"I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil."
~~ Robert F. Kennedy [1925-68]
"I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"The power of imagination makes us infinite."
~~ John Muir [1838-1914]
"An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form."
~~ Maxim Gorky [1868-1936]
"The best way to cheer yourself [up] is to try to cheer somebody else up."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war."
~~ Dr. Maria Montessori [1870-1952]
"Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good; and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig."
~~ Marcus Aurelius [121-180 C.E.]
“Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families."
~~ Charles Dickens [1812-70]
"Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62]
"Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men."
~~ Mortimer J. Adler [1902-2001]
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
~~ Greek philosopher Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture."
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1856-1915]
"Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'!"
~~ Audrey Hepburn [1929-93]
"Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me."
~~ Immanuel Kant [1724-1804]
"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."
~~ Wm. Blake [1757–1827]
"Action expresses priorities."
~~ 'Mahatma' Gandhi [1869-1948]
"Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone."
~~ poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox [1850-1919]
"We never know the worth of water till the well is dry."
~~ Thomas Fuller [1608-61]
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
~~ John Steinbeck [1902-68]
“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded."
~~ Terry Pratchett
"I don't intend to be the richest person in the cemetary; my wealth is the legacy [that] I leave behind."
~~ Amanda Okoli
"If your dreams don't scare you, they're not big enough."
~~ anonymous
"follow your inner moonlight / don't hide the madness"
~~ poet Allen Ginsberg [1926-97]
"We make our discoveries thru our mistakes; we watch one another's success, and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve."
~~ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch [1863-1944]
"Amateurs write when they are inspired. Professionals are inspired when they write. This is a subtle but important distinction."
~~ Michael Hyatt
"Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed."
~~ Ray Bradbury [1920-2012]
"Let us both small and great push forward in this work, in this pursuit, if to our country, if to ourselves we would live dear."
~~ Quintus Horatius Flaccus [65 B.C.E.-8 B.C.E.] known as Horace
"The US Supreme Court's decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission ... continued its drive to give Americans a government of, by and for big money."
~~ Viki Harrison
"Forget all the reasons why it won't work and believe the one reason why it will."
~~ anonymous
"Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it."
~~ Bill Cosby
"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]
"Are you sure you want to empty the Spam folder?"
~~ modern Eternal Question
"Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God."
~~ Lenny Bruce [1925-66]
"Nothing can be beautiful which is not true."
~~ art critic John Ruskin [1819-1900]
"If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word."
~~ Margaret Atwood
“A quart of Ale is a dish for a king."
~~ WilliamShakespeare [1564-1616], in "The Winter’s Tale" [circa 1610-11]
“The philosophy of one century becomes the common sense of the next."
~~ Henry Ward Beecher [1813-87]
"The Purpose of Life Is To Live A Life of Purpose"
~~ Richard Leider
"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]
"Elections should be held on April 16th - the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders."
~~ Thomas Sowell
"Go confidently . . . Live the life [that] you imagined."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"Never stay awake at night asking yourself questions you can't answer."
~~ Charlie Brown character, as drawn by Charles M. Schulz [1922-2000]
"If you can't fix it with a hammer, you've got an electrical problem."
~~ handyman humor
"All fishermen are liars, but not all liars are fishermen."
~~ anonymous
"I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"I have a plan: RUUUNNN!"
~~ Scarecrow in animated Oz movie
"The answers [that] you get from literature depend on the questions [that] you pose."
~~ Margaret Atwood
"A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time."
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]
"I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion. I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more. I could be martyred for my religion. Love is my religion. I could die for that."
~~ John Keats [1795-1821]
"Every time [that] you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world [that] you want."
~~ Anna Lappé
"The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me."
~~ Dudley Field Malone [1882-1950]
"If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score."
~~ Bill Copeland [1946-2010]
"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
~~ George Eliot [1819-80]
"If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door."
~~ Milton Berle [1908-2002]
"Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
~~ John F. Kennedy [1917-63]
"I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]
"It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark."
~~ Howard J. Ruff
"It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up."
~~ Vince Lombardi [1913-70]
"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."
~~ Sun Tzu [544?-496? B.C.E.]
"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em."
~~ William Shakespeare [1564-1616]
"That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"The quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket."
~~ humorist Will Rogers [1879-1935]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Monday, April 28, 2014
Wednesday, April 09, 2014
News Factoids for First Quarter 2014
The White House website contains the following statement:
"President Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible Administration in history. That begins with taking comments and questions from you, the American people, through our website."
EXCEPT FOR THE PART WHERE THEY HAVE SHUT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE'S PUBLIC FAX NUMBER
WEATHER DEPARTMENT
In January, a national propane shortage caused declared emergencies in 31 states.
"Thus far in 2014, truly bizarre weather has been the norm. Blizzards buried Birmingham, Alabama and Tokyo, Japan while it hit 62° in Alaska in January. California suffered thru its worst drought in more than a century, while the wettest winter since 1766 submerged much of New England in a biblical flood. Australia was so hot – 110 degrees for days at a time – that 1,000 bats fell out of the trees, dead of heat stroke." — William Falk, The Week Magazine
CLIMATE & FARMING DEPARTMENT
Back in January, I noticed that the bear claw pastries at the bakery of my local Albertsons supermarket had no almond slices on the top. I asked the clerk who called the baker from the back, who explained that the price of almonds in the five-pound box has tripled! and that he has been unable to find a cheaper source, so his choice was to remove the decorative nuts rather than raise the price. The crop for 2013 was average, but the drought in California is expected to reduce the size of the nuts and of the crop, so the agribusiness quasi-monopoly is raising prices NOW because their profits must be protected. (And then the further increase in price later this year won't look so huge.)
Major article in the newspaper here last week about bartenders cutting back on limes, especially on margarita cocktails. Because of weather changes and a crop disease and theft by organized crime, Mexico's lime crop is seriously down this year. So producers have raised the price of a carton from $18 to $100. Expect more of the same for other food crops.
As the shortage of fresh limes continues, airlines are no longer bringing them on board for alcoholic cocktails, not even on vodka tonics.
A virus that originated in China has killed millions of U.S. baby pigs in the last year across 27 states. The F.D.A. is still trying to track how the disease entered the country, and expect that production this year will decline by seven percent. So of course greedy meatpackers are already charging a 13% higher price for bacon.
As the prices of food ingredient crops keep rising, be aware that the annual C.O.L.A. (Cost of Living Adjustment) on Social Security will NOT be increased: the Social Security C.O.L.A. formula is based on C.P.I. (the Consumer Price Index) which does not include changes in costs of food or energy, as well as incorporating a below-reality factor for healthcare for the elderly.
BRILLIANT IDEA DEPT.
Somebody is going to make a fortune building a smartphone app for the growing number of automobile recall repairs, or maybe AAA or Carfax will do it. Set up a big database from all the manufacturers, searchable by make/model/year and-or VIN, with data about whether and when the recall repair got installed on each vehicle. The economic model would be long-term license for new & used auto dealers, short term (six month?) license for individuals shopping for a new or used vehicle.
Copyright 2014 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
"President Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible Administration in history. That begins with taking comments and questions from you, the American people, through our website."
EXCEPT FOR THE PART WHERE THEY HAVE SHUT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE'S PUBLIC FAX NUMBER
WEATHER DEPARTMENT
In January, a national propane shortage caused declared emergencies in 31 states.
"Thus far in 2014, truly bizarre weather has been the norm. Blizzards buried Birmingham, Alabama and Tokyo, Japan while it hit 62° in Alaska in January. California suffered thru its worst drought in more than a century, while the wettest winter since 1766 submerged much of New England in a biblical flood. Australia was so hot – 110 degrees for days at a time – that 1,000 bats fell out of the trees, dead of heat stroke." — William Falk, The Week Magazine
CLIMATE & FARMING DEPARTMENT
Back in January, I noticed that the bear claw pastries at the bakery of my local Albertsons supermarket had no almond slices on the top. I asked the clerk who called the baker from the back, who explained that the price of almonds in the five-pound box has tripled! and that he has been unable to find a cheaper source, so his choice was to remove the decorative nuts rather than raise the price. The crop for 2013 was average, but the drought in California is expected to reduce the size of the nuts and of the crop, so the agribusiness quasi-monopoly is raising prices NOW because their profits must be protected. (And then the further increase in price later this year won't look so huge.)
Major article in the newspaper here last week about bartenders cutting back on limes, especially on margarita cocktails. Because of weather changes and a crop disease and theft by organized crime, Mexico's lime crop is seriously down this year. So producers have raised the price of a carton from $18 to $100. Expect more of the same for other food crops.
As the shortage of fresh limes continues, airlines are no longer bringing them on board for alcoholic cocktails, not even on vodka tonics.
A virus that originated in China has killed millions of U.S. baby pigs in the last year across 27 states. The F.D.A. is still trying to track how the disease entered the country, and expect that production this year will decline by seven percent. So of course greedy meatpackers are already charging a 13% higher price for bacon.
As the prices of food ingredient crops keep rising, be aware that the annual C.O.L.A. (Cost of Living Adjustment) on Social Security will NOT be increased: the Social Security C.O.L.A. formula is based on C.P.I. (the Consumer Price Index) which does not include changes in costs of food or energy, as well as incorporating a below-reality factor for healthcare for the elderly.
BRILLIANT IDEA DEPT.
Somebody is going to make a fortune building a smartphone app for the growing number of automobile recall repairs, or maybe AAA or Carfax will do it. Set up a big database from all the manufacturers, searchable by make/model/year and-or VIN, with data about whether and when the recall repair got installed on each vehicle. The economic model would be long-term license for new & used auto dealers, short term (six month?) license for individuals shopping for a new or used vehicle.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
March 2014 Quotations (60)
"Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat."
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]
"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men."
~~ Mortimer J. Adler [1902-2001]
"We are what we repeatedly do."
~~ Greek philosopher Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defense."
~~ Dr. J.A. Langford
"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time [that] you fall."
~~ Nelson Mandela [1918-2013]
“You can become a winner only if you are willing to walk over the edge.”
~~ Damon Runyon [1884-1946]
(re: acting) "You've got to show your soul. Otherwise, you're just a piece of equipment."
~~ Sylvester Stallone
"A book is a device to ignite the imagination."
~~ British playwright Alan Bennett
"Learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Your job today is to sparkle !"
~~ G.E. Nordell
"I am, therefore I'll think."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"A 2012 poll found that people who listened to no news were better informed than those who listened to Fox News."
~~ journalist Charles Blow, New York Times
"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
~~ Anna Quindlen, in "How Reading Changed My Life"
"The moviemaker can ask questions but not give solutions."
~~ Costa-Gavras
"Free men of every generation must combat renewed efforts of organized force and greed to destroy liberty."
~~ Robert M. 'Fighting Bob' La Follette [1855-1925]
"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."
~~ poet T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]
"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."
~~ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Stuart, Countess of Bute
"Addressing our climate crisis is not just a question of morality or ethics; it is a question of our own survival."
~~ Sen. Harry Reid
"The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will'. Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilites as probabilities.”
~~ Charles Dickens [1812-70]
"Wisdom begins in wonder."
~~ Socrates [469-399 B.C.E.]
"Leap and the net will appear."
~~ naturalist John Burroughs [1837-1921]
"Be curious, not judgmental."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]
"Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering 'It will be happier . . .'."
~~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson [1809-92]
"There is neither happiness or misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness."
~~ Alexander Dumas, fils [1824-95]
"Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed."
~~ Mary Oliver
"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."
~~ Emily Dickinson [1830-86]
"Believe [that] there is a Great Power silently working all things for good, behave yourself, and never mind the rest."
~~ Beatrix Potter [1866-1943]
"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom."
~~ Count Leo Tolstoy [1828-1910]
"I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us."
~~ Anne Lamott
"If light is in your heart you will find your way home."
~~ Persian poet & mystic Rumi [1207-73]
"Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you because it will."
~~ Cheryl Strayed
"Someone [that] I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift."
~~ Mary Oliver
"Life appears too short to be spent nursing animosity or registering wrongs."
~~ Charlotte Brontë [1816-55]
"For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack."
~~ D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930]
"The stomach carries the heart, and not the heart the stomach."
~~ Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes [1547-1616]
"Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it."
~~ Simone de Beauvoir [1908-86]
"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]
"Imagination is the eye of the soul."
~~ Joseph Joubert [1754-1824]
"I travel not to go anywhere, but to travel. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"Talent is a long patience, and originality and effort of will and intense observation."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]
"We live, man and worm, in a time when almost everything can mean every thing."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]
"Democracy is a Life, and requires daily struggle."
~~ Robert M. 'Fighting Bob' La Follette [1855-1925]
"I know of only one duty, and that is to love."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]
"To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."
~~ Thomas Paine [1737-1809] in 1776
“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826], in 1779
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
~~ James Madison [1751-1836, in 1785
"There is nothing but beauty – and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie."
~~ French poet Stéphane Mallarmé [1842-98]
“Never underestimate the fondness of people and organizations for the status quo.”
~~ Andrew McAfee, author of "Enterprise 2.0"
"I am awake for the first time, and all else before me has been a mean sleep."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]
"All our progress is unfolding. Trust the instinct to the end."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"Books are the carriers of civilization."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"God will not look you over for medals, diplomas, or degrees – but for scars."
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1856-1915]
"The most exquisite things in nature and in art possess an indefinable quality called style."
~~ Gustav Stickley [1858-1942]
"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"The dog barks but the caravan passes on."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]
"If the sun and moon should doubt / they'd immediately go out."
~~ Wm. Blake [1757–1827]
"Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either."
~~ Golda Meir [1898-1978]
"Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."
~~ Maya Angelou
"Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less."
~~ Susan B. Anthony [1820-1906]
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal."
~~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton [1815-1902]
"Economics is too important to be left to the experts."
~~ Ludwig von Mises [1881-1973]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]
"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men."
~~ Mortimer J. Adler [1902-2001]
"We are what we repeatedly do."
~~ Greek philosopher Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defense."
~~ Dr. J.A. Langford
"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time [that] you fall."
~~ Nelson Mandela [1918-2013]
“You can become a winner only if you are willing to walk over the edge.”
~~ Damon Runyon [1884-1946]
(re: acting) "You've got to show your soul. Otherwise, you're just a piece of equipment."
~~ Sylvester Stallone
"A book is a device to ignite the imagination."
~~ British playwright Alan Bennett
"Learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Your job today is to sparkle !"
~~ G.E. Nordell
"I am, therefore I'll think."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"A 2012 poll found that people who listened to no news were better informed than those who listened to Fox News."
~~ journalist Charles Blow, New York Times
"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
~~ Anna Quindlen, in "How Reading Changed My Life"
"The moviemaker can ask questions but not give solutions."
~~ Costa-Gavras
"Free men of every generation must combat renewed efforts of organized force and greed to destroy liberty."
~~ Robert M. 'Fighting Bob' La Follette [1855-1925]
"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."
~~ poet T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]
"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."
~~ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Stuart, Countess of Bute
"Addressing our climate crisis is not just a question of morality or ethics; it is a question of our own survival."
~~ Sen. Harry Reid
"The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will'. Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilites as probabilities.”
~~ Charles Dickens [1812-70]
"Wisdom begins in wonder."
~~ Socrates [469-399 B.C.E.]
"Leap and the net will appear."
~~ naturalist John Burroughs [1837-1921]
"Be curious, not judgmental."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]
"Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering 'It will be happier . . .'."
~~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson [1809-92]
"There is neither happiness or misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness."
~~ Alexander Dumas, fils [1824-95]
"Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed."
~~ Mary Oliver
"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."
~~ Emily Dickinson [1830-86]
"Believe [that] there is a Great Power silently working all things for good, behave yourself, and never mind the rest."
~~ Beatrix Potter [1866-1943]
"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom."
~~ Count Leo Tolstoy [1828-1910]
"I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us."
~~ Anne Lamott
"If light is in your heart you will find your way home."
~~ Persian poet & mystic Rumi [1207-73]
"Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you because it will."
~~ Cheryl Strayed
"Someone [that] I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift."
~~ Mary Oliver
"Life appears too short to be spent nursing animosity or registering wrongs."
~~ Charlotte Brontë [1816-55]
"For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack."
~~ D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930]
"The stomach carries the heart, and not the heart the stomach."
~~ Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes [1547-1616]
"Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it."
~~ Simone de Beauvoir [1908-86]
"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]
"Imagination is the eye of the soul."
~~ Joseph Joubert [1754-1824]
"I travel not to go anywhere, but to travel. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"Talent is a long patience, and originality and effort of will and intense observation."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]
"We live, man and worm, in a time when almost everything can mean every thing."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]
"Democracy is a Life, and requires daily struggle."
~~ Robert M. 'Fighting Bob' La Follette [1855-1925]
"I know of only one duty, and that is to love."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]
"To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."
~~ Thomas Paine [1737-1809] in 1776
“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826], in 1779
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
~~ James Madison [1751-1836, in 1785
"There is nothing but beauty – and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie."
~~ French poet Stéphane Mallarmé [1842-98]
“Never underestimate the fondness of people and organizations for the status quo.”
~~ Andrew McAfee, author of "Enterprise 2.0"
"I am awake for the first time, and all else before me has been a mean sleep."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]
"All our progress is unfolding. Trust the instinct to the end."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"Books are the carriers of civilization."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"God will not look you over for medals, diplomas, or degrees – but for scars."
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1856-1915]
"The most exquisite things in nature and in art possess an indefinable quality called style."
~~ Gustav Stickley [1858-1942]
"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"The dog barks but the caravan passes on."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]
"If the sun and moon should doubt / they'd immediately go out."
~~ Wm. Blake [1757–1827]
"Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either."
~~ Golda Meir [1898-1978]
"Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."
~~ Maya Angelou
"Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less."
~~ Susan B. Anthony [1820-1906]
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal."
~~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton [1815-1902]
"Economics is too important to be left to the experts."
~~ Ludwig von Mises [1881-1973]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Wednesday, March 05, 2014
Washington State Is Proof For Minimum Wage Hike
“When Washington [State] residents voted in 1998 to raise the state’s minimum wage and link it to the cost of living, opponents warned [that] the measure would be a job-killer . . . In the 15 years that followed, the state’s minimum wage climbed to $9.32 — the highest in the country. Meanwhile job growth continued at an average 0.8 percent annual pace, 0.3 percentage points above the national rate. Payrolls at Washington’s restaurants and bars, portrayed as particularly vulnerable to higher wage costs, expanded by 21 percent. [Washing-ton State's] poverty has trailed the U.S. level for at least seven years.”
~~ Bloomberg News
~~ Bloomberg News
Tuesday, March 04, 2014
Thursday, February 27, 2014
February 2014 Quotations (55)
“We all do better when we all do better.”
~~ Sen. Paul Wellstone [1944-2002]
"There are no fresh starts in life, just new opportunities to screw up."
~~ Steve Lopez
“The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.”
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970], in "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (1937)
"There is no god higher than truth."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]
"Fire is the heart of the house."
~~ Frank Lloyd Wright [1867-1959]
"The mind of man is beneficent and noble only when it obeys truth."
~~ Nobel-laureate Hermann Hesse [1877-1962] in "The Glass Bead Game" (1943)
"What is the most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands."
~~ Alexis de Tocqueville [1806-59]
"No large institution values independent thought, and public schools actively despise and punish it; they demand and attempt to enforce and reward mindless obedience."
~~ Crispin Sartwell
"Not one in fifty really uses his eyes properly."
~~ Agatha Christie [1890-1976]
"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]
"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."
~~ oil baron Armand Hammer [1898-1990]
"Make sure that the things you do keep us alive."
~~ song lyric by Graham Nash
"The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it."
~~ Harry Emerson Fosdick [1878-1969] in the 1940s
"Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate."
~~ Dave Barry
"The tragedy of man is that of somebody who is starving and sitting at a richly laden table but does not reach out with his hand, because he cannot see what is right in front of him. For the real world has inexhaustible splendour, the real life is full of meaning and abundance, where we grasp it, it is full of miracles and glory."
~~ German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann [1882-1950]
"The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things."
~~ English author Thomas Hardy [1840-1928]
"We love justice greatly, and just men but little."
~~ Philibert Joseph Roux [1780-1854]
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?"
~~ Epicurus (341?-270? B.C.E.)
“Those believing [that] they have not voted are mistaken, for their indifference affects all our futures.”
~~ M.A. Denck
"What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give."
~~ mystery author P.D. James
"A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"Money, and not morality, is the principle of commercial nations."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness."
~~ Zhuangzi, also known as Zhuang Zhou or Chuang-tzu [350 B.C.E.]
"The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"The more I study physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer."
~~ Stephen W. Hawking
"And we all die and the stars will go out one after another . . ."
~~ beat poet Wm. S. Burroughs [1914-97]
"TANTUM RELIGIO POTUIT SUADERE MALORUM: Too much religion is apt to encourage evil."
~~ Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus [99-55 B.C.E.]
"The only thing that will make you happy is being happy with who you are, and not who people think you are."
~~ actress Goldie Hawn
"Getting money from any government agency is like getting cheese from a cow – a long and involved process."
~~ old saying
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."
~~ Nelson Mandela [1918-2013]
"If anyone destroys this country it will be the conservatives."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten."
~~ Donald E. Westlake [1933-2008] in "Two Much"
“You can keep, the things of bronze and stone and give me one man to remember me just once a year.”
~~ Damon Runyon [1884-1946]
"We have art so that we may not perish by the truth."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"Organized religion is like organized crime: it preys on people's weaknesses, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate."
~~ Anonymous
“Flatterers are the worst type of enemy.”
~~ Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus [56?-117? C.E.]
"Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others."
~~ Greek philosopher Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"People say [that] nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day."
~~ Winnie the Pooh, as written by A.A. Milne [1882-1956]
"Dream big dreams."
~~ Barack Obama
"The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction."
~~ Mortimer J. Adler [1902-2001]
"Ever tried. Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]
"Saying [that] atheism is a belief system is like saying [that] not going skiing is a hobby."
~~ comic actor Ricky Gervais
"Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted."
~~ British biographer Hesketh Pearson [1887-1964]
"Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"It's a very important thing to learn to talk to people [that] you disagree with."
~~ folksinger & activist Pete Seeger [1919-2014]
"If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses."
~~ Joseph Epstein
"If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much."
~~ Lewis Carroll [1832-98]
"Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating."
~~ Ben Stein, professional idiot
"Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery."
~~ Julian Barnes
"It sometimes strikes me that men and women aren't quite the right people for each other."
~~ novelist Penelope Fitzgerald [1916-2000]
"Pretend to be in complete control and people will assume that you are."
~~ Steve Jobs [1955-2011]
"Elegance is the only beauty that never fades."
~~ actress Audrey Hepburn [1929-93]
"Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire."
~~ Wendell Berry
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Sen. Paul Wellstone [1944-2002]
"There are no fresh starts in life, just new opportunities to screw up."
~~ Steve Lopez
“The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.”
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970], in "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (1937)
"There is no god higher than truth."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]
"Fire is the heart of the house."
~~ Frank Lloyd Wright [1867-1959]
"The mind of man is beneficent and noble only when it obeys truth."
~~ Nobel-laureate Hermann Hesse [1877-1962] in "The Glass Bead Game" (1943)
"What is the most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands."
~~ Alexis de Tocqueville [1806-59]
"No large institution values independent thought, and public schools actively despise and punish it; they demand and attempt to enforce and reward mindless obedience."
~~ Crispin Sartwell
"Not one in fifty really uses his eyes properly."
~~ Agatha Christie [1890-1976]
"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]
"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."
~~ oil baron Armand Hammer [1898-1990]
"Make sure that the things you do keep us alive."
~~ song lyric by Graham Nash
"The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it."
~~ Harry Emerson Fosdick [1878-1969] in the 1940s
"Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate."
~~ Dave Barry
"The tragedy of man is that of somebody who is starving and sitting at a richly laden table but does not reach out with his hand, because he cannot see what is right in front of him. For the real world has inexhaustible splendour, the real life is full of meaning and abundance, where we grasp it, it is full of miracles and glory."
~~ German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann [1882-1950]
"The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things."
~~ English author Thomas Hardy [1840-1928]
"We love justice greatly, and just men but little."
~~ Philibert Joseph Roux [1780-1854]
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?"
~~ Epicurus (341?-270? B.C.E.)
“Those believing [that] they have not voted are mistaken, for their indifference affects all our futures.”
~~ M.A. Denck
"What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give."
~~ mystery author P.D. James
"A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"Money, and not morality, is the principle of commercial nations."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness."
~~ Zhuangzi, also known as Zhuang Zhou or Chuang-tzu [350 B.C.E.]
"The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"The more I study physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer."
~~ Stephen W. Hawking
"And we all die and the stars will go out one after another . . ."
~~ beat poet Wm. S. Burroughs [1914-97]
"TANTUM RELIGIO POTUIT SUADERE MALORUM: Too much religion is apt to encourage evil."
~~ Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus [99-55 B.C.E.]
"The only thing that will make you happy is being happy with who you are, and not who people think you are."
~~ actress Goldie Hawn
"Getting money from any government agency is like getting cheese from a cow – a long and involved process."
~~ old saying
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."
~~ Nelson Mandela [1918-2013]
"If anyone destroys this country it will be the conservatives."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten."
~~ Donald E. Westlake [1933-2008] in "Two Much"
“You can keep, the things of bronze and stone and give me one man to remember me just once a year.”
~~ Damon Runyon [1884-1946]
"We have art so that we may not perish by the truth."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"Organized religion is like organized crime: it preys on people's weaknesses, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate."
~~ Anonymous
“Flatterers are the worst type of enemy.”
~~ Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus [56?-117? C.E.]
"Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others."
~~ Greek philosopher Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"People say [that] nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day."
~~ Winnie the Pooh, as written by A.A. Milne [1882-1956]
"Dream big dreams."
~~ Barack Obama
"The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction."
~~ Mortimer J. Adler [1902-2001]
"Ever tried. Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]
"Saying [that] atheism is a belief system is like saying [that] not going skiing is a hobby."
~~ comic actor Ricky Gervais
"Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted."
~~ British biographer Hesketh Pearson [1887-1964]
"Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"It's a very important thing to learn to talk to people [that] you disagree with."
~~ folksinger & activist Pete Seeger [1919-2014]
"If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses."
~~ Joseph Epstein
"If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much."
~~ Lewis Carroll [1832-98]
"Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating."
~~ Ben Stein, professional idiot
"Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery."
~~ Julian Barnes
"It sometimes strikes me that men and women aren't quite the right people for each other."
~~ novelist Penelope Fitzgerald [1916-2000]
"Pretend to be in complete control and people will assume that you are."
~~ Steve Jobs [1955-2011]
"Elegance is the only beauty that never fades."
~~ actress Audrey Hepburn [1929-93]
"Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire."
~~ Wendell Berry
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Early Voting Fun
I drove down the hill yesterday to the new Temporary City Hall so that I could do Early Voting (which started February 12th) for the Municipal Election on March 4th. Filled out the form, put ink in the proper ovals, and put the Official Ballot into the Official Voting Machine. I was voter #27. So the precinct ladies thanked me and I got up to leave, and I asked if there was an 'I Voted' sticker to wear.
Well, the new City of Rio Communities is struggling to get funding, and the election process is a huge expense, so they decided not to purchase any such stickers, which cost entirely too much - $100 for a roll of a thousand.
So I said something like "That's a shame", and the Official Election Clerk reached across her desk and got a sheet of white address labels and wrote on one "I Voted!". She handed it to me and I stuck it on my t-shirt and thanked them and wore it proudly for the rest of my errands.
Copyright 2014 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Well, the new City of Rio Communities is struggling to get funding, and the election process is a huge expense, so they decided not to purchase any such stickers, which cost entirely too much - $100 for a roll of a thousand.
So I said something like "That's a shame", and the Official Election Clerk reached across her desk and got a sheet of white address labels and wrote on one "I Voted!". She handed it to me and I stuck it on my t-shirt and thanked them and wore it proudly for the rest of my errands.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
official City of Rio Communities website
I went to the council meeting tonight for my new City of Rio Communities, New Mexico where I was on the agenda to formally propose building a temporary city website (my labor free, reimbursement up to $300 for cost of domains & hosting for two years). The council tabled the matter, since there is no existing budget item for such. So one citizen got businessmen sitting near him to pledge the $300 to be paid to the city and earmarked for a website. He then spoke during Public Comments and told the council that the cost was covered and that the council should stop stalling progress. So I have begun coding the pages . . .
Friday, January 31, 2014
December 2013-January 2014 News Factoids
The financial ratings agency Standard & Poor’s said Wednesday that the 16-Day TEA Party Shutdown “to date has taken $24 billion out of the economy,” equaling $1.5 billion dollars a day and “shaved at least 0.6 percent off annualized fourth-quarter 2013 G.D.P. growth". — ABC News, 10/17/2013
While the TEA Party was extremely vocal in blaming Obamacare for their tantrum, saying that Obamacare will cost Americans $35 billion over ten years (not true, but repeated without shame), the 16-Day TEA Party Shutdown sucked $24 billion out of the economy in just 2½ weeks (as reported by ABC News and by Standard & Poors). Be sure to thank a Republican!
On Thursday December 5th fast food workers struck for a living wage in 110 cities, with protestors supporting in another 100 – the movement is growing exponentially.
According to data from NASA'a G.R.A.C.E. satellite (which measures shifts in gravity) the magnetic North Pole has jumped four feet eastward since 2005, and the data correlates with the ice that has melted away at the top and bottom of the planet. (per weekly column of www.earthweek.com)
New U.S.P.S. first class postage rate of 49 cents (up 3¢) started on 25 January 2014.
Then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson told U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen [GOP-IL] in a recorded conversation in November 1968 that President Nixon committed treason when his campaign people asked South VietNam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the election, promising that he would negotiate a better deal than L.B.J. once elected. That tape was not released to the public until December 2008, so the matter is moot. Except for the part where Republicans glorify Nixon as a patriot without being laughed at.
Phillip Morris has bought a lot of advertising airtime for Superbowl XLIX in January 2015. They are currently negotiating with major networks and publishers to market 'Marlboro M' on air and in print; the marijuana cigarette ads would be broadcast only in Colorado & Washington, while generic Marlboro ads will broadcast elsewhere.
Copyright 2014 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
While the TEA Party was extremely vocal in blaming Obamacare for their tantrum, saying that Obamacare will cost Americans $35 billion over ten years (not true, but repeated without shame), the 16-Day TEA Party Shutdown sucked $24 billion out of the economy in just 2½ weeks (as reported by ABC News and by Standard & Poors). Be sure to thank a Republican!
On Thursday December 5th fast food workers struck for a living wage in 110 cities, with protestors supporting in another 100 – the movement is growing exponentially.
According to data from NASA'a G.R.A.C.E. satellite (which measures shifts in gravity) the magnetic North Pole has jumped four feet eastward since 2005, and the data correlates with the ice that has melted away at the top and bottom of the planet. (per weekly column of www.earthweek.com)
New U.S.P.S. first class postage rate of 49 cents (up 3¢) started on 25 January 2014.
Then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson told U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen [GOP-IL] in a recorded conversation in November 1968 that President Nixon committed treason when his campaign people asked South VietNam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the election, promising that he would negotiate a better deal than L.B.J. once elected. That tape was not released to the public until December 2008, so the matter is moot. Except for the part where Republicans glorify Nixon as a patriot without being laughed at.
Phillip Morris has bought a lot of advertising airtime for Superbowl XLIX in January 2015. They are currently negotiating with major networks and publishers to market 'Marlboro M' on air and in print; the marijuana cigarette ads would be broadcast only in Colorado & Washington, while generic Marlboro ads will broadcast elsewhere.
Monday, January 20, 2014
January 2014 Quotations (62) featuring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
~~ Joseph Conrad
“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”
~~ Don DeLillo, in the novel "White Noise" [1985]
"Substance separates film from movies."
~~ John Huston [1906-87]
"Ignorance is its own reward."
~~ common saying
“Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision, a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.”
~~ Gordon Graham
"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."
~~ Jorge Luis Borges [1899-1986]
"Life is a slow-motion avalanche, and none of us are steering."
~~ Donald E. Westlake [1933-2008]
“I came to the conclusion long ago that all life is six to five against.”
~~ Damon Runyon [1884-1946]
"I used to tell lies. But I gave it up. The field is overrun with amateurs."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"When you are done changing, you are done."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again."
~~ Nelson Mandela [1918-2013]
"Immanuel Kant is the real evil of our age, the villain of European history."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
~~ Alfred Hitchcock
"The universe is an intelligence test."
~~ Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed [person]."
~~ Walt Kelly [1913-73] as his comic strip character Pogo
"We has met the enemy, and it is us."
~~ Walt Kelly [1913-73] as his comic strip character Pogo
"The difference between government bonds and men is that government bonds mature."
~~ Debbie Perry
"I considered atheism but there weren't enough holidays."
~~ Anonymous
"Don't you just hate rhetorical questions?"
~~ Anonymous
"Your primary power is your character and your integrity."
~~ Sam Haskell, TV department head at William Morris Agency
"This song is copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
~~ Woody Guthrie [1912-67] about his 1944 song 'This Land Is Your Land'
"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes . . . the ones who see things differently – they're not fond of rules . . . You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things . . . they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the [people] who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do."
~~ Steve Jobs [1955-2011]
"Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine."
~~ George Gordon, Lord Byron [1788-1824]
"Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn."
~~ American humorist Garrison Keillor
"The voice of protest...is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum...is bidding all men...obey in silence the tyrannous word of command.
~~ Charles Eliot Norton [1827-1908]
“You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.”
~~ Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus [535?-475? BCE]
"The real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism."
~~ Orhan Parmuk, Turkish novelist
"Man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses."
~~ mystery author Rex Stout [1886-1975]
"I am disgusted by what a thoroughly dishonest nation of money-hungry fools we Americans have become."
~~ Suzanne Murphy, Southampton NY [Time Magazine Letters July 2005]
"I am in the world only for the purpose of composing."
~~ Franz Peter Schubert [1797-1828]
"If my poetry is aimed at achieving anything it is to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."
~~ rock music legend Jim Morrison [1943-71]
"Above all else to thine own self be true."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616]
"In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman."
~~ Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013]
"Knowledge without integrity is dreadful."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]
"There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment."
~~ gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005]
"Whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings – that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide."
~~ attributed to Gautama Buddha [5th Century BCE]
"Wherever one is not, that is where the heart is."
~~ French proverb
"What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. And what I do, I understand."
~~ Chinese proverb
"In waking a tiger, use a long stick."
~~ Chairman Mao Tse-tung [1893-1976]
"Writing is a legal way of avoiding work without actually stealing."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]
"The illiterate of the XXIst Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
~~ Alvin Toffler
"You can't cheat an honest man. He has to have larceny in his heart in the first place."
~~ Claude William Dukenfield [1880-1946], better known as W.C. Fields
Moore's Law: The number of transistors on a chip will double about once every two years."
~~ Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel (1965)
"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.
~~ Andrew Jackson [1767-1845]
"We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another."
~~ Luciano De Crescenzo
"If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you. I came to live out loud."
~~ Émile Zola [1840-1902]
"How have I loved liberty? With the enthusiasm of religion, with the rapture of love, with the conviction of geometry. That is how I have always loved liberty."
~~ Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette [1757-1834]
"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832]
<*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*>
Selected Quotations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
"The time is always ripe to do right."
"All life is inter-related. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial 'outside agitator' idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."
— in "Letter From Birmingham Jail", 16 April 1963
"Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals."
— in "Letter From Birmingham Jail", 16 April 1963
"An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal."
— in "Letter From Birmingham Jail", 16 April 1963
"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth."
— in "Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence" speech, April 1967
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
— in "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech, August 1967
"We must develop a federal program of public works, retraining, and jobs for all – so that none, white or black, will have cause to feel threatened . . . There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum and livable income for every American family."
— in "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech, August 1967
"The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that encourages men to be
I-centered rather than thou-centered."
— in "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech, August 1967
"Congress appropriates military funds with alacrity and generosity. It appropriates poverty funds with miserliness and grudging reluctance. The government is emotionally committed to the war. It is emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor."
— 'Domestic Impact of The War In America' speech November 1967
"I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of my organization or by taking a Gallup poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus."
— 'Domestic Impact of The War In America' speech November 1967
"When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
— in posthumously published essay "A Testament of Hope"
"There is also the violence of [Afro-Americans] having to live in a community and pay higher consumer prices for goods or higher rents for equivalent housing than are charged in white parts of the city."
— in posthumously published essay "A Testament of Hope"
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Joseph Conrad
“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”
~~ Don DeLillo, in the novel "White Noise" [1985]
"Substance separates film from movies."
~~ John Huston [1906-87]
"Ignorance is its own reward."
~~ common saying
“Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision, a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.”
~~ Gordon Graham
"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."
~~ Jorge Luis Borges [1899-1986]
"Life is a slow-motion avalanche, and none of us are steering."
~~ Donald E. Westlake [1933-2008]
“I came to the conclusion long ago that all life is six to five against.”
~~ Damon Runyon [1884-1946]
"I used to tell lies. But I gave it up. The field is overrun with amateurs."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"When you are done changing, you are done."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again."
~~ Nelson Mandela [1918-2013]
"Immanuel Kant is the real evil of our age, the villain of European history."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
~~ Alfred Hitchcock
"The universe is an intelligence test."
~~ Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed [person]."
~~ Walt Kelly [1913-73] as his comic strip character Pogo
"We has met the enemy, and it is us."
~~ Walt Kelly [1913-73] as his comic strip character Pogo
"The difference between government bonds and men is that government bonds mature."
~~ Debbie Perry
"I considered atheism but there weren't enough holidays."
~~ Anonymous
"Don't you just hate rhetorical questions?"
~~ Anonymous
"Your primary power is your character and your integrity."
~~ Sam Haskell, TV department head at William Morris Agency
"This song is copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
~~ Woody Guthrie [1912-67] about his 1944 song 'This Land Is Your Land'
"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes . . . the ones who see things differently – they're not fond of rules . . . You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things . . . they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the [people] who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do."
~~ Steve Jobs [1955-2011]
"Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine."
~~ George Gordon, Lord Byron [1788-1824]
"Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn."
~~ American humorist Garrison Keillor
"The voice of protest...is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum...is bidding all men...obey in silence the tyrannous word of command.
~~ Charles Eliot Norton [1827-1908]
“You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.”
~~ Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus [535?-475? BCE]
"The real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism."
~~ Orhan Parmuk, Turkish novelist
"Man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses."
~~ mystery author Rex Stout [1886-1975]
"I am disgusted by what a thoroughly dishonest nation of money-hungry fools we Americans have become."
~~ Suzanne Murphy, Southampton NY [Time Magazine Letters July 2005]
"I am in the world only for the purpose of composing."
~~ Franz Peter Schubert [1797-1828]
"If my poetry is aimed at achieving anything it is to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."
~~ rock music legend Jim Morrison [1943-71]
"Above all else to thine own self be true."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616]
"In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman."
~~ Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013]
"Knowledge without integrity is dreadful."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]
"There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment."
~~ gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005]
"Whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings – that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide."
~~ attributed to Gautama Buddha [5th Century BCE]
"Wherever one is not, that is where the heart is."
~~ French proverb
"What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. And what I do, I understand."
~~ Chinese proverb
"In waking a tiger, use a long stick."
~~ Chairman Mao Tse-tung [1893-1976]
"Writing is a legal way of avoiding work without actually stealing."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]
"The illiterate of the XXIst Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
~~ Alvin Toffler
"You can't cheat an honest man. He has to have larceny in his heart in the first place."
~~ Claude William Dukenfield [1880-1946], better known as W.C. Fields
Moore's Law: The number of transistors on a chip will double about once every two years."
~~ Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel (1965)
"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.
~~ Andrew Jackson [1767-1845]
"We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another."
~~ Luciano De Crescenzo
"If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you. I came to live out loud."
~~ Émile Zola [1840-1902]
"How have I loved liberty? With the enthusiasm of religion, with the rapture of love, with the conviction of geometry. That is how I have always loved liberty."
~~ Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette [1757-1834]
"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832]
<*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*>
Selected Quotations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
"The time is always ripe to do right."
"All life is inter-related. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial 'outside agitator' idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."
— in "Letter From Birmingham Jail", 16 April 1963
"Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals."
— in "Letter From Birmingham Jail", 16 April 1963
"An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal."
— in "Letter From Birmingham Jail", 16 April 1963
"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth."
— in "Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence" speech, April 1967
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
— in "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech, August 1967
"We must develop a federal program of public works, retraining, and jobs for all – so that none, white or black, will have cause to feel threatened . . . There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum and livable income for every American family."
— in "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech, August 1967
"The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that encourages men to be
I-centered rather than thou-centered."
— in "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech, August 1967
"Congress appropriates military funds with alacrity and generosity. It appropriates poverty funds with miserliness and grudging reluctance. The government is emotionally committed to the war. It is emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor."
— 'Domestic Impact of The War In America' speech November 1967
"I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of my organization or by taking a Gallup poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus."
— 'Domestic Impact of The War In America' speech November 1967
"When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
— in posthumously published essay "A Testament of Hope"
"There is also the violence of [Afro-Americans] having to live in a community and pay higher consumer prices for goods or higher rents for equivalent housing than are charged in white parts of the city."
— in posthumously published essay "A Testament of Hope"
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
Year-End Website Statistics for 2013
Hey, got'er done on the First!
The basic numbers from the year of 2013 are that I coded 114 new pages and 1,809 new covers (linked to Amazon); I now have 427 connections on LinkedIn (up 106) and 31 new postings here on my blog {all-time total now 285}.
Anyone who wants to see the detail can go to http://www.genordell.com/webstats.htm.
Copyright 2014 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
The basic numbers from the year of 2013 are that I coded 114 new pages and 1,809 new covers (linked to Amazon); I now have 427 connections on LinkedIn (up 106) and 31 new postings here on my blog {all-time total now 285}.
Anyone who wants to see the detail can go to http://www.genordell.com/webstats.htm.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Winter Solstice 2013 Quotations (58)
"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy."
~~ Guillaume Apollinaire [1880-1918]
"The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hifi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment."
~~ Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979]
"When you're down, every rat is big enough to try to eat you."
~~ Western author Max Brand [1892-1944]
"Women's virtue is man's greatest invention."
~~ Cornelia Otis Skinner [1899-1979]
"Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather."
~~ punk rocker Mike Dirnt
"He who limps is still walking."
~~ Polish poet Stanislaw Lec [1909-66]
"Think for yourself and question authority."
~~ Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
"Disney has the best casting. If he doesn’t like an actor he just tears him up.”
~~ Alfred Hitchcock [1899-1980]
"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education."
~~ playwright Wilson Mizner [1876-1933]
"No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess."
~~ Sir Isaac Newton [1643-1727]
"Every solution of a problem is a new problem."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1831]
"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply."
~~ Stephen Covey [1932-2012]
“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]
“They are able because they think they are able.”
~~ ancient Roman poet Virgil [70 BCE-19 BCE]
"Time ripens all things; no man is born wise."
~~ Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes [1547-1616]
"Motion pictures, first of all, should be impressionistic."
~~ Maurice Tourneur [1876-1961]
"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."
~~ poet T.S. Eliot [1888-1965] , in the 1942 poem "Little Gidding"
"This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave."
~~ Elmer Davis [1890-1958]
"For those that fought for it, freedom has a flavor [that] the protected shall never know."
~~ USMC LCpl. Edwin L. 'Tim' Craft
"Freedom is not free."
~~ USAF Col. Walter Hitchcock
"Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves."
~~ writer Carol Lynn Pearson
“Life is so often not a matter of yards, but of inches.”
~~ G.E. Nordell
"To live alone one must be an animal or a god, says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both – a philosopher."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics ... are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
~~ Charlie Chaplin [1889-1977]
"When I was 14, I was the oldest [that] I ever was. I've been getting younger ever since."
~~ Shirley Temple {Black}
"To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art."
~~ François de La Rochefoucauld [1613-80]
"The wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings. Let food be your medicine."
~~ ancient Greek physician Hippocrates of Cos [c. 460 - c. 370 BCE]
"Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship.”
~~ Elsa Schiaparelli [1890-1973]
"Man ... lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."
~~ Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
"All creative people want to do the unexpected."
~~ actress & inventor Hedy Lamarr [1913-2000]
"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]
"There is no passion to be found playing small, in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living."
~~ Nelson Mandela [1918-2013]
"Higher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution."
~~ Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
"Religion is a primitive form of philosophy."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Son, give 'em a good show, and always travel first class."
~~ actor Walter Huston [1883-1950]
"There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it."
~~ critic Diana Trilling [1905-96]
"Your net worth to the world is determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."
~~ Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919]
"Live in each season, as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]
"What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness."
~~ John Steinbeck [1902-68]
"Blanket cynicism gives the illusion of understanding."
~~ Marcia Angell, MD
"A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain."
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are."
~~ W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965]
"Absolute passion cannot be understood by a third party."
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]
"Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]
"Sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge."
~~ rock musician Don Henley
"No matter how smart you think you are, you are actually way less smart than that."
~~ author David Foster Wallace [1962-2008]
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
~~ Marcus Aurelius [121-180 C.E.]
"We are always the same age inside."
~~ Gertrude Stein [1874-1946]
"Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful."
~~ American capitalist Warren Buffett
"Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]
"The face of a child can say it all. Especially the mouth part of the face."
~~ humorist Jack Handey
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in."
~~ old Greek proverb
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Guillaume Apollinaire [1880-1918]
"The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hifi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment."
~~ Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979]
"When you're down, every rat is big enough to try to eat you."
~~ Western author Max Brand [1892-1944]
"Women's virtue is man's greatest invention."
~~ Cornelia Otis Skinner [1899-1979]
"Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather."
~~ punk rocker Mike Dirnt
"He who limps is still walking."
~~ Polish poet Stanislaw Lec [1909-66]
"Think for yourself and question authority."
~~ Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
"Disney has the best casting. If he doesn’t like an actor he just tears him up.”
~~ Alfred Hitchcock [1899-1980]
"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education."
~~ playwright Wilson Mizner [1876-1933]
"No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess."
~~ Sir Isaac Newton [1643-1727]
"Every solution of a problem is a new problem."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1831]
"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply."
~~ Stephen Covey [1932-2012]
“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]
“They are able because they think they are able.”
~~ ancient Roman poet Virgil [70 BCE-19 BCE]
"Time ripens all things; no man is born wise."
~~ Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes [1547-1616]
"Motion pictures, first of all, should be impressionistic."
~~ Maurice Tourneur [1876-1961]
"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."
~~ poet T.S. Eliot [1888-1965] , in the 1942 poem "Little Gidding"
"This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave."
~~ Elmer Davis [1890-1958]
"For those that fought for it, freedom has a flavor [that] the protected shall never know."
~~ USMC LCpl. Edwin L. 'Tim' Craft
"Freedom is not free."
~~ USAF Col. Walter Hitchcock
"Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves."
~~ writer Carol Lynn Pearson
“Life is so often not a matter of yards, but of inches.”
~~ G.E. Nordell
"To live alone one must be an animal or a god, says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both – a philosopher."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics ... are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
~~ Charlie Chaplin [1889-1977]
"When I was 14, I was the oldest [that] I ever was. I've been getting younger ever since."
~~ Shirley Temple {Black}
"To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art."
~~ François de La Rochefoucauld [1613-80]
"The wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings. Let food be your medicine."
~~ ancient Greek physician Hippocrates of Cos [c. 460 - c. 370 BCE]
"Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship.”
~~ Elsa Schiaparelli [1890-1973]
"Man ... lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."
~~ Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
"All creative people want to do the unexpected."
~~ actress & inventor Hedy Lamarr [1913-2000]
"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]
"There is no passion to be found playing small, in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living."
~~ Nelson Mandela [1918-2013]
"Higher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution."
~~ Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
"Religion is a primitive form of philosophy."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Son, give 'em a good show, and always travel first class."
~~ actor Walter Huston [1883-1950]
"There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it."
~~ critic Diana Trilling [1905-96]
"Your net worth to the world is determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."
~~ Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919]
"Live in each season, as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]
"What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness."
~~ John Steinbeck [1902-68]
"Blanket cynicism gives the illusion of understanding."
~~ Marcia Angell, MD
"A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain."
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are."
~~ W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965]
"Absolute passion cannot be understood by a third party."
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]
"Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]
"Sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge."
~~ rock musician Don Henley
"No matter how smart you think you are, you are actually way less smart than that."
~~ author David Foster Wallace [1962-2008]
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
~~ Marcus Aurelius [121-180 C.E.]
"We are always the same age inside."
~~ Gertrude Stein [1874-1946]
"Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful."
~~ American capitalist Warren Buffett
"Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]
"The face of a child can say it all. Especially the mouth part of the face."
~~ humorist Jack Handey
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in."
~~ old Greek proverb
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
WM Essay #106: Warren Buffett Is Now A Bad Guy
Warren E. Buffett has long been an example of a 'good guy' capitalist, because his Berkshire-Hathaway mega-corporation has made tons of money for investors without the common evils of the fascist oligarchs – think Mitt Romney and Bain Capital Ventures – such as off-shoring jobs and profits, draining employee pension funds, closing viable factories and-or towns, and ripping off investors. Nor has Buffett spent billions lobbying against clean-air standards, shrinking education, and suppressing the vote, like the Koch Brothers continue to do.
Many wondered why Buffett and Berkshire-Hathaway paid a steep price for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad in November 2009 – the stock was around $75/share, the offer was around $100/share. People figured that Buffett had some plan, that his record is such that he knows what he is doing, we all should watch closely and learn from the 'Wizard of Omaha'.
Well, recent events have provided a shape to Buffett's plan, and unless stopped, Buffett's new project will double pollution from coal on the planet in the next few years.
The Powder River Basin in Wyoming & Montana contains one of the largest deposits of coal in the world. 'PRB' coal currently supplies 40% of the fuel for electric power plants east of the Rockies, but as coal plants are replaced by natural gas, the market is rapidly shrinking. So the coal industry decided to sell coal to China, which has no pollution standards and little natural gas resources. China is bringing online a newly-completed coal-fired power plant every week.
The Union Pacific and BNSF railroad lines run north and west thru the Powder River Basin toward the old Northern Pacific transcontinental route that runs west to Seattle and Puget Sound. Hauling the coal to the Pacific Ocean for trans-shipment to China looks so simple.
Long way to go, though. And a Very Bad Idea, mostly having to do with pollution here in the U.S.A.
You have seen the recent news visuals of the pollution in China's interior cities reaching readings of ten times the level allowed by United Nations air quality standards. We can't do anything about their smog, not even when the dirt-clouds in China float across the Pacific Ocean and make the skies of California and Arizona and Washington State and British Columbia turn brown.
The first pollution problem here in the U.S.A. is already occuring during rail transport. Doubling and tripling coal traffic by rail will also double and triple the pollution along the rail lines. Coal is transported in uncovered hopper cars. According to recent BNSF testimony, each loaded rail car loses from 500 to 3,500 pounds of coal dust per trip. The two daily coal trains to Puget Sound run about 120 cars, so anywhere from 120,000 to 840,000 pounds of coal dust are deposited along the rail lines - every day. Divide by the roughly 1,200 miles of travel, and that is 70 pounds of pollution per mile - every day. The proposed Gateway Pacific coal port will add 18 train trips per day, and if the Longview facility is approved, that will add another 14 trains per day.
Warren Buffet's railroad is planning to deliver as much 12,000 pounds of toxic coal dust over each mile of rail line, each and every day for the next twenty years. That is six tons of pollution daily to every mile, including farmer's fields, school yards & playgrounds, running streams, back yard clotheslines, pristine wetlands, and sparkling white country churches.
The second pollution problem here in the U.S.A. is at the planned port facilities. The Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point near the Canadian border would be twice the size of the largest existing coal port in North America. Gateway's plans for mitigating the coal dust problem is to dampen the acre-sized million-ton piles of coal with water from the Nooksack River, without mentioning that the dirty water will flow back into the river and into Bellingham Bay, and in any case not help at all on windy days.
And all this is predicated on no accidents or environmental disasters whatsoever.
The proposed $643 million Millennium Bulk Terminals coal-export facility is at Longview, Washington - fifty miles up the Columbia River. The proposed coal-export facility at Point Morrow in Oregon is 250 miles farther up the Columbia River; ocean-going vessels cannot reach Port Morrow, so the plan is to load the coal from railcar to river barge, mosey downriver to Port St. Helens (25 miles upriver from Longview) and transfer to bulk cargo vessels bound for China.
Adding 400 boat visits per year and untold barge trips up and down the Columbia River per day is no concern of Peabody Coal, the railroads, or the terminal operators. (Pacific International Terminals is owned by Carrix, which is 49% owned by Goldman Sachs; Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owns 6% of Goldman Sachs.)
But environmentalists are quite concerned, and calculate that building and operating the three proposed West Coast coal export facilities will add 200 million tons of CO2 to Earth's atmosphere each year, which is roughly equivalent to all the carbon-dioxide emissions of all the volcanoes on the planet.
Warren Buffett will soon be a world-class polluter, and his days as a capitalist 'good guy' are over.
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Many wondered why Buffett and Berkshire-Hathaway paid a steep price for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad in November 2009 – the stock was around $75/share, the offer was around $100/share. People figured that Buffett had some plan, that his record is such that he knows what he is doing, we all should watch closely and learn from the 'Wizard of Omaha'.
Well, recent events have provided a shape to Buffett's plan, and unless stopped, Buffett's new project will double pollution from coal on the planet in the next few years.
The Powder River Basin in Wyoming & Montana contains one of the largest deposits of coal in the world. 'PRB' coal currently supplies 40% of the fuel for electric power plants east of the Rockies, but as coal plants are replaced by natural gas, the market is rapidly shrinking. So the coal industry decided to sell coal to China, which has no pollution standards and little natural gas resources. China is bringing online a newly-completed coal-fired power plant every week.
The Union Pacific and BNSF railroad lines run north and west thru the Powder River Basin toward the old Northern Pacific transcontinental route that runs west to Seattle and Puget Sound. Hauling the coal to the Pacific Ocean for trans-shipment to China looks so simple.
Long way to go, though. And a Very Bad Idea, mostly having to do with pollution here in the U.S.A.
You have seen the recent news visuals of the pollution in China's interior cities reaching readings of ten times the level allowed by United Nations air quality standards. We can't do anything about their smog, not even when the dirt-clouds in China float across the Pacific Ocean and make the skies of California and Arizona and Washington State and British Columbia turn brown.
The first pollution problem here in the U.S.A. is already occuring during rail transport. Doubling and tripling coal traffic by rail will also double and triple the pollution along the rail lines. Coal is transported in uncovered hopper cars. According to recent BNSF testimony, each loaded rail car loses from 500 to 3,500 pounds of coal dust per trip. The two daily coal trains to Puget Sound run about 120 cars, so anywhere from 120,000 to 840,000 pounds of coal dust are deposited along the rail lines - every day. Divide by the roughly 1,200 miles of travel, and that is 70 pounds of pollution per mile - every day. The proposed Gateway Pacific coal port will add 18 train trips per day, and if the Longview facility is approved, that will add another 14 trains per day.
Warren Buffet's railroad is planning to deliver as much 12,000 pounds of toxic coal dust over each mile of rail line, each and every day for the next twenty years. That is six tons of pollution daily to every mile, including farmer's fields, school yards & playgrounds, running streams, back yard clotheslines, pristine wetlands, and sparkling white country churches.
The second pollution problem here in the U.S.A. is at the planned port facilities. The Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point near the Canadian border would be twice the size of the largest existing coal port in North America. Gateway's plans for mitigating the coal dust problem is to dampen the acre-sized million-ton piles of coal with water from the Nooksack River, without mentioning that the dirty water will flow back into the river and into Bellingham Bay, and in any case not help at all on windy days.
And all this is predicated on no accidents or environmental disasters whatsoever.
The proposed $643 million Millennium Bulk Terminals coal-export facility is at Longview, Washington - fifty miles up the Columbia River. The proposed coal-export facility at Point Morrow in Oregon is 250 miles farther up the Columbia River; ocean-going vessels cannot reach Port Morrow, so the plan is to load the coal from railcar to river barge, mosey downriver to Port St. Helens (25 miles upriver from Longview) and transfer to bulk cargo vessels bound for China.
Adding 400 boat visits per year and untold barge trips up and down the Columbia River per day is no concern of Peabody Coal, the railroads, or the terminal operators. (Pacific International Terminals is owned by Carrix, which is 49% owned by Goldman Sachs; Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owns 6% of Goldman Sachs.)
But environmentalists are quite concerned, and calculate that building and operating the three proposed West Coast coal export facilities will add 200 million tons of CO2 to Earth's atmosphere each year, which is roughly equivalent to all the carbon-dioxide emissions of all the volcanoes on the planet.
Warren Buffett will soon be a world-class polluter, and his days as a capitalist 'good guy' are over.
Thursday, November 07, 2013
November 2013 Quotations (62)
"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"We are destined for better things."
~~ dreamt the morning of 29 October 2013 by G.E. Nordell
"Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies."
~~ R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]
"I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it."
~~ Jonathan Winters [1925-2013]
"Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]
"Turn on, tune in, drop out." ~~ phrase coined in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan [1911-80] and popularized by Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
"There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Together, we're going to finish the job [that] we started."
~~ President Obama on the new Obamacare video [1:31], 1 October 2013
"Men argue. Nature acts."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]
"You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing."
~~ Meryl Streep
"It has been the fate of our nation not to have ideologies but to be one."
~~ historian Richard Hofstadter [1916-70]
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way [that] you want, but you only spend it once."
~~ Lillian Dickson [1901-83]
"It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]
"Pressure is something [that] you feel when you don't know what you're doing."
~~ football great Peyton Manning
"Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]
"Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible."
~~ mystery author John D. MacDonald [1916-86]
"The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions."
~~ Susan Sontag [1933-2004]
"You have to climb to reach a deep thought."
~~ Polish poet Stanislaw Lec [1909-66]
"If you're the smartest person in the room, find another room."
~~ Michael Dell
"The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple."
~~ Dame Rebecca West [1892-1983]
"The most profound relationship [that] we'll ever have is the one with ourselves."
~~ Shirley MacLaine
"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"The long-term accomodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is forgetfulness."
~~ Alice Walker
"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."
~~ D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930]
"We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality."
~~ Iris Murdoch [1919-99]
"There is no more miserable human being than one to whom nothing is habitual but indecision."
~~ William James [1842-1910]
"Crime is art for lazy people."
~~ rapper CeeLo Green
"To live a life free from sorrow, think of what is going to happen as if it had already happened."
~~ Epictetus [55?–135? C.E.]
"All the world's a stage, and most of us are desparately unrehearsed."
~~ playwright Seán O'Casey [1880-1964]
"It's easy to become a millionaire – start out as a billionaire, and then buy an airline."
~~ Richard Branson
"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]
"It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out; it's the pebble in your shoe."
~~ Muhammad Ali
"If the dinosaurs had had a space program, they would not be extinct."
~~ Carl Sagan [1934-96]
"What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]
"In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained."
~~ Michael Crichton [1942-2008]
"Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course [that] it takes for us be called a 'happy' one?"
~~ Thomas Mann [1875-1955]
"[We] need to raise the minimum wage so that nobody who's working full time lives in poverty."
~~ economist Robert B. Reich
"Resolve to be thyself, and know that he who finds himself loses his misery."
~~ Matthew Arnold [1822-88]
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]
"There is no hope for the satisfied man."
~~ Frederick G. Bonfils [1861-1933], founder of the Denver Post newspaper
"The first condition of immortality is death."
~~ Polish poet Stanislaw Lec [1909-66]
"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]
“Life is a mirror - what you see out there, you must first see inside of you.”
~~ Wally 'Famous' Amos
“A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
~~ Carl Sagan [1934-96]
{on cinema}: “The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.”
~~ Virginia Woolf [1882-1941], in 1926
"Everyone's a coward about something."
~~ line from the Oscar-winning war movie "The Hurt Locker" [2008]
"I used to be self-conscious about my height, but then I thought 'F*** that, I'm Harry Potter'."
~~ Daniel Radcliffe
“True wisdom lies in gathering the precious things out of each day as it goes by.”
~~ E.S. Bouton
"That government is best which governs least."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62], in the first paragraph of the 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience"
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light not our Darkness, that most frightens us."
~~ Marianne Williamson in her 1992 book "A Return To Love"; quote used by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 inaugural address
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."
~~ first appeared in the 1981 'Narcotics Anonymous' basic text (and often mis-attributed to Rita Mae Brown or Albert Einstein [1879-1955] )
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader."
~~ John Quincy Adams [1767-1848]
"When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him."
~~ psychiatrist Thomas Szasz [1920-2012]
"Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears."
~~ playwright Arthur Miller [1915-2005]
"If you can speak about what you care about to a person [that] you disagree with without denigrating them or insulting them, then you may actually be heard."
~~ Amy Poehler
"Art is never finished, only abandoned."
~~ Leonardo da Vinci [1452-1519]
"Man is born to live, not to prepare for life."
~~ Boris Pasternak [1890-1960]
"The music is all. People should die for it. People are dying for everything else, so why not for the music?"
~~ Lou Reed [1942-2013]
“Free speech is a danger to the neo-con fascists, which is why they suppress it. Our best weapon is to speak freely and loudly and often.”
~~ G.E. Nordell
"Life works to the extent that we keep our agreements."
~~ Werner Erhard
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"We are destined for better things."
~~ dreamt the morning of 29 October 2013 by G.E. Nordell
"Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies."
~~ R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]
"I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it."
~~ Jonathan Winters [1925-2013]
"Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]
"Turn on, tune in, drop out." ~~ phrase coined in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan [1911-80] and popularized by Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
"There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Together, we're going to finish the job [that] we started."
~~ President Obama on the new Obamacare video [1:31], 1 October 2013
"Men argue. Nature acts."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]
"You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing."
~~ Meryl Streep
"It has been the fate of our nation not to have ideologies but to be one."
~~ historian Richard Hofstadter [1916-70]
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way [that] you want, but you only spend it once."
~~ Lillian Dickson [1901-83]
"It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]
"Pressure is something [that] you feel when you don't know what you're doing."
~~ football great Peyton Manning
"Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]
"Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible."
~~ mystery author John D. MacDonald [1916-86]
"The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions."
~~ Susan Sontag [1933-2004]
"You have to climb to reach a deep thought."
~~ Polish poet Stanislaw Lec [1909-66]
"If you're the smartest person in the room, find another room."
~~ Michael Dell
"The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple."
~~ Dame Rebecca West [1892-1983]
"The most profound relationship [that] we'll ever have is the one with ourselves."
~~ Shirley MacLaine
"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]
"The long-term accomodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is forgetfulness."
~~ Alice Walker
"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."
~~ D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930]
"We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality."
~~ Iris Murdoch [1919-99]
"There is no more miserable human being than one to whom nothing is habitual but indecision."
~~ William James [1842-1910]
"Crime is art for lazy people."
~~ rapper CeeLo Green
"To live a life free from sorrow, think of what is going to happen as if it had already happened."
~~ Epictetus [55?–135? C.E.]
"All the world's a stage, and most of us are desparately unrehearsed."
~~ playwright Seán O'Casey [1880-1964]
"It's easy to become a millionaire – start out as a billionaire, and then buy an airline."
~~ Richard Branson
"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]
"It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out; it's the pebble in your shoe."
~~ Muhammad Ali
"If the dinosaurs had had a space program, they would not be extinct."
~~ Carl Sagan [1934-96]
"What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]
"In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained."
~~ Michael Crichton [1942-2008]
"Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course [that] it takes for us be called a 'happy' one?"
~~ Thomas Mann [1875-1955]
"[We] need to raise the minimum wage so that nobody who's working full time lives in poverty."
~~ economist Robert B. Reich
"Resolve to be thyself, and know that he who finds himself loses his misery."
~~ Matthew Arnold [1822-88]
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]
"There is no hope for the satisfied man."
~~ Frederick G. Bonfils [1861-1933], founder of the Denver Post newspaper
"The first condition of immortality is death."
~~ Polish poet Stanislaw Lec [1909-66]
"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]
“Life is a mirror - what you see out there, you must first see inside of you.”
~~ Wally 'Famous' Amos
“A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
~~ Carl Sagan [1934-96]
{on cinema}: “The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.”
~~ Virginia Woolf [1882-1941], in 1926
"Everyone's a coward about something."
~~ line from the Oscar-winning war movie "The Hurt Locker" [2008]
"I used to be self-conscious about my height, but then I thought 'F*** that, I'm Harry Potter'."
~~ Daniel Radcliffe
“True wisdom lies in gathering the precious things out of each day as it goes by.”
~~ E.S. Bouton
"That government is best which governs least."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62], in the first paragraph of the 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience"
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light not our Darkness, that most frightens us."
~~ Marianne Williamson in her 1992 book "A Return To Love"; quote used by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 inaugural address
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."
~~ first appeared in the 1981 'Narcotics Anonymous' basic text (and often mis-attributed to Rita Mae Brown or Albert Einstein [1879-1955] )
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader."
~~ John Quincy Adams [1767-1848]
"When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him."
~~ psychiatrist Thomas Szasz [1920-2012]
"Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears."
~~ playwright Arthur Miller [1915-2005]
"If you can speak about what you care about to a person [that] you disagree with without denigrating them or insulting them, then you may actually be heard."
~~ Amy Poehler
"Art is never finished, only abandoned."
~~ Leonardo da Vinci [1452-1519]
"Man is born to live, not to prepare for life."
~~ Boris Pasternak [1890-1960]
"The music is all. People should die for it. People are dying for everything else, so why not for the music?"
~~ Lou Reed [1942-2013]
“Free speech is a danger to the neo-con fascists, which is why they suppress it. Our best weapon is to speak freely and loudly and often.”
~~ G.E. Nordell
"Life works to the extent that we keep our agreements."
~~ Werner Erhard
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Film Is Dead, Long Live Digital
The 110-year reign of 35mm film as the primary projection medium for motion pictures has come to an end.
The 35mm motion picture film format became the standard around 1903. The reason is that it is the best size for avoiding grainy visuals - smaller film sizes blown up to screen dimensions actually show the existence of the chemical crystals on the film surface, i.e. grain. Early nitrate (nitrocellulose) film stock was dangerously flammable and was replaced by fireproof acetate for X-rays in 1933 and for motion pictures in 1951. (Kodak launched production of cellulose triacetate base motion picture film in 1948.)
Sony's launch of 'electronic cinematography' in the 1980s was not a success. Better camera technology brought 'digital cinematography' into wide use starting in 1998. Editing droids, 'green screen' stages, C.G.I., and distribution hardware and software followed. The major studios decreed in 2012 that they would no longer issue new films on physical 35mm film by end of 2013, and the commercial film labs began converting to digital operations.
Physical 35mm film projectors were replaced over 2012 and 2013 with 2K digital projection capabilities, which includes digital delivery by internet or satellite; only ten percent of U.S. motion picture theaters are keeping their 35mm projector hardware for showing of archival prints. (Archives like Library of Congress, MoMA, and U.C.L.A. are expected not to give up the 35mm technology.)
So the motion picture distribution industry is in transition: the business of film exchanges now serves only the art house market, film labs are digital, projection at your local movie theater is digital, and new projectionists need not be trained in 35mm technology. The general movie patron will not notice the difference, but the observant cineaste will find that certain features like depth, clarity, and color appear degraded.
Well, too bad. Progress happens. Film Is Dead, Long Live Digital.
{For folks without the backgroundL When a king of Britain dies, the traditional announcement takes the form of 'The King is dead, long live the King', which is a transfer of allegiance by the speaker to the successor.}
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
The 35mm motion picture film format became the standard around 1903. The reason is that it is the best size for avoiding grainy visuals - smaller film sizes blown up to screen dimensions actually show the existence of the chemical crystals on the film surface, i.e. grain. Early nitrate (nitrocellulose) film stock was dangerously flammable and was replaced by fireproof acetate for X-rays in 1933 and for motion pictures in 1951. (Kodak launched production of cellulose triacetate base motion picture film in 1948.)
Sony's launch of 'electronic cinematography' in the 1980s was not a success. Better camera technology brought 'digital cinematography' into wide use starting in 1998. Editing droids, 'green screen' stages, C.G.I., and distribution hardware and software followed. The major studios decreed in 2012 that they would no longer issue new films on physical 35mm film by end of 2013, and the commercial film labs began converting to digital operations.
Physical 35mm film projectors were replaced over 2012 and 2013 with 2K digital projection capabilities, which includes digital delivery by internet or satellite; only ten percent of U.S. motion picture theaters are keeping their 35mm projector hardware for showing of archival prints. (Archives like Library of Congress, MoMA, and U.C.L.A. are expected not to give up the 35mm technology.)
So the motion picture distribution industry is in transition: the business of film exchanges now serves only the art house market, film labs are digital, projection at your local movie theater is digital, and new projectionists need not be trained in 35mm technology. The general movie patron will not notice the difference, but the observant cineaste will find that certain features like depth, clarity, and color appear degraded.
Well, too bad. Progress happens. Film Is Dead, Long Live Digital.
{For folks without the backgroundL When a king of Britain dies, the traditional announcement takes the form of 'The King is dead, long live the King', which is a transfer of allegiance by the speaker to the successor.}
Monday, October 14, 2013
October 2013 News Factoids
September: New Mexico House Speaker Ken Martinez announced a new initiative that the B.N.S.F. Railroad will soon undertake: their locomotives will start using natural gas, instead of diesel. Not only will this help the environment but it is a resource that New Mexico has an abundance of.
September: Did anyone else notice that the pumpkin harvest was three to four weeks before Halowe'en this year? Giant displays at Home Depot and on the back of trucks in vacant lots in my area showed up *before* October First.
DEPT. of LAME JOKES
How many incontinent senior citizens does it take to change a light bulb?
Well, that depends...
DEPT of CLIMATE CHANGE
The historic first-ever departure of a bulk-cargo ship from Vancouver, BC to Finland via the Arctic Sea took place on September 17th; the Nordic Orion carried 73,500 tons of coal (a 25% increase because not restricted by depth of the Panama Canal). Meanwhile, both the Russian and Canadian governments are beefing up ports and coastal police & rescue units in the Northwest Passage due to expectations of increased traffic – one of the few positive benefits of Global Warming/Climate Change.
JOBS WATCH
Economic Policy Institute introduced a new monthly economic indicator in October that more accurately gauges the weakness of the labor market; the new 'missing worker' tool accounts for potential workers who are neither employed nor actively seeking work – workers that are therefore not included in the official unemployment rate. If these nearly 5 million missing workers had been seeking work and thus counted as unemployed, the unemployment rate in August would have been a staggering 10.1 percent instead of 7.3 percent.
THE CLASS WAR
"The world’s richest one percent have $52.8 trillion [in assets] — about 40 percent of the world’s wealth." ~~ Joel S. Hirschhorn
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
September: Did anyone else notice that the pumpkin harvest was three to four weeks before Halowe'en this year? Giant displays at Home Depot and on the back of trucks in vacant lots in my area showed up *before* October First.
DEPT. of LAME JOKES
How many incontinent senior citizens does it take to change a light bulb?
Well, that depends...
DEPT of CLIMATE CHANGE
The historic first-ever departure of a bulk-cargo ship from Vancouver, BC to Finland via the Arctic Sea took place on September 17th; the Nordic Orion carried 73,500 tons of coal (a 25% increase because not restricted by depth of the Panama Canal). Meanwhile, both the Russian and Canadian governments are beefing up ports and coastal police & rescue units in the Northwest Passage due to expectations of increased traffic – one of the few positive benefits of Global Warming/Climate Change.
JOBS WATCH
Economic Policy Institute introduced a new monthly economic indicator in October that more accurately gauges the weakness of the labor market; the new 'missing worker' tool accounts for potential workers who are neither employed nor actively seeking work – workers that are therefore not included in the official unemployment rate. If these nearly 5 million missing workers had been seeking work and thus counted as unemployed, the unemployment rate in August would have been a staggering 10.1 percent instead of 7.3 percent.
THE CLASS WAR
"The world’s richest one percent have $52.8 trillion [in assets] — about 40 percent of the world’s wealth." ~~ Joel S. Hirschhorn
Monday, September 30, 2013
September 2013 Quotations (60)
"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition."
~~ Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
"Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90], in 1722
"First man take drink, then drink take drink, then drink take man."
~~ old Chinese saying
"Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
[re: parenthood] "You get a lot of tension, you get a lot of headaches. I do what it says on the aspirin bottle: Take two and keep away from children."
~~ Roseanne Barr
"Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film."
~~ comedian Steven Wright
“The class warfare that is being waged by the great rich against the greater majority is not just a slogan. It is as heartless as terrorism, as real as death, and expanding in scope day by day.”
~~ Owen Williamson
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”
~~ E.L. Doctorow
"The truth is so top secret / It only stands to reason / That anyone exposing it / Is culpable of treason."
~~ lyric by Yip Harburg [1896-1981]
"Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave but not our hearts."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. [1809-94]
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
~~ Robert Wilensky
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]
"The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]
"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them."
~~ Adlai E. Stevenson II [1900-65]
"We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs."
~~ Carl Sagan [1934-96]
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
~~ Richard Dawkins
"To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man."
~~ Michael Servetus [1509?-1553], burned at the stake as a heretic
"Democracy is not about majority rule; it is about minority rights. If there is no culture of not simply tolerating minorities, but actually treating them with equal rights, real democracy cannot take root."
~~ Thomas L. Friedman
"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best - that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."
~~ Thomas Henry Huxley [1825-95]
"There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity."
~~ Arthur Schopenhauer [1788-1860]
"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics."
~~ President Franklin Delano Roosevelt [1882-1945]
"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]
"Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble."
~~ the character Alexis Zorba
"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."
~~ Orson Welles [1915-85]
"The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman, and have a French boyfriend."
~~ Katharine Hepburn [1907-2003]
"In any war there are heroes on both sides . . ."
~~ title card at beginning of "Jet Li's Hero" feature film [2002]
"Imagination is but another name for super intelligence."
~~ Edgar Rice Burroughs [1875-1950]
"Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid."
~~ John Wayne [1907-79]
"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress."
~~ Ronald Reagan [1911-2004]
"You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."
~~ A.A. Milne [1882-1956], in "Winnie The Pooh", 1926
"Notoriety is often mistaken for fame."
~~ Aesop [620–564 B.C.E.]
"But all the magic I have known, I've had to make myself."
~~ Shel Silverstein [1930-99], in "Where The Sidewalk Ends", 1974
"After all, what's life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die."
~~ E.B. White [1899-1985], in "Charlotte's Web", 1952
"Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So . . . Get on your way!"
~~ Dr. Seuss, in "Oh, The Places You'll Go", 1990
"Anyone who participates in the Trans-Pacific Partnership is an enemy of the United States of America. Any American who participates in the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a traitor."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"Like a boil that must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed to the light of human conscience before it can be cured."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"Flattery is like chewing gum. Enjoy it but don't swallow it."
~~ cartoonist Hank Ketcham [1920-2001]
"People striving for approval from others become phony."
~~ baseball player Ichiro Suzuki
"Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet and some sort of dignity."
~~ Willa Cather [1873-1947]
"There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"A right is a responsibility in reverse."
~~ E.B. White [1899-1985]
"An empty man is full of himself."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]
"Stupidity is the same as evil, if you judge by the results."
~~ Margaret Atwood
"It takes twenty years to build a reputation, and five minutes to ruin it."
~~ capitalist Warren Buffett
"The most futile thing in this world is any attempt at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions."
~~ Theodore Dreiser [1871-1945]
"The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of one's self."
~~ activist Jane Addams [1860-1935]
"A goal is a dream with a deadline."
~~ Napoleon Hill [1883-1970]
"Your life does not get better by chance. It gets better by change."
~~ motivational speaker Jim Rohn [1930-2009]
"I am a sort of preacher. I like to talk to people and get them to change their views when I think their views are wrong. Why else would anyone write a book?"
~~ sci-fi author Frederik Pohl [1919-2013]
"The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains."
~~ Abul Ala Al-Ma’arri [973-1057]
{last words} “Get out of here and leave me alone. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough already.”
~~ Karl Marx [1818-83]
"Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming [that] the audience is any less intelligent than you are."
~~ Rod Serling [1924-75]
"Imagination is the highest kite [that] one can fly."
~~ Lauren Bacall
"There is more to life than increasing its speed."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]
"Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world."
~~ Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, known as Rumi [1207-73]
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
~~ Jim Henson ]1936-90]
"It's not your abilities that show who you are, it's your choices."
~~ character Professor Dumbeldore, in ""Harry Potter" and The Chamber of Secrets", 1998
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
"Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90], in 1722
"First man take drink, then drink take drink, then drink take man."
~~ old Chinese saying
"Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
[re: parenthood] "You get a lot of tension, you get a lot of headaches. I do what it says on the aspirin bottle: Take two and keep away from children."
~~ Roseanne Barr
"Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film."
~~ comedian Steven Wright
“The class warfare that is being waged by the great rich against the greater majority is not just a slogan. It is as heartless as terrorism, as real as death, and expanding in scope day by day.”
~~ Owen Williamson
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”
~~ E.L. Doctorow
"The truth is so top secret / It only stands to reason / That anyone exposing it / Is culpable of treason."
~~ lyric by Yip Harburg [1896-1981]
"Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave but not our hearts."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. [1809-94]
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
~~ Robert Wilensky
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]
"The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]
"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
"I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them."
~~ Adlai E. Stevenson II [1900-65]
"We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs."
~~ Carl Sagan [1934-96]
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
~~ Richard Dawkins
"To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man."
~~ Michael Servetus [1509?-1553], burned at the stake as a heretic
"Democracy is not about majority rule; it is about minority rights. If there is no culture of not simply tolerating minorities, but actually treating them with equal rights, real democracy cannot take root."
~~ Thomas L. Friedman
"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best - that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."
~~ Thomas Henry Huxley [1825-95]
"There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity."
~~ Arthur Schopenhauer [1788-1860]
"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics."
~~ President Franklin Delano Roosevelt [1882-1945]
"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]
"Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble."
~~ the character Alexis Zorba
"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."
~~ Orson Welles [1915-85]
"The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman, and have a French boyfriend."
~~ Katharine Hepburn [1907-2003]
"In any war there are heroes on both sides . . ."
~~ title card at beginning of "Jet Li's Hero" feature film [2002]
"Imagination is but another name for super intelligence."
~~ Edgar Rice Burroughs [1875-1950]
"Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid."
~~ John Wayne [1907-79]
"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress."
~~ Ronald Reagan [1911-2004]
"You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."
~~ A.A. Milne [1882-1956], in "Winnie The Pooh", 1926
"Notoriety is often mistaken for fame."
~~ Aesop [620–564 B.C.E.]
"But all the magic I have known, I've had to make myself."
~~ Shel Silverstein [1930-99], in "Where The Sidewalk Ends", 1974
"After all, what's life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die."
~~ E.B. White [1899-1985], in "Charlotte's Web", 1952
"Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So . . . Get on your way!"
~~ Dr. Seuss, in "Oh, The Places You'll Go", 1990
"Anyone who participates in the Trans-Pacific Partnership is an enemy of the United States of America. Any American who participates in the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a traitor."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"Like a boil that must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed to the light of human conscience before it can be cured."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"Flattery is like chewing gum. Enjoy it but don't swallow it."
~~ cartoonist Hank Ketcham [1920-2001]
"People striving for approval from others become phony."
~~ baseball player Ichiro Suzuki
"Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet and some sort of dignity."
~~ Willa Cather [1873-1947]
"There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"A right is a responsibility in reverse."
~~ E.B. White [1899-1985]
"An empty man is full of himself."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]
"Stupidity is the same as evil, if you judge by the results."
~~ Margaret Atwood
"It takes twenty years to build a reputation, and five minutes to ruin it."
~~ capitalist Warren Buffett
"The most futile thing in this world is any attempt at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions."
~~ Theodore Dreiser [1871-1945]
"The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of one's self."
~~ activist Jane Addams [1860-1935]
"A goal is a dream with a deadline."
~~ Napoleon Hill [1883-1970]
"Your life does not get better by chance. It gets better by change."
~~ motivational speaker Jim Rohn [1930-2009]
"I am a sort of preacher. I like to talk to people and get them to change their views when I think their views are wrong. Why else would anyone write a book?"
~~ sci-fi author Frederik Pohl [1919-2013]
"The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains."
~~ Abul Ala Al-Ma’arri [973-1057]
{last words} “Get out of here and leave me alone. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough already.”
~~ Karl Marx [1818-83]
"Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming [that] the audience is any less intelligent than you are."
~~ Rod Serling [1924-75]
"Imagination is the highest kite [that] one can fly."
~~ Lauren Bacall
"There is more to life than increasing its speed."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]
"Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world."
~~ Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, known as Rumi [1207-73]
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
~~ Jim Henson ]1936-90]
"It's not your abilities that show who you are, it's your choices."
~~ character Professor Dumbeldore, in ""Harry Potter" and The Chamber of Secrets", 1998
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Movie Review: "Inequality For All"
Economist Robert Reich's documentary film "Inequality For All" is opening in the U.S.A. on September 27th.
MY REVIEW: "A 'must see' film. Go see it because I said so."
"Inequality For All" [Radius-TWC Sept 2013]
"A Passionate Argument On Behalf of The Middle Class" Partly funded at KickStarter; former U.S. Labor Secretary {1993-97) and now Berkley University professor Robert Reich is committed to raising awareness of the sorry economic state in America, where the huge disparity in incomes and a tax system that rewards 'job creators' who create jobs overseas has decimated the Middle Class. Directed by Jacob Kornbluth; starring Robert Reich; director won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival
full credits at IMDb • official movie site
watch 8/2013 official trailer [1:48] at YouTube
Sunday, September 15, 2013
August-September 2013 News Factoids
Verizon's device recycling program ($1 each to Hopeline anti-abuse charity)
As-of mid 2013, Netflix became the dominant streaming platform, accounting for one-third of all U.S. video streaming - double the activity on YouTube.
Iodized salt was introduced in the U.S. in 1924. A study in 2013 found that this one change in diet raised the country's collective I.Q.
MONOPOLY NEWSFOUR airlines control 69 percent of domestic air travel
Amazon sells 27 percent of consumer books in USA, and B&N sells 16 percent
WalMart sells 57 percent of all groceries in USA
Universal Music Group controls 38 percent of the global recorded music market
AnheuserBusch-InBev sells 39 percent of all beer in the USA, Miller-Coors sells 26 percent
CLIMATE NEWS
"The last fourteen years are the driest in a century of record keeping [in the Colorado River Basin] and among the driest such periods in a thousand years of tree rings records." == U.S. Department of Interior report, August 2013
An international team published a three-year study in the journal "Nature Climate Change" that shows marine species moving away from the tropics and toward the poles at an average of 45 miles per decade, compared to only 4 miles per decade for species on land.
== per Earth Environmental Service, August 2013
VEGETARIAN ALERT
In a study of the effects of pesticides used in the U.S., the F.D.A says that arsenic levels in brown rice are higher than in other forms, with lowest levels in instant rice, The F.D.A. study report also says that levels of arsenic found in rice are probably not a health problem, but that consumers should 'vary their diet' just in case.
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
As-of mid 2013, Netflix became the dominant streaming platform, accounting for one-third of all U.S. video streaming - double the activity on YouTube.
Iodized salt was introduced in the U.S. in 1924. A study in 2013 found that this one change in diet raised the country's collective I.Q.
MONOPOLY NEWS
CLIMATE NEWS
"The last fourteen years are the driest in a century of record keeping [in the Colorado River Basin] and among the driest such periods in a thousand years of tree rings records." == U.S. Department of Interior report, August 2013
An international team published a three-year study in the journal "Nature Climate Change" that shows marine species moving away from the tropics and toward the poles at an average of 45 miles per decade, compared to only 4 miles per decade for species on land.
== per Earth Environmental Service, August 2013
VEGETARIAN ALERT
In a study of the effects of pesticides used in the U.S., the F.D.A says that arsenic levels in brown rice are higher than in other forms, with lowest levels in instant rice, The F.D.A. study report also says that levels of arsenic found in rice are probably not a health problem, but that consumers should 'vary their diet' just in case.
Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Root Cause of the War in Syria
This got cleared up for me today on the Randi Rhodes Radio Show.
Syria and other parts of the Middle East have experienced a severe drought for the last five years. In Syria, 85 percent of the livestock died, and 75 percent of the crops failed. So the hungry citizens migrated to the cities, hoping for work or food or some way to survive, which they did not find.
Despotic President Bashar al-Assad noticed that the shortage in wheat had raised the price sky-high, so he appropriated the harvest and sold 1.5 million metric tons to other countries and then pocketed the money (most likely to secret off-shore accounts). The people are starving, there is no bread and little water, so the masses have been ripe for revolutionary propaganda from Muslim fanatical groups such as al-Qaeda and the taliban.
The Syrian Civil War has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians since the official beginning in the Spring of 2011. There is no 'good' side here. The rebels are anti-democratic, Assad is anti-democratic. Russia is siding with Assad's government (for access to the oil fields), and the United Nations and the U.S.A have sided with the rebels, hoping that their eventual win will provide access to the oil fields.
One of the serious solutions which has been kept from discussion is food-drops to the people of Syria. Problematic from the get-go since the rebels could hoard it for themselves, but air-dropping pallets of rice or wheat away from rebel strongholds and away from government strongholds could take the pressure off.
Meanwhile, President Obama is carefully planning air strikes against a foreign country and hoping that the war-mongers and the Xian promoters of Armageddon do not get their wish for World War III.
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Syria and other parts of the Middle East have experienced a severe drought for the last five years. In Syria, 85 percent of the livestock died, and 75 percent of the crops failed. So the hungry citizens migrated to the cities, hoping for work or food or some way to survive, which they did not find.
Despotic President Bashar al-Assad noticed that the shortage in wheat had raised the price sky-high, so he appropriated the harvest and sold 1.5 million metric tons to other countries and then pocketed the money (most likely to secret off-shore accounts). The people are starving, there is no bread and little water, so the masses have been ripe for revolutionary propaganda from Muslim fanatical groups such as al-Qaeda and the taliban.
The Syrian Civil War has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians since the official beginning in the Spring of 2011. There is no 'good' side here. The rebels are anti-democratic, Assad is anti-democratic. Russia is siding with Assad's government (for access to the oil fields), and the United Nations and the U.S.A have sided with the rebels, hoping that their eventual win will provide access to the oil fields.
One of the serious solutions which has been kept from discussion is food-drops to the people of Syria. Problematic from the get-go since the rebels could hoard it for themselves, but air-dropping pallets of rice or wheat away from rebel strongholds and away from government strongholds could take the pressure off.
Meanwhile, President Obama is carefully planning air strikes against a foreign country and hoping that the war-mongers and the Xian promoters of Armageddon do not get their wish for World War III.
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