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Tuesday, May 13, 2008

May Quotations

"Supply-side economics is a bogus system."
== Ravi Batra

"Machiavelli described ways to destroy your enemy, and those ways are very effective. Unfortunately, the context is that everyone is your enemy, so that it is okay (and necessary) to destroy all."
== G.E. Nordell

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives."
== James Joyce [1882-1941]

"When anyone in the media cites 'buzz' as their basis, the rest of the sentence has been manufactured."
== G.E. Nordell

"Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness."
== Sara Paretsky

“Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.”
== Eugene O'Neill [1888-1953]

"Need a job? Ask a Republican."
== G.E. Nordell

"All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis."
== Upton Sinclair [1878-1968]

"I’ve been married three times, so I’ve had lots of supervision."
== Upton Sinclair [1878-1968]

“In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs.”
== François Truffaut [1932-84]

"No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it."
== Andrew Carnegie [1835-1919]

"No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep."
== Carl Jung [1875-1961]

"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
== poet John Donne [1572-1631]

"Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value."
== Arthur Miller [1915-2005]

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
== Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

“Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today.”
== actor James Dean [1931-55]

"I'd rather tangle with a burglar than a television executive any day."
== ex-cop/author Joseph Wambaugh

"I go on working for the same reason [that] a hen goes on laying eggs."
== H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]

"Be civil to all; serviceable to many: familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none."
== Benjamin Franklin [1706-90] (in "Poor Richard's Almanack")

"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
== Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]

"Courage is the main quality of the Warrior Mind."
== Ravi Batra

"I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas."
== Jean-Luc Godard

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
== Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"If my films don't show a profit, I know I'm doing something right."
== Woody Allen

"Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means."
== Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
== Edna Ferber [1885-1968]

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
== Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"You've got to give up being a little son of a bitch.".
== Harry Margolis

A FEW FROM George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."

"Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done."

"There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."

"I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor."

"Liberty means responsibility. That's why most men dread it."

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

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Design for George W. Bush Presidential Library


On March 30th, the quadrennial General Conference of the United Methodist Church, meeting in Fort Worth, Texas, voted 844 to 20 to reject the George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Darn. Here I went and designed a building to house the Bush Administration documents that have not been classified Über-Secret for a hundred years.

Saturday, May 03, 2008

May News Factoids

Arctic ice in September 2007 was 23 percent less than the previous record low. == AP News

Super Tuesday voting on February 5th added up to 8.3 million Republicans who voted in those states vs. 14.6 Democrats.

For every 10,000 manuscripts submitted for children's books, only three are published. == Home Testing Institute

The two-term Clinton administration added 521 species to the federal Endangered Species List; Bush 41 added 231 species in one term; the Bush 43 administration has added only 59 species to the list in its seven years. == Time Magazine

Chrysler Corp. has a new program to shut down small dealerships across America. Each existing dealership now must pay half a million dollars UP FRONT for the privilege of remaining an official Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep etc. dealer for the next five years. Family dealerships in small towns are charged the same as dealers in urban markets, no negotiation or options.

WAR WITH IRAQ & IRAN:
U.S. troops are paying $3.50 a gallon for gas or deisel in Baghdad.

"2007 was the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Iraq." == Scott Ritter

ENERGY:
Ten years ago, kerosene heating oil in Vermont was 75 cents a gallon; today the price is $4.50 a gallon. Figuring on a typical 200-gallon tank, a refill went from $150 for the winter season to $900 for the season.

Five years ago, oil was $26 per barrel; oil went above $117 per barrel on 21 April 2008.

ECONOMICS:
The price of rice has doubled worldwide in the last four months.
== AP Radio News
The price of wheat flour has tripled in two years. == AP Radio News

If you make $28,000 a year, then you are in the top 50% of taxpayers; $55,000 puts you in the top 25%; and $92,000 puts you in the top 10%, the so-called 'super-rich'. {data from 2007} — Said another way, 90% of American taxpayers make below $95,000 per year.

U.S. home prices plunged by a record 8.4 percent in November 2007, marking two years of slowing returns.

"Construction spending fell again in February as home building tumbled for a record 24th straight month."
== U.S. Commerce Department, on 31 March 2008

Housing sales dropped in March to the lowest level in 16 years, and the bottom has not yet been reached. == AP Radio News

"Combined market value of independent, publicly-traded U.S. newspaper publishers has fallen by 42 percent in the past three years." == Eric Alterman (in The Nation, February 2008)

U.S. job cuts in December were greater than jobs created (while 150,000 net jobs are needed to keep even with the monthly population increase). == AP Radio News

BLOCKING TELEMARKETERS: Cell phone numbers were released this week to the telemarketing industry, and it will now be open season on all cell phone users – AND you will be charged for the call.

The solution is to call the National DO NOT CALL Registry [est. October 2003] at 1-888-382-1222 from your cell phone; it takes about a minute.

Telemarketers must obey these new Registry list restrictions starting on June First.

You can list all the phone numbers at your household or business concern online at http://www.DoNotCall.gov

Friday, May 02, 2008

An Open Letter To Barack Obama

Take the gloves off.
You are fighting FOR the American people, not with them.

You are the only candidate for President who represents We The People. We were sold a load of crap in 2000, and the election was stolen in 2004.
We want our country back.

Billary sold out to the Corporatist Party – Richard Mellon Scaife, Rupert Murdoch, The Family, et al – long ago and Hillary thinks that she is entitled to dominion over the American people.
Not true, no way, no how.

John McCain is an unstable tyrant and a warmonger, and the saddest thing about this political season is that McCain is the best that the remnants of the Republican Party could come up with. (The key personality on the G.O.P. ticket will be the V.P. choice. If McCain wins the Oval Office through American stupidity or Corporatist chicanery, he will not serve his full term and the new President will be -- Lieberman? Romney? O.M.G. !!)

We The People demand restoration of Constitutional Democracy in these United States, we demand a return to the Rule of Law (not even George W. Bush is above the law), and we demand Freedom (from economic slavery), Justice (over corruption and cronyism), and Liberty (without tyranny by a self-declared 'unitary executive').

We The People demand that this country be restored to its former glory as the economic engine of the Free World, not the planet's greatest debtor nation. We demand that this country be restored as the beacon of democratic government and freedom and liberty for all peoples, rather than a bad example of imperial oppression. We demand that this country restore itself as the shining example of a free and prosperous and peaceful nation, as we were decades back, and that we hold all individuals and nationa accountable to the same high standard.

We The People want you, Barack Obama, to lead us. Like the Founding Fathers, We The People must "mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor" to restore the Constitution in America, and we ask that you take the gloves off and lead us in this battle for the soul of the United States of America.