"[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel - back in 1980, before I was online - I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: "˜Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.'"
- Robert Anton Wilson interviewed by Paul Krassner -
"One thing I can tell you is that we don't know what the actual relationship between consciousness and the physical world is. There are good reasons to be skeptical of the naive conception of a soul. We know that almost everything we take ourselves to be subjectively - all of our cognitive powers, our ability to understand language, our ability to acknowledge anything in our physical environment through our senses - this is mediated by the brain. So the idea that a brain can die and a soul that still speaks English and recognizes Granny is going to float away into the afterlife, that seems to be profoundly implausible. And yet we do not know what the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity ultimately is. For instance, we could be living in a universe where consciousness goes all the way down to the bedrock so that there is some interior subjective dimension to an electron. So I'm actually quite skeptical of our ever being able to resolve that question - what the real relationship between consciousness and matter ultimately is."
"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures."
- Vincent Van Gogh -
"The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory."
- Paul Fix -
"We will develop love, we will practice it, we will make it both a way and a basis, take our stand upon it, store it up, and thoroughly set it going."
- Samyutta Nikaya -
"I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave."
- H. L. Mencken: Why Liberty? -
"Thank goodness for the Swiss. Alone in Europe, their government has dared to condemn what the Israelis are doing to Gaza. It is collective punishment, they say. It violates the principle of proportionality. Israel has not taken the precautions required by international law to protect civilians.
"Inevitably, the bloggers are pouring out the usual irrelevancies about the role of Swiss banks during the Nazi period. But as the depository of the Geneva conventions, one of the key legal advances to emerge from the ravages of the 20th century, Switzerland has a duty to speak out.
"Its statement stands in contrast to the European Union's shamefully muted voice. The Palestinians kill two soldiers and take one prisoner and, in response, power stations are blown up, sewage and water systems grind to a halt, bridges are destroyed, sonic booms terrify children day and night, and all this is inflicted on a hungry people who are under siege in what is effectively a huge open prison. The EU's response? Vague expressions of 'concern' and calls for 'restraint'".
"In an extraordinary letter of protest, representatives for 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists are asking Congress to stop the Bush administration from closing the agency's network of technical research libraries. The EPA scientists, representing more than half of the total agency workforce, contend thousands of scientific studies are being put out of reach, hindering emergency preparedness, anti-pollution enforcement and long-term research, according to the letter released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
"In his proposed budget for FY 2007, President Bush deleted $2 million of support for EPAs libraries, amounting to 80% of the agency's total budget for libraries. Without waiting for Congress to act, EPA has begun shuttering libraries, closing access to collections and reassigning staff. The letter notes that EPA library services are [now] greatly reduced or no longer available to the general public in agency regional offices serving 19 states."
"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially ... the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
"On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed."
"Conservative pundits, right-wing talk show hosts and other forms of life who are just below plankton on the evolutionary scale (excuse me, intelligent design scale) got their red and blue tights in a bunch last week because the famous line in Superman Returns was changed from 'truth, justice and the American way' to 'truth, justice.and all of that stuff.' Proponents of the new line, including screenwriter Dan Harris, said the change was needed because 'the American way' holds a different connotation than it did in 1945. But opponents believe the line implies that Superman isn't American and, therefore, unpatriotic.
"That's right. Superman's shorts ain't the only thing about him that's 'red.'
"Is this really what political experts from both sides of the aisle should be discussing at a time of war: the un-American activities of a superhero? Will the CIA put a tap on Underdog's phone to see if his alter ego, Shoe Shine Boy, has been polishing any of Al-Qaida's sandals?"
"When reason succumbs to passion, we act against our better judgment."
- Benedictus de Spinoza -
"Under federal criminal law, anyone who 'commits a war crime - shall be fined - or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.' And a war crime is defined as 'any conduct - which constitutes a violation of Common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at Geneva.' In other words, with the Hamdan decision, U.S. officials found to be responsible for subjecting war on terror detainees to torture, cruel treatment or other 'outrages upon personal dignity' could face prison or even the death penalty.
"Don't expect that to happen anytime soon, of course. For prosecutions to occur, some federal prosecutor would have to issue an indictment. And in the Justice Department of Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales - who famously called the Geneva Convention 'quaint' - a genuine investigation into administration violations of the War Crimes Act just ain't gonna happen."
"CORRECTION: We reported recently that Congress had raised the minimum wage while declining to raise their own salaries. In fact, they raised their own salaries while declining to raise the minimum wage. We apologize for any confusion caused by our mistake."
"As I see it, there's one Arab terrorist with a sense of humor, known in his cell as Khalid the Droll, and he said 'I bet I could get them all to take their shoes off at airports.' Some people disagree with me, but if the next one is called, because of his MO, the Underwear Bomber, you'll know I'm onto something."
-- Calvin Trillin on The Daily Show -
"Gore v. Bush. Kerry v. Bush. Obrador v. Calderon.
"As in Florida in 2000, as in Ohio in 2004, the exit polls show the voters voted for the progressive candidate, but the race is 'officially' too close to call.
"But they will call it - after they steal it. Reuters News agency reports that, as of 8pm Eastern time, as voting concluded in Mexico, exit polls show Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the 'left-wing' Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) leading in exit polls over Felipe Calderon of the ruling conservative National Action Party (PAN).
"We've told you again and again: Exit polls tell us how voters say they voted, but the voters can't tell pollsters if their vote will be counted. In Mexico, counting the vote is an art, not a science - and Calderon's ruling crew is very artful indeed. The PAN-controlled official electoral commission, not surprisingly, has announced that the presidential tally is too close to call.
"Calderon's election is openly supported by the Bush Administration.
"On the ground in Mexico City, our news team reports accusations from inside the Obrador campaign that operatives of the PAN had access to voter files which are supposed to be the sole property of the nation's electoral commission.
"We are not surprised."
"What a nasty week. The southern provinces turned into a desert Vietnam. Kabul had a kidnapping warning then a multi-bomb scare. My neighborhood store slapped a 30 percent price hike on peanut butter. And the ugliness was only warming up.
"From the Gulf Times: 'Nearly 15,000 bottles of alcoholic drinks and 1.5 tons of drugs went up in smoke near Afghanistan's capital yesterday as officials torched illegal substances confiscated...'
"The day before this insanity, I barged into the office of the Minister of Interior pleading - 'begging' might be more accurate - for a more civilized approach to the problem. My economic argument went like this: I could take the evil product off their hands for free, allowing the government to focus its resources on feeding its starving citizens. But economics is never enough when outside the window there is a raging war and the threats are flying and peanut butter has skyrocketed, so I added a moral element: the evil juice and sinful substance are loathsome, repugnant, satanic forces doing the devil's work in Afghanistan, no doubt about that. But for Americans they are moral necessities.
"This was a time, then, for Afghanistan to shine, a time to help their struggling American friends. After all, in today's world it is not easy for an American to keep his head.
"I knew my humanitarian effort to transfer the 15,000 bottles of booze and 1.5 tons of heavy drugs to my possession for the good of America was a long shot, but I don't live for odds. Still, I didn't expect to be laughed at and then manhandled off the Ministry compound."
"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.' The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary bourgeois, equality..."
"I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
"Here it is in modern English: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account...
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you--even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent-and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
"What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.
one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
- Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
"Accept my words only when you have examined them for yourselves; do not accept them simply because of the reverence you have for me. Those who only have faith in me and affection for me will not find the final freedom. But those who have faith in the truth and are determined on the path, they will find awakening."
- Majjhima Nikaya -
"Bush's invasion of Iraq may have eliminated the remote possibility that Saddam would someday develop a nuclear bomb and share it with al-Qaeda. (Some intelligence analysts put that scenario at less than one percent, although Bush called it a gathering danger.) But the U.S. military invasion of Iraq had the unintended consequence of bolstering the conviction in North Korea and Iran that having the bomb may be the only way to fend off the United States.
"The unending scenes of bloodshed in Iraq also have inflamed anti-American passions in the Middle East, including Pakistan which already has nukes and is governed by fragile pro-U.S. dictator Pervez Musharraf.
"So, while eradicating one unlikely nightmare scenario - Hussein's mushroom cloud in the hands of Osama - Bush has increased the chances that the other two points on Bush's axis of evil, North Korea and Iran, will push for nuclear weapons and that Pakistan's Islamic fundamentalists, already closely allied with Osama, will oust Musharraf and gain control of existing nuclear weapons."
"'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"
- G.K. Chesterton -
"The law of karma, in the first place, is not a law. That word gives it an aroma as if it is something scientific, like the law of gravitation. It is merely a hope, not a law at all. It has been hoped for centuries that if you do good you will attain to good results. It is a human hope in existence which is absolutely neutral.
"If you look at nature, there are laws - the whole of science is nothing but discovery of those laws - but science has not come even close to detecting anything like the law of karma. Yes, it is certain that any action is going to bring certain reactions, but the law of karma is hoping for much more. If you simply say any action is bound to produce some reactions, it is possible to have scientific support for it. But man is hoping for much more. He is asking that a good action inevitably brings a good consequence with it, and the same with a bad action.
"Now, there are many things implied in this. First, What is good? Each society defines good according to itself. What is good to a Jew is not good to a Jaina; what is good to a Christian is not good to a Confucian. Not only that, what is good in one culture is bad in another culture. A law has to be universal. For example, if you heat water to one hundred degrees centigrade, it will evaporate -- in Tibet, in Russia, in America, even in Oregon. Certainly the law of karma is neither a scientific law nor part of any legal system.
"Then what kind of law is it? It is a hope. A man wandering in immense darkness, groping his way, clings to anything that gives a little hope, a little light - because what you observe in life itself is something totally different from the law of karma. A man who is a well-known criminal may succeed and become the president, the prime minister; or vice versa: he was not a criminal before, but when he becomes the president or prime minister of a country he becomes a criminal... So in life this strange situation happens: bad people reach good positions, become respectable or honored, not only in their time but throughout history...
"So the one thing to be remembered is: in my vision of life, yes, every action is bound to have some consequences, but they will not be somewhere else, you will have them here and now. Most probably you will get them almost simultaneously. When you are kind to someone, don't you feel a certain joy? A certain peace? A certain meaningfulness? Don't you feel that you are contented with what you have done? There is a kind of deep satisfaction. Have you ever felt that contentment when you are angry, when you are boiling with anger, when you hurt somebody, when you are mad with rage? Have you ever felt a peace, a silence descending in you? No, it is impossible. You will certainly feel something, but it will be a sadness that you again acted like a fool, that again you have done the same stupid thing that you decided again and again not to do. You will feel a tremendous unworthiness in yourself. You will feel that you are not a man but a machine, because you don't respond, you react. A man may have done something, and you reacted. That man had the key in his hands, and you just danced according to his desire; he had power over you. When somebody abuses you and you start fighting, what does it mean? It means that you don't have any capacity not to react."
"The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.
"The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation's largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.
"'The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,' plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. 'This undermines that assertion.'"
"Oil and electricity consumption across the world could easily be cut by half, with major benefits for the environment, if clean energy technologies that are currently available were applied, an international watchdog said here Thursday.
"'A sustainable energy future is possible, but only if we act urgently and decisively to promote, develop and deploy a full mix of energy technologies... We have the means, now we need the will,' said Claude Mandil, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA)."
"Here's what happened in '04 - and what's in store for '08.
"In the 2004 election, over THREE MILLION voters were challenged at the polls. No one had seen anything like it since the era of Jim Crow and burning crosses. In 2004, voters were told their registrations had been purged or that their addresses were 'suspect.'
"Denied the right to the regular voting booths, these challenged voters were given "provisional" ballots. Over a million of these provisional ballots (1,090,729 of them) were tossed in the electoral dumpster uncounted.
"Funny thing about those ballots. About 88% were cast by minority voters.
"This isn't a number dropped on me from a black helicopter. They come from the raw data of the US Election Assistance Commission in Washington, DC.
"At the heart of the GOP's mass challenge of voters were what the party's top brass called, 'caging lists' - secret files of hundreds of thousands of voters, almost every one from a Black-majority voting precinct.
"When our investigations team, working for BBC TV, got our hands on these confidential files in October 2004, the Republicans told us the voters listed were their potential 'donors.' Really? The sheets included pages of men from homeless shelters in Florida.
"Donor lists, my ass. Every expert told us, these were 'challenge lists,' meant to stop these Black voters from casting ballots.
"When these 'caged' voters arrived at the polls in November 2004, they found their registrations missing, their right to vote blocked or their absentee ballots rejected because their addresses were supposedly 'fraudulent.'
"Why didn't the GOP honchos 'fess up to challenging these allegedly illegal voters? Because targeting voters of color is AGAINST THE LAW. The law in question is the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
"The Act says you can't go after groups of voters if you choose your targets based on race. Given that almost all the voters on the GOP hit list are Black, the illegal racial profiling is beyond even Karl Rove's ability to come up with an alibi.
"The Republicans target Black folk not because they don't like the color of their skin. They don't like the color of their vote: Democrat. For that reason, the GOP included on its hit list Jewish retirement homes in Florida. Apparently, the GOP was also gunning for the Elderly of Zion.
"These so-called 'fraudulent' voters, in fact, were not fraudulent at all. Page after page, as we've previously reported, are Black soldiers sent overseas. The Bush campaign used their absence from their US homes to accuse them of voting from false addresses.
"Now that the GOP has been caught breaking the Voting Rights law, they have found a way to keep using their expensively obtained 'caging' lists: let the law expire next year. If the Voting Rights Act dies in 2007, the 2008 race will be open season on dark-skinned voters. Only the renewal of the Voting Rights Act can prevent the planned racial wrecking of democracy."
"The freedom that really differentiates Americans from much of the rest of the world is codified in the Bill of Rights, including a free press, the right to assemble freely, and the right of the accused to habeas corpus, that ultimate right seized from kings, to 'have the body' instead of leaving it rot without trial in, say, a Gitmo cell."
"In this business you either sink or swim or you don't."
- David Smith -
"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."
- Thomas A. Edison -
"Only exceptionally rational men can afford to be absurd."
- Allan Goldfein -
"If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything."
- Bill Lyon -
"An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person."
- Joseph Addison -
"I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way."
- Carl Sandburg: Incidentals -
"Have courage and a little willingness to venture and be defeated."
- Robert Frost -
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
- Walt Whitman: Song of Myself -
