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 M.P.I.F.E.A. attempted to negotiate a less-damaging deal, but the Foundation chose to act in bad faith and rescinded their demands.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

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}

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

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

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}

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

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

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

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

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

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}

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

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

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

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}

'The Rich Are Unethical' graphic

graphic designed by Tony J. Shin {{ TonyJShin81 gmail.com }} who is interested in feedback

'iKill' graphic about Apple in China

graphic designed by Tony J. Shin {{ TonyJShin81 <at> gmail.com }} who is interested in feedback

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

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}

News Factoids for April to June 2012

"High oil prices now pose a greater risk to the world economy than even Europe's sovereign debt crisis."
— per Fatih Birol, chief economist at Intl. Energy Agency - in late March 2012

The Economic Policy Institute gathered data from a range of market researchers and found that the profit on Apple's iPhone was $319 per unit, against the sale price of $630 and labor costs in China of $15 per unit. (That cost in China includes payroll, overhead, and profit for Foxconn.)

British Petroleum announced in April that 2011 corporate profits were $25.7 billion – while payments and cleanup in the devastated Gulf have not proceeded according to B.P.'s promises.

In the first year since the B.P. Megaspill Disaster, the crab crop dropped 42% in Louisiana, 37% in Alabama, and 33% in Mississippi; the oyster harvest fell 55% in Louisiana, 34% in Mississippi, and 3% in Alabama; and the shrimp catch declined 52% in Mississippi, 48% in Alabama, and 14% in Louisiana.

The Google Chrome browser reached a market share of 32.8 percent in May, while the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser's share dropped to 31.9 percent; Mozilla's Firefox browser is third with just more than 25% of the market. — per StatCounter

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., the publisher of authors from Mark Twain to J.R.R. Tolkien, sought bankruptcy protection in May to eliminate more than $3 billion in debt.

Investors withdrew $85 billion from U.S. stock mutual funds last year and have pulled more money out than they put in for five years in a row – significant given how many Americans automatically put money in through 401(k) accounts.
— A.P. Business

INVENTIONS OF THE MONTH
artificial soybeans
Tofu Helper™
powdered water (for emergencies)

documentary videos countering Mitt Romney's repeated lies
G.S.T. Steel of Kansas City, Missouri [6:07]
Broken Promises: Romney's Massachusetts Record [4:18]

"A Massachusetts solar company to which Mitt Romney personally delivered a $1.5 million loan when he was governor has gone belly up, leaving him vulnerable to the same 'picking winners and losers' charges that he’s been lobbing at President Obama over Solyndra ... In January 2003, just less than three weeks into his term as governor, Romney handed a check to Konarka executives during a news conference ... One of the other winners announced that day – Evergreen Solar – has already undercut Romney’s Solyndra attacks by filing last year for bankruptcy protection."

A new Gallup poll finds that 46 percent of Americans believe in creationism: that Jehovah created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. [Thus, 46 percent of Americans are irrational idiots – Ed.]

Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

June 2012 Quotations

"You can't tell a book by it's movie."
~~ Broadway producer Louis A. Safian

"Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]

“Out of the mysterious we discover the undiscovered.”
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"I just try to concentrate on concentrating."
~~ Martina Navratilova

"If you don't think too good, don't think too much."
~~ baseball legend Ted Williams [1918-2002]

"You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them."
~~ athlete Michael Jordan

"If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done."
~~ Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]

"The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world."
~~ Leonard Cohen

"Don't be possessed by your possessions."
~~ photographer Lisl Steiner

"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]

"A narcissist is someone better looking that you are."
~~ Gore Vidal

"One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk."
~~ novelist Victoria Wolff [1903-92]

"Most human beings are quite likable if you don't see too much of them."
~~ Irish writer Robert Wilson Lynd [1879-1949]

"Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times."
~~ Joan Baez

"The value of an industry is inversely proportional to the number of awards [that] it gives itself."
~~ blogger David Burge

"To be afraid is to act as if the truth were not true."
~~ Bayard Rustin [1912-87]

"Some defeats are only installments to victory."
~~ Jacob Riis [1849-1914]

"Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes, adversity not without many comforts and hopes."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]

"Never think [that] you've seen the last of anything."
~~ Eudora Welty [1909-2001]

"It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read."
~~ Elizabeth Savage

"Nothing recedes like success."
~~ Walter Winchell 1897-1972]

"Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it."
~~ Irving Berlin [1888-1989]

"Joy is the simplest form of gratitude."
~~ theologian Karl Barth [1886-1968]

"The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it."
~~ Edith Wharton [1862-1937]

"The more [that] you learn, the less [that] you fear."
~~ British author Julian Barnes

"The most truthful part of a newspaper is the advertisements."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"I'm not trying to PREDICT the future. I'm just trying to PREVENT it."
~~ Ray Bradbury

"The believer is happy; the doubter is wise."
~~ Hungarian proverb

"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believ e, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]

"To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world, since it is experience of life and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind."
~~ Giacomo Leopardi [1798-1837]

"To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]

"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]

"Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind."
~~ Nicolas Chamfort [1741-94]

"A grouch escapes so many little annoyances that it almost pays to be one."
~~ Frank McKinney 'Kin' Hubbard [1868-1930]

"A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road."
~~ poet Alexander Smith [1830–67]

"Always behave like a duck: Keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath."
~~ Judge Jacob Braude of Illinois

"Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus."
~~ Françoise Sagan [1935-2004]

"Familiarity breeds contempt -- and children."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but many of the things [that] they make it easier to do don't need to be done."
~~ TV curmudgeon Andy Rooney [1919-2011]

"Simple is the most sophisticated thing of all."
~~ cookbook author Ina Garten

"If you hear any sinister background music, run like hell."
~~ Carol Cail

"The biggest enemy is tap water."
~~ Robert S. Morrison, Vice Chairman of Pepsi-Co

"Little things come in small packages."
~~ Mrs. Emile Renan

"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
~~ Ani DiFranco

"All television is children's television."
~~ Richard P. Adler

"All things are never equal."
~~ Robert L. Wolke

"Surrounding yourself with dwarfs does not make you a giant."
~~ Yiddish proverb

"They can't break you if you don't have a spine."
~~ cartoonist Scott Adams

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

May 2012 Quotations

"The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable."
~~ attributed to James A. Garfield [1831-81]
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]
"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off."
~~ Gloria Steinem

"If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet."
~~ rock legend Keith Richards

"It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach."
~~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt [1882-1945]

"Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it."
~~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1821-81]

"Growing old is a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form."
~~ André Maurois [1885-1967]

"Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite -- but they all worship money."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"An idiot will try anything. That is how you know [that] he is an idiot."
~~ Michel Audiard [1920-85]

"All diseases run into one, old age."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Every act of rebelling expresses a nostalgia for innocence."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]

"A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything was last year."
~~ comedian Marty Allen

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
~~ Virginia Woolf [1882-1941]

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; n othing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
~~ Calvin Coolidge [1872-1933]

"An idea doesn't have to be true, or even especially convincing, to be politically effective."
~~ Elizabeth Kolbert

"Give me any two pages of the Bible and I'll give you a picture."
~~ Cecil B. DeMille [1881-1959]

"Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows. This – the supremacy of reason – was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism."
('Brief Summary', The Objectivist Sept 1971)
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate."
~~ Charles Dickens [1812-70]

"Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts."
~~ Serge Gainsbourg [1928-91]

"If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice."
~~ playwright Tom Stoppard

"Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people."
~~ Carl Gustav Jung [1875-1961]

"Never say [that] you know a man until you have divided an inhereitence with him."
~~ poet Johann Kaspar Lavater [1741-1801]

"Civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]

"Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention [that] it deserves."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass; it’s about learning to dance in the rain."
~~ Vivian Greene

"I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they are not around."
~~ Charles Bukowski [1920-94]

"If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."
~~ Bambi's friend Thumper

"Always make new mistakes."
~~ Esther Dyson

"To some extent what we saw in the 2007, 2008 crash was the result of the throwing off of Glass-Steagall."
~~ Richard Parsons, former Citigroup board chairman

"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."
~~ last words of physicist Richard P. Feynman [1918-88], as quoted in the biography "Genius"

"Better to do a good deed near at home than to go far away to burn incense."
~~ aviator Amelia Earhart [1897-1937]

"Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty."
~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne [1804-64]

"When I was young, I used to think that money was the most important thing in life. Now that I'm old, I know it is."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic."
~~ Cullen Hightower [1923-2008]

"He was a bold man that first ate an oyster."
~~ Jonathan Swift [1667–1745]

"If you have talent, you don't have to tell [people."
~~ baseball great 'Pee Wee' Reese [1918-99]

"A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence [that] we have that people are still thinking."
~~ Jerry Seinfeld

"Tradition is tending the flame, it's not worshiping the ashes."
~~ composer Gustav Mahler [1860-1911]

"'Love thy neighbor' is a precept which could transform the world if it were universally practiced."
~~ Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune [1875-1955]

"The only difference between science and science fiction is timing."
~~ Ted Bell

"Remember, what happens in Las Vegas goes on Facebook."
~~ reporter Ungelbah Daniel-Davila

"We are stuck with an unemployment rate three points higher that the postwar average, and the percentage of working adult Americans is as low as it's been in almost thirty years."
~~ James Suroweicki, New Yorker Magazine
{"Be sure to thank a Republican." ~~ G.E. Nordell}

"Meetings are indespensible when you don't want to do anything."
~~ economist John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world."
~~ British author John le Carré

"If evolution really works, how come mothers have only two hands?"
~~ Milton Berle [1908-2002]

"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages [that] you've been."
~~ author Madeleine L'Engle [1918-2007]

"It is cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age."
~~ Margaret Mead [1901-78]

"Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes the edge off admiration."
~~ William Hazlitt [1778-1830]

"Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius."
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]

"Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act, and in that action are the seeds of new knowledge."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

April 2012 Quotations

"The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for."
~~ Dostoyevsky [1821-81]

"The middle class built America. It's time for America to rebuild the middle class."
~~ Rev. Al Sharpton

"The only lord I know, is the landlord."
~~ bookseller Lewis Micheaux [1885-1976]

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to concieve."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]

"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

"Never interrupt someone doing something [that] you said couldn't be done."
~~ aviator Amelia Earhart [1897-1937]

"If we do not speak up for our children, they may not be heard. And if we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much."
~~ Marian Wright Edeleman

"Vanity is a mortgage that must be deducted from the value of a man."
~~ Otto von Bismarck [1815-98]

"Silence is the unbearable repartee."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]

"There is no perception that is not full of memories."
~~ Henri Bergson [1859-1941]

"The most important four words in politics are 'up to a point'."
~~ conservative columnist George Will

"It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet."
~~ Margaret Mead [1901-78]

"The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved. They can only be outgrown."
~~ sci-fi novelist Frank Herbert [1920-86]

"You want me to do something? Tell me [that] I can't do it."
~~ Maya Angelou

“To be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible.”
~~ Plato [428?-327? B.C.E.]

"The greatest thing in the world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]

"Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"All that we see or seem / Is but a dream, within a dream"
~~ Edgar Allan Poe [1809-49]

"Conceit may puff a man up, but can never prop him up."
~~ John Ruskin [1819-1900]

"To try to be better is to be better."
~~ actress Charlotte Cushman

"Exhilaration is that feeling [that] you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what's wrong with it."
~~ British actor Rex Harrison [1908-90]

"It is my rule never to lose my temper till it would be detrimental to keep it."
~~ Irish playwright Sean O'Casey [1880-1964]

"Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]

"Beauty is a short-lived tyranny."
~~ Socrates [469-399 B.C.E.]

"Whoever has learned to be anxious the right way has learned the ultimate."
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]

"Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved."
~~ Wm. Jennings Bryan [1860-1925]

"Nothing is more responsible for 'the good old days' than a bad memory."
~~ Franklin P. Adams [1881-1960]

"The only reason [that] some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory."
~~ actor Paul Fix [1901-83]

"There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown helpless about them."
~~ Clare Boothe Luce [1903-87]

"Our reality is determined by our usefulness."
~~ playwright Edward Albee, in 1978

"Believe those who search for truth. Doubt those who claim to have found it."
~~ Nobel Laureate André Gide [1869-1951]

"At the moment of creativity, absolute inner peace is essential for the artist."
~~ Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky [1840-93]

"I feel sorry for future generations that won't have polar bears or coastal cities."
~~ TIME Magazine columnist Joel Klein

"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
~~ Berthold Auerbach [1812-82]

"Speak truth to power!" ~~ slogan created by the American Friends Service Committee {Quakers} circa 1955

"If states are the laboratory for democracy, [then] Arizona is a meth lab."
~~ educator quoted by Native American activist Winona LaDuke (in 2012)

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, misdiagnosing it, and applying the wrong remedies."
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]

"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]

"World history is nothing but an endless, dreary account of the rape of the weak by the strong ... (It is) a race with time, a scramble for profit, for power, for treasures."
~~ Herman Hesse [1877-1962], in "The Glass Bead Game", 1943

"When in charge, ponder. When in trouble, delegate. When in doubt, mumble."
~~ James H. Boren [1925-2010]

"Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in a man."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"Every dream has a price."
~~ Louis L'Amour [1908-88], in "Sitka" 1957

"One kind of change occurs when you add something. If you take an entity and add something to it, it's changed. Another kind of change occurs when you take an entity and subtract something from it – so you've got two kinds of changes there. There's a third kind of change which is very strange – the only kind which I think has any real value – and that is when you take a thing and get it to be itself. You neither add to it nor subtract from it. This is almost a definition of consciousness for me."
~~ Werner Erhard (KQED radio interview, 1975)

"The single most exciting thing [that] you encounter in government is competence, because it is so rare."
~~ Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]

"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"There is no country in which people live under more overpowering compulsions [than America]. You must wave, you must shout, you must go with the irresistible crowd: otherwise, you will feel like a traitor, a soulless outcast, a deserted ship high and dry upon the shore . . . In a country where all men are free, every man finds that what most matters has been settled for him beforehand."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

November is going to be fun!

The Republicans have a dilemma – vote for a Mormon or for a Muslim – and the Democrats have a choice – a constitutional scholar who happens to practice Christianity.

Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Apartheid In Arizona

The Arizona Legislature has passed a series of laws that essentially bring Apartheid Law to America. In fulfillment of the new laws, the Board of Education in Tucson, Arizona made a list of fifty books in its Xicano & Ethic Studies programs in January, and then over-reacted by sending jackbooted thugs to classrooms to rip the banned books from the hands of students and off the shelves of libraries and classrooms; the captured books, especially the top seven offenders, were boxed up and taken to an undisclosed location for 'storage'.

So I have begun coding links to the Seven Major Offenders on the Spirit of America Bookstore Ethnic Authors page { click here }; works 'Banned in Tucson' include a stageplay by Wm. Shakespeare and books by Rudolfo Anaya, N. Scott Momaday, Sherman Alexie, poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, Henry David Thoreau [1817-62], and others.

Aren't you glad to be living in 'modern' times?

Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved