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Thursday, October 18, 2007

October Quotations

"In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"Pleasure can be based on illusion, but happiness rests on reality."
~~ Nicolas Chamfort [1741-94]

"The life that awaits after death is infinitely more tiresome than this one."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]

"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
~~ Spinoza [1632-77]

"When there is no joy there can be no courage, and without courage all other virtues are useless."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]

"The poets lie too much."
~~ poet Robinson Jeffers [1887-1962]

"Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them [that] they are superior."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]

Nice bumper sticker: Who Would Jesus Bomb?

"Life is plenty good."
~~ Charlie Chan, as written by Earl Derr Biggers [1884-1933]

"Consequent to a time of War ... the life of Man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
~~ Thomas Hobbes [1588-1679] (in "Leviathan" 1651)

"It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think [that] you were born that way.”
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"A better day is coming."
~~ Michael Moore

"I hate how the white masters of the universe have squeezed and exploited every last square inch of earth for every penny [that] they can get. There's nothing left, nothing [that] they haven't ruined."
~~ Robert Westbrook

"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
~~ full text of the famous Dictum of Lord Acton [1834-1902]

"It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty."
~~ John C. Calhoun [1782-1850], in Senate speech 1848

"If the government has nothing to hide, why is it hiding everything?"
~~ USAF LtCol. Robert Bowman

"Happiness consists in realizing [that] it is all a great strange dream."
~~ Jack Kerouac [1922-69]

"Nothing exists until it is measured."
~~ physicist Niels Bohr [1885-1962]

"A lie is profanity ... A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth."
~~ Richard Pryor [1940-2005]

"None of the world's problems will have a solution until the world's individuals become thoroughly self-educated."
~~ R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Small people talk of other people, average people talk of things, great people talk of ideas."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]
"Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine."
~~ Fran Lebowitz

"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny. All of those may be turned against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defence is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65], in 1858

"The task of my generation is a separation of corporation and state."
~~ John Laesch, 2008 candidate for Congress in Illinois

"A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom."
~~ Bob Dylan

"The most effective idealist is one who is nine-tenths entertainer."
~~ silent movie star Fred C. Thomson [1890-1928]

"63% of U.S. corporations paid no federal taxes last year."
~~ Robert Kennedy, Jr. (2007)

"The clearest way into the universe is thru a forest wilderness."
~~ John Muir [1838-1914]

"The Bush administration has taken politics from the gutter into the sewers."
~~ Stephen H. Weentland of Houston, TX

"With democrats, it's often a struggle to get them to take their own side in an argument."
~~ Will Durst

"What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."
~~ Fitzgerald (in "The Last Tycoon")

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."
~~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Like virtue, adventure is its own reward."
~~ James D. Doss

"A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done."
~~ Fred Allen [1894-1956]

"[The Bush] administration has taken a wrecking ball to the very foundations of our democracy."
~~ Al Gore, Jr. (August 2007)

"The road to hell is not paved with good intentions, but with self-justification."
~~ D.R. Meredith

"The class warfare that is being waged by the great rich against the greater majority is not just a slogan. It is as heartless as terrorism, as real as death, and expanding in scope day by day."
~~ Owen Williamson

"Integrity needs no rules."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]

"You can't fix stupid."
~~ Ron White

"At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done.
Then they begin to hope [That] it can be done.
Then they see [that] it can be done.
Then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago."
~~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

"The usurpation on the part of the Executive of the conduct of foreign relations, which results in Congress blindly and ignorantly following the course dictated by the President, instead of itself declaring the war policy, is fundamentally the cause of our being in this war."
~~ Sen. Robert 'Fighting Bob' La Follette, in June 1917

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm."
~~ Walter Benjamin [1892-1940]

{many other such quotations are posted
on the Working Minds website}

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

October News Factoids

GAS/PETROL PRICE GOUGING
Lots of activity on the internet about boycotting Exxon-Mobil as a protest against price-gouging by the Oil Cartel. Better to boycott them all: Exxon-Mobil, Conoco-Phillips 66, B.P.-Shell, Chevron-Texaco-Unocal, and Wal-Mart – just do not buy gas there. That leaves Valero-Shamrock & Fina and others, plus your local "Bob's Gas" operations.

Profits of U.S. oil companies in the last six years were $477 BILLION!

TALK RADIO
Conservative talk radio (and worse: the vast right-wing extremism talk radio onslaught) is 89% of U.S. airtime, progressive talk only 10% as-of May 2007. What is curious about this is that the Radio-TV Cartel is in a panic about the Fairness Doctrine chimera, which no one is actually advocating.

Clear Channel is indeed 'flipping' K.L.S.D. in San Diego to a sports talk format (so that there will be no station for Democrats to purchase ads during the real 2008 election cycle).
Save K.L.S.D. website: www.saveklsd.com

CLASS WAR
The number of individuals worth one million dollars rose 8% in the last year worldwide.

Less than 10% of income in America is taxed for Social Security.

2007 wages & salaries in the U.S are at the lowest portion of G.D.P. since 1929.

Americans now owe $850 BILLION in credit card debt, which is $9,659 for the average household. == per Mother Jones Magazine (Sept-Oct 2007 issue)

The number of foreclosure filings reported in the U.S. in July 2007 jumped 93 percent from July of 2006 and rose 9 percent from June 2007.

ENVIRONMENT
"This summer, Canada's fabled Northwest Passage – the shortest sea route from Europe to the Pacific – was free of obstructing ice for the first time in recorded history." == Time Magazine, September 2007

The United States provided funding of $159 million last year for research on solar technology versus $303 million for research on nuclear energy and $427 million for research on coal energy. == Time Magazine, July 2007

The United Nations Integovernmental Panel on Climate Change says [that] "man-made global warming is unequivocal", in a new report that confirms fears that global weather extremes are now becoming the norm across the planet. (August 2007)

WAR GAMES
Seventy percent of the 2006 C.I.A. budget for intelligence work was paid to private companies.

The U.S. Navy has stopped training Navy personnel for many jobs and has outsourced operation of the nuclear propulsion on our warships to mercenaries such as Halliburton & Blackwater.

HEALTHCARE
"While the U.S. population grew 13% between 1993 and 2003, the amount of prescription drugs [that] we bought went up 70% over the same period."
== columnist Cecil Adams

THE NATION
77,000 highway bridges across the U.S. are classified as 'structurally deficient' or 'functionally obsolete', which is 25% – a serious infrastructure backlog caused by the long-term obstruction of highway funding bills by Republican politicianss under orders from Gingrich, DeLay & Hastert

Good illegal immigration primer website at www.illegalaliens.us

Friday, October 12, 2007

U.S. Supreme Court Decision

This afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Al Gore did NOT win the Nobel Peace Prize, that it was instead won by George W. Bush.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

WMail ezine Final Issue

The WMail ezine / newsletter of the Working Minds Philosophy of Empowerment began in the Summer of 2000, and has delivered 71 issues over the seven years. The last issue will be going out this month, as soon as I re-code that portion of the WM website.

The mission of the Working Minds Philosophy and the websites will continue by posting essays
on the Dateline Chamesa blog {your free subscription there}
and to wider distribution services such as
Op Ed News {your free subscription there}.

Further essays will also be posted on the website as another numbered entry on the WM Essays Pages.