1866) Item 4: We say enough to the instigators of game show design for we are sick and dizzy. Show us the backs of these monstrous facades, for even bare plywood is a healthier texture. Oh you seekers of the new who run terrified from history into the clutches of an eternal life where no electric shaver can be built to last. [...]

Item 8: Beautiful and effective communicative marketing and aesthetic media are not innately evil; merely seductive. However, seductive aesthetics and media are prone to undermine common sense and vision in a capitalistic culture. Our own creations have shamed us. Teaching us that the hand and opinion of the individual are not as legitimate as that of opinion transmuted and inflated by broadcast [...] especially when that opinion is on 80-pound coated stock, in full color [...] or when that opinion steals invisibly and incomprehensibly into a box in our homes. Would that society reveled in certain varieties of vandalism and disarray. May we mow our lawns and remain civilized. [...]

Item 10: In a capitalistic society such as the in which we live, aesthetics as an endeavor flows thorough a body which is built of free enterprise and various illnesses. In boom times art may be supported by wildcat speculation or my excess funds in form of grants from the state or patronship as a tax write-off. Currently we are suffering from a lean economy. By necessity we must infiltrate popular mediums. We are building a business-based art movement. This is not new. Admitting it is. [...]

Item 12: Waiting for art talent scouts? There are no art talent scouts. Face it, no one will seek you out. No one gives a shit. [...]

Item 15: Law: If you want better media, go make it. [...]

Final Note: Capitalism for good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim, and stocks the supermarket.

Gary Panter
"The Rozz Tox Manifesto" (c.1980)
posted by Marc Librescu [PKD] (7/3/1996)

1859) You are a true believer. Blessings of the State; blessings of the masses. Thou art a subject of the Divine, created in the image of Man, by the masses, for the masses. Let us be thankful we have Commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy.

THX-1138 (film, 1971)
screenplay by George Lucas & Walter Murch,
directed by George Lucas
spoken by the character "OMM"
voiced by James Wheaton
"sig" (signature) of Erich Schneider,
seen on rec.art.sf.written (6/29/1996)

1855) Major Major Major Major had had a difficult time from the start. [...] In the hospital corridor [...] Major Major's father [...] filled out the birth certificate without faltering, betraying no emotion at all as he handed the completed form to the floor nurse. [...] "I have named the boy Caleb." he announced to [his wife] [...] in a soft voice. "In accordance with your wishes." The woman made no answer and slowly the man smiled. He had planned it all perfectly, for his wife was asleep and would never know that he had lied to her as she lay on her sickbed in the poor ward of the county hospital [...] A lesser man might have wavered that day in the hospital corridor, a weaker man might have compromised on such excellent substitutes as Drum Major, Minor Major, Sergeant Major, or C Sharp Major, but Major Major's father had waited fourteen years for such an opportunity, and he was not a person to waste it. [...] Not until Major Major was enrolling in kindergarten was the discovery of his real name made, and the effects were disastrous. The news killed his mother, who just lost her will to live and wasted away and died. [...] On Major Major himself the consequences were only slightly less severe. It was a harsh and stunning realization that we was not, as he had always been led to believe, Caleb Major, but instead was some total stranger named Major Major Major about whom he knew absolutely nothing and about whom nobody else had ever heard before. What playmates he had withdrew from him and never returned, disposed, as they were, to distrust all strangers, especially ones who had already deceived them by pretending to be someone they had known for years. Nobody would have anything to do with him. [...]

[T]he Army [took Major Major] in as a private and [made] him a major four days later so that Congressman with nothing else on their minds could go trotting back and forth through the streets of Washington D.C., chanting, "Who promoted Major Major? Who promoted Major Major?"

Actually, Major Major had been promoted by an I.B.M. machine with a sense of humor almost as keen as his father's.

Joseph Heller
Catch-22 (1961)

[Note: cf #1842 Lears]

1849) What is truly troubling about the "cultural" or "critical" study of science as it tends to be carried out in universities today is what is troubling about postmodernism in general. By teaching that the distinction between true and false is one more repressive human fiction, postmodernism promotes contempt for the truth and undermines the virtues of intellectual integrity. Those who have never performed an experiment or mastered an equation can, therefore, enjoy a sneering superiority based on the alleged insight that science is a form of literary invention distinguished primarily by its outsized social cachet.

Peter Berkowitz
"Science Fiction" in
The New Republic (7/1/1996)

[discussing Sokal's article "Transgressing the Boundaries:
Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity", in the journal Social Text
(Spring/Summer 1996), and his description of the hoax in
"A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies"
in the journal Lingua Franca (May 1996)]

1850) I never met [Theodore J.] Kaczynski [the Unabomber] [...] [b]ut in the blaze of publicity after his arraignment, I recognized where I'd seen him before: in the movies. In Hollywood, scientists star in dramas of destruction. In their quest for power, they bring trouble on us all. If convicted, Kaczynski will be perfect - he'll get top billing in the celluloid pantheon of scientists becoming monsters, replacing Vincent Price plotting murders in his laboratory or Dr. Strangelove wheeling through the War Room. He will become the apotheosis of the stereotype, the archetype of the scientist, run amok.

I don't want him as the governing image of scientists in popular imagination. If I get to pick an embodiment, it will be in the likeness of the numberless people who have extended my leisure time and life expectancy with their intelligent work, people exemplified by Paul Ehrlich or Marie Curie but never by the gaunt face of Theodore J. Kaczynski.

Anne Eisenberg
"Among the Papers in Kacyzinski's Cabin"
Scientific American (6/1996)

1851) [S]cience is an attempt [...] to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1996)
quoted by Joe Nickell in
"A Bright Light" [review] in
Scientific American (6/1996)

1852) Evidently the New Science, similarly to the New Math, has developed a New Scientific Method which requires no empirical evidence or rational argumentation, and of course the demand for coherence, logic, or "truth" is simply our old Eurocentric historical imperialist baggage being unjustly rammed down the throats of the innocents.

Zenon M. Feszczak
posted on [AMB] (6/13/1996)

1853) Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas

Every revolutionary idea – in science, politics, art, or whatever – seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:

1. "It's completely impossible – don't waste my time";


2. "It's possible, but it's not worth doing";


3. "I said it was a good idea all along."

Arthur C. Clarke
The Promise of Space (1968)

[Note: In The Quote Verifier [QV], Ralph Keyes gives this similar quote:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.

Although frequently attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer, no trace of it in his writing has been found. Keyes concludes that it probably came from Louis Agassiz, perhaps elaborating on an earlier thought by Schopenhauer. Others who have had similiar quotes attributed to them, aside from Clarke, are Michel de Montaigne, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Huxley, William James, Elbert Hubbard, J.B.S. Haldane and Charles Kettering.

Clarke's Laws - First Law: 110, 111, 751, 752; Second Law: 753; Third Law: 109, 647, 754, 755, 1013, 1057, 1402]

1854) Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

Alan Turing
quoted by John D. Barrow in
Theories of Everything (1991)

1839) [R]emember that [fashion] magazines are selling images of what you can't get. It's about unconsummated desire. The object is to make you want to go out and buy lipstick so you can feel better about yourself.

anonymous fashion magazine editor
quoted by John Tierney in
"The Big City: Masochism Central" in
New York Times Magazine (6/16/1996)

1840) [An online friend] said to me not long ago that e-mail discussions, by their very nature, required exaggeration. She is correct, IMO, to a certain degree. We feel the need to ensure the attention we think our letter deserves. So there is a great temptation to overstate and exaggerate. And before you know it, some becomes all, sometimes becomes always, sometimes not becomes never, the rejection of a part becomes the rejection of the whole, the failure to read a certain book becomes a failure to read all books, and pride in flag and country becomes chauvinism.

Sanya A. Smyth
personal e-mail, (6/13/1996)

1841) Both [Howard Hughes and his father] had that cleverness and ruthlessness and attention to detail usually called a "knack" for making money.

Donald E. Westlake
"A Prison of His Own Making" in
New York Times Book Review (6/16/1996)
[review of Howard Hughes: The Untold Story
by Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske]

1842) [John Wayne's] attachment to a single unchanging cinematic role may have stemmed from his own uncertain sense of who he was. Before he was John Wayne he was Marion Mitchell Morrison, but from his birth in 1907 until he was 5 he was Marion Robert Morrison. His family called him Robert. When he was 5 his mother had another son, and named him Robert, and told her first-born that from now on he would have a new middle name and be called Marion. In one fell swoop the boy had lost his pride of place, his mother's lap and his name. One can only imagine the effect of this on a young child.

Jackson Lears
"Screw Ambiguity" in
The New Republic (4/22/1996)
[review of John Wayne: American
by Randy Roberts and James S. Olsen]

[Note: cf. #1855 Heller]

1843) There is a kind of ambitious young person who mistakes frenetic movement for advancement in the world. He'll call you from the road and say, "I'm in Bangladesh on business, heading for Iceland," and you know that he thinks this is sufficient explanation for his purpose in life.

Michael Lewis
"Campaign Journal: Automatic Pilot" in
The New Republic (6/24/1996)

1844) On the plane heading back East I look up and take a mental photograph. A wise old man once told me how to do this: look hard, close your eyes, try to recall what you have seen. Repeat this procedure three times and you'll always remember the picture.

Michael Lewis
"Campaign Journal: Automatic Pilot" in
The New Republic (6/24/1996)

1845) Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

Ron Robertson
personal e-mail (06/20/1996)

1846) If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.

The Godfather: Part II (film, 1974)
screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo
based on the novel by Mario Puzo
directed by Francis Ford Coppola
spoken by the character "Michael Corleone"
played by Al Pacino

1847) Where it is a question of criminal justice, it is all too easy to imagine a society that wished to humiliate its criminals, but was fastidious about seeing that only the guilty were humiliated. The society depicted in The Scarlet Letter is a fair approximation of this state of things - sinners were not only to be punished, but were to be cast out of society. Still, it was a society that cared very much that what we suffered was our just deserts. The Alabama legislature recently reintroduced chain gangs; and its aim was precisely to humiliate the prisoners by doing so - the modern, lightweight shackles would do none of the physical damage that old-fashioned chains had done, but they would do just as much emotional damage. Lawmakers took it for granted that nobody ought to be in an Alabama jail without having committed a crime; they did not repudiate justice, but they expressly denied that criminals had to be treated decently.

Alan Ryan
"The Politics of Dignity"
New York Review of Books (7/11/1996)
[review of The Decent Society
by Avishai Margalit]

1848) No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

William S. Burroughs (attributed)
posted by Deborah L. Benedict on the
Court-TV message boards (6/23/1996)

1829) "Nothing is gained by execution, and a lot is lost," [criminologist James Alan] Fox maintains. It costs more, largely because of the legal machinery needed to ensure a fair trial and not, as many people believe, because of repeated appeals. Given the sentence, prosecutors take more care in preparation, and judges give the defense a wider latitude. The argument that it is expensive to lock up murderers for life does not wash with Fox, either. He disputes the typically cited estimates of $30,000 to $40,000 a year, which comes from dividing the correctional budget by the number of inmates. Most costs are fixed and do not drop when prisoners are executed. "You can't call up the commissioner and tell him we're going to cut his salary because there is one fewer inmate," Fox sneers. "The actual expendable cost for incarcerating that one person is probably a couple of thousand dollars."

"We have a very good alternative to the death penalty, which is life in prison," he explains. "One reason so many American thirst for the death penalty is that they don't trust the criminal justice system." They fear that such offenders will be given parole after only a brief jail term. But to Fox, the system works pretty well, given that millions of people pass through it. It is the rare instance of a corrupt judge or a recidivist parolee that captures the front pages. "Good news is no news," he concludes, "and bad news is big news."

Philip Yam
"Profile: James Alan Fox;
Catching A Coming Crime Wave" in
Scientific American (6/1996)

1817) Asking the right question is the pillar of good science, both social and otherwise, as well as a source of endless debate and despair among researchers. In survey work, the perfect question has become the Holy Grail, forever out of reach. Researchers dedicate themselves to the question, experimenting with words to create the perfect inquiry - a question that does not presume, lead or color. But [...] there will never be a truly neutral question.

Researchers know one thing about questions: However precise and neutral they seem to be, they often have unpredictable effects - response effects, researchers call them. Response effects arise from the quirkiness of language and the complexities of human emotion - pride, embarrassment, self-righteousness, contempt or any of the hundreds of other strings that play when one person speaks to another. Even under ideal circumstances, when asked to remember something recent and concrete, recall is often different from fact. [...]

The imprecision of language exacerbates the problem. Single words that mean the same thing con convey wildly different ideas. Taxes or revenues? MX missile or Peacekeeper? Pro-choice or pro-abortion? Welfare or public assistance? Department of War or Department of Defense? [...] S.I. Hayakawa called some words "purr-words" and others "snarl-words." A young monk was once rebuffed by his superior when he asked if he could smoke while he prayed. Ask a different question, a friend advised. Ask if you can pray wile you smoke. [...]

[R]esearchers now know that the order in which questions are asked is as critical as the wording of any of them. [...] The wording of questions, their order, their intonation, the pacing - are all so subtly persuasive that they can look innocent even thought they have been consciously manipulated. The pitfalls of the researcher's craft have become the tools of its corruption.

Cynthia Crossen
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1818) The thinner the data, the thicker the dogma.

unnamed researcher
quoted by Cynthia Crossen in
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1819) Pecuniary Truth: Truth is what sells. Truth is what you want people to believe. Truth is that which is not legally false.

Jules Henry
Culture Against Man (1963)
quoted by Cynthia Crossen in
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1820) Deception is often undertaken by those who know or assume that they have a more objective view of the situation than those to whom they speak. [...] [They] sincerely believe that they manipulate facts in order to convey a "truer picture".

Sissela Bok
Lying (1978)
quoted by Cynthia Crossen in
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1821) Overseeing advertising claims is a relatively modern phenomenon, another consequence of our increasingly complex world. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, people typically had a "craft knowledge" of most things they bought - they understood how the product was made and how to judge its quality - and advertising rarely outweighed it. But as the number of products and their technological sophistication grew, people could not maintain a craft knowledge of most items they bought - their blender, their lawn mower, even their cake mix. Today a few people retain knowledge of cars or of items used for a hobby, such as fishing or skiing. But most have neither the opportunity nor the expertise to inspect technologically sophisticated goods coming from around the globe.

Cynthia Crossen
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1822) When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

E.G. Bulwer-Lytton
Alice; Or, The Mysteries (1838)
quoted by Cynthia Crossen in
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1823) [T]hat great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs which is called public opinion.

Sir Robert Peel
letter to John Wilson Croker (3/23/1820)
Croker Papers (1884)
quoted by Cynthia Crossen in
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1824) It isn't polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It's right and wrong.

Harry S. Truman
quoted by David McCollough in
Truman (1992)
quoted by Cynthia Crossen in
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1825) In public policy debates and deliberations, words like decency, right and wrong, fairness, trust and hope have lost their force. Numbers, which can offer so much illumination and guidance if used professionally and ethically, have become the tools of advocacy. Even if their cause is worthy, people who massage data undermine the power and purity of statistics that may be crucial to future decisions. There are numbers we will never know, and we should admit it. It is essential to understand the homeless before making policy about them. But [...] understanding is not the same as counting.

Cynthia Crossen
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1826) The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told at all times. If we do not penalise false statements made in error, we open up the way, don't you see, for false statements by intention. And of course a false statement of fact made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.

C.P. Snow
The Search (1959)
quoted (in part) by Cynthia Crossen in
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1827) The idea of seeking truth through advocacy is tested most often in America's courts of law. At the heart of the legal system is the belief that truth lies among the self-interested claims of competing parties. The ethics of [social] research are quite different. Self-interest, though acknowledged to be inevitable, is seen as something to be staunchly resisted. Although scientists and social scientists who appear in court insist their work meets their profession's highest standards, in fact their work always supports their clients' positions, or else it and they are simply dropped from the action.

The bald self-interest at the heart of litigation research is only one of the many ways it differs from the academic search for truth. A court constructs its view of truth from the materials before it. If a witness says black is white, and no one contradicts it, then for the purpose of the court, black is white. Legal adversaries stake out extreme positions, making consensus unlikely. In research, however, consensus is an indicator - though an imperfect one - of truth.

The methods by which the two disciplines seek truth also differ. In uncorrupted research, the ideal is to search for an unknown, probably hypothesized, truth; in law, it is to assemble facts to support a predetermined position.

Cynthia Crossen
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1828) Since it has become standard procedure for many kinds of cases to produce two sets of competing data, judges and juries often fall back on the more subjective judgment of credibility: which expert had better credentials, was more articulate or held up better under cross-examination.

Cynthia Crossen
Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact
in America (1994)

1810) [George Bernard] Shaw was, on any reckoning, a nutter, even by the standards of a time when being any sort of political radical seems to have required you to go whole hog in food and clothing faddism and in imbibing whatever daft theories of the self were on offer. Join the Fabians, say, or some other league of socially reformist chums, and immediately you must start exposing your naked body to the sun, get those pores into the air and light, cobble up a pair of sandals for city wear, dine on fruit juice at a socialist vegetarian cafe, wrap your loins in a woolen shirt and worry yourself silly lest your sperm was of the sort declared scientifically degenerate by the latest German sex clinician.

Valentine Cunningham
"Don Juan in Hell" in
New York Times Book Review (6/2/1996)
[review of Bernard Shaw: The Ascent
of the Superman by Sally Peters]

1811) [For Thomas Sowell] cultures are more than grab bags of quaint customs equally deserving of respect and praise; they involve differences in social choices, economic efficiency and political stability, in the relative significance people attach to such fundamentals as sex, art, thrift, violence and the "particular ways of accomplishing the things that make life possible."

Thurston Clarke
"Culture Capital" in
New York Times Book Review (6/2/1996)
quoting Thomas Sowell from
Migrations and Cultures (1996)

1812) The background interview is a vicious device because it lets officials escape responsibility.

Edwin A. Lehey
quoted by Martin F. Nolan in
"Newsroom Cynics, Listen Up" in
New York Times Book Review (6/2/1996)
[review of News Values: Ideas for
An Information Age by Jack Fuller]

1813) [P]sychologists Alan Baddeley of England's Cambridge University and Pierre Salame of Strasbourg's Center for Bioclimatic Research [...] gave tests to find out how well French college students could recall nine-digit numbers when subjected to different kinds of environmental noise.

Ninety-five decibel inanimate noise (like a subway train) did not lower ability to store numbers in short-term memory, but human voices did, even when speaking - or singing - in a language the students did not understand.

Janet Asimov
"Science: Sounding Off" in
Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy (5/1996)

1814) Few people truly want raw data, they seek information, taste, even wisdom. Filtering the Net gusher is essential, and finder software continues to improve beyond the simple key-word seekers of today. But these still take our scarcest resource: time. Often gobs of it.

Gregory Benford
"A Scientists's Notebook: Net@Fandom.com" in
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (6/1996)

1815) Idealism in America desperately needs a new language. Those who preach in the old style [...] preach only to the converted, and so they convert no one.

Sara Mosle
"What We Talk About When
We Talk About Education" in
The New Republic (6/20/1996)
[review of Amazing Grace
by Jonathan Kozol and other books
about the "crisis in education"]