"Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]
"It's useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk, or running for office."
~~ Shirley MacLaine
"To the surprise of pundits, numbers continue to be the best system for determining which of two things is larger."
~~ cartoonist Randall Munroe
"Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly."
~~ Alice Munro
"Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed."
~~ Erica Jong
"It's easy to be miserable. Being happy is tougher – and cooler."
~~ Thom Yorke, member of the rock band Radiohead
"Poetry should be written the way [that] adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened."
~~ poet Vera Pavlova
"It would seem that something [that] means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge."
~~ Phyllis Diller [1917-2012]
"I'm getting ready to be a parent. I just turned 30, and I'm tired of mowing the grass."
~~ Jeff Foxworthy
"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."
~~ Thomas Mann [1875-1955]
"A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there is less of you."
~~ Margaret Atwood
"Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]
"Do something instead of killing time, because time is killing you."
~~ Brasilian author Paulo Coelho
"The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste."
~~ playwright Joe Orton
"While the election is over, the class war isn't."
~~ New York Times, November 2012
"I must live until I die – mustn't I?"
~~ Joseph Conrad [1857-1924], in "N*gger of The Narcissus", 1897 novella
"All [that] I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl."
~~ Charlie Chaplin [1889-1977]
"Inherently, each of us has the substance within to achieve whatever our goals and dreams define. What is missing from each of us is the training, education, knowledge, and insight to utilize what we already have."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
“The most political act you can do is raise a child well.”
~~ Wendell Berry
"The stone and the tiger have no choice of life: the stone must gravitate and the tiger must pounce. Only human beings are faced with the mind-boggling responsibility of having, at each and every moment of their lives, to choose what to do and what to be. It is both a necessity and an invitation."
~~ José Ortega y Gassett [1883-1955]
"There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"Romanticism ... deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with the timeless, fundamental, universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned – in the words of Aristotle – not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day."
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]
"Sports is the only profession I know that when you retire, you have to go to work."
~~ basketball star Earl Monroe
"If you can convince yourself that you look fabulous, you can save yourself the trouble of primping."
~~ Andy Warhol [1928-87]
"Start planning before you think you should."
~~ Martha Stewart
"For every minute [that] you are angry, you lost 60 seconds of happiness."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"True friends stab you in the front."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”
~~ poet Muriel Rukeyser [1913-80]
"If it weren't for problems, the work day would be over by 10 a.m."
~~ Woody Allen
"Anyone who thinks [that] the world would be a better place if it were run by women doesn't remember high school."
~~ Madeleine Albright
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you."
~~ Leonard Cohen
"You just can't beat the person who won't give up."
~~ baseball great George Herman 'Babe' Ruth, Jr. [1895-1948]
"Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]
"The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare."
~~ basketball coach Bobby Knight
"Why is it that when we talk to God we are said to be praying, but when God talks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?"
~~ Lily Tomlin
"Prejudice is the raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety."
~~ Ben Hecht [1894-1964]
"I like work: It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."
~~ Jerome K. Jerome [1859-1927]
"No sinner forgets his vows of repentance so quickly as one whose fortunes have made a dramatic improvement."
~~ James A. Michener [1907-97]
"It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
~~ Charles Lutwidge Dodson {aka Lewis Carroll} [1832-98]
"Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles."
~~ Frank Lloyd Wright [1867-1959]
"Absence is to love what wind is to fire: it extinguishes the small, it rekindles the great."
~~ Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy [1618-93]
"Diplomacy is the art of telling plain truths without giving offense."
~~ Winston Churchill [1874-1965]
“Our lives begin to end the day [that] we become silent about things that matter.”
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"Never underestimate America's willingness to do exactly the wrong thing."
~~ blogger Digby {pseudonym of Heather Parton of Santa Monica, California}
"Whatever you are, be a good one."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence, if only for an instant."
~~ Brasilian architect Oscar Niemeyer [1907-2012]
“Memory presents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.”
~~ (Michel Eyquem de) Montaigne [1533-92]
"Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come home."
~~ Bill Cosby
"We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business."
~~ Vineet Jain, managing director of Times of India
"[The modern Republican Party] has become a party of hypocrisy masquerading as principled ideology."
~~ Robert Reich
"Let us make our time on Earth . . . worthwhile, and do what’s right, and make a difference for the children, our working families, and our elderly."
~~ New Mexico politician Ben Luján [1935-2012]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Friday, December 28, 2012
December 2012 News Factoids
“From fiscal 2009 to fiscal 2012, the deficit shrank 3.1 percentage points, from 10.1% to 7.0% of GDP . . . the federal deficit has fallen faster over the past three years than it has in any such stretch since demobilization from World War II." ~~ surprising source: the conservative Investors’ Business Daily!, Nov 2012
Did you see anything on the news about the one-day strike on November 29th by New York City fast food workers for pay above minimum wage? It was coordinated by FastFoodForward as well as the Service Employees International Union.
"During Obama's first term, the Dow Jones Industrial Average nearly doubled, corporations saw their profits grow an average of 78 percent per year, and banker bonuses remained high." ~~ TIME Magazine, Nov 2012
The nationwide drought is expected to lower the Mississippi River to 9 feet or less, which is too shallow for barge traffic between the Missouri River and the Ohio River.
The average age of the members of the Rolling Stones band, now on their 50th Anniversary Tour, is two years higher than the average age of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court. ~~ Associated Press item
Only 64 percent of students recently graduating with a science or engineering degree in America have found jobs, the lowest level in decades. ~~ per National Science Foundation survey
"[America's] 9,146 gun homicides in 2009 [is] a rate nearly twenty times higher than other supposedly civilized countries." ~~ Tomothy Egan, New York Times
Consumers! only 362 more shopping days till Xmas 2013!
Google made more than $20B in ad revenue in 2012, more than all U.S. print media combined. ~~ Atlantic Magazine website
The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, averaging 88.8 guns per hundred people. War-torn Yemen is second highest with 54.8 guns per hundred population, and Iraq is third with 34.2 guns per hundred population. ~~ per Washington Post
{AND the U.S. number went up sharply at the end of 2012}
MY WACKY NEIGHBORS!: The local Wal-Mart store in Los Lunas was burglarized around 2 a.m. on Christmas morning and the three masked crooks (caught on video) took $30,000 {sic} in assault weapons and ammunition and electronics.
~~ per Albuquerque Journal & KRQE-TV websites
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Did you see anything on the news about the one-day strike on November 29th by New York City fast food workers for pay above minimum wage? It was coordinated by FastFoodForward as well as the Service Employees International Union.
"During Obama's first term, the Dow Jones Industrial Average nearly doubled, corporations saw their profits grow an average of 78 percent per year, and banker bonuses remained high." ~~ TIME Magazine, Nov 2012
The nationwide drought is expected to lower the Mississippi River to 9 feet or less, which is too shallow for barge traffic between the Missouri River and the Ohio River.
The average age of the members of the Rolling Stones band, now on their 50th Anniversary Tour, is two years higher than the average age of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court. ~~ Associated Press item
Only 64 percent of students recently graduating with a science or engineering degree in America have found jobs, the lowest level in decades. ~~ per National Science Foundation survey
"[America's] 9,146 gun homicides in 2009 [is] a rate nearly twenty times higher than other supposedly civilized countries." ~~ Tomothy Egan, New York Times
Consumers! only 362 more shopping days till Xmas 2013!
Google made more than $20B in ad revenue in 2012, more than all U.S. print media combined. ~~ Atlantic Magazine website
The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, averaging 88.8 guns per hundred people. War-torn Yemen is second highest with 54.8 guns per hundred population, and Iraq is third with 34.2 guns per hundred population. ~~ per Washington Post
{AND the U.S. number went up sharply at the end of 2012}
MY WACKY NEIGHBORS!: The local Wal-Mart store in Los Lunas was burglarized around 2 a.m. on Christmas morning and the three masked crooks (caught on video) took $30,000 {sic} in assault weapons and ammunition and electronics.
~~ per Albuquerque Journal & KRQE-TV websites
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Question of The Week
Since the State of Colorado legalized possession of marijuana in November, does that mean that the famous Brown Palace Hotel [est.1892] in Denver will soon be opening an Amsterdam-style Brown Cafe (bruine kroeg)?
Sunday, December 09, 2012
Variation on Longfellow
There was a little girl,
Who had a little zit,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
She combed down her bangs,
And drank aqvavit,
Until sobered up she was horrid.
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Who had a little zit,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
She combed down her bangs,
And drank aqvavit,
Until sobered up she was horrid.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Working Minds Essay #102: “Coyotes and Republicans”
The recent New Mexico Coyote Hunt got lots of national press, which may not be a good thing. The week-long shooting spree killed only 39 coyotes, less than expected.
1) With only 39 coyote pelts collected, maybe the perceived ‘coyote problem’ is not actually real.
2) Alternate observation: Maybe part of the perceived ‘coyote problem’ is that the coyotes are smarter than the hunters.
3) It is very unfortunate that nobody has the cojones (and-or the money) to offer a reward for a Republican Hunt. The perceived ‘Republican problem’ is very real.
* * * * * * * * A big reward for the indictment and conviction of criminal Republicans starts with traitor Karl Rove, who now has added election fraud to his many other crimes.
The cyber patriot team called Anonymous will eventually release the evidence showing that the firewall that they hacked into Rove’s O.R.C.A. election data system prevented his intention to flip the votes in three important counties in Ohio (as was done in 2004). Knowing what took place in cyberspace that Election Day makes the YouTube footage of Rove’s election night meltdown on the Faux News Channel really hilarious. (But of course, finding an official in Ohio who will actually prosecute is another matter.)
Next on the list are traitor and war profiteer Dick Cheney and lobbyist Grover Norquist. George Dubya will likely never be prosecuted for his treasonous action in approving the release of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame’s identity (proven in court) nor for his many war crimes.
Add to the list all the Republicans who directly participated in the above-cited crimes and you already have a long list. And then there are even more local and national Republican miscreants, maybe too many. Good thing that Halliburton designed all those concentration camps to be built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – boy, I hope there’s enough room.
* * * * * * * * The Japanese are an honorable people; they surrendered after World War II and they have kept their word.
The Republican Party has no honor. They continue to lie and cheat and steal in order to win elections, and to subvert the U.S. Constitution. The Republicans and the Oligarchs who own them hold themselves beyond and above The Law and they have no intention of surrendering.
Do your homework: Wikipedia has reliable details on the following:
a) the Powell Memorandum of 1971
b) Jude Wanniski’s ‘Two Santas Theory’
c) P.N.A.C. (Project For A New American Century)
d) The Federalist Society
e) the Citizens United v. F.E.C. court case
* * * * * * * * 4) Calling Republicans coyotes defames canis latrans. All Republicans are fascists and ideologues; a majority of their leaders have committed treason and war crimes and election fraud, not to mention publicly lying to the American people, without guilt or remorse or apology.
“If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.”
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
NOTE: This is the 250th post on this weblog!
1) With only 39 coyote pelts collected, maybe the perceived ‘coyote problem’ is not actually real.
2) Alternate observation: Maybe part of the perceived ‘coyote problem’ is that the coyotes are smarter than the hunters.
3) It is very unfortunate that nobody has the cojones (and-or the money) to offer a reward for a Republican Hunt. The perceived ‘Republican problem’ is very real.
The cyber patriot team called Anonymous will eventually release the evidence showing that the firewall that they hacked into Rove’s O.R.C.A. election data system prevented his intention to flip the votes in three important counties in Ohio (as was done in 2004). Knowing what took place in cyberspace that Election Day makes the YouTube footage of Rove’s election night meltdown on the Faux News Channel really hilarious. (But of course, finding an official in Ohio who will actually prosecute is another matter.)
Next on the list are traitor and war profiteer Dick Cheney and lobbyist Grover Norquist. George Dubya will likely never be prosecuted for his treasonous action in approving the release of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame’s identity (proven in court) nor for his many war crimes.
Add to the list all the Republicans who directly participated in the above-cited crimes and you already have a long list. And then there are even more local and national Republican miscreants, maybe too many. Good thing that Halliburton designed all those concentration camps to be built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – boy, I hope there’s enough room.
The Republican Party has no honor. They continue to lie and cheat and steal in order to win elections, and to subvert the U.S. Constitution. The Republicans and the Oligarchs who own them hold themselves beyond and above The Law and they have no intention of surrendering.
Do your homework: Wikipedia has reliable details on the following:
a) the Powell Memorandum of 1971
b) Jude Wanniski’s ‘Two Santas Theory’
c) P.N.A.C. (Project For A New American Century)
d) The Federalist Society
e) the Citizens United v. F.E.C. court case
“If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.”
NOTE: This is the 250th post on this weblog!
Monday, November 19, 2012
November 2012 Quotations
"Thanks for being true to yourself. Someone has to do it."
~~ Tom Voccola of Idaho
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
~~ physicist Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence."
~~ poet Marianne Moore [1887-1972]
"If you follow every dream, you might get lost."
~~ Neil Young
"What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds."
~~ humorist Will Rogers [1879-1935]
"Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]
"Nothing is worse than active ignorance."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]
"The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool."
~~ Stephen King
"If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor."
~~ physicist Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"Statistics are like bikinis. They show a lot but not everything."
~~ baseball manager Lou Piniella
"If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent."
~~ Bette Davis [1908-89]
"A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble in the road."
~~ Henry Ward Beecher [1813-87]
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]
"I've learned one thing – people who know the least anyways seem to know it the loudest."
~~ cartoonist Al Capp [1909-79]
"The only way of catching a train [that] I have ever discovered is to miss the train before."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"Don't underestimate your vote. Voting is the great equalizer."
~~ Dr. Maya Angelou
"All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"The art of politics is a honey and baloney sandwich – it is undignified and icky."
~~ Joe Klein, Time Magazine columnist
"Let us mock the midnight bell."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616], in "Antony and Cleopatra", Act III Scene 11
"How fleeting are all human passions compared to the massive continuity of ducks."
~~ Dorothy L. Sayers [1893-1957]
"In Art and Dream may you proceed with abandon."
~~ Gertrude Stein [1874-1946]
"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."
~~ Anaïs Nin [1903-77]
“You have powers you never dreamed of. You can do things you never thought you could do. There are no limitations in what you can do except the limitations of your own mind.”
~~ Darwin P. Kingsley [1857-1932]
"Sometimes when they say [that] you're ahead of your time, it's just a polite way of saying [that] you have a real bad sense of timing."
~~ George McGovern [1922-2012]
"My rule is, if it flies, floats or fornicates, rent it. It's cheaper in the long run."
~~ Felix Dennis, owner of The Week Magazine [est. 1995]
"Start every day with a smile and get it over with."
~~ W.C. Fields [1880-1946]
"Nature has given us one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak."
~~ Epictetus [55?–135? C.E.]
"Fun is like life insurance. The older you get the more it costs."
~~ Kin Hubbard [1868-1930]
"There are some things [that] one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]
"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]
"The best way to keep your word is not to give it."
~~ Napolean Bonaparte [1769-1821]
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
~~ Simone Weil [1909-43]
"In a full heart, there is room for everything."
~~ poet Antonio Porchia [1885-1968]
"Every life, even the best ones, ends in sadness. Books hold out hope that things may end otherwise."
~~ Joe Queenan
"The problem with capitalism is not too many capitalists, but not enough capitalists".
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"One man with courage is a majority." ~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
~~ playwright George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"The government is the shadow cast by business over society."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
"Choice. It's the word that allows yes and the word that makes no possible. It's the word that puts the free in freedom and takes obligation out of the mix. It's the word upon which adventure, exhilaration, and authenticity depend. It's the word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar."
~~ adapted from Tom Robbins
"Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
The Lego Group's motto is "Det bedste er ikke for godt", which means 'the best is never too good'.
"In America, anyone can become President. It's one of the risks [that] we take."
~~ Adlai Stevenson II [1900-65]
"Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church, or robbing a bank, but never to being bores."
~~ hostess Elsa Maxwell [1883-1963]
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
"The people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can't."
~~ Woody Allen
"No one is so eager to gain new experience as he who doesn't know how to make use of the old ones."
~~ novelist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach [1830-1916]
"To acquire knowledge one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."
~~ Marilyn vos Savant
"You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad."
~~ Adlai Stevenson II [1900-65]
"Find ecstacy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough."
~~ Emily Dickinson [1830-86]
"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."
~~ Count Leo Tolstoy [1828-1910]
"No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut."
~~ longtime House Speaker Sam Rayburn [1882-1961]
"The very meaninglessness of life forces man to make his own meaning."
~~ Stanley Kubrick [1928-99]
"The Republican Party is in a death spiral."
~~ radio show host Sam Seder
"One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
"I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward."
~~ Scottish explorer David Livingston [1813-73]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Tom Voccola of Idaho
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
~~ physicist Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence."
~~ poet Marianne Moore [1887-1972]
"If you follow every dream, you might get lost."
~~ Neil Young
"What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds."
~~ humorist Will Rogers [1879-1935]
"Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]
"Nothing is worse than active ignorance."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]
"The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool."
~~ Stephen King
"If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor."
~~ physicist Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"Statistics are like bikinis. They show a lot but not everything."
~~ baseball manager Lou Piniella
"If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent."
~~ Bette Davis [1908-89]
"A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble in the road."
~~ Henry Ward Beecher [1813-87]
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]
"I've learned one thing – people who know the least anyways seem to know it the loudest."
~~ cartoonist Al Capp [1909-79]
"The only way of catching a train [that] I have ever discovered is to miss the train before."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"Don't underestimate your vote. Voting is the great equalizer."
~~ Dr. Maya Angelou
"All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"The art of politics is a honey and baloney sandwich – it is undignified and icky."
~~ Joe Klein, Time Magazine columnist
"Let us mock the midnight bell."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616], in "Antony and Cleopatra", Act III Scene 11
"How fleeting are all human passions compared to the massive continuity of ducks."
~~ Dorothy L. Sayers [1893-1957]
"In Art and Dream may you proceed with abandon."
~~ Gertrude Stein [1874-1946]
"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."
~~ Anaïs Nin [1903-77]
“You have powers you never dreamed of. You can do things you never thought you could do. There are no limitations in what you can do except the limitations of your own mind.”
~~ Darwin P. Kingsley [1857-1932]
"Sometimes when they say [that] you're ahead of your time, it's just a polite way of saying [that] you have a real bad sense of timing."
~~ George McGovern [1922-2012]
"My rule is, if it flies, floats or fornicates, rent it. It's cheaper in the long run."
~~ Felix Dennis, owner of The Week Magazine [est. 1995]
"Start every day with a smile and get it over with."
~~ W.C. Fields [1880-1946]
"Nature has given us one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak."
~~ Epictetus [55?–135? C.E.]
"Fun is like life insurance. The older you get the more it costs."
~~ Kin Hubbard [1868-1930]
"There are some things [that] one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]
"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]
"The best way to keep your word is not to give it."
~~ Napolean Bonaparte [1769-1821]
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
~~ Simone Weil [1909-43]
"In a full heart, there is room for everything."
~~ poet Antonio Porchia [1885-1968]
"Every life, even the best ones, ends in sadness. Books hold out hope that things may end otherwise."
~~ Joe Queenan
"The problem with capitalism is not too many capitalists, but not enough capitalists".
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"One man with courage is a majority." ~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
~~ playwright George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"The government is the shadow cast by business over society."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
"Choice. It's the word that allows yes and the word that makes no possible. It's the word that puts the free in freedom and takes obligation out of the mix. It's the word upon which adventure, exhilaration, and authenticity depend. It's the word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar."
~~ adapted from Tom Robbins
"Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
The Lego Group's motto is "Det bedste er ikke for godt", which means 'the best is never too good'.
"In America, anyone can become President. It's one of the risks [that] we take."
~~ Adlai Stevenson II [1900-65]
"Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church, or robbing a bank, but never to being bores."
~~ hostess Elsa Maxwell [1883-1963]
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
"The people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can't."
~~ Woody Allen
"No one is so eager to gain new experience as he who doesn't know how to make use of the old ones."
~~ novelist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach [1830-1916]
"To acquire knowledge one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."
~~ Marilyn vos Savant
"You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad."
~~ Adlai Stevenson II [1900-65]
"Find ecstacy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough."
~~ Emily Dickinson [1830-86]
"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."
~~ Count Leo Tolstoy [1828-1910]
"No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut."
~~ longtime House Speaker Sam Rayburn [1882-1961]
"The very meaninglessness of life forces man to make his own meaning."
~~ Stanley Kubrick [1928-99]
"The Republican Party is in a death spiral."
~~ radio show host Sam Seder
"One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
"I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward."
~~ Scottish explorer David Livingston [1813-73]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Wednesday, November 07, 2012
America Saved From Fascism
The Fascists in Italy took control of the country in 1922. The German people handed control of their country to the fascist National Socialist {Nazi} Party in 1933. The five Republican members of the U.S. Supreme Court declared the United States to be a fascist country by their Citizens United vs. F.E.C. decision in January 2010.
But the American people prevented further encroachment by the fascists and their wholly-owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, just yesterday. Karl Rove and Sheldon Adelman and Grover Norquist and the other agents of the fascist Oligarchy could not buy enough airtime nor tell enough bald-faced lies to overcome the Will of The People.
Barack Obama appears to have 300 electoral votes, to Willard Mitt Romney's 200 electoral votes. While I predicted here that Obama would win by a 60-40 landslide in the popular vote, the 60-40 win in the Electoral College is just fine with me. (The early score on the popular vote is a squeaker 50.3 to 48.1.)
So with President Obama in the White House for Four More Years, perhaps nothing much has changed. The House is Republican, and House Speaker Boehner will prevent as much progress as possible. The Senate is still Democratic – but Harry Reid is a chicken, and the Republicans just threaten to filibuster and progress is prevented.
So the forward-looking among us have already figured where to work to erase the Republican stranglehold on solutions for America – every single Congress district is up for re-election in 2014, along with another one-third of the Senate.
The Revolution is never over; the Class War is perpetual.
But the American people prevented further encroachment by the fascists and their wholly-owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, just yesterday. Karl Rove and Sheldon Adelman and Grover Norquist and the other agents of the fascist Oligarchy could not buy enough airtime nor tell enough bald-faced lies to overcome the Will of The People.
Barack Obama appears to have 300 electoral votes, to Willard Mitt Romney's 200 electoral votes. While I predicted here that Obama would win by a 60-40 landslide in the popular vote, the 60-40 win in the Electoral College is just fine with me. (The early score on the popular vote is a squeaker 50.3 to 48.1.)
So with President Obama in the White House for Four More Years, perhaps nothing much has changed. The House is Republican, and House Speaker Boehner will prevent as much progress as possible. The Senate is still Democratic – but Harry Reid is a chicken, and the Republicans just threaten to filibuster and progress is prevented.
So the forward-looking among us have already figured where to work to erase the Republican stranglehold on solutions for America – every single Congress district is up for re-election in 2014, along with another one-third of the Senate.
The Revolution is never over; the Class War is perpetual.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
October 2012 News Factoids
A national aggregate poll by www.RealClearPolitics.com in mid-September gives Obama 49% and Romney 45.4%
By one count of the first presidential debate on October 3rd, Mitt Romney misled the nation 27 times in 38 minutes of airtime! The Romney campaign said a few weeks ago that "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." They weren’t kidding.
The Democrats' 'Romney Tax Plan' website is hilarious!
"The 112th Congress is set to enter the Congressional record books as the least productive body in a generation, passing a mere 173 public laws as of [August 2012]. That was well below the 906 enacted from January 1947 through December 1948 by the body [that] President Harry S. Truman referred to as the 'Do-Nothing' Congress, and far fewer than even a single session of many prior Congresses."
Australia's Great Barrier Reef has lost HALF of its coral over the last thirty years, while coral reefs worldwide have declined by 20 percent. (The greater Australian problem has to do with agricultural runoff.)
Movie due in 2014 “Lego: The Piece Of Resistance” has the funniest plot description in a long time: A regular everyday little Lego figure is mistaken as a MasterBuilder and suddenly becomes part of a group on a quest to stop an evil tyrant from gluing everything together.
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
By one count of the first presidential debate on October 3rd, Mitt Romney misled the nation 27 times in 38 minutes of airtime! The Romney campaign said a few weeks ago that "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." They weren’t kidding.
The Democrats' 'Romney Tax Plan' website is hilarious!
"The 112th Congress is set to enter the Congressional record books as the least productive body in a generation, passing a mere 173 public laws as of [August 2012]. That was well below the 906 enacted from January 1947 through December 1948 by the body [that] President Harry S. Truman referred to as the 'Do-Nothing' Congress, and far fewer than even a single session of many prior Congresses."
Australia's Great Barrier Reef has lost HALF of its coral over the last thirty years, while coral reefs worldwide have declined by 20 percent. (The greater Australian problem has to do with agricultural runoff.)
Movie due in 2014 “Lego: The Piece Of Resistance” has the funniest plot description in a long time: A regular everyday little Lego figure is mistaken as a MasterBuilder and suddenly becomes part of a group on a quest to stop an evil tyrant from gluing everything together.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Legacy of Mary Pickford Defiled
The barbarian-controlled board at the Mary Pickford Foundation recently cut funding for the very-accomplished work done over many years by the non-profit Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education (M.P.I.F.E.A.) of West Los Angeles, California. The Foundation then demanded surrender of all of M.P.I.F.E.A.'s assets, including the domain name MaryPickford.com. M.P.I.F.E.A. attempted to negotiate a less-damaging deal, but the Foundation chose to act in bad faith and rescinded their demands. The Foundation's latest act is legal terrorism: they filed suit against curator Hugh Neely in Federal court for $100,000 in damages and triple punitive damages (plus all legal fees).
The Foundation did not seek the MaryPickford.com domain thru the simple internet (I.C.A.N.N.) procedures because they would lose. They did not sue M.P.I.F.E.A. because if they won, they would bear the costs when they take over M.P.I.F.E.A.'s assets (and liabilities). The Foundation chose instead to sue an unprotected individual, an employee of M.P.I.F.E.A., its curator Hugh Neely, expecting that he will concede to their attack because he has no resources for a defense. The terrorism derives from the $50,000 cost to Neely to mount any defense.
But Hugh Neely is standing on principle and trying to muster a defense against the board of the Mary Pickford Foundation.
I say that the Foundation board are terrorists and fascists and barbarians and that Hugh Neely deserves the support of all who resist the looters who infest American business.
Hugh Neely Defense Fund [est. 9/2012]
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
The Foundation did not seek the MaryPickford.com domain thru the simple internet (I.C.A.N.N.) procedures because they would lose. They did not sue M.P.I.F.E.A. because if they won, they would bear the costs when they take over M.P.I.F.E.A.'s assets (and liabilities). The Foundation chose instead to sue an unprotected individual, an employee of M.P.I.F.E.A., its curator Hugh Neely, expecting that he will concede to their attack because he has no resources for a defense. The terrorism derives from the $50,000 cost to Neely to mount any defense.
But Hugh Neely is standing on principle and trying to muster a defense against the board of the Mary Pickford Foundation.
I say that the Foundation board are terrorists and fascists and barbarians and that Hugh Neely deserves the support of all who resist the looters who infest American business.
Hugh Neely Defense Fund [est. 9/2012]
Sunday, October 07, 2012
October 2012 Quotations
"We should have an extra debate where Romney soundbites debate themselves."
~~ tweet from mantisdragon91 quoted in TIME Magazine
"Please think responsibly."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one."
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1859-1915]
"The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people."
~~ New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
"Bravery never goes out of fashion."
~~ William Makepeace Thackeray [1811-63]
"It's better to be quotable than to be honest."
~~ British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard
"The past is always tense, the future perfect."
~~ Zadie Smith
"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."
~~ Maimonides [1135-1204]
"One revolution is like one cocktail, it gets you organized for the next."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]
"I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it."
~~ Maya Angelou
"A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship."
~~ John D. Rockefeller [1839-1937]
"If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, [then] you don't understand it yourself."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"You will always find those who think [that] they know your duty better than you know it."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"Each of us owes a death to the world."
~~ Denne Bart Petitclerc [1929-2006]
"A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"When I was really young I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories."
~~ John Sayles
"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
“This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.”
~~ Rutherford B. Hayes [1822-93], in his diary, March 1888
"One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]
"It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies and the wrong sort take mean advantage of them."
~~ P.G. Wodehouse [1881-1975]
"Scratching is one of Nature's sweetest gratifications."
~~ Montaigne [1533-92]
"Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more."
~~ Oprah Winfrey
"No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president."
~~ Johnny Carson [1925-2005]
"Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings."
~~ George Will
"Thought itself is probably a superstition."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]
"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."
~~ Socrates [469-399 B.C.E.]
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished – unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]
"One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged."
~~ Heinrich Heine [1797-1856]
"Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, but only saps today of its strength."
~~ A.J. Cronin [1896-1981]
"God created woman to tame man."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]
"One good father can do more than 100 schoolmasters."
~~ ancient Persian saying
"Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief."
~~ Marcus Tullius Cicero [106 B.C.E. – 43 B.C.E.]
"Battery life has to improve."
~~ Catherine Clinch
"Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]
"No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country ... we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.”
~~ Xicano playwright Luis Valdez
"Laws are spider webs thru which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught."
~~ Honoré de Balzac [1799-1850]
"There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]
"A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works."
~~ columnist Bill Vaughan [1915-77]
"A man by himself is in bad company."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]
"Before you write good words you have to get rid of a million bad words."
~~ Madeline Miller
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping [that] it will eat him last."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]
"To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"The truth shall make you free.”
~~ spoken by Jesus of Nazareth, John 8:32
"Too much apology doubles the offense."
~~ poet James Richardson
"A gentleman is someone who can play the accordian, but doesn't."
~~ Tom Waits
"At a certain age, it's better to look up than down."
~~ Penny Marshall
"In the case of good books, the point is not how many you can get thru, but rather how many can get thru to you."
~~ Mortimer J. Adler [1902-2001]
"Despair is a black leather jacket that everyone looks good in. Hope is a frilly pink dress that exposes the knees."
~~ writer Rebecca Solnit
"You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be."
~~ poet Johann Kaspar Lavater [1741-1801]
"The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will and the other from a strong won't."
~~ Henry Ward Beecher [1813-87]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ tweet from mantisdragon91 quoted in TIME Magazine
"Please think responsibly."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one."
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1859-1915]
"The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people."
~~ New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
"Bravery never goes out of fashion."
~~ William Makepeace Thackeray [1811-63]
"It's better to be quotable than to be honest."
~~ British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard
"The past is always tense, the future perfect."
~~ Zadie Smith
"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."
~~ Maimonides [1135-1204]
"One revolution is like one cocktail, it gets you organized for the next."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]
"I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it."
~~ Maya Angelou
"A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship."
~~ John D. Rockefeller [1839-1937]
"If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, [then] you don't understand it yourself."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"You will always find those who think [that] they know your duty better than you know it."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"Each of us owes a death to the world."
~~ Denne Bart Petitclerc [1929-2006]
"A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"When I was really young I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories."
~~ John Sayles
"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
“This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.”
~~ Rutherford B. Hayes [1822-93], in his diary, March 1888
"One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]
"It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies and the wrong sort take mean advantage of them."
~~ P.G. Wodehouse [1881-1975]
"Scratching is one of Nature's sweetest gratifications."
~~ Montaigne [1533-92]
"Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more."
~~ Oprah Winfrey
"No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president."
~~ Johnny Carson [1925-2005]
"Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings."
~~ George Will
"Thought itself is probably a superstition."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]
"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."
~~ Socrates [469-399 B.C.E.]
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished – unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]
"One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged."
~~ Heinrich Heine [1797-1856]
"Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, but only saps today of its strength."
~~ A.J. Cronin [1896-1981]
"God created woman to tame man."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]
"One good father can do more than 100 schoolmasters."
~~ ancient Persian saying
"Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief."
~~ Marcus Tullius Cicero [106 B.C.E. – 43 B.C.E.]
"Battery life has to improve."
~~ Catherine Clinch
"Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]
"No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country ... we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.”
~~ Xicano playwright Luis Valdez
"Laws are spider webs thru which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught."
~~ Honoré de Balzac [1799-1850]
"There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]
"A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works."
~~ columnist Bill Vaughan [1915-77]
"A man by himself is in bad company."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]
"Before you write good words you have to get rid of a million bad words."
~~ Madeline Miller
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping [that] it will eat him last."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]
"To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"The truth shall make you free.”
~~ spoken by Jesus of Nazareth, John 8:32
"Too much apology doubles the offense."
~~ poet James Richardson
"A gentleman is someone who can play the accordian, but doesn't."
~~ Tom Waits
"At a certain age, it's better to look up than down."
~~ Penny Marshall
"In the case of good books, the point is not how many you can get thru, but rather how many can get thru to you."
~~ Mortimer J. Adler [1902-2001]
"Despair is a black leather jacket that everyone looks good in. Hope is a frilly pink dress that exposes the knees."
~~ writer Rebecca Solnit
"You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be."
~~ poet Johann Kaspar Lavater [1741-1801]
"The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will and the other from a strong won't."
~~ Henry Ward Beecher [1813-87]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Friday, September 28, 2012
Stealth Propaganda Film "Won't Back Down"
That new movie "Won't Back Down" is a stealth propaganda film backed by right-wing Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz – funder of A.L.E.C. and other Koch Brothers groups – and by billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Fox Studios. The story of the film is 'inspirational' and the trailer purports that the film is about actual events, but the premise is based on union-busting and on the 'parent trigger' element of A.L.E.C.'s school privatization agenda. Privatization is fascism, and the One Percent is spending billions of dollars on the 2012 election and elsewhere to destroy the availability of healthcare and to prevent an untainted education in America.
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
September 2012 News Factoids
"The most promising new energy source in terms of supply [is] micropower – cogeneration, wind, sun, small hydro, geothermal, biomass, and waste fuel – [which] is now providing about one third of the world's new electric capacity." ~~ Amory Lovins, 2008
DEPT. OF REALLY STUPID PRODUCTS
Received another paper catalog in the mail of stuff that I will never buy. Second prize for stupidest product goes to the N.F.L.-themed gingerbread house for under the Xmas tree; first prize for stupidest product goes to the twelve toaster machines, each of which burns the name and logo of your favorite N.F.L. team onto the surface of the toast.
"A representative democracy only works when everyone truly has a voice, and when the voices of the many aren’t drowned out by the pocketbooks of a few."
~~ Helena, Montana Independent Record editorial, February 2012
"Dubya can’t win in Iraq, and he failed totally in Louisiana, and the same blindness that caused the thousands of deaths in New Orleans will also trigger the collapse of the world economy." ~~ philosopher G.E. Nordell in WMail ezine Issue #54 Sept 2005
The 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand [1905-82]is the 'second most influential book for Americans today' after the Bible, according to a recent joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of The Month Club
"Moody's Analytics estimates that the housing crisis wiped out $4.3 trillion in owner-occupied-home values from 2007 to 2010." — per TIME Magazine, September 2012
Decades of overfishing has left fewer than 100 {sic} adult codfish in the North Sea. — per Sunday Times of U.K.
Why are Israel and the United States pounding the war drums about theocratic Iran? While the 'obvious' reason is Iran's dangerous potential for building a nuclear weapon, what may be a more important reason is that Iran has broken ranks with the New World Order people that demand payment for crude oil in U.S. petrodollars – Iran is instead accepting payments for oil exports to Russia and China in gold.
===============================
New York Times/C.B.S. polling in late September shows that the Romney-Ryan campaign is losing ground. Ohio results have Obama leading 53 percent to Romney's 43 percent; Florida has Obama leading 53 percent to Romney's 44 percent; in Pennsylvania, Obama is leading Romney by 12 points. A separate poll in Massachussetts (Romney's 'home' state) has Obama leading 64 percent to Romney's 33 percent.
So I repeat my prediction on this blog back in March 2012: a landslide for Barack Obama in November of something like 60-40 in the popular vote.
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
DEPT. OF REALLY STUPID PRODUCTS
Received another paper catalog in the mail of stuff that I will never buy. Second prize for stupidest product goes to the N.F.L.-themed gingerbread house for under the Xmas tree; first prize for stupidest product goes to the twelve toaster machines, each of which burns the name and logo of your favorite N.F.L. team onto the surface of the toast.
"A representative democracy only works when everyone truly has a voice, and when the voices of the many aren’t drowned out by the pocketbooks of a few."
~~ Helena, Montana Independent Record editorial, February 2012
"Dubya can’t win in Iraq, and he failed totally in Louisiana, and the same blindness that caused the thousands of deaths in New Orleans will also trigger the collapse of the world economy." ~~ philosopher G.E. Nordell in WMail ezine Issue #54 Sept 2005
The 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand [1905-82]is the 'second most influential book for Americans today' after the Bible, according to a recent joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of The Month Club
"Moody's Analytics estimates that the housing crisis wiped out $4.3 trillion in owner-occupied-home values from 2007 to 2010." — per TIME Magazine, September 2012
Decades of overfishing has left fewer than 100 {sic} adult codfish in the North Sea. — per Sunday Times of U.K.
Why are Israel and the United States pounding the war drums about theocratic Iran? While the 'obvious' reason is Iran's dangerous potential for building a nuclear weapon, what may be a more important reason is that Iran has broken ranks with the New World Order people that demand payment for crude oil in U.S. petrodollars – Iran is instead accepting payments for oil exports to Russia and China in gold.
===============================
New York Times/C.B.S. polling in late September shows that the Romney-Ryan campaign is losing ground. Ohio results have Obama leading 53 percent to Romney's 43 percent; Florida has Obama leading 53 percent to Romney's 44 percent; in Pennsylvania, Obama is leading Romney by 12 points. A separate poll in Massachussetts (Romney's 'home' state) has Obama leading 64 percent to Romney's 33 percent.
So I repeat my prediction on this blog back in March 2012: a landslide for Barack Obama in November of something like 60-40 in the popular vote.
Friday, September 14, 2012
September 2012 Quotations
"I hate authors. I wouldn't mind them so much if they didn't write books."
~~ Elizabeth van Arnim
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.”
~~ Federico Fellini [1920-93]
"If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven't seen them since."
~~ Gore Vidal [1925-2012]
"People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election."
~~ Otto von Bismarck [1815-98]
"If one cannot do great work, it is worthwhile to do good work and think it great."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842-1914]
"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]
"Hell is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"In Hollywood a girl's virtue is much less important than her hairdo."
~~ Marilyn Monroe [1926-62]
"What is that unforgettable line?"
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]
"Occupy something!"
~~ radio talk show host Thom Hartmann
"It's theatre, you know. I'm whispering in your ear, and you're dreaming my dreams, and then I'm getting a feeling for yours. I've been doing that for forty years."
~~ Bruce Springsteen
“A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.”
~~ Federico Fellini [1920-93]
"I hate it when I don't forward a chain letter and I die the next day."
~~ Kelly Kronbar
"The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]
"My country, right or wrong; when right to be kept right, when wrong to be put right."
~~ Carl Schurz [1829-1906]
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot / Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
~~ Dr. Seuss {Theodor Geisel 1904-91}, in "The Lorax", 1971
"To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."
~~ Nelson Mandela
“The next best thing to knowing something is to know where to find it.”
~~ Robert Johnson
"The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally-accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]
"Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion."
~~ Richard M. Nixon [1913-94]
"Hobbies of any kind are boring, except to people who have the same hobby."
~~ Dave Barry
"Take care of the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves."
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]
"The truth is lived, not taught."
~~ Herman Hesse [1877-1962]
"If you're not a sex object, you're in trouble."
~~ Helen Gurley Brown [1922-2012]
"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."
~~ art historian Robert Hughes [1938-2012]
"[Paul Ryan is] a supply-side zealot who would shred the safety net to put more money in the pockets of the very rich."
~~ William Falk
"There are no rationalists. We all believe in fairy tales, and live in them."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"Jesus was a bachelor."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]
"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."
~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne [1804-64]
"Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]
"I don't pretend to understand the universe, it is a great deal bigger than I am."
~~ Thomas Carlyle [1795-1881]
"To invent you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]
"Never use a long word when a short one will do."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]
"Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just apirin."
~~ Gore Vidal [1925-2012]
"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided."
~~ Konrad Adenauer [1876-1967]
"Success loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one."
~~ Junot Diaz
"Life is too short, and the time [that] we waste in yawning can never be regained."
~~ Stendhal 1783-1842]
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
~~ Charles Darwin [1809-82]
"Speak softly and carry a big stick."
~~ Vice President Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919], in a speech at the Minnesota State Fair on 2 September 1901
"It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself."
~~ poet Ezra Pound [1885-1972]
"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."
~~ poet T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]
"Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness."
~~ eco-activist John Muir [1838-1914]
"I do not like what is going on in our society. Our education system . . . is a total disaster."
~~ Ray Bradbury [1920-2012], in Salon interview 8/2001
"I don't believe in the tooth fairy, although I once had a dentist [that] I wasn't too sure of."
~~ Hollywood columnist James Bacon [1914-2010]
"If you tell about one place really well, you tell about the whole world."
~~ Isaac Bashevis Singer [1902-91]
"Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
~~ rocket scientist Werner Von Braun [1912-77]
"If Paul Ryan was honest, he would have pointed to that debt clock and said, ‘We built that'."
~~ Cong. Chris Van Hollen
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Elizabeth van Arnim
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.”
~~ Federico Fellini [1920-93]
"If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven't seen them since."
~~ Gore Vidal [1925-2012]
"People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election."
~~ Otto von Bismarck [1815-98]
"If one cannot do great work, it is worthwhile to do good work and think it great."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842-1914]
"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]
"Hell is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"In Hollywood a girl's virtue is much less important than her hairdo."
~~ Marilyn Monroe [1926-62]
"What is that unforgettable line?"
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]
"Occupy something!"
~~ radio talk show host Thom Hartmann
"It's theatre, you know. I'm whispering in your ear, and you're dreaming my dreams, and then I'm getting a feeling for yours. I've been doing that for forty years."
~~ Bruce Springsteen
“A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.”
~~ Federico Fellini [1920-93]
"I hate it when I don't forward a chain letter and I die the next day."
~~ Kelly Kronbar
"The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]
"My country, right or wrong; when right to be kept right, when wrong to be put right."
~~ Carl Schurz [1829-1906]
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot / Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
~~ Dr. Seuss {Theodor Geisel 1904-91}, in "The Lorax", 1971
"To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."
~~ Nelson Mandela
“The next best thing to knowing something is to know where to find it.”
~~ Robert Johnson
"The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally-accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]
"Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion."
~~ Richard M. Nixon [1913-94]
"Hobbies of any kind are boring, except to people who have the same hobby."
~~ Dave Barry
"Take care of the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves."
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]
"The truth is lived, not taught."
~~ Herman Hesse [1877-1962]
"If you're not a sex object, you're in trouble."
~~ Helen Gurley Brown [1922-2012]
"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."
~~ art historian Robert Hughes [1938-2012]
"[Paul Ryan is] a supply-side zealot who would shred the safety net to put more money in the pockets of the very rich."
~~ William Falk
"There are no rationalists. We all believe in fairy tales, and live in them."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"Jesus was a bachelor."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]
"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."
~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne [1804-64]
"Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]
"I don't pretend to understand the universe, it is a great deal bigger than I am."
~~ Thomas Carlyle [1795-1881]
"To invent you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]
"Never use a long word when a short one will do."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]
"Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just apirin."
~~ Gore Vidal [1925-2012]
"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided."
~~ Konrad Adenauer [1876-1967]
"Success loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one."
~~ Junot Diaz
"Life is too short, and the time [that] we waste in yawning can never be regained."
~~ Stendhal 1783-1842]
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
~~ Charles Darwin [1809-82]
"Speak softly and carry a big stick."
~~ Vice President Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919], in a speech at the Minnesota State Fair on 2 September 1901
"It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself."
~~ poet Ezra Pound [1885-1972]
"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."
~~ poet T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]
"Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness."
~~ eco-activist John Muir [1838-1914]
"I do not like what is going on in our society. Our education system . . . is a total disaster."
~~ Ray Bradbury [1920-2012], in Salon interview 8/2001
"I don't believe in the tooth fairy, although I once had a dentist [that] I wasn't too sure of."
~~ Hollywood columnist James Bacon [1914-2010]
"If you tell about one place really well, you tell about the whole world."
~~ Isaac Bashevis Singer [1902-91]
"Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
~~ rocket scientist Werner Von Braun [1912-77]
"If Paul Ryan was honest, he would have pointed to that debt clock and said, ‘We built that'."
~~ Cong. Chris Van Hollen
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Sunday, September 09, 2012
Patting Myself On The Back
It came up in conversation again recently, the right-wing meme that 'nobody could have predicted the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown of 2008'. I refuted that person's falsehood by citing my own early predictions on the matter, but of course since I only carry a dumb-phone (i.e. not a smart phone) along with me, I did not have the citations at my fingertips.
So here is that list of citations, as hotlinks, for direct use by me or you:
WMail Newsletter Essay #39 January 2004: "The 100-Year Exercise"
look for the phrase 'Great Depression II'
WMail Newsletter Essay #42 April 2004: "The Oligarchy"
look for the word 'bubble'
WMail Newsletter Essay #45 July 2004: "What is Reason?"
look for the word 'bubble'
WMail Newsletter Essay #51 March 2005: "The Three Economies"
the word 'collapse' is used in several places
WMail Newsletter Issue #54 March 2005
before the essay in 'News & Links of Interest'
WMail Newsletter Issue #72 November 2007: "Farewell Issue"
a warning about 'the imminent economic meltdown desired by the Bush-P.N.A.C. crime family'
WMail Newsletter Essay #76 June 2008: "How To Survive The Coming Depression"
the essay topic itself
. . . plus I suggested the Virtual Tea Party in January 2002
WMail Newsletter Essay #19 January 2002: "Virtual Tea Party"
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
So here is that list of citations, as hotlinks, for direct use by me or you:
WMail Newsletter Essay #39 January 2004: "The 100-Year Exercise"
look for the phrase 'Great Depression II'
WMail Newsletter Essay #42 April 2004: "The Oligarchy"
look for the word 'bubble'
WMail Newsletter Essay #45 July 2004: "What is Reason?"
look for the word 'bubble'
WMail Newsletter Essay #51 March 2005: "The Three Economies"
the word 'collapse' is used in several places
WMail Newsletter Issue #54 March 2005
before the essay in 'News & Links of Interest'
WMail Newsletter Issue #72 November 2007: "Farewell Issue"
a warning about 'the imminent economic meltdown desired by the Bush-P.N.A.C. crime family'
WMail Newsletter Essay #76 June 2008: "How To Survive The Coming Depression"
the essay topic itself
. . . plus I suggested the Virtual Tea Party in January 2002
WMail Newsletter Essay #19 January 2002: "Virtual Tea Party"
Monday, September 03, 2012
Lubbock, Texas Concentration Camps
Lubbock County, Texas professional idiot and elected judge Tom Head somehow acquired 'knowledge' of President Obama's secret plan to send United Nations troops into West Texas after his re-election to take over the city and put Republicans into concentration camps. Then Judge Head got himself on any radio or TV talk show that would have him, talking about it, ad nauseum.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon had a cool response: He said that the United Nations has no plans whatsoever to 'mess with Texas'.
But I am still left with several questions.
1) Since the concentration camps in question were built under a five-year contract with Halliburton – see 2006 Halliburton press release – why does Judge Head blame President Obama?
2) Why are so many crazy people living in Texas?
3) How does Judge Head explain his access to 'secret plans' of the President?
4) If these plans are indeed secret, did he not commit treason by revealing them?
5) Why is there no Justice Department investigation of Judge Head's claims? Or even an investigation of the sources of the 'leak'?
6) Does the Lubbock, Texas Chamber of Commerce have no better way to get into the news stream?
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon had a cool response: He said that the United Nations has no plans whatsoever to 'mess with Texas'.
But I am still left with several questions.
1) Since the concentration camps in question were built under a five-year contract with Halliburton – see 2006 Halliburton press release – why does Judge Head blame President Obama?
2) Why are so many crazy people living in Texas?
3) How does Judge Head explain his access to 'secret plans' of the President?
4) If these plans are indeed secret, did he not commit treason by revealing them?
5) Why is there no Justice Department investigation of Judge Head's claims? Or even an investigation of the sources of the 'leak'?
6) Does the Lubbock, Texas Chamber of Commerce have no better way to get into the news stream?
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Working Minds Essay #101: Anti-Obama Hoaxsters
Essay #100 on the topic of voter suppression was printed as a Letter To The Editor in the local Valencia County News-Bulletin newspaper on August 29th, which generated a telephone call from a local octogenarian Republican who took exception to my statement that "If the Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections."
Among the many false right-wing memes that that person offered was the long-debunked notion that President Obama inititated some conspiracy to keep records of his student loans secret. That story includes ludicrous details like Obama used a false name, that he applied *as* a foreigner, and so on.
So after the phone conversation ended, I checked that one story out – Republicans never check with reality, very blind faith is sufficient – at snopes.com, with quite satisfying results. {link here}
The Obama college records hoax began on April Fools Day – that's correct! – in 2009 with a fake Associated Press news item email.
1) The fake A.P. email failed twice on the surface: first, it did not conform to A.P. practice, and second, it was written by a person without training in journalism.
2) Organizations mentioned in the email did not and do not exist.
3) Fellow students at Occidental College remember 'Barry' Obama very well, and kindly; no record or memory has been located of the spurious pseudonym Barry Soetero.
4) The source of the supposed tuition funding has never had a program for foreign students: American citizenship is required.
So here is the problem for Valencia County residents and other readers: These and other lies of local and national Republicans have not been discredited, at least, they are very comfortable in repeating such lies.
These Republican lies float around Valencia County and Albuquerque and New Mexico and America like hantavirus.
* * * * * * * * But here is what is now true: All who have read this essay can be certain of two things.
A) Anyone who has parroted one or more of these Republican neo-con lies in the past or does so in future is now known by you to be someone who lies without their conscience being bothered one whit. Republicans do not fact-check, Republicans will not issue corrections for their falsehoods, Republicans will blame you for questioning their blind obedience to the fascist oligarchs and to the Koch Brothers-funded propaganda machine.
B) You can truly never again trust anyone who has repeated the 'Obama college records conspiracy' hoax. Never again, whether it be your employer or a neighbor or relative or some overpaid bilge-mouth pundit on the Fox Noise Channel. When they repeat this lie, you know that everything that they say is now suspect. And the same is true of the 'Obama was born in Africa' hoax and the 'Obama never went to Columbia' hoax.
* * * * * * * * If the Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Among the many false right-wing memes that that person offered was the long-debunked notion that President Obama inititated some conspiracy to keep records of his student loans secret. That story includes ludicrous details like Obama used a false name, that he applied *as* a foreigner, and so on.
So after the phone conversation ended, I checked that one story out – Republicans never check with reality, very blind faith is sufficient – at snopes.com, with quite satisfying results. {link here}
The Obama college records hoax began on April Fools Day – that's correct! – in 2009 with a fake Associated Press news item email.
1) The fake A.P. email failed twice on the surface: first, it did not conform to A.P. practice, and second, it was written by a person without training in journalism.
2) Organizations mentioned in the email did not and do not exist.
3) Fellow students at Occidental College remember 'Barry' Obama very well, and kindly; no record or memory has been located of the spurious pseudonym Barry Soetero.
4) The source of the supposed tuition funding has never had a program for foreign students: American citizenship is required.
So here is the problem for Valencia County residents and other readers: These and other lies of local and national Republicans have not been discredited, at least, they are very comfortable in repeating such lies.
These Republican lies float around Valencia County and Albuquerque and New Mexico and America like hantavirus.
A) Anyone who has parroted one or more of these Republican neo-con lies in the past or does so in future is now known by you to be someone who lies without their conscience being bothered one whit. Republicans do not fact-check, Republicans will not issue corrections for their falsehoods, Republicans will blame you for questioning their blind obedience to the fascist oligarchs and to the Koch Brothers-funded propaganda machine.
B) You can truly never again trust anyone who has repeated the 'Obama college records conspiracy' hoax. Never again, whether it be your employer or a neighbor or relative or some overpaid bilge-mouth pundit on the Fox Noise Channel. When they repeat this lie, you know that everything that they say is now suspect. And the same is true of the 'Obama was born in Africa' hoax and the 'Obama never went to Columbia' hoax.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
August 2012 News Factoids
Just 196 super-wealthy persons have provided more than 80 percent of the Super P.A.C. money spent in the presidential election (thru June 2012).
Doubt the drought (and global warming)? As-of mid-August of 2012, one-half of U.S. counties have been declared federal disaster areas due to drought.
There is a marvelous video excerpt of Barack Obama's speech in Pueblo, Colorado on 8 August 2012
{watch video [2:29] free on YouTube}
A giant mass of pumice (lightweight volcanic rock) is floating on the ocean surface of the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and the island nation of Tonga. Some of the chunks are as high as two feet above the water, and the mass extends for 250 nautical miles by 30 nautical miles (26,000 square miles). The likely source is eruption activity at the ocean-floor volcano Monowai.
Middle-class income and wealth fell in the last 10 years. Median middle-class income dropped 5% in the 2000s, while net worth plummeted 28% – from $129,582 to $93,150 – as housing prices shriveled. The middle class has steadily shrunk over the years, falling from 61% in 1971 to 51% of the population in 2011. ~~ per The Los Angeles Times, based on a Pew survey report
=============== The nice folks at www.creditscore.net advised me of a broken link on the old WMail ezine pages, so thanx guys.
That correction found a few similar links that may be useful to all readers:
U.S. Federal Trade Commission tips for reducing & reporting spam emails
U.S. Federal Trade Commission website against Identity Theft
U.S. Federal Communication Commission 'Do Not Call' info page
U.S. government 'Do Not Call List' official website
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Doubt the drought (and global warming)? As-of mid-August of 2012, one-half of U.S. counties have been declared federal disaster areas due to drought.
There is a marvelous video excerpt of Barack Obama's speech in Pueblo, Colorado on 8 August 2012
{watch video [2:29] free on YouTube}
A giant mass of pumice (lightweight volcanic rock) is floating on the ocean surface of the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and the island nation of Tonga. Some of the chunks are as high as two feet above the water, and the mass extends for 250 nautical miles by 30 nautical miles (26,000 square miles). The likely source is eruption activity at the ocean-floor volcano Monowai.
Middle-class income and wealth fell in the last 10 years. Median middle-class income dropped 5% in the 2000s, while net worth plummeted 28% – from $129,582 to $93,150 – as housing prices shriveled. The middle class has steadily shrunk over the years, falling from 61% in 1971 to 51% of the population in 2011. ~~ per The Los Angeles Times, based on a Pew survey report
That correction found a few similar links that may be useful to all readers:
U.S. Federal Trade Commission tips for reducing & reporting spam emails
U.S. Federal Trade Commission website against Identity Theft
U.S. Federal Communication Commission 'Do Not Call' info page
U.S. government 'Do Not Call List' official website
Friday, August 10, 2012
Working Minds Essay #100: Voter Suppression 2012
The vote of each and every citizen of New Mexico and across America is so important that the fascist Republican Party is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to take away the rights of enough voters in this critical Election 2012 to ensure that the Republicans can steal the elections in states and districts that they will not otherwise win.
The 2000 presidential election was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in their egregious Bush v. Gore decision of December 2000. Skipping all those 'hanging chads', George W. Bush was allotted 537 more votes than Al Gore, Jr., giving Bush 271 electoral votes and Gore 266 – quite a squeaker. Had the Supreme Court not delivered their unconstitutional decision, Gore would have won Florida by a tiny several hundred votes and the electoral count would have jumped the other way: 293 for Gore and 244 for Bush.
That Florida election was already skewed by the 12,000 voters wrongly categorized as convicted felons and prevented from voting.
Here in New Mexico, our Secretary of State Dianna J. Duran has recently mailed out 178,000 postcards to potential expired voters. Her office made a really big mistake though in targeting Democratic voter Diane Wood, who happens to be a local officer in Common Cause, and a few other outspoken victims. Luckily for New Mexico voters, the New Mexico Legislature (Thank you, Michael Sanchez!) made the process harder to corrupt – our state procedure is notification by postcard, status change if postcard is returned by the U.S.P.S., and then removal does not occur unless the citizen does not vote in any election in the next two years.
Ohio has been suppressing early voting by having polling locations in highly-Democratic urban precincts open only from 8am to 5pm Monday thru Friday, thus preventing working citizens from voting.
In Florida, the corruption goes much deeper. The Florida Legislature cancelled the right to vote for 100,000 convicted felons this year. Republican Gov. Rick Scott ordered Secretary of State Ken Browning to compile a list of 'non-citizen voters' to be purged; Browning resigned, stating that the database was not reliable in that area. Browning's successor compiled a list of 182,000 potential non-citizens registered to vote, along with a list of 50,000 supposed dead registered voters.
A lawsuit against the Secretary of State from plaintiffs that included the non-partisan League of Women Voters asked for a temporary injunction; that filing in a Florida district court was denied; they were told to just file a lawsuit for a permanent decision. Another district court judge then issued the permanent injunction against the state's plan to remove voters who did not reply within 48 hours under threat of a $1,000 fine. The Department of Justice also issued a letter to the State of Florida declaring them in violation of federal law and demanding a halt to the biased voter purge.
Further evidence of the fascist corruption of American politics soon followed. The Republican-owned national media reported that Florida WON twice in court and skipped the federal block of further action. So naturally, Republican governors used the false news reports to justify similar voter suppression action – at taxpayer expense – in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Iowa, and Colorado.
On the good news side, the governors of New Hampshire and Michigan vetoed similar voter suppression laws passed by their legislatures. (These laws were modelled after unconstitutional text written by Koch Brothers-funded lobbyist A.L.E.C., who are adept at purchasing state and federal politicians, including several in New Mexico.)
What can you do?
1) Read your mail closely.
2) Vote early.
3) Work locally to bring out local voters (any party) – call it anti-suppression.
4) Raise hell via the media if you are wrongly targeted.
If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
The 2000 presidential election was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in their egregious Bush v. Gore decision of December 2000. Skipping all those 'hanging chads', George W. Bush was allotted 537 more votes than Al Gore, Jr., giving Bush 271 electoral votes and Gore 266 – quite a squeaker. Had the Supreme Court not delivered their unconstitutional decision, Gore would have won Florida by a tiny several hundred votes and the electoral count would have jumped the other way: 293 for Gore and 244 for Bush.
That Florida election was already skewed by the 12,000 voters wrongly categorized as convicted felons and prevented from voting.
Here in New Mexico, our Secretary of State Dianna J. Duran has recently mailed out 178,000 postcards to potential expired voters. Her office made a really big mistake though in targeting Democratic voter Diane Wood, who happens to be a local officer in Common Cause, and a few other outspoken victims. Luckily for New Mexico voters, the New Mexico Legislature (Thank you, Michael Sanchez!) made the process harder to corrupt – our state procedure is notification by postcard, status change if postcard is returned by the U.S.P.S., and then removal does not occur unless the citizen does not vote in any election in the next two years.
Ohio has been suppressing early voting by having polling locations in highly-Democratic urban precincts open only from 8am to 5pm Monday thru Friday, thus preventing working citizens from voting.
In Florida, the corruption goes much deeper. The Florida Legislature cancelled the right to vote for 100,000 convicted felons this year. Republican Gov. Rick Scott ordered Secretary of State Ken Browning to compile a list of 'non-citizen voters' to be purged; Browning resigned, stating that the database was not reliable in that area. Browning's successor compiled a list of 182,000 potential non-citizens registered to vote, along with a list of 50,000 supposed dead registered voters.
A lawsuit against the Secretary of State from plaintiffs that included the non-partisan League of Women Voters asked for a temporary injunction; that filing in a Florida district court was denied; they were told to just file a lawsuit for a permanent decision. Another district court judge then issued the permanent injunction against the state's plan to remove voters who did not reply within 48 hours under threat of a $1,000 fine. The Department of Justice also issued a letter to the State of Florida declaring them in violation of federal law and demanding a halt to the biased voter purge.
Further evidence of the fascist corruption of American politics soon followed. The Republican-owned national media reported that Florida WON twice in court and skipped the federal block of further action. So naturally, Republican governors used the false news reports to justify similar voter suppression action – at taxpayer expense – in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Iowa, and Colorado.
On the good news side, the governors of New Hampshire and Michigan vetoed similar voter suppression laws passed by their legislatures. (These laws were modelled after unconstitutional text written by Koch Brothers-funded lobbyist A.L.E.C., who are adept at purchasing state and federal politicians, including several in New Mexico.)
What can you do?
1) Read your mail closely.
2) Vote early.
3) Work locally to bring out local voters (any party) – call it anti-suppression.
4) Raise hell via the media if you are wrongly targeted.
If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
August 2012 Quotations
"America’s founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more — and nothing less.”
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Dog food again?”
~~ Snoopy, of the Peanuts comic strip
"The wisdom of the ages and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.”
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
~~ biologist Richard Dawkins
"Lack of money is the root of all evil.”
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"To steal from a thief is not theft. It is merely irony.”
~~ Johnston McCulley [1883-1958]
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of govern-ment by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
~~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt [1882-1945]
"When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”
~~ Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
"The real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
~~ biologist Edward. O. Wilson
"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.”
~~ novelist Catherine Aird
"The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.”
~~ comedian Mitch Hedberg [1968-2005]
"The dream which is not fed with dream disappears.”
~~ poet Antonio Porchia [1885-1968]
"Talent does you no good unless it's recognized by someone else.”
~~ employment baron Robert Half [1919?-2001]
"The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough.”
~~ Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941]
"Just as the world's powers have siezed and exploited the physical territories and natural resources of the Earth, so too they have colonized the cultural commons – the space of ideas that everyone shares.”
~~ Antonio Lopez
"In order to succeed in the U.S., you must speak English; having a second language, such as Spanish or Chinese, is a major advantage over those who do not. But it does not work the other way around, even in foreign countries.”
~~ G.E. Nordell
"The Higgs boson [particle] has two functions: One is to give mass to the Universe. The other is to prevent the standard model from going bananas.”
~~ physicist Fabiola Gianotti
"Civilization begins with distillation.”
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]
"We all choke. Winners know how to handle choking better than losers.”
~~ John McEnroe
"Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.”
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"Never second-guess inspiration.”
~~ Flannery O'Connor [1925-64]
"One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”
~~ writer-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [1900-1944]
"Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people [that] you wouldn't have [there].”
~~ David Frost
"If no one ever took risks, Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine Floor.”
~~ Neil Simon
"A good writer is not per se a good book critic, no more than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.”
~~ journalist Jim Bishop [1907-87], in the New York Journal, 1957
"...If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”
~~ Hilaire Belloc [1870-1953]
"If [the Republicans] will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.”
~~ Adlai E. Stevenson II [1900-65], during the 1952 campaign
"A government big enough to give you everything [that] you want is a government big enough to take from you, everything [that] you have.”
~~ Gerald Ford [1913-2006]
"The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change.”
~~ Bill Clinton
"Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.”
~~ author Cyril Connolly [1903-74]
"Show business is not so much 'dog eat dog' as 'dog doesn't return other dogs' phone calls'.”
~~ Woody Allen
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]
"A mistake is simply another way of doing things.”
~~ newpaper publisher Katharine Graham [1917-2001]
"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
~~ Hannah Arendt [1906-75]
"Existence is a tough proposition, and a man has to possess fortitude to endure it.”
~~ Johnston McCulley [1883-1958]
"A failure is a man who has bludered but is not able to cash in on the experience.”
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1856-1915]
"There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you can enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961], in "Farewell To Arms", 1929
"We have something to fight for in this [election]: the future of the American middle class.”
~~ Shelley Berkley, running in 2012 for U.S. Senate from Nevada
"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
~~ Edith Wharton [1862-1937]
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
~~ Alice Walker
"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
~~ author Harper Lee
"Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.”
~~ Theodore Isaac Rubin
"Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.”
~~ philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach [1804-72]
"The life [that] you have led doesn't need to be the only one [that] you have.”
~~ Anna Quindlen
"An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anyhting into an empty head.”
~~ longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer [1902-83]
"It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot harder to make a difference.”
~~ Tom Brokaw
"Knowledge may have its purposes, but guessing is always more fun than knowing.”
~~ W.H. Auden [1907-73]
"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]
"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent.”
~~ cinema master Stanley Kubrick [1928-99]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Dog food again?”
~~ Snoopy, of the Peanuts comic strip
"The wisdom of the ages and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.”
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
~~ biologist Richard Dawkins
"Lack of money is the root of all evil.”
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"To steal from a thief is not theft. It is merely irony.”
~~ Johnston McCulley [1883-1958]
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of govern-ment by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
~~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt [1882-1945]
"When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”
~~ Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
"The real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
~~ biologist Edward. O. Wilson
"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.”
~~ novelist Catherine Aird
"The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.”
~~ comedian Mitch Hedberg [1968-2005]
"The dream which is not fed with dream disappears.”
~~ poet Antonio Porchia [1885-1968]
"Talent does you no good unless it's recognized by someone else.”
~~ employment baron Robert Half [1919?-2001]
"The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough.”
~~ Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941]
"Just as the world's powers have siezed and exploited the physical territories and natural resources of the Earth, so too they have colonized the cultural commons – the space of ideas that everyone shares.”
~~ Antonio Lopez
"In order to succeed in the U.S., you must speak English; having a second language, such as Spanish or Chinese, is a major advantage over those who do not. But it does not work the other way around, even in foreign countries.”
~~ G.E. Nordell
"The Higgs boson [particle] has two functions: One is to give mass to the Universe. The other is to prevent the standard model from going bananas.”
~~ physicist Fabiola Gianotti
"Civilization begins with distillation.”
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]
"We all choke. Winners know how to handle choking better than losers.”
~~ John McEnroe
"Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.”
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"Never second-guess inspiration.”
~~ Flannery O'Connor [1925-64]
"One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”
~~ writer-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [1900-1944]
"Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people [that] you wouldn't have [there].”
~~ David Frost
"If no one ever took risks, Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine Floor.”
~~ Neil Simon
"A good writer is not per se a good book critic, no more than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.”
~~ journalist Jim Bishop [1907-87], in the New York Journal, 1957
"...If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”
~~ Hilaire Belloc [1870-1953]
"If [the Republicans] will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.”
~~ Adlai E. Stevenson II [1900-65], during the 1952 campaign
"A government big enough to give you everything [that] you want is a government big enough to take from you, everything [that] you have.”
~~ Gerald Ford [1913-2006]
"The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change.”
~~ Bill Clinton
"Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.”
~~ author Cyril Connolly [1903-74]
"Show business is not so much 'dog eat dog' as 'dog doesn't return other dogs' phone calls'.”
~~ Woody Allen
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]
"A mistake is simply another way of doing things.”
~~ newpaper publisher Katharine Graham [1917-2001]
"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
~~ Hannah Arendt [1906-75]
"Existence is a tough proposition, and a man has to possess fortitude to endure it.”
~~ Johnston McCulley [1883-1958]
"A failure is a man who has bludered but is not able to cash in on the experience.”
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1856-1915]
"There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you can enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961], in "Farewell To Arms", 1929
"We have something to fight for in this [election]: the future of the American middle class.”
~~ Shelley Berkley, running in 2012 for U.S. Senate from Nevada
"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
~~ Edith Wharton [1862-1937]
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
~~ Alice Walker
"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
~~ author Harper Lee
"Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.”
~~ Theodore Isaac Rubin
"Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.”
~~ philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach [1804-72]
"The life [that] you have led doesn't need to be the only one [that] you have.”
~~ Anna Quindlen
"An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anyhting into an empty head.”
~~ longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer [1902-83]
"It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot harder to make a difference.”
~~ Tom Brokaw
"Knowledge may have its purposes, but guessing is always more fun than knowing.”
~~ W.H. Auden [1907-73]
"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]
"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent.”
~~ cinema master Stanley Kubrick [1928-99]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Monday, July 30, 2012
What Barack Obama Actually Said
At a campaign stop in Roanoke, Virginia on 13 July 2012, what President Obama said during his sppech was:
"Somebody helped to create the unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business . . . you didn't build that [system] – somebody else made that happen . . . The point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."
What the Republican Party and the fascist media did was to intentially edit the video so that it seems as if Obama was denigrating business creation.
If the fascist Republicans had anything of value to offer the American voter, then they would not choose to lie and cheat and steal like they are doing in campaigns all across America in 2012.
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
"Somebody helped to create the unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business . . . you didn't build that [system] – somebody else made that happen . . . The point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."
What the Republican Party and the fascist media did was to intentially edit the video so that it seems as if Obama was denigrating business creation.
If the fascist Republicans had anything of value to offer the American voter, then they would not choose to lie and cheat and steal like they are doing in campaigns all across America in 2012.
Monday, July 23, 2012
July 2012 News Factoids
BANKING & FINANCE
The top banks are 23 percent larger than they were before the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown crisis began.
52 percent of all the assets held by the entire banking industry have now become aggregated into the hands of just five companies (up from 17 percent four decades ago), and the top 10 institutions have swollen so large that they possess wealth that equates to roughly half of America’s annual G.D.P. (gross domestic product). == per Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in its annual report for 2011 released March 2012
By mid-July, JPMorgan said that the bad trade in U.K. has ballooned to a loss of $5.8 billion.
GLOBAL WARNINGS
Precipitation in New Mexico from January to June this year has been 54 percent of the longterm average, and 81 percent of the state is classified as being in 'severe drought'. == per the U.S. National Weather Service
Sea levels along the coast of Virginia have risen more than a foot {30+ cm} and are still rising. Average rise along the Altantic coast of America is 4.85 inches.
"For the entire country, the first six months of 2012 were the hottest ever recorded – an amazing 4.5°F above the XXth Century average." == per U.S. National Climatic Data Center
OTHER CONCERNS
Search engine usage statistics for May 2012: Google handled 66.7 percent of searches; Bing was second with 15.4 percent (vs. 14.1 percent a year ago); Yahoo was third with 13.4 percent (vs. 15.9 percent a year ago); Ask did 3 percent; AOL did 1.5 percent.
The lingering power outages from the July storms on the East Coast are largely due to deferred maintenance on the grid by the power companies – the money not spent on needed repairs makes the bottom line seem better – including rust-damaged 'steel wire' power lines still in place from the 1940s.
Is nothing sacred? The uniforms for the U.S. Olympic Team that were announced in July were made in China.
TIME Magazine combined information from several sources into a half-page graphic about 'Where The Jobs Will Be' over the next five years. Their top ten are: social networking sites (27% growth); street traffic info providers; green construction; social network gaming; relaxation drinks; medical device recycling; green building materials; retinal-imaging machines (17% growth); internet publishing & broadcasting; and secure data storage.
For some reason, this seems like a very cool piece of equipment: the off-road wheelchair from Action Trackchair in Minnesota.
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
The top banks are 23 percent larger than they were before the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown crisis began.
52 percent of all the assets held by the entire banking industry have now become aggregated into the hands of just five companies (up from 17 percent four decades ago), and the top 10 institutions have swollen so large that they possess wealth that equates to roughly half of America’s annual G.D.P. (gross domestic product). == per Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in its annual report for 2011 released March 2012
By mid-July, JPMorgan said that the bad trade in U.K. has ballooned to a loss of $5.8 billion.
GLOBAL WARNINGS
Precipitation in New Mexico from January to June this year has been 54 percent of the longterm average, and 81 percent of the state is classified as being in 'severe drought'. == per the U.S. National Weather Service
Sea levels along the coast of Virginia have risen more than a foot {30+ cm} and are still rising. Average rise along the Altantic coast of America is 4.85 inches.
"For the entire country, the first six months of 2012 were the hottest ever recorded – an amazing 4.5°F above the XXth Century average." == per U.S. National Climatic Data Center
OTHER CONCERNS
Search engine usage statistics for May 2012: Google handled 66.7 percent of searches; Bing was second with 15.4 percent (vs. 14.1 percent a year ago); Yahoo was third with 13.4 percent (vs. 15.9 percent a year ago); Ask did 3 percent; AOL did 1.5 percent.
The lingering power outages from the July storms on the East Coast are largely due to deferred maintenance on the grid by the power companies – the money not spent on needed repairs makes the bottom line seem better – including rust-damaged 'steel wire' power lines still in place from the 1940s.
Is nothing sacred? The uniforms for the U.S. Olympic Team that were announced in July were made in China.
TIME Magazine combined information from several sources into a half-page graphic about 'Where The Jobs Will Be' over the next five years. Their top ten are: social networking sites (27% growth); street traffic info providers; green construction; social network gaming; relaxation drinks; medical device recycling; green building materials; retinal-imaging machines (17% growth); internet publishing & broadcasting; and secure data storage.
For some reason, this seems like a very cool piece of equipment: the off-road wheelchair from Action Trackchair in Minnesota.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Working Minds Essay #99: Mitt Romney Got Caught
Willard Mitt Romney is a liar and a pirate, and possibly a sociopath.
Mitt professes to practice the Mormon religion, and yet he does nothing but lie and lie and lie all day long, every day since announcing his candidacy for President in April 2011.
(And this is the best that the Republican Party has to offer the American voter?)
Aside from the old news of Romney's mistreatment of his dog and his children and his employees, there are two recent scandals concerning Mitt's integrity.
The first is his refusal to disclose his financial records as is the longtime practice for presidential candidates. Romney flat refuses to be honest with the American people and make his tax returns public (not even redacted versions).
He also refuses to name his 'bundlers', the folks working to bring in the millions of dollars financing his campaign. Keeping these workers hidden from view brings up all kinds of conjecture, such as violations of employee/campaign restrictions, federal and state.
So the New York Times and the Boston Globe newspapers went looking, and soon discovered several falsities, some by ommission and some by commission.
Mitt Romney is the sole owner of a questionable (tax-dodge) corporation in the off-shore tax haven of Bermuda. Bain Capital
's corporate identity is based in a mail-drop in the Cayman Islands off-shore tax haven.
Until recently, Romney kept millions in cash in a secret Swiss bank account.
Maybe the information is being kept hidden because it will reveal dastardly deeds beyond piracy and vulture capitalism. Who is to say there isn't illegal business dealings, such as money laundering. With no data, we will never know.
But the second and most damaging part of these scandals is the revelation that Mitt Romney was running Bain Capital a full TWO YEARS after the date he has given over and over for when he left the company. He has stated many times that he left Bain in 1999, especially when accused of acts of piracy against viable companies and shipping the jobs overseas and leaving the firms bankrupt. His position was that such things happened only after he left.
Well, golly. That turns out not to be true. Mitt Romney is listed on official documents filed with the S.E.C. (Securities & Exchange Commission) as the sole owner, sole proprietor, and president and CEO of Bain Capital thru February 2001.
Ooops.
And he was paid $100,000 each year as head of the company. Probably one reason that he dares not reveal his tax returns – and what else is there in this category? (Either he did perform work for the salary and lied about it, or he performed no work for that money, which is immoral and un-American if not illegal.)
Ooops.
So Romney and the spin-doctors of his campaign team try to say that it was a formality, they had to send in the forms, it still doesn't prove that he ran the company after 1999.
Yes, it does. But wait a minute, maybe what the Romney folks mean is that Mitt signed legal documents that lied about his role at Bain Capital. Could that be his out? It was just another lie – this one delivered on official documents required by the S.E.C. from each and every American corporation.
Ooops. Violation of federal law, probably including perjury.
And all Romney's protests the last few days are on tape, uploaded to the internet a hundred places.
So Mitt Romney is in rather a pickle here: Mitt Romney either lied back then, on federal documents, under penalty of perjury – OR – Mitt Romney has been and still is lying to America on the campaign trail about his past.
* * * * * * * * Given that the faux-news media is owned by the fascists of the American Oligarchy, Mitt Romney may squeak by on this one. Perhaps another decades-long child molestation scandal will divert the American people. Or a lost little girl in Georgia will pre-empt more air-time than politics altogether. The American sheeple are easily diverted.
I expect that Barack Obama will win by a landslide because I am an idealist, and cannot concieve of an American voter population that is as brain-dead as the Republicans want and expect.
But what really worries me are the three probable negative options for the November 2012 election.
One: Romney will win, a disaster for democracy and for your grandchildren's future and for the future of life on this planet.
Two: Barack Obama wins the election, but the Republicans manage to steal it once again.
Three: Romney does not win at the Republican Convention on the first ballot. Bet you forgot about that. The convention then becomes a free-for-all, with possible candidates including Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, Donald Trump, Darrell Issa – none of whom are qualified to hold public office, much less to occupy the White House.
Look again and try not to cringe: The above short list is the best that the Republican Party has to offer the American voter.
Having read all this, if you get a good night's sleep tonight you can consider yourself lucky (or maybe just another ignorant sheeple).
Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Mitt professes to practice the Mormon religion, and yet he does nothing but lie and lie and lie all day long, every day since announcing his candidacy for President in April 2011.
(And this is the best that the Republican Party has to offer the American voter?)
Aside from the old news of Romney's mistreatment of his dog and his children and his employees, there are two recent scandals concerning Mitt's integrity.
The first is his refusal to disclose his financial records as is the longtime practice for presidential candidates. Romney flat refuses to be honest with the American people and make his tax returns public (not even redacted versions).
He also refuses to name his 'bundlers', the folks working to bring in the millions of dollars financing his campaign. Keeping these workers hidden from view brings up all kinds of conjecture, such as violations of employee/campaign restrictions, federal and state.
So the New York Times and the Boston Globe newspapers went looking, and soon discovered several falsities, some by ommission and some by commission.
Mitt Romney is the sole owner of a questionable (tax-dodge) corporation in the off-shore tax haven of Bermuda. Bain Capital
's corporate identity is based in a mail-drop in the Cayman Islands off-shore tax haven.
Until recently, Romney kept millions in cash in a secret Swiss bank account.
Maybe the information is being kept hidden because it will reveal dastardly deeds beyond piracy and vulture capitalism. Who is to say there isn't illegal business dealings, such as money laundering. With no data, we will never know.
But the second and most damaging part of these scandals is the revelation that Mitt Romney was running Bain Capital a full TWO YEARS after the date he has given over and over for when he left the company. He has stated many times that he left Bain in 1999, especially when accused of acts of piracy against viable companies and shipping the jobs overseas and leaving the firms bankrupt. His position was that such things happened only after he left.
Well, golly. That turns out not to be true. Mitt Romney is listed on official documents filed with the S.E.C. (Securities & Exchange Commission) as the sole owner, sole proprietor, and president and CEO of Bain Capital thru February 2001.
Ooops.
And he was paid $100,000 each year as head of the company. Probably one reason that he dares not reveal his tax returns – and what else is there in this category? (Either he did perform work for the salary and lied about it, or he performed no work for that money, which is immoral and un-American if not illegal.)
Ooops.
So Romney and the spin-doctors of his campaign team try to say that it was a formality, they had to send in the forms, it still doesn't prove that he ran the company after 1999.
Yes, it does. But wait a minute, maybe what the Romney folks mean is that Mitt signed legal documents that lied about his role at Bain Capital. Could that be his out? It was just another lie – this one delivered on official documents required by the S.E.C. from each and every American corporation.
Ooops. Violation of federal law, probably including perjury.
And all Romney's protests the last few days are on tape, uploaded to the internet a hundred places.
So Mitt Romney is in rather a pickle here: Mitt Romney either lied back then, on federal documents, under penalty of perjury – OR – Mitt Romney has been and still is lying to America on the campaign trail about his past.
I expect that Barack Obama will win by a landslide because I am an idealist, and cannot concieve of an American voter population that is as brain-dead as the Republicans want and expect.
But what really worries me are the three probable negative options for the November 2012 election.
One: Romney will win, a disaster for democracy and for your grandchildren's future and for the future of life on this planet.
Two: Barack Obama wins the election, but the Republicans manage to steal it once again.
Three: Romney does not win at the Republican Convention on the first ballot. Bet you forgot about that. The convention then becomes a free-for-all, with possible candidates including Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, Donald Trump, Darrell Issa – none of whom are qualified to hold public office, much less to occupy the White House.
Look again and try not to cringe: The above short list is the best that the Republican Party has to offer the American voter.
Having read all this, if you get a good night's sleep tonight you can consider yourself lucky (or maybe just another ignorant sheeple).
Monday, July 09, 2012
July 2012 Quotations
“How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!”
~~ Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]
"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."
~~ Bob Dylan
"The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"The things [that] we hate about ourselves aren't more real than the things [that] we like about ourselves."
~~ columnist Ellen Goodman
"You know [that] you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake."
~~ Bob Hope [1903-2003]
"Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]
"Sanity is a cozy lie."
~~ Susan Sontag [1933-2004]
"There is nothing that is always or never."
~~ Maxine in Santa Fe, New Mexico
“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.”
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"I've never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know."
~~ Epicurus [341–270 B.C.E.]
"I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishment – there are consequences."
~~ R.G. Ingersoll [1833-99]
"Everything is funny as long as it's happening to someone else."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]
"There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"Self-pity is our worst enemy, and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]
"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in a cage."
~~ Ray Bradbury [1920-2012]
"If pregnancy were a book, they would cut out the last two chapters."
~~ Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
"Creativity is intelligence having fun."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"Time is the only critic without personal ambition."
~~ John Steinbeck [1902-68]
"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."
~~ Mae West [1893-1980]
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]
"Keep your face always to the sunshine, and the shadows will fall behind you."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]
"There is no such thing as bravery, only degrees of fear."
~~ John Wainwright [1921-95]
"you can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough for me."
~~ C.S. Lewis [1898-1963]
"Parents are not interested in justice. They're interestded in peace and quiet."
~~ Bill Cosby
"There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."
~~ novelist Marilynne Robinson
"The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control."
~~ Ogden Nash [1902-71]
"The only thing more destructive than a tornado is a family."
~~ Reynolds Price [1933-2011]
"To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is a reason."
~~ artist Ai Weiwei
"To be what we are, and to be what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"If you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself."
~~ Carl Gustav Jung [1875-1961]
"We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities. The consequences of this simple, devastating realization define American life."
~~ Chris Hayes
"An historian is a prophet in reverse."
~~ Friedrich von Schlegel [1772-1829]
“Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.”
~~ Frank Capra [1897-1991]
"The luxury of doing good surpasses every personal enjoyment."
~~ John Gray
"People cannot remain good unless good is expected of them."
~~ Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956]
"So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indespensible; and no man is useless while he has a friend."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"Everything changes, nothing is lost."
~~ Ovid [43 B.C.E. – 17 or 18 C.E.]
"There is a limit to what you can do in politics."
~~ Ronald Reagan [1911-2004]
"All good books have one thing in common: They are truer than if they had really happened."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]
"You don't want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one."
~~ Jerry Garcia [1942-95], of the Grateful Dead band
"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
~~ Adam Smith [1723-90]
"When a man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear."
~~ H.G. Wells [1866-1946]
"It is very strange that the years teach us patience – that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting."
~~ novelist Elizabeth Taylor of U.K.
"Every life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]
"Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not."
~~ John Irving
"Happy people do a great deal for their friends."
~~ Willa Cather [1873-1947]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]
"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."
~~ Bob Dylan
"The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"The things [that] we hate about ourselves aren't more real than the things [that] we like about ourselves."
~~ columnist Ellen Goodman
"You know [that] you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake."
~~ Bob Hope [1903-2003]
"Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]
"Sanity is a cozy lie."
~~ Susan Sontag [1933-2004]
"There is nothing that is always or never."
~~ Maxine in Santa Fe, New Mexico
“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.”
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"I've never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know."
~~ Epicurus [341–270 B.C.E.]
"I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishment – there are consequences."
~~ R.G. Ingersoll [1833-99]
"Everything is funny as long as it's happening to someone else."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]
"There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"Self-pity is our worst enemy, and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]
"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in a cage."
~~ Ray Bradbury [1920-2012]
"If pregnancy were a book, they would cut out the last two chapters."
~~ Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
"Creativity is intelligence having fun."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"Time is the only critic without personal ambition."
~~ John Steinbeck [1902-68]
"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."
~~ Mae West [1893-1980]
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]
"Keep your face always to the sunshine, and the shadows will fall behind you."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]
"There is no such thing as bravery, only degrees of fear."
~~ John Wainwright [1921-95]
"you can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough for me."
~~ C.S. Lewis [1898-1963]
"Parents are not interested in justice. They're interestded in peace and quiet."
~~ Bill Cosby
"There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."
~~ novelist Marilynne Robinson
"The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control."
~~ Ogden Nash [1902-71]
"The only thing more destructive than a tornado is a family."
~~ Reynolds Price [1933-2011]
"To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is a reason."
~~ artist Ai Weiwei
"To be what we are, and to be what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"If you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself."
~~ Carl Gustav Jung [1875-1961]
"We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities. The consequences of this simple, devastating realization define American life."
~~ Chris Hayes
"An historian is a prophet in reverse."
~~ Friedrich von Schlegel [1772-1829]
“Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.”
~~ Frank Capra [1897-1991]
"The luxury of doing good surpasses every personal enjoyment."
~~ John Gray
"People cannot remain good unless good is expected of them."
~~ Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956]
"So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indespensible; and no man is useless while he has a friend."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"Everything changes, nothing is lost."
~~ Ovid [43 B.C.E. – 17 or 18 C.E.]
"There is a limit to what you can do in politics."
~~ Ronald Reagan [1911-2004]
"All good books have one thing in common: They are truer than if they had really happened."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]
"You don't want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one."
~~ Jerry Garcia [1942-95], of the Grateful Dead band
"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
~~ Adam Smith [1723-90]
"When a man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear."
~~ H.G. Wells [1866-1946]
"It is very strange that the years teach us patience – that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting."
~~ novelist Elizabeth Taylor of U.K.
"Every life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]
"Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not."
~~ John Irving
"Happy people do a great deal for their friends."
~~ Willa Cather [1873-1947]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
'The Rich Are Unethical' graphic
graphic designed by Tony J. Shin {{ TonyJShin81
'iKill' graphic about Apple in China
graphic designed by Tony J. Shin {{ TonyJShin81 <at> gmail.com }} who is interested in feedback
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Two Educations
"There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living . . . In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another – namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings."
— James Truslow Adams [1878-1949], circa 1929
— James Truslow Adams [1878-1949], circa 1929
Sunday, June 24, 2012
June 2012 Quotations II
"Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable."
~~ Larry Wall
"Everybody knows more than anybody."
~~ Lorrie B. Potters
"There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money."
~~ advice columnist Abigail Van Buren
"Pain plus time equals humor."
~~ Lenny Bruce [1925-66]
"To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self."
~~ Joan Didion
"An artist is an artist because he is not happy with the world, so he creates his own existence."
~~ Robin Gibb [1949-2012]
"Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]
"All great change in America begins at the dinner table."
~~ Ronald Reagan [1911-2004]
"Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry."
~~ Spanish proverb
"Forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them more."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
"The reason American cities are prosperous is that there is no place to sit down."
~~ Albert J. Tally, in 1924
"Hate-on-the-highway is an institution occupying a high place in our modern civilization . . . The godawful glares that drivers exchange as they pass each other, the mutual hatred between motorist and pedestrian, these manifestations seem to constitute the ultimate in righteous wrath."
~~ H. Allen Smith [1907-76], in 1947
"The last freedom is choosing your attitude."
~~ Viktor Frankl [1905-97]
"The second law of thermodynamics, simply put, is as follows: left to themselves, things tend to go to hell in a handbasket."
~~ columnist Cecil Adams
"Fate takes its cut."
~~ Lord Buckley [1906-60]
"My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating."
~~ Ashley Brilliant
"Trust everyone, but cut the cards."
~~ Anonymous
"The head of my fan club lives under the Hollywood Freeway in a cardboard box."
~~ independent filmmaker John Carpenter
"I've never seen turkey being sold as imitation tofu."
~~ Lorrie B. Potters
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
~~ Clay Shirky
"When in doubt, doubt."
~~ John R. Henderson
"The main quality that sets humans apart from other animals is the human desire to set itself apart from other animals."
~~ Peter Berryman
"Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library."
~~ Barbara Tuchman
"Our whole American way of life is a great war of ideas, and librarians are the arms dealers selling weapons to both sides."
~~ James Quinn
"Life really does go on whether you're enjoying it or not."
~~ Kendall Morse
"Life is not fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."
~~ William Goldman
"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
~~ Stephen King
"When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'"
~~ Hilaire Belloc [1870-1953]
"What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?"
~~ Rex Stout [1886-1975]
"In numbers there is quantity."
~~ Richard Connolly
"Data is the plural of anecdote."
~~ U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]
"No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."
~~ sci-fi author Terry Pratchett
"We have to believe in free will. We've got no choice."
~~ Isaac Bashevis Singer [1902-91]
"It is the nature of emergencies to be inconvenient."
~~ Terri Weiner
"Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket."
~~ Isaac Asimov [1920-92]
"Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is?"
~~ Frank Scully
"When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]
"Nothing hurts like your own pain."
~~ Silent Era actress Anita Page [1910-2008]
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969], on 16 April 1953
"The fist starves the hand."
~~ Noah benShea
"Beyond a certain amount, money costs too much."
~~ Michael Z. Lewin
"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."
~~ Thomas Berger
"An editor's job is to take something great and make it good."
~~ Kinky Friedman
"Books are like your children. They take nine months to write; the manuscript weighs six pounds and . . . you send them out into the world and hope that some day they'll send back money."
~~ Edna Buchanan
"You are about to be told, again, that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what this country does to its valuable natural resources?"
~~ Utah Phillips [1935-2008], addressing a high school class
"A mushroom cloud has no silver lining."
~~ controversial saying
"There are more important things than money; the only trouble is they all cost money!"
~~ Louis A. Safian
"She used to be a schoolteacher, but she has no class now."
~~ Fred Allen [1894-1956]
"A man's home is his castle. {The house of an Englishman is to him as his castle.}"
~~ Sir Edward Coke [1552-1634]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Larry Wall
"Everybody knows more than anybody."
~~ Lorrie B. Potters
"There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money."
~~ advice columnist Abigail Van Buren
"Pain plus time equals humor."
~~ Lenny Bruce [1925-66]
"To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self."
~~ Joan Didion
"An artist is an artist because he is not happy with the world, so he creates his own existence."
~~ Robin Gibb [1949-2012]
"Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]
"All great change in America begins at the dinner table."
~~ Ronald Reagan [1911-2004]
"Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry."
~~ Spanish proverb
"Forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them more."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
"The reason American cities are prosperous is that there is no place to sit down."
~~ Albert J. Tally, in 1924
"Hate-on-the-highway is an institution occupying a high place in our modern civilization . . . The godawful glares that drivers exchange as they pass each other, the mutual hatred between motorist and pedestrian, these manifestations seem to constitute the ultimate in righteous wrath."
~~ H. Allen Smith [1907-76], in 1947
"The last freedom is choosing your attitude."
~~ Viktor Frankl [1905-97]
"The second law of thermodynamics, simply put, is as follows: left to themselves, things tend to go to hell in a handbasket."
~~ columnist Cecil Adams
"Fate takes its cut."
~~ Lord Buckley [1906-60]
"My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating."
~~ Ashley Brilliant
"Trust everyone, but cut the cards."
~~ Anonymous
"The head of my fan club lives under the Hollywood Freeway in a cardboard box."
~~ independent filmmaker John Carpenter
"I've never seen turkey being sold as imitation tofu."
~~ Lorrie B. Potters
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
~~ Clay Shirky
"When in doubt, doubt."
~~ John R. Henderson
"The main quality that sets humans apart from other animals is the human desire to set itself apart from other animals."
~~ Peter Berryman
"Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library."
~~ Barbara Tuchman
"Our whole American way of life is a great war of ideas, and librarians are the arms dealers selling weapons to both sides."
~~ James Quinn
"Life really does go on whether you're enjoying it or not."
~~ Kendall Morse
"Life is not fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."
~~ William Goldman
"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
~~ Stephen King
"When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'"
~~ Hilaire Belloc [1870-1953]
"What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?"
~~ Rex Stout [1886-1975]
"In numbers there is quantity."
~~ Richard Connolly
"Data is the plural of anecdote."
~~ U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]
"No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."
~~ sci-fi author Terry Pratchett
"We have to believe in free will. We've got no choice."
~~ Isaac Bashevis Singer [1902-91]
"It is the nature of emergencies to be inconvenient."
~~ Terri Weiner
"Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket."
~~ Isaac Asimov [1920-92]
"Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is?"
~~ Frank Scully
"When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]
"Nothing hurts like your own pain."
~~ Silent Era actress Anita Page [1910-2008]
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969], on 16 April 1953
"The fist starves the hand."
~~ Noah benShea
"Beyond a certain amount, money costs too much."
~~ Michael Z. Lewin
"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."
~~ Thomas Berger
"An editor's job is to take something great and make it good."
~~ Kinky Friedman
"Books are like your children. They take nine months to write; the manuscript weighs six pounds and . . . you send them out into the world and hope that some day they'll send back money."
~~ Edna Buchanan
"You are about to be told, again, that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what this country does to its valuable natural resources?"
~~ Utah Phillips [1935-2008], addressing a high school class
"A mushroom cloud has no silver lining."
~~ controversial saying
"There are more important things than money; the only trouble is they all cost money!"
~~ Louis A. Safian
"She used to be a schoolteacher, but she has no class now."
~~ Fred Allen [1894-1956]
"A man's home is his castle. {The house of an Englishman is to him as his castle.}"
~~ Sir Edward Coke [1552-1634]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)