dangerous years, has always been spent in locations treacherous and absolutely forbidden to me. Naumburg, Schulpforta, Thuringia, in fact, Bonn, Liepzig, Basel, Venice, — all of them places of misfortune for my physiology. ...” Connected with this unusual sensitivity in Leopardi as well as in Nietzsche, is a contempt for all altruistic feelings. Both of them had to overcome this in order to be able to tolerate mankind. From Nietzsche's own words one can see that his shyness in presence of strong impressions, of attractions which demand too much of his sensitivity, fill him with suspicion toward selfless impulses.

Federer, then fourteen, was in his first year as a boarding student in Ecublens, a suburb of Lausanne on Lake Geneva. He was still in his home country but very much an outsider as a youngster from German-speaking Basel. The primary language in Lausanne is French, and Federer arrived in August 1995 with a problem

(1) Karl Barth was not an evangelical. He was a European Protestant wrestling with how to salvage Protestant Christianity in the wake of World War I, which exposed the debacle of liberal theology. Barth was not an inerrantist or a revivalist, and he was wrestling with a different array of issues than the “battle for the Bible.” (2) Karl Barth is on the side of the good guys when it comes to the major ecumenical doctrines about the Trinity and the atonement. Barth is decidedly orthodox and Reformed in his basic stance, though he sees the councils and confessions mainly as guidelines rather than holy writ. (3) Karl Barth arguably gives evangelicals some good tips about how to do theology over and against liberalism. Keep in mind that Karl Barth’s main sparring partner was not Billy Graham or the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, but the European liberal tradition from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Albert Ritschl. For a case in point, whereas Schleiermacher made the Trinity an appendix to his book on Christian Faith because it was irrelevant to religious experience, Barth made the Trinity first and foremost in his Church Dogmatics, which was Barth’s way of saying, “Suck on that one, Schleiermacher!” (4) Evangelicals and the neoorthodox tend to be rather hostile toward each other. Many evangelicals regard the neoorthodox as nothing more than liberalism reloaded, while many neoorthodox theologians regard evangelicals as a more culturally savvy version of fundamentalism. Not true on either score. Evangelicalism and neoorthodoxy are both theological renewal movements trying to find a biblical and orthodox center in the post-Enlightenment era. The evangelicals left fundamentalism and edged left toward a workable orthodox center. The neoorthodox left liberalism and edged right toward a workable orthodox center. Thus, evangelicalism and neoorthodoxy are more like sibling rivals striving to be the heirs of the Reformers in the post-Enlightenment age. There is much in Karl Barth that evangelicals can benefit from. His theology is arguably the most christocentric ever devised. He has a strong emphasis on God’s transcendence, freedom, love, and “otherness.” Barth stresses the singular power and authority of the Word of God in its threefold form of “Incarnation, Preaching, and Scripture.” Barth strove with others like Karl Rahner to restore the Trinity to its place of importance in modern Christian thought. He was a leader in the Confessing Church until he was expelled from Germany by the Nazi regime. He preached weekly in the Basel prison. His collection of prayers contain moving accounts of his own piety and devotion to God. There is, of course, much to be critical of as well. Barth’s doctrine of election implied a universalism that he could never exegetically reconcile. Barth never could regard Scripture as God’s Word per se as much as it was an instrument for becoming God’s Word. He never took evangelicalism all that seriously, as evidenced by his famous retort to Carl Henry that Christianity Today was Christianity Yesterday. Barth’s theology, pro and con, is something that we must engage if we are to understand the state of modern theology. The best place to start to get your head around Barth is his Evangelical Theology, but note that for Barth, “evangelical” (evangelische) means basically “not Catholic” rather than something like American evangelicalism. Going beyond that, his Göttingen Dogmatics or Dogmatics in Outline is a step up where Barth begins to assemble a system of theology based on his understanding of the Word of God. Then one might like to launch into his multivolume Church Dogmatics with the kind assistance of Geoffrey Bromiley’s Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth, which conveniently summarizes each section of Church Dogmatics.

Everything was beautiful until the insanity began. The CIA got into the business of altering human behavior in 1947. Project Paperclip, an arrangement made by CIA Director Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, brought 1,000 Nazi specialists and their families to the United States. They were employed by military and civilian institutions. Some Nazi doctors were brought to our hospitals and colleges to continue further experimentation on the brain. American and German scientists, working with the CIA, then the military, started developing every possible method of controlling the mind. Lysergic Acid Diethylmide, LSD, was discovered at the Sandoz Laboratories, Basel, Switzerland, in 1939 by Albert Hoffman. This LSD was pure. No other ingredients were added. The U.S. Army became interested in LSD for interrogation purposes in 1950. After May 1956 until 1975, the U.S. Army Intelligence and the U.S. Chemical Corps experimented with hallucinogenic drugs. The CIA and Army spent $26,501,446 “testing” LSD, code-named EA 1729, and other chemical agents. Contracts went out to 48 different institutions for testing. The CIA was part of these projects. They concealed their participation by contracting to various colleges, hospitals, prisons, mental hospitals and private foundations. The LSD I will refer to is the same type that the CIA tested. We shall be speaking of CIA-LSD, not pure LSD. Government agents had the ability to induce permanent insanity, identical to schizophrenia, without physician or family knowing what happened to the victim.

Along with working on the Basel problem, Euler realized that adding an infinite sequence of reciprocal powers for all whole numbers will give you the same answer as multiplying together an infinite sequence of fractions which use only the prime numbers. So the zeta function can be written as two different equations, one of which relies only on the prime numbers. The one which uses all the whole numbers gives the same result as the prime fractions, but it's easier to work with. We know what all the whole numbers are, but we don't know what all the primes are. So we can substitute one for the other.

For many English speakers up is synonymous with north, and down with south; you go up to Scotland or Canada and down to Devon or Florida. For the Swiss it’s about gradient not direction, making up short for uphill or upstream, which is logical for a mountainous country. So the Bernese talk about going down (north) to Basel but up (south) to Interlaken.

The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD. This was an unusual centennial in that the man being feted was very much in attendance. Entering his second century, Hofmann appeared in remarkably good shape, physically spry and mentally sharp, and he was able to take an active part in the festivities, which included a birthday ceremony followed by a three-day symposium. The symposium’s opening ceremony was on January 13, two days after Hofmann’s 100th birthday (he would live to be 102). Two thousand people packed the hall at the Basel Congress Center, rising to applaud as a stooped stick of a man in a dark suit and a necktie, barely five feet tall, slowly crossed the stage and took his seat. Two hundred journalists from around the world were in attendance, along with more than a thousand healers, seekers, mystics, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, consciousness researchers, and neuroscientists, most of them people whose lives had been profoundly altered by the remarkable molecule that this man had derived from a fungus half a century before. They had come to celebrate him and what his friend the Swiss poet and physician Walter Vogt called “the only joyous invention of the twentieth century.

claiming publicly that comets follow natural law and not God’s whim was a gutsy thing to do, especially given that the prior year—almost fifty years after Galileo’s condemnation—the professor of mathematics at the University of Basel, Peter Megerlin, had been roundly attacked by theologians for accepting the Copernican system and had been banned from teaching it at the university.

when his airplane stopped briefly at Lydda airport in 1951.

After escaping from Paris and finally leaving France entirely, Calvin spent his exile in Basel, Switzerland, between 1534 and 1536. To redeem the time, “he devoted himself to the study of Hebrew.” (Imagine such a thing! Would any pastor today, exiled from his church and country, and living in mortal danger, study Hebrew? What has become of the vision of ministry that such a thing seems unthinkable today?)

A week at the Grand Hotel Bear in that first winter season cost £10 5s 0d (about £600 today), including second-class train travel from London, room (with lights, service and heating), full board and 56lb of luggage. Passengers could leave Charing Cross at 2.20pm and arrive in Grindelwald at 3.10pm the next day, having caught a boat, travelled through the night and changed trains four times. The same train journey today takes ten hours with three changes, in Paris, Basel and Interlaken.

Against Socrates and Plato Nietzsche set ‘the Sophists.’ In a Basel lecture he had referred with approval to Grote’s defense of them (iv. 361 Mus.). But he later condemned Grote for representing them as ‘respectable men and models of morality’; on the contrary, ‘their glory was that they refused to cheat with big words and phrases,’ but ‘had the courage, which all strong spirits have, to recognize their own unmorality’ (Will to Power, 429). It seems evident that in this large generalization Nietzsche had in mind men of the stamp of Callicles or Thrasymachus. His words recall the passage where Socrates praises Callicles’ frankness in ‘saying plainly what others think but do not care to say’ (Gorg. 492d); and that Nietzsche in fact considered Callicles a spokesman for ‘the Sophists’ is made clear in his lectures on Plato (iv. 422 Mus.).

I stopped periodically to slog through fields around the rest stops with Peppy. Athin, cold rain had been falling since we left the Quad Cities, turning the ground muddy. After the first stop, I changed my socks and jeans and then had to do it again at our next break. I should have packed more clothes, another pair of boots, newspapers to wrap them in, my espresso machine, a fireplace, my mother's piano, a case of Barolo, a ticket to Basel.