BartCop Entertainment Archives - Tuesday, 7 June, 2005

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press... They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.

"An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."

- U.S. Congressman Oscar Callaway, 1917 -

"The Post follows current American news industry practice of killing any story based on evidence from a confidential source if a government honcho privately denies it. A flat-out 'we didn't do it' is enough to kill an investigation in its cradle. And by that rule, there is no chance that the Managing Editor of the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, would today run Deep Throat's story of the Watergate break-in. And that sucks."

- Greg Palast: Deep Throat Cover Blown -

"The world can therefore seize the opportunity [Persian Gulf crisis] to fulfill the long-held promise of a New World Order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind."

- George Herbert Walker Bush -

"In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all."

- Strobe Talbot, President Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State, as quoted in Time, July 20th, l992 -

"I'm not conceited. Conceit is a fault and I have no faults."

- David Lee Roth -

"There is a kind of monkey trap used in Asia. A coconut is hollowed out and attached by a rope to a tree or stake in the ground. At the bottom of the coconut a small slit is made and some sweet food is placed inside. The hole on the bottom of the coconut is just big enough for the monkey to slide in his open hand, but does not allow for a closed fist to passed out. The monkey smells the sweets, reaches in with his hand to grasp the food and is then unable to withdraw it. The clenched fist won't pass through the opening. When the hunters come, the monkey becomes frantic but cannot get away. There is no one keeping that monkey captive, except the force of its own attachment. All that it has to do is to open the hand. But so strong is the force of greed in the mind that it is a rare monkey which can let go.

"It is the desires and clinging in our minds which keep us trapped. All we need to do is to open our hands. Let go of ourselves, our attachments, and be free."

- Monkey Trap -

"During the Iran-Iraq war, Halabjah was attacked with blood agent gas; how many Kurd deaths were originally reported until the number was increased several years later right before Desert Storm? Several hundred.

"When doctors sent by France, the United Nations and the Red Cross examined gassed Kurdish refugees in Turkey, what symptoms did the doctors say were exhibited? Non-lethal tear gas.

"What city presented Hussein with the Key to the City in 1979? Detroit, USA.

"What nation won Humanitarian Awards for its literacy programs? Iraq, under Hussein's government.

"What nation had the highest number of citizens with PhDs on the world, even more than America? Iraq, under Hussein's government.

"Who 'mass-graved' thousands of Iraqis by bulldozing over them? US forces in 1991.

"What nation defended this atrocity by saying a gap in international law allowed for burying Iraqis alive? The USA."

- BEFORE the US attacked Iraq, Facts EVERY war supporter should have known -

"Words, colors, light, sound, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! ... Steal anything in sight...."

- William S. Burroughs -

"I try very, very hard not to think of the conservative movement as a gaggle of thick-skulled fanatics. To help me along in this process, I seek out well-reasoned commentary from conservative intellectuals such as Tod Lindberg of the Washington Times and Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review. But my efforts at ideological toleration inevitably get spoiled when something comes along like Human Events magazine's list of the 'Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.'

"Human Events is a conservative weekly that Ronald Reagan was known to favor, and which the Wall Street Journal called a 'bible of the right.' It compiled its list by polling a panel of conservative academics (such as Robert George of Princeton University) and Washington think-tank types (such as Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute). As such, it offers a fair window into the dementia of contemporary conservative thinking.

"One amusing thing about the list is its seeming inability to distinguish between seminal works of social science and totalitarian manifestos. Marx, Hitler and Chairman Mao sit alongside pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. You'll be comforted to know that Mao, with 38 points and a No. 3 ranking, edged out Kinsey, with 37 points. The Feminine Mystique, meanwhile, checks in at No. 7, with 30 points, just behind Das Kapital, which totaled 31 points."

- Jonathan Chait: The Right's Wrong Books -

"The World Policy Institutes report analyzed U.S. weapons sales from September 11, 2001 through 2003, the last year in which full information on weapons sales are available. The Bush administration says that weapons exports are necessary in order to gain and maintain access to military facilities around the world, and to reward coalition forces who have participated in our military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this new report indicates that weapons have been sold to countries who are engaged in their own military conflicts, and who are flagrant human rights abusers. As a consequence, weapons sales frequently serve to bolster unstable, anti-democratic governments at the expense of both American and international security.

"In 2003, the Bush administration transferred weapons to 18 of the 25 nations engaged in active conflicts. Thirteen of the 25 nations who received weapons were classified by the U.S. State Department as undemocratic governments. These 13 governments received over $2.7 billion in U.S. weapons. And 20 of those 25 nations were defined by the State Department as having poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse...

"The report concludes by noting that the gravest danger stemming from U.S. weapons sales is the impact on the image, credibility and security of America. Funneling arms to repressive and undemocratic governments, while at the same time championing democracy, causes the credulity of America to be questioned. Providing weapons to nations with poor human rights records often helps to enhance their power and causes further abuses. And as has occurred before, weapons given to a 'friendly' government can end up in the hands of future enemies, as happened in Iraq and Panama in the 1980s, and is presently the case with the remnants of the former Taliban in Afghanistan."

- Gene C. Gerard: Bush Administration Promotes Global Conflicts by Rewarding Allies -

"In TV and radio ads two conservative groups greatly overstate the burden that the federal estate tax puts on heirs to a family farm or business.

"One ad claims the federal estate tax 'can bury your family in crippling tax bills,' which is untrue for nearly all of those who will see the ad, including the large majority of farm and business owners. Both ads claim the estate tax is a 'double tax,' which is only partly true, and mostly false when it comes to very wealthy families.

"We take no position on whether the estate tax should or should not be repealed permanently. The claims made in these one-sided ads, however, present a misleading picture of who is actually affected by the tax."

- Estate Tax Malarkey -

"Know what real men do? They admit their mistakes. Know what real people do in times of great stress and strife and economic downturn? They seek help, understand they don't know all the answers, realize they might not've been asking the right questions in the first place.

"Know what great leaders, great nations do at times of war and fracture and massive bludgeoning debt? All of the above, all the time, with great intelligence and humility and grace and awareness and shared humanity. Or they die.

"But not BushCo. This is the hilarious thing. This is the appalling thing, still. How can this man remain so blindly, staggeringly resolute? How can he be so appallingly ignorant of fact, of truth, of evidence, of deep thought? In short, what the hell is wrong with George W. Bush?...

"Unlike you or me or any human anywhere who happens to be in possession of humility or subtlety of mind, Bush, to this day, admits zero mistakes. He refuses help, rejects suggestions that everything is not dandy and swell. He is confounded by questions that dare suggest he might be somewhat inept, or failing. And he absolutely insists that America exists in some sort of bizarre utopian vacuum, isolated and virtuous and towering like a mad hobbled king over our enemies and allies alike.

"He is, in other words, our downfall...

"There is no eloquent, deeply felt defense of ideas. There is no intellectual breakdown of opinion, no multifaceted explanation, no passionate clarification. And there is certainly no reference to outside ideas, a confession that we might need help, input, wisdom from our neighbors, from science, from the wise and the experienced.

"It's a fact we've known all along but which keeps hammering at us like a drunk gorilla hammers at a dead mouse: Bush is able to speak only at one level, to one level. The level of a child. The level of a simpleton. The level of a sweet, bumbling, small-town mayor, addressing a PTA meeting, everyone in soft plaids and everyone drinking light beer and everyone wondering about just what the heck to do about the rusty swing sets and the busted stoplight."

- Mark Morford: Bush, The Spoiled Man-Child. What causes the fall of empires? Why, stubborn leaders who speak like toddlers and never admit mistakes -

"There's something about me that makes a lot of people want to throw up."

- Pat Boone -

"Without facts, the decision cannot be made logically. You must rely on your human intuition."

- Spock: Assignment: Earth, stardate unknown -

"Short of obtaining a degree in logic, or studying the nuances of debate, remember this one simple rule for defusing those who are skilled at defending bad ideas: Simply because they cannot be proven wrong, does not make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea.

"For example, just because you can't prove that I'm not the king of France reincarnated doesn't make it so. So when someone tells you My plan A is the best because no one has explained how it will fail - know that there is a logical gap in this argument. Simply because no one has described how it will fail, doesn't necessarily make it the best plan. It's possible than plans B, C, D and E all have the same quality, or that the reason no one has described how A will fail is that no one has had more than 30 seconds to scrutinize the plan...

"If you want your smart people to be as smart as possible, seek a diversity of ideas. Find people with different experiences, opinions, backgrounds, weights, heights, races, facial hair styles, colors, past-times, favorite items of clothing, philosophies, and beliefs. Unify them around the results you want, not the means or approaches they are expected to use. It's the only way to guarantee that the best ideas from your smartest people will be received openly by the people around them. On your own, avoid homogenous books, films, music, food, sex, media and people. Actually experience life by going to places you don't usually go, spending time with people you don't usually spend time with. Be in the moment and be open to it. Until recently in human history, life was much less predictable and we were forced to encounter things not always of our own choosing. We are capable of more interesting and creative lives than our modern cultures often provide for us. If you go out of your way to find diverse experiences it will become impossible for you to miss ideas simply because your homogenous outlook filtered them out."

- Scott Berkun: Why smart people defend bad ideas -

"Investors have applied for a license to build a slot-machine casino in Gettysburg, PA, near the site of the brutal Civil War battle. The casino would be paid for with profits from a similar venture, the Appomattox Dildo Emporium."
- Jon Stewart -

"Following a successful launch of an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral carrying the first of a new Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) satellite into space, Deep Space Communications Network launched the first private communications message into deep space for craigslist. The 23 minute transmission included over 24 million words and pictures from the global craigslist community into deep space. The transmission was preceded by a tone and identifier to the audio signal that stated the earth date and that the transmission was from the planet earth."

- craigslist "test launches" 138,179 classified ads from earth toward outer space communities -

"The Religious Right uses the Constitution just like it does the Bible. It picks and chooses the pieces of either that fit the argument-of-the-minute. They tout the Constitution to argue for gun ownership and trample it when it comes to the freedoms of other peoples' speech or choice. They quote the Bible for their arguments only to ignore it when their own sins are in the spotlight. Contrary to what some people believe, religion has no place in politics. That is not to say one's faith should not be a factor in decision making; it just shouldn't be the only factor because, like it or not, situations and people do change. It's called evolution."

- Doug Griffin: Dim-witted, half-hearted blowhards -

"Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior become your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny."

- Mohandas Gandhi -

"The average CEO made 42 times the average worker's pay in 1980. That increased to 85 times in 1990 and is now over 300 times."

- Brandon Rees -

"My decision to become a Republican didn't come easily. For years I clung to the idea that the foundation of a democratic society was our implied social contract, each of us committing some level of personal sacrifice to the common good of all.

"I regarded taxes as dues we pay for better roads and schools, safe inspection of meat and dairy products, maintenance of parks and protection of wilderness areas. I see now that looking out for the common good resulted in shortchanging the most important element in this formula - me."

- Jeff Gillenkirk: Why I'm joining the GOP - Leaving the left for fun and profit -

"Is George Lucas a knowing Economic Terrorist? Lucas KNEW that by releasing the last Star Wars movie what effect it would have on the United States Economy. The movie was released on a working day. Lucas could have well waited to release his movie on Saturday or even Sunday. The effect was a $627 million loss in American Productivity. The box-office take was $158.5 million. That leaves a $468.5 cost to the U.S. Economy."

- D.L. Graham -

"Looking to the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?"

- Vincent Van Gogh -

"At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas."
- Aldous Huxley -

"There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president."
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. -

"The fool will never find freedom
By practicing concentration.

But the master never fails.

Just by knowing how things are,
He is free and constant.

Because the fool wants to become God,
He never finds him.

The master is already God,
Without ever wishing to be."

- Ashtavakra Gita 18:36-37 -

"Originality is nothing but judicious imitation."

- Voltaire -

"As I am, so are others;
as others are, so am I.
Having thus identified self and others,
harm no one nor have them harmed."

- Buddha: Sutta Nipata 705 -

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the fine line between sanity and madness gotten finer?"
- George Price -

"Style is a simple way of saying complicated things."

- Jean Cocteau -

"Consult, n. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on."

- Ambrose Bierce: the Devil's Dictionary -

"So what are you going to do? This is the season when a clutch of successful women - who have it all - give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can't have it all. Maybe young women don't wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands. And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn't know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever. We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things are for you today, they won't make the list in ten years - not that you still won't be some of those things, but they won't be the five most important things about you. Which is one of the most delicious things available to women, and more particularly to women than to men. I think. It's slightly easier for us to shift, to change our minds, to take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee who made a specialty of saying things that were famously maladroit, quoted himself at a recent commencement speech he gave. 'When you see a fork in the road,' he said, 'take it.' Yes, it's supposed to be a joke, but as someone said in a movie I made, don't laugh this is my life, this is the life many women lead: two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to take them both. It's another of the nicest things about being women; we can do that. Did I say it was hard? Yes, but let me say it again so that none of you can ever say the words, nobody said it was so hard. But it's also incredibly interesting. You are so lucky to have that life as an option."

- Nora Ephron: Remarks to Wellesley College Class of 1996 -

"We must not fail to observe that we often fall into error because our conclusion is not in fact primary and commensurately universal in the sense in which we think we prove it so. We make this mistake (1) when the subject is an individual or individuals above which there is no universal to be found: (2) when the subjects belong to different species and there is a higher universal, but it has no name: (3) when the subject which the demonstrator takes as a whole is really only a part of a larger whole; for then the demonstration will be true of the individual instances within the part and will hold in every instance of it, yet the demonstration will not be true of this subject primarily and commensurately and universally."

- Aristotle: Posterior Analytics -

"I don't want to toot my own horn here - you couldn't hear it from this distance anyway - but I think I'm fairly open-minded when it comes to the idea of Freedom. I think I'm one of the only former drug abusers and alcoholics who doesn't decry the years I partied, or regret them. Instead, I look on those experiences as fun and exciting, and crucial to getting me where I am today. And I believe all drugs should be legal and available. In fact, I believe that as long as you don't harm another person, or get in the way of their freedom, ALL THINGS should be legal and available. As no amount of laws passed seem to prevent people's love of freedom, nor squelch their curiosity, nor their basic humanity, we would do better to look through the eyes of love and compassion, rather than condemnation and fear. Drug abusers are not criminals in my minds eye. At worst, they are just sick, and I know of no jail that has ever healed anyone."

- Bill Hicks: My Philosophy -

"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito..."

- African Proverb -

"Those who spend their time fighting tyranny are patriots. Those who spend their time fighting patriots are advancing tyranny."

- The John Birch Society -

"We wondered whether, following the Gannon affair, the White House would tighten up the rule for day passes - to prove that Gannon was a fluke - or would keep things loose, to prove his easy passage was hardly exceptional. From what we could tell, it was the second. We sailed in on little more than Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, and the claim that we worked for Vanity Fair. Care to add the White House press briefing room to the Lincoln Memorial and the National Air and Space Museum to your next trip to the capital? Say you're a journalist, and we don't think you'll have much of a problem."

- David Margolick & Richard Gooding: Wrong Man, Wrong Place, Vanity Fair, June 2005 -

"When a Mason learns the key to the warrior on the block is the proper application of the dynamo of living power, he has learned the mystery of his Craft. The seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands and before he may step onward and upward, he must prove his ability to properly apply energy."

- Manly P. Hall: The Lost Keys To Freemasonry -

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

- David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991 -

"North Korea on Thursday said the deployment of 15 US F-117 Stealth bombers to South Korea was part of preparations for a preemptive nuclear strike on the country. The deployment announced by Washington last week was an unpardonable act, said the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland... 'We... bitterly denounce the deployment of Stealth fighter bombers in South Korea by the United States as a... provocation of a war against the North and the worst malicious challenge to the Korean nation', ... This proves that the US scheme of preemptive nuclear attack is systematically going over from violent words to operational plan and from the plan to the stage of military action', the committee said."

- North Korea says US Stealth bomber move signals nuclear war -

"Amnesty [International] recently criticized the Bush administration's treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, calling the facility 'the gulag of our times,' a reference to political prisoners held by the former Soviet Union.

"Bush and his supporters quickly responded by calling the accusation absurd. 'I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd - it's an absurd allegation,' Bush said.

"It would appear the Bush administration objects to Amnesty's use of the word 'gulag'. Often people automatically assume 'gulag' refers to work-camps, but a closer look reveals a more broad definition, including: 'A place or situation of great suffering and hardship, likened to the atmosphere in a prison system or a forced labor camp.'

"If that isn't a universally accepted description of the conditions for the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, then what is?"

- Brian Richards: Editorial: George Bush Is An Idiot, Amnesty International Report Upsetting Only Because It's True -

"Like all historic events, the Enron scandal has already started to affect the language. The stick-up artist goes into the Jiffy Mart to pull a heist. He whips out his rod and says, 'Put 'em up, this is an aggressive accounting practice.'"

- Molly Ivins: Who Let the Dogs In? -

"1. Fractured index finger, right hand. Sustained in self-defense during the ghastly 'banter' between Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen in the dogfight scene. The finger was merely badly sprained until I realized that McGregor, star of genuinely good movies such as Trainspotting, was being out-acted by R2D2, the star-speckled and unconvincing backdrop and his own beard.

"2. Dislocated kneecap, left leg. Caused by violent convulsions brought about by the scripting of the first love scene between Natalie Portman and Christensen. Current theories suggest that my knee was performing actions consistent with running away, out of the cinema, to another cinema in another land, where a better film might be playing. Sadly I was wedged into an Ewok-sized seat in a soulless Odeon box, hence the damage caused to my patella and surrounding tissue."

- Owen Goodyear: Injuries I inflicted on myself during Star Wars III -

"The U.S. government gave the slave trade a boost by offering money for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Afghan and Pakistani warlords simply rounded up people who looked Arab or foreign and sold them to the Americans as captured fighters. The 'fighters' apparently included relief workers, refugees, and Arab businessmen. The tribunals looking into the classification of Guantanamo prisoners as 'enemy combatants' have uncovered numerous examples of hapless victims of a naive U.S. government too flush with money.

"The Bush administration, of course, denies that it bought its detainees, as it denies everything. However, on May 31, 2005, Michelle Faul of the Associated Press reported that in March 2002, leaflets and broadcasts from helicopters in Afghanistan enticed Afghans to 'Hand over the Arabs and feed your families for a lifetime.' One leaflet said: 'You can receive millions of dollars. This is enough to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life, pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.'"

"Najeeb al-Nauimi, a former Qatar justice minister, leads a group of lawyers representing 100 detainees who were sold to the naive Americans. He says a consortium of wealthy Arabs are buying back fellow citizens kidnapped by Pakistani gangs before they can be sold to the Americans."

- Paul Craig Roberts: Washington Is the Source of Terror -

"We couldn't get him to do a cameo because, being dead, it just ruined the whole thing."

- Keith Gordon on why screenwriter Dennis Potter didn't appear in the film of The Singing Detective -

"I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin' and hook up with them later."

- Mitch Hedberg -

"Cheer up. Life isn't everything."

- Mike Nichols -