1710) The Progressive's goal is not to strengthen government for government's sake, but to use government where possible to strengthen the institutions of civil society.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (1996) quoted by Michael Lind in his review "The Return of the Liberal" in the New York Times Book Review (2/18/1996)
1711) Why is the middle anxious? Mr. Dionne identifies four crises confronting the United States: "the economic crisis itself, a political crisis, a moral crisis and a crisis over how Americans view their country's role in the world." The first crisis is the cost of globalization and automation, enriching the few while endangering the living standards of the majority and increasing inequality. The second involves the abandonment, particularly by the left, of grandiose ideologies like socialism, creating a vacuum filled particularist movements of "race, gender and culture" or "nationalism, religious fundamentalism and xenophobia." The third pits social conservatives against those who favor "new roles for women" and a "somewhat looser and more tolerant attitude towards sexuality." These economic, political and moral crises are joined by discord on foreign policy, with the division between nationalists and internationalists cutting across both parties.
The response of the political class to these four crises has been evasion and worse, Mr. Dionne write; increasingly, politicians avoid substantive debate altogether in favor of vicious attack politics.
Michael Lind "The Return of the Liberal" in New York Times Book Review (2/18/1996) quoting E.J. Dionne Jr. in They Only Look Dead (1996)
1712) Mistakes were made.
Ronald Reagan commenting on the Iran-Contra scandal (1986) quoted by A.R. Gurney in Overtime (play, 1996)
1713) History is full of falsehoods widely believed and taught. Sometimes these falsehoods have made those who believe them feel proud [...]
Glen Bowersock "Rescuing the Greeks" in New York Times Book Review (2/25/1996) [review of Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996) by Mary Lefkowitz and Black Athena Revisited (1996), edited by Mark Lefkowitz and Guy Maclean Rogers]
1714) Outsiders are in. A good deal of current scholarship examines the rise of nationalism or national identities in terms of everything they are against. The Nation defines itself in relation to the Other. England provides an especially rich example. At various times the national identity has seemed to depend on its opposition to Rome and its Church, to Spain, to France, to Germany, or to all the far-flung lesser colonized breeds who set off by contrast the civilized imperial self. Yet the excluded also lie nearer to home. Despite the political unions intended to transform the English into the British, Great Britain and Britons remain an artificial construct for many in Wales and Scotland, let alone Ireland.
Just who is this "we"? The English know who they are, or say that they do, and English literature has seldom found room for writings in Welsh or Manx or Irish or Scots. Nor is English indivisible in itself. The hyphen in Anglo-Saxon exposes a prior series of invasions and alliances, when two alien peoples gradually chanced to go native together. And the founding myth of 1066 and all that - the assimilation of the Normans by Saxons, after the Conquest, in a union of race as well as of language - might equally show an irremediable split at the root of English identity. [...] In truth, the English language and people consist of many unreconciled strains. The deeper one looks, the more the nation seems a multicultural, patchwork quilt, as if the self were already an other.
Whoever "we" may be, however, Jews are somebody else. That has made them especially useful for defining a nation. Whatever they are - a people, a race, a religion, or even a wandering, rival nation - the Jews by strict definition cannot be English. Morever they never have been. A link between ancient and modern times, they offer a stable counterpoint to everything the nation could have been in the past or will be in the future. Nor can this ever change. Once Jews cease being Jews, once all of them covert to Christianity and its Messiah, according to the standard evangelical reading of Scripture, history will end with the Second Coming and nations will be no more. No other people have such power or make a better foil. Hence Christian nations measure themselves by their ideas of Jews. Whether or not it is true that each nation gets the Jews it deserves, it does seem to be true that nations create the Jews they imagined.
Lawrence Lipking "The English Question" in The New Republic (2/26/1996) [review of Shakespeare and the Jews by James Shapiro, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes by Frank Felsenstein and Figures of Conversion by Michael Ragussis]
1715) Ah, the neighbors. Always a mixed blessing. A blessing without a doubt, but mixed. They helped and they meddled. The would without hesitation grab a child poised treacherously on the edge of an irrigation ditch; but they also condemned hair styles, clothing that "showed too much," poor housekeeping and loose ways in general. They rallied and they ostracized. That is what real neighbors do. You can't have it both ways. If they care enough to help, they also have the power - indeed, they would say, the responsibility - to chasten, to correct, to chastise.
That's what real villages are about.
Jean Bethke Elshtain "Suffer the Little Children" in The New Republic (3/4/1996) [review of It Takes A Village by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Guide My Feet by Marian Wright Edelman]
1716) [S]uccesful businessmen who want to be President are marching across our great nation with their curious blend of good sense and total oblivousness. I can't pretend to have gained any clear insight into their ability to govern. I have, however, compiled a short list of the qualities that seem to set them apart from other politicians. To wit:
A Genuine Sense of Superiority. This in infectious, especially when a rich businessman is lording it directly over a Republican politician. [...]
Core Convictions. Put the most phlegmatic businessman in America on the stump and he will appear, at least at first, to be a man of unwavering principle and conviction. He does not have the record of compromise and concilliation because he does not have a record. What is more, he can plausibly claim that he wouldn't be running for office if he didn't have some urgent principle to advance. Why would he? After all, he could be out making money.
Financial Freedom. [...] [T]here is no getting around it: a lot of Americans believe that the absence of financial need is a sign of moral worth. [...]
A Belief That Our Problems Are Simple. [T]he belief that our problems are simple is a habit of mind developed over a lifetime of pursuing a single, simple goal (money). Anyone who has had to court public approval to pass new laws knows that life can be very complicated indeed. But the businessman is persuaded that the Government is merely a business that is badly run. When viewed through his eyes, all those social problems we don't much like to see or hear about suddenly vanish.
Regular-Guy-Ness. Even businessmen who lack this quality can fake it. [...] [T]he businessman, unlike the politician, has spent most of his life wanting what most regular guys want. That's right, money.
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 450 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1700) We scientists are clever - too clever - are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it.
Richard Feynman personal note, undated quoted by James Gleick in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) quoted by Richard Rhodes in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)
1701) I don't think we ought to use this thing [the atomic bomb] unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something like that [...] that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we gave ever had. You have got to understand that this isn't a military weapon [...] It is used to wipe out woman and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.
Harry S. Truman in a meeting with Atomic Energy Commission commissioners and defense officials (7/21/1948) quoted by David E. Lilienthal, first chairman of the AEC, in The Atomic Energy Years, 1945-1950 (1964) quoted by Richard Rhodes in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)
1702) [Q]uite contrary to the way I thought things were [...] you don't do staff work and then make a decision. You make a decision and then do staff work.
John H. Manley physicist, secretary to the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission quoted in the transcript of a videotaped conference, "The H-bomb decision," held at Princeton University quoted by Richard Rhodes in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)
1703) [Science is] the gradual removal of prejudices.
Neils Bohr Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (1958) quoted by Richard Rhodes in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)
1704) Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
Robert Oppenheimer quoted by Richard Rhodes in Looking for America (1979) quoted by Richard Rhodes in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)
1705) Fundamentally, and in the long run, the problem which is posed by the release of atomic energy is a problem of the ability of the human race to govern itself without war. There is no permanent method of excising atomic energy from our affairs, now that men know that it can be released. Even if some reasonably complete international control of atomic energy should be established, knowledge would persist, and it is hard to see how there could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually use and make atomic bombs. In this respect the problem of armaments was permanently and drastically altered in 1945.
Robert Oppenheimer, et al. conclusion of a 1952 panel on disarmament, quoted by McGeorge Bundy in "Early Thoughts on Controlling the Nuclear Arms Race" International Security (Fall 1982) quoted by Richard Rhodes in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)
1706) I was indignant. Here was a man [Robert Oppenheimer] who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atomic bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. A small, mean group. There were scientists among them. One reason for doing it might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A thirst, a genuine fear of communism. He was an aesthete. I don't think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn't pay enough attention to the outward symbols. He was a very American person of a certain kind. A certain kind of intellectual, aesthetic person of the upper middle classes. [...] [In 1955] we had this [international] conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. And [AEC Chairman] Lewis Strauss asked me, whom should we have for president of this conference? And I said, I guess we killed Cock Robin.
I.I. Rabi physicist, on the destruction of Robert Oppenheimer interviewed by Bill Moyers in A Walk Through the Twentieth Century quoted by Richard Rhodes in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)
1707) Edward Teller became the Richard Nixon of American science - dark, brooding, indefatigable.
Richard Rhodes Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)
1708) If real political leaders understood from one end of the Cold War to the other that even one hydrogen bomb was sufficient deterrence, why did they allow the arms race to devour the wealth of the nation while it increased the risk of an accidental Armageddon? In 1982, political scientist Miroslav Nincic examined the economics of the arms race and discovered that it was hardly a race at all; US and Soviet levels of defense spending were only weakly coupled at best. Far more influential on the US side were such domestic political phenomena as competition among the military services, coalitions of scientific and industrial organizations promoting new technologies, the pressure of "defense" as a political issue and defense spending to prime the economic pump, particularly in election years. Similar patterns obtained along somewhat different lines for the Soviet command economy. "The arms race," Nincic summarized, "is embedded in circumstances proper to the domestic political and economic systems of the superpowers in addition to dynamics inherent in the interaction between the two nations. [...] Strategic doctrines are designed, in large part, to justify the weaponry that the arms race has imposed on both the United States and the Soviet Union."
Richard Rhodes Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995) quoting Miroslav Nincic The Arms Race (1982)
1709) By one estimate that properly counts delivery systems as well as weapons, [the arms race] cost the United States $4 trillion - roughly the US national debt in 1994. Soviet costs were comparable and were decisive in the decline of the Soviet economy that triggered the USSR's collapse. Cold warriors have argued from that fact that spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy itself justifies the arms race. Their argument overlooks the inconvenient reality that the expense of the arms race contributed to US decline as well, decline evident in an oppressive national debt, in decaying infrastructure and social and educational neglect. The potlach theory of the arms race also overlooks the unconscionable risk both superpowers took of omnicidal war.
Richard Rhodes Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 450 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1695) Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.
Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (play, 1967) spoken by the character "The Player"
1696) We're tragedians, you see. We follow directions - there is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (play, 1967) spoken by the character "The Player"
1697) The music of the future is not music.
liner notes Environments compilation posted by Robb Cunningham on alt.music.techno (2/24/1996)
1698) Noise is annoying when you try to ignore it; fascinating when you listen to it.
John Cage (attributed) posted by Robb Cunningham on alt.music.techno (2/24/1996)
1699) It's not what you play, it's what you're plugged into.
Seefeel (attributed) ambient-techno musical group (Mark Clifford, Sarah Peacock, Justin Fletcher, Daren Seymour) posted by Robb Cunningham on alt.music.techno (2/24/1996)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 450 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
I wrote this back in February. I can't recall now what provoked it, or why I ended up not posting it, but it seems to me a worthwhile thought, fairly cogently expressed, so I offer it here now for posterity, apropos of nothing:
Low-brow culture can be dirty and disposable, but it also has vitality and energy to spare; high-brow culture can be stuffy and pretentious, but can also be formal and precise and beautiful. Middle-brow culture, on the other hand, is mostly full of schmaltzy sentimentality, hopelessly delusional cut-rate romanticism, belittling gossip and the adulation of celebrity. It appeals primarily to people too lazy to think, who don't ever want to be challenged or jostled out of their comfortable lives by excessive liveliness, disturbing ideas or truly interesting people. It promotes not clear seeing or deep feeling but blindness, complacency and the worship of superficial values.
1691) I take it you've never been involved in military intelligence? No, of course not. But you see in intelligence work we have to go by capabilities, not by intentions. If a potential enemy can do something to you, you have to prepare for it, without regard to what you think he wants to do.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle The Mote in Gods Eye (1974) spoken by the character "Lt. Jack Cargill"
1692) Believe what you like, but you'll ruin the math.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle The Mote in Gods Eye (1974) spoken by the character "Dr. Buckman", an astrophysicist
1693) "Yeah." Ben Fowler stood and removed his dress tunic. The shirt underneath was old, very soft, and carefully patched in three places. "Rod, just what do Moties think of their kids?" Fowler asked. "Maybe they think they're nothing much until they can talk. Expendable."
"Wrong." said Renner
"The tactful way," Rod said quietly, "the polite way to disagree with the Senator would be to say, 'That turns out not to be the case.'"
"Renner's face lit up. "Hey. I like that. Anyway, the Senator's wrong..."
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
1694) One of your most ancient writers, a historian named Herodotus, tells of a thief who was to be executed. As he was taken away he made a bargain with the king: in one year he would teach the king's favorite horse to sing hymns. [...] The other prisoners watched the thief singing to the horse and laughed. "You will not succeed," they told him. "No one can." To which the thief replied, "I have a year, and who knows what might happen in that time. The king might die. The horse might die. I might die. And perhaps the horse will learn to sing.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle The Mote in Gods Eye (1974) spoken by the character "Charlie"
[Note: The attribution to Herodotus is unconfirmed – the story may have originated in Islamic folklore.]
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 451 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1687) As politics decays into a spectator sport, we face a political season where neither major political party seems even capable of putting on a show. American political life is crowded with color and incident and drama, from the Million Man March to the militias, and from insurgents in the AFL-CIO to the "national socialists" of the Buchanan campaign. But American politics is monochrome and predictable; the province of the lobbyists and donors and pollsters and those who pay or are paid by them and who hope to deal in negotiable security. (To this list must be added the major media outlets, who are the recipients of the advertising and polling dollars and who have every interest, latent as well as explicit, in presenting the "race" as a Herblock-style knockabout between a large, rich donkey and a large, opulent elephant.)
Christopher Hitchens "Pulp Politics" in New York Review of Books (2/29/1996) [review of Primary Colors by "Anonymous" (Joe Klein); The People's Choice by Jeff Greenfield and The Last Debate by Jim Lehrer]
1688) Those of you who come in with me now, will get big pieces of pie. Those who come in with me later will get smaller pieces of pie. Those who don't come in at all will get - Good Government.
Huey Long (widely attributed) to a meeting of Louisiana business leaders quoted by Christopher Hitchens in "Pulp Politics" in New York Review of Books (2/29/1996)
1689) There would be a lot more civility in this world if people didn't take that as an invitation to walk all over you.
Bill Watterson "Calvin & Hobbes" (syndicated comic strip) It's A Magical World (1996) "sig" (signature) of "kurtz", seen on alt.fan.oj-simpson (2/17/1996)
1690) This is a great country. Know what makes it great? Because you don't have to be witty or smart as long as you can hire someone who is.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (TV series) Episode 7.20: "Murray Ghosts for Ted" (2/14/1977) written by David Lloyd directed by Jay Sandrich spoken by the character "Ted Baxter" played by Ted Knight
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 451 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1683) Both [science fiction and fantasy] do rise from the same impulse; first, the speculative urge to constantly examine other possible shapes for the universe and, with it, the belief that any person equipped with the proper knowledge can make changes in the milieu.
Fantasy and science fiction are highly similar arts. But in science fiction power emanates from the individual, whereas in fantasy it comes down from above; it is in a sense a gift, probably a loan, and subject to caprice in the giver. Science fiction recognizes a 'luck' — it was science fiction writers who did much to popularize Murphy's Law [...] but the characters in science fiction stories do not attempt to propitiate supernatural powers.
Wizards acquire capability and control over their milieux by learning what the powers will let them learn, or can be made to let them learn. Scientists, engineers, technicians, and simply ordinarily educated persons in science fiction acquire parallel capabilities by investigating the nature of reality, by codifying and then processing the data, and applying it to their milieux, but there is implicit as the central idea in science fiction the idea that the universe is not amenable to cozening or threats; it is not capricious. [...]
Fantasy presumes a hierarchical milieu, in which there is always some source of power above the individual. This is the essential difference from science fiction; the two coeval branches of speculative fiction, or sf, probably share all other attributes in common, and can freely exchange furniture and costumes, as in sub-forms like 'science fantasy.'
Algis Budrys "Literatures of Milieux" in Missouri Review (7/2/1984) posted by Tom Dillingham [SF-LIT] (1/31/1996)
1684) The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of independent natural experiments; but unfortunately it is now clear that there has been a great deal of historical continuity and exchange among those "independent" experiments, most of which have felt the strong effect of contact with societies organized as modern states. More important, there has never been a human society with unlimited resources, of three sexes, or the power to read other people's minds, or to be transported great distances at the speed of light. How then are we to know the effect on human social organization and history of the need to scrabble for a living, or of the existence of males and females, or of the power to make our tongues drop manna and so to make the worse appear the better reason? A solution to the epistemological impotence of social theory has been to create a literature of imagination and logic in which the consequences of radical alterations in the conditions of human existence are deduced. It is the literature of science fiction. [...]
[S]cience fiction is the laboratory in which extraordinary social conditions, never possible in actuality, are used to illumine the social and historical norm. [...] Science fiction stories are the Gedanken experiments of social science.
R[ichard] C. Lewontin "The Last of the Nasties?" in New York Review of Books (2/29/1996) [review of The Lost World by Michael Crichton]
1685) Presenting that which cannot be, but is, fantasy exposes a culture's definition of that which can be: it traces the limits of its epistemological and ontological frame.
Rosemary Jackson Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) quoted by R[ichard] (3089/9C. Lewontin in "The Last of the Nasties?" in New York Review of Books (2/29/1996) [review of The Lost World by Michael Crichton]
1686) You really can't predict someone's beliefs or attitudes based on what they read. People can read stories about aliens without believing in UFOs, or read stories about psychic phenomenon without believing in Uri Geller, or read magical fantasy without believing in wizards.
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 452 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
A politically conservative student armed with a video camera and a Web site is trying to force a Democratic congressional candidate out of his teaching job at Central Michigan University.
Dennis Lennox, a 23-year-old junior, has posted videos on YouTube of himself questioning assistant professor Gary Peters about campaigning for office while holding a prestigious position at the university.
Some say Lennox is persistent. Others accuse him of pandering for attention.
"What I'm doing isn't about getting media attention," said Lennox, a political science major. "I'm speaking for the hundreds of students, alumni, taxpayers and even legislators who have complained because Gary Peters won't pick between Congress and campus."
In one video Lennox posted online, Peters is seen walking to his car while Lennox asks him several questions, including whether he is angry about his campaign not getting "positive press." Peters doesn't respond.
Peters said in an interview this week with The Associated Press that his university position is part-time and privately funded.
"The bottom line is that people who run for public office still need to pay the bills and still need to work," he said. He drives 130 miles from a Detroit suburb to Mount Pleasant to teach class once a week.
Peters, 48, is seeking the Democratic nomination to face Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg in Oakland County, one of the top congressional targets for Democrats nationally in 2008.
"If I was running for Congress in a seat where I had no chance of winning, I probably wouldn't have any attention put on me at all," said Peters, a former state senator who lost a close race for Michigan attorney general in 2002.
He acknowledges it would be difficult to keep his $65,000-a-year job at the university if he gets elected to Congress, but says he will worry about that if he wins. Peters holds the Griffin Endowed Chair in American Government — named for a former Republican U.S. senator and Michigan Supreme Court justice.
Lennox helped start the group Students Against Gary Peters and created a Web site for what he calls "Petersgate." He insists that he isn't targeting Peters because he's a Democrat.
But some see it differently.
"Basically, he's just an extreme partisan. Anybody that's a Democrat, he's going to try to get at," said fellow political science major Eric Schulz.
Not only is this Lennox guy an asshole, he's an idiot as well. He's a political science major, yet he doesn't have a clue that being a citizen-legislator is not a bad thing, it is in fact the ideal in our system, one that's unfortunately practically impossible to reach, considering the way things have evolved.
There's no reason in the world if Peters can meet his academic obligations and run for office at the same time that he shouldn't, and it's not some praiseworthy exercise of political freedom to hound him the way Lennox is, it's stalking, pure and simple.
(Oh, and if anyone wonders what the difference is between this and S.R. Sidarth's following Senator George Allen on behalf of Jim Webb in last year's Virginia U.S. Senate campaing - which provoked Allen's "macaca" comment - it's that Sidarth was taping Allen's public campaign events in order to document them, while Lennox is harrassing Peters going to and from a place of employment with the aim of making things unpleasant. No comparison -- but I'll bet you that Lennox doesn't understand that. Personally, I'd sic the cops on him and charge him with stalking, but then I'm not running for Congress.)
1682) These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids – the Abraham Lincoln one in that book – and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity "schizoid," which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word "thing." A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.
Philip K. Dick "Man, Androids and Machine" (1975) republished in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995), Lawrence Sutin, ed. posted by Hans Persson [PKD] (2/6/1996)
Sources
[PKD] - Internet Philip K. Dick mailing list
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 452 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1679) The popular prediction that electronic communication would create a global village has been shown to be wrong. What is being created is less like a village than an entity that reproduces the worst aspects of urban life: the ability to retreat into small communities of the like-minded, where we are safe not only from unnecessary interactions with those whose ideas and attitudes are not like our own, but also from having to relate our interests and results to other communities.
Vartan Gregorian "A Place Elsewhere: Reading in the Age of the Computer" Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1/1996) quoted by James Fallows in "Caught in the Web" in New York Review of Books (2/15/1996) [review of The Road Ahead by Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson]
1680) Clearly computers will have large cultural effects, as will any shift in technology. Yet having myself worked with and written about computers for nearly twenty years, I can't believe that their most important or their worst effects will be on contemporary culture. Most of what computers make possible is an extension of previous habits and functions. People once wrote letters; now they send e-mail. It is different but it's also the same. I would be surprised if computers change the tone of life more radically than the telephone did. Their cultural impact probably won't be as great, and cannot be as bad, as that of TV.
The most worrisome cultural implication of the new developments may be the one least discussed in print so far: the sudden concentration of the number of "content providers," as NBC allies itself with Microsoft, CNN is absorbed by Time, Disney buys ABC, and the once-diverse universe of publishers, software companies, and entertainment studios reduces itself to a handful of giant combines. But this trend toward concentration is not caused by computers - which are, indeed, often described as the main instrument for a decentralized, nonhierarchical communications system.
James Fallows "Caught in the Web" in New York Review of Books (2/15/1996) [review of The Road Ahead by Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson]
1681) Numerous writers have worried about the tendency of electronic exchanges to fly off into vituperation, or to be dominated by political extremists, most of them (as it happens) from the right wing.
James Fallows "Caught in the Web" in New York Review of Books (2/15/1996) [review of The Road Ahead by Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson]
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 452 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1678) In the fashion world, models are always "girls." Successful models are "big girls." Stars like [Kate] Moss and [Naomi] Campbell and [Linda] Evangelista are "huge girls." Diminutive though the term may sound for a 30-year-old like Evangelista, who has made millions during her career, "girl" captures the peculiar role played by a model of any age. Backstage at a show or at a shooting in a loft, "girl" suggests, as it is meant to, someone more beautiful and less complicated than a woman.
In recent year, America has become obsessed with "girls," and the fashion world has a theory why: actresses have lost their glamour by turning into real people, and models have replaced them as the stars of our time. Certainly models are this decade's contribution to our already crowded celebrity pantheon. They are what rock stars were to the 70's and visual artists were to the 80's. The rise of models has less to do with the fashion industry, whose business has slumped since the 80's, than with the potent blend of cultural preoccupations they embody: youth, beauty and, perhaps most of all, media exposure. Models are perfectly suited to a culture obsessed with fame for its own sake. Appearing in the media is their job - their images are their stock in trade. They are famous for being famous.
Jennifer Egan "James is a girl" in New York Times Magazine (2/4/1996)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 452 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1676) In the welter of words written and spoken in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial and its outcome, one fundamental consideration underlying this sordid saga has been all but ignored. [...] It is that rational thought, the ultimate basis for action on which the survival and prosperity of our civil society depends, has been decisively trashed once again, once too often for comfort. [...] As long as rational thought is devalued by insisting that unsupported suspicions, folklore or superstition should govern over plain, objective knowledge, our civil society will remain at risk. [...] [I]t is the human ability to distinguish fact from fiction that is at the core of the astonishing biological success of our species. The ability to think is a crucial asset, the development of which our educational system has abdicated, and which our political system has increasingly discouraged. [...]
[T]he conduct and outcome of the Simpson trial has much in common with the majority of pseudoscience controversies [...] In the face of irrefutable scientific evidence to the contrary, people continue to assert the validity of astrology, false memories, satanic events, outlandish conspiracies, megavitamin therapies, bogus cancer cures, and psychic phenomena. People insist on the existence of UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, and now, milk-drinking statues. When challenged by powerful refuting evidence, the purveyors of these fictions usually change the subject. That is exactly what the O.J. defense team did by changing the subject from murder to Los Angeles Police Department racism. [...] Under such circumstances we should be saddened but not surprised that the O.J. Simpson jury provided a devastating metaphor for the abysmal credulity that afflicts a reputedly modern society about to enter the twenty-first century.
1677) [P]roceedings in law share with the scientific method the same kind of thoughtful discipline on rules of evidence. Neither science nor law ever has been the game of strategy that the media has made of them. Ideally, the world of jurisprudence is a rational anchor in a civil society. It is not the self-serving and self-contained universe that some of its practitioners have insisted it is by turning it into a mockery of justice [...]
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 453 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1673) Anytime someone starts talking about "Western science" in contrast to "Eastern science" or some other putative science, the alarm bells start to ring. There is only one science. The may be personal approaches, or flavors, to doing, thinking about, expressing, and reporting science, but there can be only science. It is not Western, not Eastern, not African, not northern European, neither male nor female, not socialist, nor communist, nor bourgeois, not proletarian; science transcends all ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and philosophical strife that so divides our modern world. As such, science become an archetype that has the potential to heal our painful rifts of diversity.
1674) Concisely stated, fuzzy logic does not and cannot violate the laws of ordinary logic! It merely allows a consistent way to express linguistic concepts in a "machine" or computer environment. As such, it is a wonderfully useful tool that can enlighten our understanding of linguistics and make computers much more useful to humans, but it has nothing to say about objective reality apart from the human minds and its cultural concepts.
1675) Popular entertainment media have long portrayed scientists as mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but in the past few decades entertainment media portrayals of science have changed significantly, and those changes seem to have accelerated in recent years. Science remains dangerous, but it is also increasingly portrayed as useless in solving problems. The skepticism about paranormal claims that is a part of scientific thinking is portrayed as a handicap. [...] Film and television entertainment programming increasingly portray science and reason as tools that are unsuitable for understanding our world in a new age of credulity.
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 452 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1672) The form of jazz suggests too frequently that people are talking - that is, in succession - like in a panel discussion or a group of individuals simply imposing their remarks without responding to each other. If I am going to listen to a speech then I would like to hear some words. [...] The person responsible for keeping the beat in jazz does not slow it down or speed it up, does he? Now, when we have something, do we always have to have this measurement of it? I think that, if you examine these things, which you think you like about jazz, and then apply them to your daily life - that is to say outside the field of jazz music altogether - you will discover that they are thing you really have no use for. [...] If [the main premise of jazz is the regular time], then I don't want any part of it because I don't see it as relating to anything I can use. I don't mean in music, I mean use in my life. The clock is okay ticking away second by second: It is useful if I have to catch a train, but I don't think that catching a train is one of the most interesting aspects of my living. I think those times that I am most full with the enjoyment of life are precisely those times when the ticking of the clock, the passing of time, is forgotten. So, likewise, with measurement. The reiterated beat in jazz reminds me of all those aspects of my life which don't seem to be the most interesting.
Rock and roll is more interesting to me than jazz. [...] The impression is gives is not one of discourse but of everybody in agreement [...] There is no discussion. This business of one thing being free while something else is not free bothers me. Everyone seems to be together in rock and roll music. [...] It's a curious thing, but the reason the beat doesn't oppress me as much in rock and roll as it does in jazz, I think, is because the volume is so high. In other words, one's attention is taken away from the beat by the amplitude. The volume of sound is so great that it blurs, as it were, the fact of the beat. Any other ways that one might discover to blur the fact of the beat would increase, actually, the rhythmic interest, as least as far as I am concerned, of the music being made, whether it was jazz or not. [...] [W]hen time is organized by the regular beat, we [...] lose essentially the rhythm.
John Cage interviewed by Michael Zwerin in "A Lethal Measurement" in Village Voice (1/6/1966) republished in John Cage (1970) Richard Kostelanatz, ed.
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 453 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
And then came the Assumptions, And the Assumptions were without form, And the Plan was completely without substance. And darkness fell upon the face of the Workers.
And they spake amongst themselves, saying, "It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh!"
And the Workers went to their Supervisors and sayeth,"It is a pail of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof!"
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers and sayeth unto them, "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong such that none may abide by it!"
And the Managers went unto the Directors and sayeth, "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength!"
And the Directors spake amongst themselves, saying one unto the other, "It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants, and it is very strong!"
And the Directors went unto the Vice Presidents saying unto them, "It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went unto the President and sayeth unto him, "This new Plan will actively promote growth and the efficiency of this company, and in these areas in particular..."
And the President looked upon the Plan, And saw that it was good, And the Plan became Policy.
AND THIS IS HOW SHIT HAPPENS!
unknown Thomasina Ring, personal e-mail (2/4/1996)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 453 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1667) Juries may be getting dumber, but it's because attorneys (especially defense attorneys) want them that way. If, as I have argued, the overwhelming number of defendants who go to trial are guilty, then it is reasonable to expect that a defense attorney will seek jurors who will or cannot intelligently evaluate evidence. He will want gullible, manipulable, emotional, suggestible jurors - and through our system of selection, he will get them.
Harold J. Rothwax Guilty: The Collapse of the Criminal Justice System (1996) quoted by Jan Hoffman in "The Transformation of A Judge" Sunday New York Times Metro Section (2/4/1996)
1668) The greatest criticism of the exclusionary rule is that it is mandatory. Imagine for a moment that the exclusionary rule was discretionary instead of mandatory. This model uses reasonableness as a guide, and proposes that we not try to set detailed guidelines for police behavior in every possible situation.
Harold J. Rothwax Guilty: The Collapse of the Criminal Justice System (1996) quoted by Jan Hoffman in "The Transformation of A Judge" Sunday New York Times Metro Section (2/4/1996)
1669) Our system is a carefully crafted maze, constructed of elaborate and impenetrable barriers to the truth. Even when the evidence against the accused is as clear as a ringing bell, lawyers will grasp at anything to fog the issues and mask the terrible facts..
Harold J. Rothwax Guilty: The Collapse of the Criminal Justice System (1996) quoted by Jan Hoffman in "The Transformation of A Judge" Sunday New York Times Metro Section (2/4/1996)
1670) [Legal culture] is a strength-testing process. The defense strategy has nothing to do with the truth. It has to do with the odds..
Harold J. Rothwax Guilty: The Collapse of the Criminal Justice System (1996) quoted by Jan Hoffman in "The Transformation of A Judge" Sunday New York Times Metro Section (2/4/1996)
[Note: See #2059-2070 and #2071-2076 for more quotes from Guilty: The Collapse of the Criminal Justice System]
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 453 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1663) I want to suggest to you today, that unless we have a tolerant attitude toward mistakes - I might almost say "a positive attitude toward them" - we shall be behaving irrationally, unscientifically, and unsuccessfully.
Now, of course, if you now say to me, "Look here, you weird Limey, are you seriously advocating relaunching the Edsel?" I will reply, "No." There are mistakes - and mistakes. There are true, copper-bottom mistakes like spelling the word "rabbit" with three Ms; wearing a black bra under a white shirt; or, to take a more masculine example, starting a land war in Asia. These are the kind of mistakes described by Mr. David Letterman as Brushes With Stupidity, because they have no reasonable chance of success.
But I’m talking about mistakes which, at the time they were committed, did have a chance. The problem may be linguistic -- we don’t have a good word for “a reasonable try which didn’t come off.”
All of which ties in with my experience of what makes a group function more creatively. People must lose their inhibitions. They must gain the confidence to contribute spontaneously to what’s happening. Inhibition arises because of the fear of looking foolish, the fear of making mistakes. People are held back by this fear; they go over each thought they have six times before expressing it, in case someone will think it’s “wrong.” While this is going on, nothing useful can happen creatively.
A positive attitude towards mistakes will allow them to be corrected rapidly when they occur. We all know that when we and our colleagues admit our mistakes, it’s comparatively easy to put them right. The problems come when mistakes are denied. If you don't acknowledge a mistake, you can’t correct it.
1664) Persistence in error is the problem. Practitioners of government continue down the wrong road as if in thrall to some Merlin with magic power to direct their steps. [...] [T]o recognize error, to cut losses, to alter course, is the most repugnant option in government.
Barbara W. Tuchman The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984)
1665) America has been the world's most successful assimilator of different people. Changing from assimilation to separatism, as seems to be happening now, threatens to fracture the brittle bonds which hold our nation together.
Gregory Benford "A Scientist's Notebook: America As Rome" in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (3/1996)
1666) America has become a clapping nation. Television, always the bellwether, teaches how: watch as audiences on game and talkshows clap not to express approval but to provide punctuation. They clap before commercials and after commercials, when someone enters and when someone leaves, when they are told to and when they are not.
Ethan Mordden "Quick: Name a Hot, New Musical Star" in Sunday New York Times Art & Leisure Section (1/28/1995)
Sources
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 453 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
Axiom 1. Any quotation that can be altered will be.
Corollary 1A: Vivid words hook misquotes in the mind.
Corollary 1B: Numbers are hard to keep straight.
Corollary 1C: Small changes can have a big impact [...]
Corollary 1D: If noted figures don't say what needs to be said, we'll say it for them.
Corollary 1E: Journalists are a less than dependable source of accurate quotes.
Corollary 1F: Famous dead people make excellent commentators on current events.
Axiom 2. Famous quotes need famous mouths.
Corollary 2A: Well-known messengers get credit for clever comments they report from less celebrated mouths.
Corollary 2B: Particularly quotable figures receive more than their share of quotable quotes.
Corollary 2C: Comments made about someone might as well have been said by them.
Corollary 2D: Who you think said something may depend on where you live.
Corollary 2E: Vintage quotes are considered to be in the public domain.
Corollary 2F: In a pinch, any orphan quote can be called a Chinese proverb.
These, then, are the laws of misquotation. All evolve from our basic need to have said what must be said, and by someone whose name we recognize.
Reflecting these laws, some terms [are useful]:
flypaper people - prominent, quotable figures to whom more than their share of quotations stick.
sounds-like quotes - comments attributed to the prominent figure whome they most "sound like."
retroquotes - words placed posthumously in the mouth of a well-known dead person.
public domain quotes - remarks made so long ago that they can be safely claimed by whoever wishes to claim them.
orphans - unattributed quotes in search of a home.
bumper-sticker (verb) - compressing a longer statement to make it more quotable.
euphonize - making a clumsy quotation more harmonious.
requisitioning - attributing an old saying to someone famous.
lip syncing - mouthing someone else's words as if they were your own.
parenting - attributing authorship of one's own words to someone more prominent; the opposite of lip syncing.
hook words or phrases - colorful words of groups of words which make a quote easier to remember; often retrofitted.
modular sayings - multipurpose comments with blanks to be filled in (e.g., "If we can afford to go to the moon, then we can afford to _________.").
numbernesia - getting the words right but the numbers wrong.
The many streams of miswording and misattribution eventually converge into a raging river of misquotation. As a result, even our most hallowed sayings are liable to be revised, requisitioned, and stolen outright.
Ralph Keyes "Nice Guys Finish Seventh": False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations (1992) [NGF] posted (in part) by Bill Thomas [UAQ] (1/23/1996)
[Note: On Usenet, the most prominent "flypaper people" appeared to be H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain and Albert Einstein. Noted by me on [UAQ] (1/24/1996). Also, cf. #1435 Comins]
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 454 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1653) EMILY: I wish everybody had a little window. Right in front like a TV screen? ... You know? Like just a little window where you could just see in and see what they were feeling and thinking about. ... So you wouldn't always have to wonder. ... You could just see. Wouldn't that be neat?
Craig Lucas Blue Window (play, 1984)
1654) What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.
Francis Bacon "Of Truth" in Essays (1625)
1655) The well of true wit is truth itself.
George Meredith Diana of the Crossways (1885)
1656) There is no jesting with edge tools.
John Fletcher and Philip Massinger The Little French Lawyer (play, c.1619-1623, printed 1647)
[Note: cf. "It is ill jesting with edge tools, or dallying with Prince's matters." from the anonymous True Tragedy of Richard III (1594)]
1657) Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.
unknown
[Note: This aphorism, which is usually credited to Otto von Bismarck -- although always without citation -- exists in a large number of variations, some of which can be seen at [WQ]. Others who have had the comparison attributed to them include: Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, Clarence Darrow, Mark Twain, Kaiser Wilhelm, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, Betty Talmadge (the wife of former Georgia senator Herman Talmadge), and "Old Mr. Hawes", an Illinois state legislator in 1896.
The oldest known citation for the comparison of laws and sausages is given in [YQ] as coming from the McKean Miner of Smethport, PA (4/22/1869):
Saxe says in his new lecture 'Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made'.
[YQ] speculated that "Saxe" may refer to lawyer-poet John Godfrey Saxe.]
1658) Disinformation and propaganda are the art of presentation, not of lies. By merely changing the sequence in which you present information, you alter the conclusions your audience can reach.
Brandon de Wilde (attributed) posted by Fred F. Freeman on rec.arts.movies.current-films (1/22/1996)
[Note: There is no Google support for the existence of this quote said by "Brandon de Wilde" or anyone else.]
1659) Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Sigmund Freud (attributed) [B16] posted by Fred F. Freeman on rec.arts.movies.current-films (1/22/1996)
[Note: Ralph Keyes concludes that there is no evidence that Freud ever said or wrote this, and that it is, in fact, at odds with Freud's actual views. [QV]]
1660) The worst horror of his rampages was not the pain and fear that he inflicted, not the blood, not the mutilated cadavers. The pain and the fear were comparatively brief, considering all the routine pain and anxiety of life. The blood and bodies were merely aftermath. The worst horror was that he stole meaning from the unfinished lives of those people he killed, made himself the primary purpose of their existence, robbed them not of time but of fulfillment.
Dean R. Koontz Intensity (1995) Cindy Hedstrom, personal e-mail (1/22/1996)
1661) Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
Aldous Huxley "Variations on a Philosopher" Themes and Variations (1950) posted by Chris West [ISQ] (1/22/1996)
[Note:
One definition of man is "an intelligence served by organs".
Ralph Waldo Emerson "Works and Days" Society and Solitude (1870)
perhaps quoting Louis De Bonald Theorie de Pouvoir Politique et Religieux (1796) [CQ].]
Sources
[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993) [CQ] - Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) [ISQ] - Internet Serial-Quotations mailing list [QV] - The Quote Verifier (2006), Ralph Keyes [WQ] - Wikiquote [YQ] - The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), Fred R. Shapiro, ed.
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 454 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1645) Racism is the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority an another group to congenital superiority.
Ruth Fulton Benedict Race, Science and Politics (1940) [B16]
1646) Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
Joseph Brodsky Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986) [CQ]
1647) There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed [...] Trouble doesn't come from Slopes, Kikes, Niggers, Spics or White Capitalist Pigs; it comes from the heart.
P.J. O'Rourke Holidays in Hell (1988) [CQ]
1648) Uh, Mister Policeman, what makes America great?
It's candied apples And ponies with dapples You can ride all day It's girls with pimples And cripples with dimples That just won't go away.
It's Spics and Wops and Niggers and Kikes With noses as long as your arm It's Micks and Chinks and Gooks and Geeks and Honkies (honk-honk) That never left the farm.
That's America, buddy!
Firesign Theatre (Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Philip Proctor) How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All (lp, 1969)
1649) No person who examines and reflects, can avoid seeing that there is but one race of people on the earth, who differ from each other only according to the soil and the climate in which they live.
Captain J.G. Stedman Narrative of a Five-Years' Expedition Against The Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) [CQ]
1650) From the moment of his birth the customs into which [an individual] is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture.
Ruth Fulton Benedict Patterns of Culture (1934) [B16]
1651) In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture. In scientific language, culture is not a function of race.
Ruth Fulton Benedict Race, Science and Politics (1940) [B16]
1652) The tough-minded [...] respect differences. Their goal is a world made safe for differences [...]
Ruth Fulton Benedict. The Chrysathenum and the Sword (1946) [B16]
Sources
[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993) [CQ] - Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 454 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1644) Joan Miro painted his constellations series (some of the most beautiful paintings in 20th century art) while in exile during the early years of World War II. Fifty years after the fact, it's pretty clear that the world is better off for having these paintings than it would be for having more art telling us that war, fascism, and religious persecution are bad things. Those of us who haven't figured this out are unlikely to be persuaded by art.
Emile Tobenfeld posted on [AMB] (1/13/1996)
Sources
[AMB] - Internet Ambient Music mailing list
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 454 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
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1641) There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.
Hannah Arendt Crises of the Republic (1972) [CQ]
1642) One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all." [...] One who break an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Martin Luther King, Jr. "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" (4/16/1963) Why We Can't Wait (1964) [ALQ]
1643) When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignity of the people to the sovereignity of mankind.
Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1835) [ALQ]
Sources
[ALQ] – Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations (1993) [CQ] - Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 454 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1637)The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest ... You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down ... Basically I am a very lazy man.
T. S. Eliot quoted in "The Calloused Hand" in Time (10/23/1950) posted by "jr3000" [UAQ] (1/11/1996)
1638) The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.
Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931) posted by "jr3000" [UAQ] (1/11/1996)
1639) Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
Anthony Powell Temporary Kings (1973) posted by "jr3000" [UAQ] (1/11/1996)
1640) To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
Bernard Baruch on his 85th birthday Newsweek (8/20/1955) posted by "jr3000" [UAQ] (1/11/1996)
Sources
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 454 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever, and your obediant humble servant has been alive for 19,359 days or exactly 53 years.
This article in the Guardian says that "disillusioned Christian conservatives" are upset about the Presidential nominees being offered by the Republican party, and may leave the fold in order to back a third-party candidate. (I've heard the name of Anthony Perkins -- the head of the Fanily Research Council, not the dead actor -- being mentioned as a possibilty.)
Please, please, say it isn't so! Having the Republican vote divided and some of their staunchest supporters split off is just about the worst possible thing that could happen to the Democratic Party!!! If those fundamentalists really do go off on their own, and are finally able to put forward a platform which covers exactly what they know needs to be done to this country, without being held back by all the compromises they've had to make as part of the Republican "big tent", I just know that people all over the country are going to flock to their clarion call, and they will be swept into office on a wave of righteous morality!!!
Oh woe is us!! We will be doomed!! Doomed, I tell you! No longer will the bright light of the radical religious right be hidden by all those ultra-liberal Republicans who the public has finally started to distrust, and we Democrats will certainly feel the heat as we go down in flames.
These are my very worst fears come to pass. I guess the only thing I can hope for is that this never happens, and the religious right never truly realizes what power it would have if it finally broke away from the GOP.
1634) To receive trouble is to receive good fortune; To receive agreement is to receive opposition.
Zen poem from the Zenrin Kushu Toyo Eicho, comp. quoted by Alan Watts in The Way of Zen (1957)
1635) Committee: A group of the unfit appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.
Carl C. Byers Webster's Unafraid Dictionary (1967) posted by "liblanc1" [UAQ] (1/5/1996)
1636) A committee is the only know form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.
Robert A. Heinlein Methuselah's Children (1958) posted by Matt Hickman [UAQ] (1/9/1996)
Sources
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 455 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1628) Most of the striking images that we encounter are in the service of salesmanship; and if skimpy panties and bulging briefs have become commonplace billboard images, it should be no surprise that sexually explicit art gets construed as a form of advertising. [...]
Consumer culture has almost obliterated the line between the public sphere. where certain images were once proscribed by civic standards of decency, and the private sphere, where images frankly designed to induce sexual pleasure have been tolerated. In this environment, one does not necessarily have to be hostile to pornography as an option to be disturbed by the drift of contemporary art toward what was once deemed the pornographic.
Andrew Delbanco "They Know What They Don't Like" New York Times Book Review (12/31/1995) [review of The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism by Wendy Steiner]
1629) It is no wonder that Senators Helms and D'Amato have trouble distinguishing representation of sado-masochistic sex from the advocacy of sado-masochistic sex when the normal [sic] function of photography in the "real world" is to promote products.
Wendy Steiner The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (1995) quoted by Andrew Delbanco in "They Know What They Don't Like" New York Times Book Review (12/31/1995)
1630) In sociobiological terms, a species that suffers severely from constant internal strife--including theft, assault, and other acts which we now think of as criminal--will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to species whose members behave more cooperatively with each other. To a large extent, then, large-scale intra-species sociopathic behavior has been selected out by evolution. Consequently, in primitive cultures, people respect each others' rights even though there is no explicit threat of retribution. (There may be various mores and taboos instead, or social pressure to conform, but this is not what you're talking about when you say that it is only the threat of punishment that keeps people from running amok.)
Even in "decadent" modern cultures, people do not in fact habitually steal from each other, and the threat of law enforcement has very little to do with it. For instance, it would be a simple matter to steal a newspaper off my neighbor's doorstep. Yet when my neighbor comes home in the evening, his newspaper is still there, waiting for him. And this in New York City, not known as a center for law abiding behavior.
A couple of decades ago, the police in New York went on strike for a few days. So far as anyone was able to tell, there was no increase in crime.
The idea that we need "properly qualified" law-enforcement personnel to avert social self-destruction is rooted mostly in fear. I have never seen any proof that it is true. A recent Cato study showed that crime in America correlates much more with poverty than with lack of police; indeed, an increase in police recruitment is usually followed by an increase in reported crime, though no one is precisely sure why.
Since a "law enforcement class" always entails the probability of corruption and usually attracts at least some people who enjoy the application of power as an end in itself, I would personally prefer a society without a police force in the usual sense, and I would feel safer in it. I trust my neighbor more than I trust my neighborhood police.
Charles Platt rec.arts.sf.written (1/3/1996)
1631) There is something about moderation that runs directly against the American grain. This is a country that doesn't like speed limits, backs the rights of every citizen to shoulder a grenade launcher and firmly believes that the aging process can be either slowed down or arrested entirely.
William Grimes "Good News on Drinking: Fries With That, Please" New York Times Week In Review (1/7/1996)
1632) I am quite certain that political societies are not what their laws make them, but what sentiments, belief, ideas, habits of the heart, and the spirit of the men who form them, prepare them in advance to be, as well as what nature and education have made them.
Alexis de Tocqueville letter Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society (1985) Roger Boesche, ed.
1633) There is, in formation, a whole body of potential 'new men' in American universities and even in business circles: men without heads and without imagination, with three or four eyes and iron teeth, who are secretly in love with the concept of a vast managerial society. One day we are going to wake up and find American and Russia in bed together (forgive the unmonastic image) and realize they were happily married all along. It is then that the rest of us are going to have to sort ourselves out and find out if there remains, for us, a little fresh air somewhere in the universe.
Thomas Merton letter to Czeslaw Milosz (c.1969) Courage for Truth (1993) posted by Tom Dillingham [PKD] (1/8/1996)
Sources
[PKD] - Internet Philip K. Dick mailing list
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 456 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
oligarchic
opportunistic
out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
prevaricating
propagandists
rapacious
relentless
reprehensible
rigid
scandalous
schemers
selfish
secretive
shameless
sleazy
tricky
unAmerican
uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
unprincipled
unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
unscientific
unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
All the fine sites I've
guest-blogged for:
Be sure to visit them all!!
recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
E-mail
All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses.
Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
Men's urinal in the Sofitel in Queenstown, New Zealand
1678) In the fashion world, models are always "girls." Successful models are "big girls." Stars like [Kate] Moss and [Naomi] Campbell and [Linda] Evangelista are "huge girls." Diminutive though the term may sound for a 30-year-old like Evangelista, who has made millions during her career, "girl" captures the peculiar role played by a model of any age. Backstage at a show or at a shooting in a loft, "girl" suggests, as it is meant to, someone more beautiful and less complicated than a woman.
1666) America has become a clapping nation. Television, always the bellwether, teaches how: watch as audiences on game and talkshows clap not to express approval but to provide punctuation. They clap before commercials and after commercials, when someone enters and when someone leaves, when they are told to and when they are not.
numbernesia - getting the words right but the numbers wrong.
It's candied apples 
1650) From the moment of his birth the customs into which [an individual] is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture.
1636) A committee is the only know form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.
