Quotations & Notes

Aable, Chris

”The best way to do good and be good is with no expectations of heaven nor hell.”           

Aamodt, Sandra

“A restless nature was once helpful to people who needed to find food sources in the wild, but in today’s classrooms, it’s often classified as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.”         

Abbey, Edward:

His M.A. thesis:

‘Anarchism and the Morality of Political Violence’.

“Under the pressure of extreme circumstances… All those who are concerned with issues of good and evil – so-called ‘men of goodwill’ – may someday find themselves confronted with that critical situation in which all moral alternatives have been eliminated by circumstances, but two: passive submission to unquestioned wrong or the exercise of violence.”

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” via Wikipedia

“Why is the Park Service so anxious” to cater to “the indolent millions born on wheels and suckled on gasoline, who expect and demand paved highways to lead them in comfort, ease and safety into every nook and cranny of the national parks?”

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.

…be true to your innate sense of justice…

Let the nation-state go hang itself…

Action, there’s the thing. Action! When I grow sick with the buzzing of the brain, I like to go climb a rock. Cut down a billboard. Disable a bulldozer…Climb a mountain. Run a rapid.  ‘Be true to the earth,’ says Nietzsche. I like that.

Ken Sleight alias Seldom Seen Smith, to students:

“The monkey wrench is not a symbol of destruction. Ed Abbey told me right here on this ranch, the monkey wrench is a symbol of restoration. It’s symbolic of your own talents. That’s how you are going to fix the world – with you own gifts and talents. … See the monkeywrench as a tool of restoration.”

“why write?… I write to entertain my friends and exacerbate our enemies. I write to record the truth of our time, as best as I can see it. To investigate the comedy and tragedy of human relationships. To resist and sabotage the contemporary drift toward a technocreatic, militaristic totalitarianism, whatever it’s ideological coloration. To oppose injustice, defy the powerful, and speak for the voiceless. I write to make a difference…I write for the joy and exultation of writing itself. To tell my story.”

“Revolution is a hastening of the process of Evolution.” Jack Loeffler

Saboteurs – wooden shoes into the works — monkey wrenching, from:

http://radiowest.kuer.org/post/through-lens-wrenched-0

“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”from Hayduke Lives!

“The Mormon vice: reject alcohol, you plunge into sugar.”

“Men. They all think they’re so smart and they’re all so dumb. Crude…Dense as rocks. They think like rocks, in a straight line, nothing but gravity, straight down the hill, that’s how they think. No feelings…Skin deep. …no sensitivity, no inner understanding, no empathy….I feel sorry for men.”      Bonnie Abbzug-Sarvis

“An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human….Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

“A patriot must be ready to defend his country against his government.”

“. . .  the  love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need — if only we had the eyes to see. …No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.  A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins, and betraying the principle of civilization itself. “      

“Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.”

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.”

“We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all; but we cannot have freedom without wilderness.”

from The Monkey Wrench Gang:

“It became a question of subtle, sophisticated harassment techniques versus blatent and outrageous industrial sabotage…

Bonnie to Hayduke: “You’re a verbal cripple. You use obscenities as a crutch. Obscenity is a crutch for crippled minds.”

from Notes from a Secret Journal:

“I write to make a difference…to  raise more questions. To give pleasure and promote esthetic bliss. To honor life and praise the divine beauty of the world. For the joy and exultation of writing itself. To tell my story” by Samuel Johnson…

…rewards…: the immense satisfaction … of speaking out in plain, blunt language on matters that the majority of American authors are too tired, timid, or temporizing even to allow themselves to think about….

in this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it … becomes and honor to be labeled curmudgeon…

In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that’s on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy…Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things….

Belief in the supernatural is a failure of the imagination…

There’s nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas…

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power or means to coerce others…

Society is like a stew. If you don’t keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top…

Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them…

In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority…

Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth…

Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best…

Freedom begins between the ears…

When the situation is hopeless, there’s nothing to worry about…

One brave deed is worth a thousand books…

Death is every man’s final critic. To die well you must live bravely…

When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful…

I find more and more, as I grow older, that I prefer women to men, children to adults, animals to humans…

The writer speaks not to his audience…but for them, expressing their thoughts and emotions through the imaginative power of his art…

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth…

The artist’s job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live…

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: 1.) art and 2.) sedition…

Good writing can be defines as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times…

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it’s the right word.

It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written…

Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional…

The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward…

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I’ve always found the second approach the more pleasing…

There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author’s self-effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice…

Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence…

It is not the writer’s task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive…

Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record the truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss…

Abolition of a woman’s right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State…

Of all of our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused…

Concrete is heavy, iron is hard – but the grass will prevail…

You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light…

“We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.”

“…stop every Mexican at the line, give him a gun and ammunition and send him home to fix his country.” via Charles Bowden.

“…science in our time is the whore of industry and the slut of war, and that scientific technology has become the instrument of potential planetary slavery, the most powerful weapon ever placed in the hands of despots.”

“…fellow traveler in this fool’s journey out of the dark, through the light, and into the unknown.” inscription in Bowden’s gift copy of A Fool’s Progress.

“I don’t believe in doing work I don’t want to do in order the live the way I don’t want to live.”

“I feel such signage [common sense safety] is part of the unfortunate anti-Darwinian tendency of our times.”

Abbey’s neighbor, Dewey Foster: “‘Them there liberals, they can’t say the word shit even when their mouths is full of it.’ True fact, Dewey.”

“Western cattlemen are nothing more than welfare parasites. They’ve been getting a free ride on the public lands for over a century, and I think it’s time we phased it out”…

“It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. … That is all I ask of the author. To be a hero, appoint himself a moral leader, wanted or not. I believe that words count, that writing matters, that poems, essays, and novels — in the long run — make a difference. If they do not, then in the words of my exemplar Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s work is of no more importance than the barking of village dogs at night.”

Hayduke Lives!

O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers.—William Shakespeare

We stand for what we stand on.—Bonnie Abbzug

the DOE (Department of Entropy),

The lonesome juniper, nine-tenths dead, thrust its bare burnished gray claw toward the blue. A brown towhee crept beneath the juniper’s one live branch, picking at the turquoise berries and the bugs that crawled within the clutch of surviving green. High on the rosy canyon wall a wren sang out, flute notes falling in a bright cascade of quicksilver semiquavers.

basic native-American white male working-class chump, the only social stratum in America subject to legal and socially approved school, job and advancement discrimination, accompanied by slurs and sneers.

Bonnie andDoc, “could be like they say only a statistical anomaly.” “How come children keep dying of these statistical anomalies?”

old Doc …” Sarvis

The ecology warrior hurts no living thing, absolutely never, and he avoids capture, passing all costs on to them, the Enemy. The point of his work is to increase their costs, nudge them toward net loss, bankruptcy, forcing them to withdraw and retreat from their invasion of our public lands, our wilderness, our native and primordial home …”

Avoiding organization and all forms of networking, operating strictly on anarchic principles of democratic decentralism, the eco-warrior must also be a man or woman of heroic dedication

The eco-warrior is anonymous, mysterious, unknown

Editorial writers will denounce you,

Congressmen will fulminate, senators abominate, bureaucrats denunciate and all the vipers of the media vituperate.”

Rule Number Four: No domestic responsibilities. That lets me out. The eco-warrior does not marry, or if he marries he does not breed. Better not to marry. She does not marry or breed. The eco-warrior, like a priest or priestess, like a samurai, like a dedicated revolutionary, forgoes the personal pleasures of ordinary life, forgoes ordinary life,

The eco-war is only for the young.

poison the air, crush vegetation, destroy wildlife, waste energy, promote entropy and accelerate the unfoldings of the second law of thermodynamics. For this purpose, then, an endless circling round and round from morn to night could be perfectly satisfactory to all participants, requiring only that road signs be shifted here and there, now and then, so as to provide the illusion of linear progress on a European-style space-time axis. Everyone knows that. The spiking party, meanwhile, proceeded happily through the woods, working steadily but not too hard, not sweating, enjoying themselves, vaccinating the trees for protection against a possible chainsaw massacre in the future.

Wasn’t it Emma Goldman who said, If there’s no dancing at the revolution I won’t come?”

a pessimist is simply an optimist infull possession of the facts.”

As the years go by, one by one, I find it harder and harder to feel any respect, or even much sympathy, for the human race.”

“People are no damn good,” agreed Seldom. “Take ‘em one at a time, they’re all right. Even families. But bunch ‘em up, herd ‘em together, get ‘em organized and well fed and branded and ear-notched and moving out, then they’re the meanest ugliest greediest stupidest dangerest breed of beast in the whole goldang solar system far as I know.”

Our terrors and our darknesses of mind Must be dispelled then not by sunlight. … But by insight into nature, and a scheme Of systematic contemplation…. Very good, Titus.

via McTaggart:

His novel is an activist handbook, offering ideas for actions, debate about their ethics, and instructions for completing them.

…instruction continues for four pages

via Hoagland in NYT 5-7-1989:

Abbey of course loved coyotes (and, for that matter, buzzards) and had played his flute to answer their howls during the many years he had earned his

living watching for fires from Government towers…

There’s a saying that life gets better once you have outlived the bastards – which would certainly be true except that as you do, you are also outliving your friends.

”How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas . . . how utterly rich and wild. . . . Yet some among us have the nerve, the insolence, the brass, the gall to whine about the limitations of our earthbound fate and yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky. We are none of us good enough for the world we have.”

from Wrenched book of interviews 2020 by ML Lincoln:

“A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself..

from Jack Loeffler, Wrenched interview:

‘Ed imagined a shadow edging across the land. That’s how it appeared to me as well – there was a darkening of not just the landscape but of human consciousness itself.”

[In Hayduke Lives! Abbey writes via Doc Sarvis character]:

“The eco-warrior does not fight people. He fights an institution, the planetary empire of growth and greed. He fights not human beings but a monstrous megamachine never seen since the days of the late Jurassic in the carnivorous dinosaur. He does not fight humans. He fights a runaway technology, and all-devouring entity that feeds on humans, and all animals, on all living things, and even finally on minerals, metals, rock, soil, on the earth itself, on the bedrock basis of universal being.”

“One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words…

The domination of nature leads to the domination of human beings.”

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

via Doug Peacock:

“Abbey wanted to be reincarnated as a buzzard…

Ed Abbey looked forward to the day “when somebody with a terminal disease (such as life) is going to strap a load of TNT around his waist and go down into the bowels of Glen Canyon dam and blow that ugly thing to smithereens. That would be a good way to go.”

Abby finally concluded, “that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing worth saving.”

via David Brinkley, 2000:

‘It was the ‘moral duty’ of a writer, Abbey insisted, to act as a social critic of one’s country and culture, and as such to speak for the voiceless. And he did…

“Sentiment without action”, Abbey always said, “is the ruin of the soul.”.’

…a self-styled flute-playing bum wandering…

Abbey recalled: “I pounded in survey stakes before I ever got the notion to pull them out.”

… to him, anarchy was just democracy in action…

Earth First!… Burying salt in dirt airstrips in Idaho so the deer and elk would dig them up beyond usefulness…

The late Wallace Stegner… proclaimed that Abbey presented the ‘stinger of a scorpion’ and was the ‘most effective publicist of the West’s curious desire to rape itself since Bernard DeVoto.”

end Brinkley on Abbey…

from Beyond the Wall, 1971, 1984:

If I regret anything, it is my good behavior:

what demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

harmonica

I breakfast on fig newtons and peanuts…

Stop too long and they cover you with rocks…

What’s the gain in ridding ourselves of the Judeo-Christian hierarchy of intellectual oligarchs if we merely in meekly accept another power-hungry ideology in its place?

The defense of wildlife is a moral issue. All beings are created equal, I say. All are endowed by their Creator… with certain in alienable rights; among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit – each in its own way – of reproductive happiness.

Seated once more on my rear end, like everybody else in the modern world, I slump with relief back into the delights of the civilization I love to despise.

Paria Pariah Canyon. Buckskin Gulch

Desert Images

I find it hard to learn to love cement… I am not alone, for I belong to that ever-growing number of Americans, probably a good majority now, who have become aware that a fully industrialized, thoroughly urbanized, elegantly computerized social system is not suitable for human habitation.

… cattle growers, a vocational group notoriously intolerant of any predators but themselves.

… too many people in a shrinking world, not enough man-eating predators.

Sea of Cortez

… the appeal of the Pinacate country lies in its total lack of any obvious appeal.   

Douglas Peacock

… I gave up fishing decades ago… In the time one man spends trying to catch one fish I have ascended a small mountain, explored five miles of river valley, or probed to its secret heart a winding Desert Canyon.

I have never met a book yet that did not have something good about it.

…. the wolf stares at me; for one, still, frozen, sacred moment.

I see the wild green fire in its eyes.

End Abbey

Abdurraqib, Hanif:

“There are few things that seduce like scarcity…

Sometimes a desire to be gone is simply a desire to be gone.”

Abgrall, Jean-Marie:                

“Drug addiction and cult membership are striking in their similarities…

reinstating reality…

Cults set up various rituals that are used as tools for mind control, [and] as answers [for] psychic emptiness and existential concerns…

The parents are only seeking to establish the diagnosis of cult addiction…to transfer the responsibility to society…”

From his Soul Snatchers – The Mechanics of Cultssects   guru

Abinanti, Abby:

“We have to speak truth. We have not figured out as a country at this point how do we reconcile our behavior. How do we make this right?”

Abbzug, Bonnie (Abbey character):

“We stand for what we stand on.”

Abrahamian, Atossa:

‘It is not about this border. It’s the border in here’, pointing to his head. ‘and that is gone now.”

quoting a Kurdish Ali in The Jungle, a play.

“…the world will guarantee us little in the way of freedom, fairness or equality. It makes more sense to think of modern borders as overlapping and concentric circles that change size, shape and texture depending on who — or what — is trying to pass through….

…what are borders supposed to protect us from…

Modern borders exist to control…the movement of people. They control us.”

Abramoff, Jack:

“…contributions from parties with an interest in legislation are really nothing but bribes.

…Bush personally told him [Ralph Reed] that his presidency would make us all rich.”

…it’s the system which needs to be changed, not the current cast of characters running the system…

Members loved to attack corruption…one of the great hypocrisies of the system. Members swim in a swamp of corruption, and thrive in it…”

The revolving door is one of the greatest sources of corruption in government.

…do away with…’bringing home the bacon.’

Apply every federal law enacted by Congress to the Congress itself…

Abramoff, Rose:

“My job can’t just be to calmly document the end of the world.” via

Scientist Rebellion

Abramovic, Maria:

… people don’t do anything really important from the state of happiness. Because happiness is to say that you don’t want to change. …

…physical pain is almost like a door to secrets. The moment you understand how you can control the physical pain, then you stop having the fear.”

in a nyt mag interview? she noted death by diamonds assassination

“It’s so important to be obsessed and completely diseased by creativity and ideas.”

Abrams, Michael:

Birdmen, Batmen, and Skyflyers: Wingsuits and the Pioneers Who Flew in Them, Fell in Them, and Perfected Them

Christoph Aarns, who flies the rigid Skyray, is safety-obsessed and extends the bumper sticker by two words: NO FEAR, NO LIMIT: NO BRAINS.)

Chinese were centuries ahead of the rest of the world at putting men in the air. Sometime in the sixth century A.D., the emperor Kao Yang began experimenting with the power of large kites to lift the human body.

the mathematician Giovanni Battista Danti.

A wealthy member of the wedding party was so impressed that he took Danti to Venice as his private mathematician, where he became famous.

Unfortunately for those who came after, his manuscripts were not found until 1797, which meant—as the world saw few geniuses of his genius thereafter—278 more years of botched attempts at flight.

João Torto in Portugal had heard of the tragedy, as his wings were a slight improvement on what had preceded him.

Vliskov leapt from the top of a Moscow building in 1610, hesurvived.

parachutists jump from balloons when the famous Spencer brothers came by.

(And the first Spencer airships could turn into a huge, umbrella-like parachute if they lost all their gas.)

camel thorns

a phenomenon that still plagues the world of skydiving today: the better the equipment, the riskier the daredeviltry.

thanks largely to the television series Ripcord, the number of skydivers in the country was swelling.

1968, and in that same year the Para Commander parachute came out.

On September 10, 1981, Carta jumped from a plane at 10,000 feet, holding a blue flare, and landed on the South Tower of the World Trade Center—exactly twenty years and a day before their destruction. Four days later he tried the stunt again, but missed and complained that he had to take a taxi to get to the towers.

The humans who have tried to fly like birds throughout history are like teenagers in love: they can’t learn from anyone else’s mistakes, and they generally think they’re the only ones.

Patrick de Gayardon, known to skydivers everywhere as Deug.

“sky surfing,”

Gayardon made a commercial for Reebok’s “Life Is Short/ Play Hard” marketing campaign.

“I think that the problem with wingsuit flying is that you are so close to the dream of flying, you get fooled into it, like Icarus,” explains Gayardon’s friend Loïc Jean-Albert.

Loïc Jean-Albert,

Jean-Albert went on to make the suit himself, and it was eventually produced and sold as the Crossbow.

“The wingsuit is one of the things that you can fly the best—not in terms of flight angle or glide ratio, but in terms of how you can change the shape of the flying machine.

Skyray, is a sleek carbon-fiber wing

Flying is not so difficult. Security is difficult.”

That’s what makes us different from animals: we can experience fear with knowledge.”

Abrams, Stacey:

Brother Richard: “But there’s nothing spur of the moment about Stacey. She has a plan for everything.”

‘I hate books, I hate writing, I hate the English language, but I’m going to write it anyway’ “I’m a very efficient user of time.”

“So let’s be clear – this is not a speech of concession, because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. Democracy failed Georgia.

…avarice when left to its own devices is corrosive and that it will always outweigh conscience in our marketplace.”

“Being a storyteller is the beginning of being good at politics. People need to know how they fit into what you’re doing.”

Lead from the Outside:

“I offer this modification [to Archimedes]: Give me good friends to stand beside, and we will move the world…my life … is about knowing  and then deciding if they apply. Or if we need to nwrite our own rules…

For those of us on the outside, the quest for power is always rigged…

I’d read my book…Right and wrong remain valid, real constructs….What’s not right is giving credence to bad actions, and thereby becoming complicit.

I refused to be gaslighted…once we recognize that wrong exists, we must fight to change it every day.

…silence is not only dangerous, it is corrosive…

…we have to hack [the system]. Figure out its flaws, identify backdoors, and overwhelm the system….I will never fail to try.”

“I write either to idea or to contract.”

“…it’s not just about somebody winning an election. It’s about your life getting better and that should be our mission.”

 “In almost every sci-fi story, it begins with what decisions people are making long before the story takes place.”

Abramsky, Sasha:

“In the historically depraved calculus of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and most other Republican leaders, power clearly wins over decency or ideological coherence…a politics of barbarism, of undiluted majoritarian tyranny, emerges.”

“When you’re battling an invisible, formless for – a hard-to-define enemy against which there is no easy fix, an enemy with the power to upend daily certainties and to inflict chaos out of the blue – it changes how you live. It changes how you make choices, how you interact with the world. It alters your emotional state, making morossness something of a default state and optimism appear more akin to naivete. It is hard to stay upbeat if you always fear the worst.”

“… increasingly, large parts of our society behave as if under continual neurotoxin attack.”           from Jumping at Shadows, 2017  Ciguatoxin chapter.

“That [Trump] could consider Nazi and anti-Nazi motives to be morally equivalent implies damage to a core part of his ethical being so profound as to be irreparable….

No politician in American history has ever gone down so many different demagogic paths simultaneously and with so much success….

Trump—the son of KKK-supporting Fred Trump, the pupil of Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn—actually is, to the very core of his being, a white supremacist, a man who always has and always will divide humanity into hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, and religion….

Trump is spreading a toxic sludge over this great land.”

“On the day of Trump’s inauguration, a rainy, cold, gray day in Northern California, the US flag at the elegant, domed Capitol in Sacramento began flying at half-mast. It stayed there for the next several days—throughout the Saturday women’s march, which saw well over a million Californians take to the streets, along with huge protests in Oregon and Washington, and into the first full week of Trump’s reign. And then, the day that Governor Jerry Brown delivered a fiery State of the State address promising to fight Trump’s discriminatory, extremist agenda every step of the way, the flag was hoisted to full mast once more.”

Abravanel, Maurice

“Music has the power to strengthen people’s minds. There is a point where words give up and music comes in.”

Abruzzo, Jennifer:

“I do not worry about what the courts may or may not do. I do not feel constrained at all.”

“One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.”

Acevedo, Enrique:

“Los Angeles …was Mexico once and remains part of the memory, culture, street names, food andfamilies who never crossed a border because the border crossed them. …the Mexican flagisn’t necessarily a symbol of separation or rejection. Sometimes, it’s a claim: We are both. We areMexican and American, not divided but layered. This is what our identity looks like…

that being American doesn’t require being less of anything else. That pride in your

roots doesn’t cancel your claim to this country. That loving where you are doesn’t mean forgettingwhere you’re from.”

Achebe, Chinua

”Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

Nigerian Writer

Achen, Christopher and Larry Bartels,

“It Feels Like We’re Thinking.” 2006 paper title, see pdf

Democracy for Realists

“… intellectual conversion experience …

Niebuhr quotes….

Lippmann quote

“… election outcomes are mostly just erratic reflections of the current balance of par- tisan loyalties in a given political system….

Schattschneider quote Ch 11

“… the greatest electoral disaster of the 20th century, the victory of Adolf Hitler in the … elections of Weimar Germany.

The folk theory [of democracy] is like the ether theory of electromagnetic and gravitational forces: it is based on 19th-century intellectual foundations, and the empirical evidence has passed it by.

James Madison argued … that in politics, human beings are not angels. We care more about ourselves than about the common good, and we are prone to faction.”

Our analysis … sheds useful light on a common circumstance—friction between politically inconsistent social identities….For ordinary citizens, parties make sense—if they make sense at all—in social identity terms, not as ideological frameworks.”

Lippmann quote

“the least informed members within the electorate …seem to hold the critical balance of power…… more effective democracy [requires] a greater degree of economic and social equality.

Acheson, Dean

“Sometime it is necessary to make things clearer than the truth.”

Truman’s Sec. of State

Ackerman, Diane

Adventure is not something we find, it’s something we take with us.”

Diane Ackerman, SLC 8-2-03

Ackerman, Elliot

“Are we entering an era where we hold elections in a nation so hopelessly divided that neither side is willing to accept defeat? In a democracy that is the truest form of mutually assured destruction.”

Ackerman, Peter

“Real power derives from the consent of those it would control, not from the threat of violence against them…

Those who used nonviolent action… did not come to make peace. They came to fight.”

Shooting your way to power may destroy the old order, but you cannot free your people until they give you their consent.”

On Otpor: Stickers were far from trivial; in fact, they represented both the cheerful insolence and ubiquity of Otpor’s effort to undermine Milosevic. Popovic called stickers, ‘the key medium’, in part because putting up posters made people more noticeable to the police, but ‘you can count on everyone to get involved when it comes to a sticker’.”

The object of nonviolent conflict is not to avoid violence, except insofar as violence damages the cause or the movement, as it so often does. The purpose of nonviolent power is to end oppression, check, invaders, secure, rights, or establish democracy.”

Vaclev Havel

Gandhi: Satyagraha – exposing the truth about an evil – no one has to look expectantly at another… All are leaders and all are followers.

Once the truth about oppression is circulating in the public mind, it cannot be evaded, and when acts of opposition – personal at first, then collective, and finally strategic – are seized upon and multiply, the people’s acquiescence begins to come apart, and with it, their cooperation with oppressors.”

The choice has to be realistic, for a movement must make progress before it can make history.”

Ackerman, Spencer

“…security-based responses to political problems are futile…

the most durable terrorism in this country is white people’s terrorism. A war cannot defeat it. Persistent political struggle can.”

Ackley, Danielle

“This is not even a political divide, it’s a reality divide.”

Acosta, Carmen

“If we stay silent, they win. This is what they want: to make everyone live in fear.”

Captain Acosta’s cousin.

Acosta, Jim (via HC Richardson Jan. 28, 2025:

“As the son of a Cuban refugee I took home this lesson: It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I’ve always believed it is the job of the press to hold power to account. I’ve always tried to do that … and I plan on…doing…that in the future.You have to get out your phone, record that message: ‘I will not give in to the lies. I will not give into the fear.’ Post it on your social media.”

Adair, Bill

”The talking points drive the discourse. They repeat the

talking points so often I think they start actually believing them.”

via Bill Keller

Adams, Ansel:

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

Adams, Douglas

“I may not have gone where I intended to go but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.”

via Chris Johnson

Adams, Henry

“Power is poison. Its effects on Presidents … had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwords;…”

“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

“Power is a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.”

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.”

Adams, James Truslow

’[The American ] dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement….not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and recognized by others for what they are,

regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Adams, John::

”The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there was no religion in it.”

“…democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.

It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

“Tyranny is around the bend whenever a political system strays far from moderation.”

“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

Adams, John Luther:

Memoir: Silences so Deep.

“I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art.”

“The Inuit have a particular kind of person, an isumataq. An isumataq is not an elder; an isumataq is a person who creates the atmosphere, or the place, within which wisdom may reveal itself.”

Adams, Samuel

“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.”

Adern Jacinda

“There cannot be a case of all profit and no responsibility.”

re: Facebook, etc.

Adewumi, Tanitoluwa:

“I never lose. I learn.” via Kristof

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi

“Privilege blinds, because it’s in its nature to blind. Don’t let it blind you too often. Sometimes you’ll need to push it aside in order to see clearly.”

“My madness will now bare itself.”

“Art has to be able to go to a place that’s messy, a place that is uncomfortable. Literature is the last thing we can depend on to tell us the truth about who we are.”

Adkins, Homer

Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target.

Adler, J

“Ecstasy experience is a year of therapy in two hours.”

J Adler Newsweek, 1985

Adler, Mortimer

“Ideas are things to see with…

Free time is like a vacuum.

Anyone not in an asylum has a duty to think”

Adler-Bell, Sam:

“Cultivate disdain for the ultrarich.” Know Your Enemy podcast

Admiri, Alessandro

“When fascists rise, it’s because the left is weak.”

Adorno, Theodor:

“The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.”

Theodor Adorno writes in “Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life” (1951), his meditation on exile in the United States, “is not … the absence of historical memories, as that it bears no traces of the human hand … no marks of foot or wheel, no soft paths along their edges.” He adds, “It is as if no one has ever passed their hand over the landscape’s hair. It is uncomforted and comfortless.”

Truth, power…

Adshead, Gwen:

The Devil you Know 11 cases chapters mosaic portraits:

“…we all have the capacity to get into states of mind that we might call evil…

a loud voice…says…we do not want to understand, we want to punish and we want to take revenge…

radical empathy…

We should expect the human mind to be complicated…violence is complicated…

ordered/disordered mind, their ‘universe’…

Agatha Christie, P D James…

mosaic characters…mosaics of evil…mosaic portraits

“Psychiatrists are doctors who look after the only part of the body that votes.”

revenge is a basic human impulse, a kind of wild justice that keeps us stuck in our fear and anger, mirroring the very cruelty we claim to abhor. I’ve come to think of my patients as survivors of a disaster, where they are the disaster and my colleagues and I are the first responders.

the importance of listening out for the unconscious poetry that may be heard even from those who seem dangerously alien.

patient who once said, “I’m blind because I see too much.”

Aeschylus via Robert Kennedy

“In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

African proverb:

‘If you wish to go quickly, go alone. If you wish to go far, go together.

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito.”

Ethiopian proverb: “When spider webs unite, they entangle a lion.”

“You can’t wake a person who is pretending to sleep.”

Africa Orono (Africa) proverb

“when you pray—move your feet”.  African proverb

Agee, James:

“the cruel radiance of what is”

“This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time; and is why in turn I feel such rage at its misuse.”

Agre, Peter

I was getting a D in chemistry. If my high school chemistry teacher is still with us, he probably aspirated his morning coffee when he heard the news.

Nobel in Chemistry, 2003 aquaporin

Agre, Philip:

“your face is not a bar code,”

Agüera y Arcas, Blaise:

“Humans did not inventcomputation any more

than they did electricalcurrent or optical lenses.”

‘intelligenceexplosions’: the rapid evolutionary increasesin brain size that have been observed in highlysocial animals, including bats, whales anddolphins, birds and our own ancestors.

in large numbers, humanscan achieve many improbably complex feats

beyond any individual’s cognitive or physical

capacity: transplanting organs, travelling to

the Moon, manufacturing silicon chips. These

feats require cooperation, thinking in parallel

and division of labour. They are group-level

phenomena, and can justifiably be calledsuperhuman.

technologicalsymbiogenesis

…parallelize silicon-based computation. It’s

no coincidence that this is when modern,

neural-net-based AI models finally began

to take off. Practically speaking, neural nets

require massively parallel processing;

artificial life.   Evolution.  Darwin

nothing in evolution — starting with the origin

of life itself — makes sense except in the light

of computational symbiogenesis.

Metabolism efficiency entropy

Evolution, especially in its

creative, symbiogenetic aspect, can be under-

stood as a continuous quest for fresh sources

of free energy.

More collective intelligence,not less, lights our brightest path forwards.

Books: What is Life?    What is Intelligence?

Ahmari, Sohrab:

“The monsters that menace us don’t lurk abroad.”

“[GOP] North Star… is rule by large corporate and financial power, and support for militarism and cultural aggression abroad.”

Ahmed, Imran:

‘Don’t Feed the Trolls’ – see pdf

“…trolling is purposeful…to  dissuade the target from speaking out freely…

You’re being targeted … because they know that you’re good.”

Ahmed, Waqas The Polymath:

‘he is investigating multidisciplinary approaches to the research and treatment of chronic pain.’

Ahmed, Osman

“Black and white is the best language to bring the pain out.”

Kurdish artist

Ainsworth, Claire

”You are born 100% human, but die 90% microbial.”

Ajina, Nasim Abu:

Hamas paraglider and drone commander, killed 10-31-2023 or earlier.

Akerlof, George A

”…there have to be rules and there has to be a referee that enforces them.

People had taken the ‘invisible hand’ too seriously, and enshrined it with a mythology.

Animal spirits – our sense of confidence, of fairness, of good faith, of realistic valuations – drive the economy.”

“Competitive markets by their very nature spawn deception and trickery.”

With Robert J Schiller

Akerson, Daniel F

”Don’t be afraid of new ideas; be afraid of old ones.”

Akin, William E.:

“…at the center of their view of America was the paradox of a society victimized by abundance and technology…”

Akopov, Petr:

“The world is changing, and those countries that have challenged the Western world order will not be able to change it by playing by its rules.”

Akyol, Mustafa:

from Reopening Muslim Minds, 2021: see also Islam without Extremes.

from fatalism to obedience see quote; religion police.

Islamicity Index six values -intentions.

“Faith is not something you can police…

via Quran: There is no compulsion in religion…

religion enforcement officer…

via Mariam Mokhtar: ‘Anyone whocan liberate the Malay Muslim mind is a dangerous threat. That is why the authorities had to censure Mustafa Akyol.’

…cultural naturalists…silenceyour opponent…no abrogation…

quoting ??:’…cite the views ofyour opponent. Silencing them is an admission of the weakness of your case…’

Alander, Minna:

re Trump and EU:

“This is literally all the kids coming together and trying to figure out

what to do about the drunk dad.”

Alareer, Refaat  :

Alareer published this poem just over a month before he was killed:

If I must die,

you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze — and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale

Al-Awada, Salman

…democracy is the only legitimate form of government; … Islam does not permit theocracy; …separation of powers is required; … the worst nepotism is that practiced in the name of religion.”

Muslim cleric

al-Hamad, Turki

“How can they confront an ideology that they themselves carry within them and within their mind-set?”

via Thomas Friedman

Albert, Michael:

”indignity, disempowerment, and hunger accompany capitalism worldwide.”

Albisa, Cathy:

“You can’t change what you can’t name,”

Alcala, Lucia:

““We, as U.S.scholars, feel we have to fix everyone. … People don’t need us to save them and fix them.”

Albrecht, Stan

”religious leave-taking has received far less attention

than has religious conversion.”

Albright, Madeline:

“Collective hatred becomes much more dangerous than individual hatred. It’s a process in which hatred gets legitimized.”

Fascism should perhaps be viewed less as a political ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power…

secular evangelists…

“I am an optimist…who worries a lot..make the new normal ..better, more just and more secure than the old.’

notes from 2000:

“Putin is small and pale, so cold as to be almost reptilian…

his competition of choice is not chess, as some assume, but rather judo…”

“…the self-centered moral numbness that allows Fascism to thrive.”

“There is no shortage of worthwhile work to be done and… no surplus of seasons in which to achieve our goals. So let us buckle our boots, grab a cane if we need one, and march.”

“Silence may be golden, but it won’t win many arguments. You have to interrupt.”

via Hillary Clinton: ‘when dictators drag their feet or ambassadors filibustered, Madeline never hesitated to speak up. And just in case they didn’t get the message, she would put on a snail pin to signal her impatience.”

“Respect for the rights of others is a lofty principle; but envy is a primal urge.”         

Alcott, Louisa May:

“I had a pleasant time with my mind, for it was happy,” Louisa May Alcott wrote in her diary just after she turned eleven

”There are some natures too noble to curb and too lofty to bend.”

Louisa May Alcott’s mother:

Alda, Alan:

“…leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.

What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.”

“…speaking into the vague mist of interpersonal nothingness.”

“We have the capacity for empathy. It feels good when we exercise it. Things go so much better … yet it wears off after awhile, and I need a booster shot.”

“The trouble with a lecture is that it answers questions that haven’t been asked.”

“We’re 11. We’re not 7!” know your audience!

The ‘secret’ of 60 Minutes? original producer:

‘Tell me a Story!”

“Dr Parkinson has fun with the keyboard.”

on marriage: “I don’t think it

can be put into a nugget. It involves being aware of how much you love the

person not only in tender moments but also when you’re screaming at each

other. Arlene has a simpler explanation.

” What’s that? “When people ask her

what’s the secret of a long marriage she says ‘a short memory’.

Alexander, Michelle:

“…we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration).”

“Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages.”

“Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off limits.”

…mass incarceration is a system that locks people not only behind actual bars in actual prisons, but also behind virtual bars and virtual walls – walls that are invisible to the naked eye. …mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison. Once released, former prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion. They are members of America’s new undercaste.”

…the new nation that’s struggling to be born…

Alexander, Samuel

from Entropia, 2013:

“Politics … the art of living well with people who disagree with you.

…we restricted freedom to maximize freedom….autopsy of capitalism…   

Alexievich, Svetlana:

“I strive desperately to…reduce history to the human being.”

“I would say that I am a human ear,” she said. “When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases and exclamations, I always think — how many novels disappear without a trace!”

“The Soviet soldier is the cheapest soldier there is,” said a prescient combat medic in “Boys in Zinc,” her Afghan war book. “Unequipped and unprotected. Expendable. The same way it was in 1941.” He added, “It’ll still be the same in 50 years.”

“Putin bought Russia.”

Democracy is in retreat partly because individuals have convinced themselves that they are too small to effect change, to confront evil.

“I think that we have to convince ourselves of the contrary. Each of us has to find this strength, this ability to resist.”

Alfonzo, Juan Pablo Pérez

“Oil is the devil’s excrement.”   1975

Alford, C Fred

“Evil is pleasure in hurting and lack of remorse…It is about the pleasures of absolute control inherent in the ability to harm another…The evil person wants to take [you] over…they want to hurt you from the inside….Not Satan but the vampire is the leading icon of evil among younger informants….evil is the impulse to malevolent destruction…”

Algheriani, Salah

“The taste of freedom is very delicious.”

Libyan freedom movement

Alhazen, via Popova

Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly disenchanted by its unquestioned dogmas and the way it turned people on each other with the self-righteous fist of zealous subjectivity. Instead, he devoted himself to the search for objective truth, pure and impartial, taken from the open hand of Mother Nature — the study of reality raw and rapturous, unmediated by interpretation.

Ali, Saleem:

“In environmental discourse, we often talk about the precautionary principle, that you have to be careful about things, but if you go to the extreme, it becomes paralysis because you can’t make any kind of forward movement. That’s the main problem we have had.”

Al-Khalili, Jim:

“I suddenly fell in love with physics. It was like puzzle solving; it was common sense.

science is about getting closer to the truth…

As a scientist, I want to find a non-supernatural explanation that obeys the laws of physics… it’s intellectual laziness to reach a point and say: ‘well I can’t understand things further, it’s down to a divine creator.’

Science is constantly taking us beyond what we thought we could understand.

Life is somehow different from inanimate matter of equivalent complexity, because life has evolved the trickery of the quantum world to make it more efficient.”

also Kindle book The Joy of Science.

Ali, Ayaan Hirsi:

“… the violent strain of Islam appears to have metastasized…

does this violent extremism stem from Islam’s sacred texts? Or is it the product of circumstance, which has twisted and contorted Islam’s foundations?

…we can distinguish three different groups of Muslims in the world today based on how they envision and practice their faith.

…The first group is the most problematic — the fundamentalists who envision a regime based on sharia, Islamic religious law. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version and take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else. I call them “Medina Muslims,” in that they see the forcible imposition of sharia as their religious duty, following the example of the Prophet Mohammed when he was based in Medina. They exploit their fellow Muslims’ respect for sharia law as a divine code that takes precedence over civil laws. It is only after they have laid this foundation that they are able to persuade their recruits to engage in jihad.

The second group — and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world — consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence or even intolerance towards non-Muslims. I call this group “mecca Muslims.” The fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law- abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.

…a third group is emerging within Islam — Muslim reformers or, as I call them, “modifying Muslims” — who promote the separation of religion from politics and other reforms.

Anyone seeking support for armed jihad in the name of Allah will find ample support in the passages in the Quran and Hadith that relate to Mohammed’s Medina period.

…the so-called “sword verses” (9:5 and 9:29) have “abrogated, canceled, and replaced” those verses in the Quran that call for “tolerance, compassion, and peace.”

As the Princeton scholar Michael Cook observed in his book Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, “the historical salience of warfare against unbelievers … was thus written into the foundational texts” of Islam.

…so-called moderate representatives of Islam insist that violence has nothing to do with Islam and as a result the intolerant and violent aspects of the Quran and the Hadith are never acknowledged or rejected. There is never any discussion about change within Islam to bring the morally outdated parts of the religion in line with modernity or genuine tolerance for those who believe differently.

We need to confront the nonviolent preaching of sharia and martyrdom that precedes all acts of jihad.

We will win only if we engage with the ideology of Islamist extremism, and counter the message of death, intolerance, and the pursuit of the afterlife with our own far preferable message of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, 2015:

It is foolish to insist, as our leaders habitually do, that the violent acts of radical Islamists can be divorced from the religious ideals that inspire them.

Instead we must acknowledge that they are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in Islam itself, in the holy book of the Qur’an as well as the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad contained in the hadith. Let me make my point in the simplest possible terms:

Islam is not a religion of peace. the burning and increasingly global problem of political violence carried out in the name of religion.

“Violence is inherent in Islam.”

along with numerous quotations from the Qur’an, an explicit threat on my life:

when a murderer quotes the Qur’an in justification of his crime, we should at least discuss the possibility that he means what he says.

that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam.

Western liberals now seem to collude against critical thought and debate.

… the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.

we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.

Rather, it is they who must learn to live with our commitment to free speech.

Islam is a single core creed based on the Qur’an, the words revealed by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, and the hadith, the accompanying works that detail Muhammad’s life and words.

No symbol represents the soul of Islam more than the Shahada.

three different groups of Muslims.

The first group is the most problematic. These are the fundamentalists who,

argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version.

Medina Muslims, in that they see the forcible imposition of sharia as their religious duty.

The second group—and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world—consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence. I call them Mecca Muslims.

…think of me not as an apostate, but as a heretic: one of a growing number of people born into Islam who have sought to think critically about the faith we were raised in. It is with this third group—only a few of whom have left Islam altogether—that I would now identify myself. These are the Muslim dissidents; call them the Modifying Muslims.

religious doctrines matter and are in need of reform.

We delude ourselves that our deadliest foes are somehow not actuated by the ideology they openly affirm.

The five things to be reformed are:

There are such fundamental differences between the teachings of Jesus and Muhammad,

Brother Rachid:

Mr. President, if you really want to fight terrorism, then fight it at the roots. How many Saudi sheikhs are preaching hatred? How many Islamic channels are indoctrinating people and teaching them violence from the Quran and the hadith? . . . How many Islamic schools are producing generations of teachers and students who believe in jihad and martyrdom and fighting the infidels?

Malala Yousafzai:

The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them. That is why they are blasting schools every day—because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring to our society.

… it was through a process of repeated blasphemy that Christians and Jews evolved and grew into modernity. That is what art did. That is what science did. And yes, that is what irreverent satire did. The Muslim Reformation is… more likely to come from a relentless campaign of blasphemy. So when a Muslim sees you reading this book and says, “I am offended, my feelings are hurt,” your reply should be: “What matters more? Your sacred text? Or the life of this book’s author? Your sacred text? Or the rule of law? Human life, human freedom, human dignity—they all matter more than any sacred text.” Christians have been through this, Jews have been through it. It’s now time for Muslims to go through it.

five core concepts in Islam that are fundamentally incompatible with modernity:

Voltaire, the freest of freethinkers.

that the right to think, to speak, and to write in freedom and without fear is ultimately a more sacred thing than any religion.

“Islam is not a religion of peace…

Without fundamental alterations to some of Islam’s core concepts, we shall not solve the burning and increasingly global problem of political violence carried out in the name of religion…

Islamic violence is rooted not in social, economic or political conditions…but rather in the foundational texts of Islam itself….

the religion is a destructive, nihilistic cult of death…

NYT review by Filipovic: No such concept of individual rights and responsibilities exists in the Muslim world. ‘… the individual is inextricably linked to the group, condemnation of the individual is considered vilification of the group.’

End Ali, Ayaan Hirsi

Alinsky, Saul:

” The first rule of change is controversy. You canʼt get away from it for the

simple reason: all issues are controversial. Change means movement, movement means friction, friction means heat, and heat means controversy.”

Rules for Radicals:

The rules[1]

1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
10. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
11. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.

12.       “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

via Gal Beckerman:

For a revolution to be successful, it has to follow the three-act structure of a play. The first act establishes the characters and the plot, the second act sharpens the conflict, and in the third act, “good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution.”

end Alinsky

Allee, Warder Clyde

“… the present system of international relations is biologically unsound.”

From The Social Life of Animals, via Tamm

Allen, James:

“Adversity does not build character, it reveals it.” via Charles Koch

Allen, Myles:

“Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.  In the 21st century, climate is what you affect, weather is what gets you.”

NATURE, 2003

Allen, Steve character quotes

Meeting of Minds series

Da Vinci: Shows 21, 22 of Series  and Volume 4.

[One] must be born in a time, place, and circumstances in which one’s gifts can be brought to flower. It was my good fortune to grow up in la bella citta de Firenze…

The act of procreation…is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if it were not a traditional custom…

Anyone who relies on authorities is using his memory, not his understanding…

I found that the more thoroughly I understood something the less I was inclined to love or to hate. The act of investigation  – understanding -became the powerful emotional experience…

I often attended to small matters in order to earn a living…

“The past is never, in fact, broken with, but is eternally dragged…into the present and the future.”

It is the mindless … aspects of conservatism  [that ] make it literally dangerous not only to attempt to introduce new knowledge and ideas but to contradict the errors of the past…even the right to subject any and all things to rational critical inquiry may be denied.”

“There are limits to our ignorance.”

William Blake via Steve Allen: Meeting of Minds, Shows 21q, 22:

…the American Declaration of Independence makes the blood course through your own veins.

,,,the words of Jesus Christ in the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ …opposed to the private ownership of property.

Most Christians…accept only those portions of the Master’s words that are harmonious with their own selfish interests or prejudices!

end Allen, Steve

Allen, Woody:

“If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.”

“My one regret in life is that I’m not someone else.”

“Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love, that give meaning to the indifferent universe.”

 Martin Bergmann speaking as Levy via Woody Allen

One option is not to regard it as puzzling at all. Recall the character in Woody Allen’s movie Hannah and Her Sisters, whose response to Arendt’s problem of evil was to say that people who ask how the Holocaust happened are asking the wrong question. “Given what people are, the question is, ‘Why doesn’t it happen more often?’”

            via Jonathan Freedland

Via O’Toole: Woody Allen compared the sumptuous dinners

at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse to those

hosted in Castle Dracula, “where Lugosi has

three young female vampires who service the

place,” and suggested, about Epstein, that “one

can picture him sleeping in damp earth.”

end Woody Allen

Allende, Isabel:

“…we have to defend the borders from aggression. But not from the desperate. How are you going to stop the invasion of the desperate? You have to incorporate them and provide space for everybody…

I’m 77…I’ve seen how things seem really bad and we seem to be in a very dark place, and then we get out…”

I have three things that all writers want: silence, solitude and time

Allende, Salvador:

Cybersyn…exploring direct democracy…Chile

Alley, Patrick,

Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption.Foreword by George Soros

as ‘Publish What You Pay’ (PWYP). The idea was to get oil and mining

the world of grand corruption

To make and then hide the billions of dollars of countries’ wealth stolen every year, you need a whole service industry behind you.

the term ‘blood diamonds’ was born.

At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity. Chico Mendes

One of our most important discoveries was a simple one: make it personal.

The UK, Europe and the US have imposed laws to ensure that the identity of the real owners of companies is known, and one of the most famous advertising slogans of all time–‘A diamond is forever’–was eclipsed by a new term: ‘Blood diamonds’. Has the Resource Curse ended? Far from it–the scramble for the world’s resources is greater than ever. Have we destroyed the shadow network? No. But it’s not quite as obscured by shadows as it was, and we have learned many valuable lessons. It’s just as well, because it turns out that everything we have done so far has just been a rehearsal.

on Rio de Janeiro for the first international Earth Summit. ‘No place on the planet could remain an island of affluence in a sea of misery. We are either going to save the whole world or no one will be saved,’ said the summit’s secretary-general, Maurice Strong.

US president George H W Bush

home. ‘The American way of life is not up for negotiation. Period.’

And what is that way of life they’re so scared of losing? It is one based on self-interest, deregulation and inequality and the common denominator–

Like a mycorrhizal fungus, the shadow network had already spread throughout the roots of the political system.

The shadow network knows no political boundaries as it leads humanity into a mass greed-fueled suicide.

we ended up with a complete picture of the cows’ convoluted journey from farm to slaughterhouse.’

tackle a rising new challenge, one of the most insidious forms of corruption: digital threats against democracy.

Cambridge Analytica was immortalized in the documentary film The Great Hack.

The fact that these people don’t understand why we do what we do is one of their greatest weaknesses, and one of our greatest strengths.

end Alley

Almond, Steve

“As Americans have become geographically uprooted and spiritually unmoored, they have turned to sports as a source of tribal identity, a primarily masculine refuge from the anxieties of adulthood…

Mr. Trump understood that most Americans have exchanged the burdens of citizenship for the pleasures of fandom. And he intuited that politics, for all its precious norms and pretensions, was at its root a blood sport….

…“negative partisanship,” an ingrained hatred for the other party that is often entirely divorced from ethics or policy….

…we now have a leader who grasps, all too well, the ways in which our sporting spirit can be prodded to reveal the darkest precincts of our national soul.”

see also Orwell

Alpe, Daniel

“We are no longer faced with a world in which supply-side economic remedies – easy money, reduced taxation, fiscal belt-tightening and deregulation – can spur new capacity and the creation of well-paying private sector jobs.”

“We need a new economic multilateralism with the developing world, to encourage them … toward consumption … we in the West must curb our addiction to credit and consumption.”

Alperovitz, Gar:

”We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing.”

“…the idea that the American ‘system’ as a whole is in real trouble – …heading in a direction that spells the end of its historic values – that idea is difficult, indeed all but impossible, for most people to grasp.”

“Systemic change…involves questions of how property is owned and controlled – the locus of real power in most political economies.”

“We don’t have an economic problem, we have a political problem managing the wealthiest economy in the world.”

Alpert, Carol Lynn

”Science is inherently messy, full of controversy, false leads, dead ends, hindsight, hunches, intuition, and social and cultural lenses that color its paradigms and assumptions. Only continuing dialogue, challenge, debate, controversy, imagination and competitiveness drive it forward toward a closer and closer approximation of an agreed-upon model of reality; most of this occurring over time in an imperfect and noisy community of reigning dons, renegade disciples, back-stabbing apprentices and all-around, careerist trouble-makers, though all of them, on the whole, mainly well-intentioned.”

Boston Mus Sci., 2003

Alpert, Herb:

re: trumpet: “I was aquiet, insecure kid and this instrument could talk for me.”

“The trumpet is just a piece of plumbing. You’re the instrument!”

Alpert Richard (Ram Dass):

“It’s been a hell of a dance, hasn’t it?” to Timothy Leary.

“…surf the silence…

Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”

al-Sharif, Anas:

I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many

times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification – so that Allah may bear witness against those who

stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath,

and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children

and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced

for more than a year and a half.

Al-Sheikh, Youssef:

PhD Dedication: “Though it has been the degrading force

                        Diabetes has been the driving force as well.”

Alter, Charlotte:

“Socialism is a generational Rorschach test: Boomers think of Soviet gulags and bad shoes, millennials think of Swedish health care and free education.”

‘This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination…’Robert F Kennedy

Alterman, Eric:

“…the era of sustained growth on which the social and economic advances of postwar America rested is gone for good…” reviewing R J Gordon book, Rise and Fall of American Growth. And

‘…stagnant living standards for most Americans…reinforced by a set of headwinds’: rising inequality, a plateau in education levels, an aging population and more.” citing Paul Krugman

“… the establishment media resented Obama’s thoughtfulness, his  penchant for prudence and deliberation … stigmatization of intellect.

By relentlessly promoting [the] false equivalence between truth and bullshit, thoughtfulness and stupidity, the press sowed the seeds of the unimaginable disaster … Donald Trump’s presidency.”

Hannah Arendt sardonically noted that “no one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.” To the contrary, she went on, “lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade.”

Clearly, politics is not a profession that rewards, much less fetishizes, honesty. Results are what matter.

Presidents who do not lie to the nation have been the exception, not the rule. But early in American history, presidents lied in most cases without anything like the consequences that have become possible in modern times. The United States was not a terribly powerful nation in its infancy. The federal government was not even all that powerful

Richard Nixon’s incessant dishonesty, together with his noxious combination of ambition, racism, and criminality, produced an even more volatile situation, which, thanks to bipartisan efforts in Congress, was brought swiftly to an end without a constitutional crisis. Nevertheless, the policies of these presidents caused over fifty-seven thousand senseless American battle deaths and likely

members of the press have historically proven themselves to be decidedly ambivalent about holding presidents to a standard of basic truthfulness.

In the century following the AmericanRevolution, journalism was primarily a partisan endeavor, with news-sheets and journals tied explicitly to one of the major political parties or local bosses. News articles at the time, like life itself, were largely nasty and brutish (though not always short).

Ben Bradlee once explained, … “even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face.”

Republicans ended up renouncingvirtually the entire Enlightenment, and with it, “reason, facts, science, open-mindedness,

“Bullshit”

enables both misinformation and disinformation to thrive. 22

the media and the growing trend of presidential dishonesty have laid

the groundwork for the otherwise implausible presidency of Donald J. Trump.

This systematic use of lying

as propaganda, as Arendt observed in her 1951 study of totalitarianism, would discourage people from even seeking truthfulness.

…secret meeting in 2016 where Republican Kevin McCarthy of California, then House majority leader, said he thought Trump might have

been in the pay of Vladimir Putin. When laughter followed, McCarthy added, “Swear to God.”

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, explained, “Unwilling to pay the political price of breaking with their own president, Republicans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly redefine what is and isn’t tolerable. This will have terrible consequences for our democracy.”

“We’re not at war. We’re at work,” was how Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron put it .

New York Times, which reassured readers in 1922 that “several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,” and was just a political ploy “to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic…”

James Comey explained, “It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence.”

end Eric Alterman

Alterman, Kent:

“The relativity of reality has become so commonplace it’s disconcerting. Facts don’t seem to matter. Reality doesn’t seem to matter. It’s what you will it to be or what you say it is.”

Alterman, John B:

“The president and his entourage think fellow billionaires who have an itch to get things done make the world go round.”

Altman, Sidney:

“I wasn’t looking for what I found…

an elegant experiment …is one that tests one specific prediction in a way that allows the result…to stand above the noisy background of secondary  phenomena.”

Alto, Joe:

Relay’s director of growth

“Addiction is the opposite of connection. Isolation is what

fuels addiction. … You need community and you need accountability.”

Alvarez, Carlos Manuel

“The task of conscentiously lying is perhaps the most unpleasant role to play…

Navigating Communism is like trying to cross a cobblestone road in high heels, trying not to fall, feigning normalcy. Some of us end up twisting our ankles.” Cuba pdf

Alvarez,Maximillian:

“Cogito Zero Sum – I think, therefore I am entitled to my opinion – isn’t helpful.”

Alvarez, Walter:

“We are stardust … concentrated by Earth!”

Alyokhina, Maria  (Pussy Riot):

““Revolution” is talked about as a project, but it’s not a project which one can start and finish, framing it with dates as if in a history textbook. Revolution is life, in which one always faces a choice: to act or to stand aside….

revolution is a political process within each one of us: the choice to act and overcome your fear, which appears each time you start to act…

Our enemies are fear and indifference….

Mr Putin? The answer is simple and cynical. This is the image that Russia creates for itself….

the “Iron Curtain” is not a political term from the 20th century, but a wall of mistrust which is built by each one of us when we refuse to take responsibility and to participate in politics. This is the wall of separation between “us” and “them”. …

only trust can become the core that will help us to overcome political hypocrisy….”

“They say if you will strike our regime, we will put you in solitary confinement. They call it prison inside prison. What they don’t realise is that it doesn’t matter what is around you. Where you keep your freedom is inside you.”        

al-Zeyada, Zeina(8 years old):

“God is a weak one. I will never say God again. He can’t change anything.”

Amanpour, Christiane:

“I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth. We have to be prepared to fight especially hard right now for the truth….We must fight against the normalization of what is unacceptable.”

“Truth leads to democracy, lies lead to dictatorship.…”

“We have to be truthful, not neutral,”

Amar, Akhil Reed

“Too often, Justice Scalia stopped reading. He failed to read the Constitution’s text all the way to the end — to give due weight to its transformative amendments added by post-founding reformers. And he failed to read modern originalist scholarship that has conclusively disproved many of the historical canards that were prominent in the 1950s when he attended law school.”

The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840

Franklin countered with a lovely satire in the press. (This was another side of Franklin.) This would turn out to be his very last journalistic piece, and it poetically recalled his very first journalistic hoax, when, as a teenage lad, he had puckishly posed as a middle-aged matron, Silence Dogood. Franklin likewise published his 1790 parody under a pen name, but no one who knew him could miss his signature style and sly wit. The piece pretended to be an earnest letter to the editor, telling readers about a 1687 debate among Algerian Muslims concerning their customary practice of enslaving European Christians…playful piece was also deadly serious. They were his dying words to America. By pretending to excavate the past, Franklin’s farewell message was in fact inviting his fellow Americans to envision the future.

FRANKLIN AND WASHINGTON WERE AMERICA’S two greatest founding figures, and it is remarkable that Washington’s de facto farewell message, when he passed away in 1799 at his Mount Vernon home, was so similar in substance—though not at all in tone—toFranklin’s parting soliloquy. Metaphorically, both men died with abolition and emancipation on their lips.

What kind of person is able to die on cue? Only a person of extraordinary will, with an eye on history and an astonishing drive to be remembered and celebrated in a certain way.

Jefferson’s attachment to the Declaration—his sense of special authorship of it—is the unmistakable message of his gravesite inscription,

because by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered.

end Amar, Akhil Reed

Amaral, Matt:

”…we are in an endless spin-cycle of nothingness.”

American Petroleum Inst.:

“Rather than a patchwork of federal and state regulations and mandates that could ineffectively address the climate challenge, an economywide government carbon price policy is the most impactful and transparent way to achieve meaningful progress.”

“Victory will be achieved when uncertainties in climate science become part of the conventional wisdom” for “average citizens” and “the media.”

via ExxonMobil

Amici, Federica:

“Individuals with high problem-solving skills may not be the most socially skilled people.”

Amin, Idi:

Journalist: “Do you have many visions?”

Amin: “Only when necessary.”   via G I Smith

Amherst, Lord Jeffrey: British military, 1763:

“Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?”

Amte, Baba:

“Where there was fear, there was no love; and when an action was not done in love, it had no value…

Not by tears, but by sweat…how similar they are.”

Indian leprosy champion The Economist mar 1 08

Anbar, Ariel:

The internet…”It’s a culture that moves fast but breaks people.”

Anders, Bill:

“ We came all this way to explore the moon and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

            astronaut, on EarthRise image

Anders, William. CEO of General Dynamics in 1991

“… most [weapons manufacturers] don’t bring a competitive advantage to non-defense business,” and “Frankly, sword makers don’t make good and affordable plowshares.”

Andersen, Kurt:

”I find ideologues creepy because they’re like robots, built to respond to the fluid, complicated world in simple, unchanging ways….a few crude lines of code that can’t be overridden or rewritten.”

…the American body politic suffers from autoimmune disorders…Many autoimmune diseases of the literal kind…are apparently triggered by stress…”

“If you need proof that ideas have power and that radical change is possible, it’s there in the rearview mirror. Evil genius is genius nonetheless…”

Andersen, Hans Christian:

”Just living is not enough … one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”

Andersen,Lene Rachel: The Nordic Secret, 2017

Short of a meteorite hitting Earth, the problems we face as a species are problems we have created ourselves. Climate change, overpopulation, pov- erty, pollution, wars, terrorism; you name it, we created it. Ironically, what created many of these problems was once the solution to something else. ..

populations among whom a critical number of people could see the nation as a whole, cared about the totality and elected leaders with the same big, yet detailed picture in mind….

…to develop that kind of identification and national loyalty and cohesion, they needed a richer and more complex inner world. They needed to develop a sense of responsibility towards self and society; they needed moral, emotional and cognitive development…

…emerged was the understanding that people must be able to con- trol their emotions, internalize the norms of society and take individual moral responsibility. In German, this kind of personal ego-development goes under the name Bildung..

The Nordic countries became successful due to a deliberate cultural, intellectual, moral, and emotional cultivation of the least educated part of the population..

 Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him- or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms.

Taken together, it is a story of freedom and beauty, and it is a history of increased understanding and sense of responsibility; consciousness and conscience.

Anderson, Carol:

“…most important lesson from 2000 was to lie. Lie often. Say the lies loud; say them with pride. Lie over and over and over. Lie without shame. Lie until the truth is drowned out, dead. Lie until no amount of evidence could convince anyone otherwise. Lie until there is no other narrative….Republicans had fashioned a noose around our democracy. And it’s only getting tighter and tighter.”

“The Republicans are suicide bombers aimed at our ship of state.”

Anderson, Christopher:

‘[Stephen Miller] said to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do, too.”

Anderson, Elizabeth:

equality freedom Rawls hierarchy Nussbaum truth herzog Dewey Tanner assumptions reversal Bentham panopticon contributive justice

Anderson, Laurie:

“I read as a survival strategy…

I no longer compare the differences between screen and paper.

I’ll read anything anywhere….

Books are the way the dead talk to the living…”

Anderson, Ray:

“The day must come when plundering is illegal.”

intergenerational tyranny – taxation without representation.

We must move on to another industrial revolution – and get it right this time.”

“We are all part of the continuum of humanity and life. We will have lived our brief span and either helped or hurt that continuum and the earth that sustains all life. It’s that simple. Which will it be?”

died 8-2011 NY Times obit

Anderson, Rocky:

”We’re going to use social media. If other nations can carry on their revolutions and bring in a complete change of government through that kind of grassroots organizing and use of social media…”.  Justice Party

“The Democratic Party,…especially when it’s in power, is incredibly timid, unprincipled and gutless.

We’ve seen an enormous transformation of the parties. …they’re feeding at basically the same trough and are almost indistinguishable, except on certain wedge issues.”

“…the Democratic Party… is a gutless, unprincipled party, bought and paid for by the same interests that buy and pay for the Republican Party.”

Anderson, Sam:

“The internet is…designed to coax all of your neural pathways open and then, while they are in a state of ecstatic receptivity, to dump horrible things into them.”

Anderson, Gen. Steven:

“I’m a soldier. Why should I be concerned about climate change? Climate change brings

about global instability. That makes the world more vulnerable and it’s more likely that soldiers like myself will have tofight and die somewhere.”

Andrade, Aaron:

Complacency allows in power-seekers and fascists, as not keeping kitchen counters clean invites ants.

Andrade, Barb:

“infantile paralysis 1964” Barb’s journal re Dagua politics

fascination with abomination. 1-2025

Andrade, Joe:

One of the reasons our nation is in the mess it’s in – where ideology rules and critical thinking is almost non-existent – is because the most educated in our society have chosen to be among the least involved. This is especially true in academia. Academic apathy often prevails.

The effect or influence of a book on the reader depends on that reader’s mental, psychological, intellectual, and educational state and background.

The USA was quickly physically grounded. And the mental grounding then began.

most people know major changes are coming – they know their historical expectations are in flux. They are afraid of such change. They are afraid of the climate change they hear about and work to deny. They are afraid of impending drought. They are afraid of carbon fees or taxes. They are afraid of higher energy costs. They are… afraid.

Andrade, Josephine:

“I don’t have an attitude. I have a personality you can’t handle.”

Andrade, Tonio:

Sun Zi advised, “Know your enemy and know yourself.”

“In writing the beginning is the hardest part. You sputter on in good faith and eventually your subconscious mind engages, like an engine catching. That’s when the good stuff starts happening…

the subconscious must be honored…

Andreessen, Marc:

via Harrington: published a manifesto calling

for “Becoming Technological Supermen,” defined by embarking on a “Hero’s Journey”

and “conquering dragons.”

Angelou, Maya:

”…people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

“You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.”

“Believe people when they tell you who they are.

They know themselves better than you do.”

“You can’t use up creativity. The moreyou use, the more you have.”

“We, this people, on a small and lonely planet / Traveling through casual space / Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns / To a destination where all signs tell us / It is possible and imperative that we learn / A brave and startling truth…”

on Sagan/Druyan’s Orion craft – see Popova.

“We are the possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.” via Popova

end Angelou

Angulo, A J:

ed. Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad

‘…slaveholders, radio broadcasters, politicians, religious figures, and corporate executives all shared the common goal of suppressing forms of knowledge considered threatening or disruptive to their interests’ …

Angus, Charlie (Canadian journalist):

“We will boycott everything American — your booze, your produce, your

tourist destinations — as long as you are under an administration that denies our

fundamental right to sovereignty while demonizing our nation as some kind of

terrorist gang haven.”

Angwin, Julia:

“[Facebook, Meta] is what it looks like when a mature business runs out of ideas and insteadseeks to continue its dominance through money and political power.”

“Now that our phones are the primary weapons of today’s

information war, we should be as zealous about our right to bear phones

as we are about our right to bear arms. To adopt the language of Second

Amendment enthusiasts, perhaps the only thing that can eventually

stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a camera.”

Aniano, Sara:

“Some people are like, ‘we don’t need to use violence, we have memes’…

Memes are historically under-studied and not taken as seriously as they should be.”

Andre, Arnoldo, FM Costa Rica:

“[Trump’s calls] … could be signal flares pointing towards broader policy ideas and need to be responded to with some restraint….the meaning might not have a literal meaning. Rather they might be signals. There are statements that could rapidly alter the global order. Thus, we know that we need caution and patience until there’s more certainty.”

Annan, Kofi:

“The challenges of our age are problems without passports; to address them we need blueprints without borders. The United Nations is there to provide them.”

Commencement Address, 1998

Anonymous:

A Warning by Anonymous:

Restore Truth

‘Let’s Roll!’

T Roosevelt quotes…

“[Trump] is the most distracted person I’ve ever met…He has no fucking clue what we are talking about.”

[Stephen Miller] relishes having the president wrapped around his finger on any number of issues…

Hayek Serfdom quotes:

“…an authoritarian personality is likely to be surrounded not by the best ‘but rather by the worst elements of any society’.”

‘If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail.’

“…religious belief is mostly gone. Faith has been replaced by disgust.”

            Daughter of Muslim Cleric, economist 11-1-20114, p. 5

2012 platform of the Republican Party of Texas which, astonishingly enough, reads as follows: “We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

“Here, I feel like I have a voice, and people treat you like a real person. I can weather this cold for a bit of dignity.”

            Jane, Occupy Wall St. in Occupy bk

“Equilibrium:  In the social sciences, an equilibrium is a situation that involves several individuals or groups, in which each one’s actions turn out to be the best reply to everyone else’s.”

                        quoted in Science or Nature, May, 2002

“If you are thinking a year ahead, sow a seed.

If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree.

If you are thinking one hundred years ahead, educate the people.”

                        Chinese proverb, 420 BC

“The journey begins from inside your house.” “No one returns from traveling with nothing to say.”

Akan Proverb, Ghana

“Alone a youth runs fast; with an elderly person, slow; but together, they go far.”

            Luo saying, Ghana

“It doesn’t matter. It will either happen or it won’t….what probability of recurrence would cause you to make different choices for your lives?”

            Oncologist cited in NY Times

“The More you Know—

The Less you Need”

aboriginal saying (Portland bumper sticker)

“Screw us and we’ll multiply.”

Seattle Occupy protestor

“Life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.”

“What happened on that day is tattooed on your soul.”

            Pearl Harbor survivor

“If enough people say it, something becomes as solid as gold.”

            Chinese idiom

“Light travels faster than sound.  That is why some people appear bright, until you hear them speak.”

“The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.”

fundamentalist slogan

“…no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.”

            from Occupy Wall St Declaration 10-2011

“One day the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich.”

            from OccupyWallStreet

“If you don’t let us dream, we won’t let you sleep.”

            Occupy Madrid

“…policies…passed in an arrogant frenzy by a Tea Party-tide of Republicans elected in 2010…weary voters had to drag them back to the center. ..an overdue return of common sense…”

            NY Times editorial 11-10-2011

“When you’re 16 years old and somebody treats you like you’re smart, serious, and competent, that does a lot for how you see yourself in the world.”

            Amer Chem Soc Project SEED student, CandEN, 2-18-08, p. 47

“You’re as sick as your secrets.”

            AA adage, quoted by David Sheff

“It’s the provincial fear of ‘otherness’ that most often stems from ignorance…evidence of the ignorance of xenophobic legislators…the real world, not the imaginary one conjured by a common core of paranoid legislators.”

            SL Tribune editorial related to Common Core education issues. 2-24-2012

“If everything’s coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.”

            “This…is how the terrorists win. They so frighten the citizens and leaders of a previously free and open society that those citizens begin to accept that their society will become less free and less open.”

            ‘Balance of Power’ SL Trib editorial 7-15-06

“Lottery—a tax on people who can’t do math.”

            Sign in an Oregon bar.

“Everybody wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to go today.”

            Health insurance executive

“We are doomed to die; let us spend.”

            Sumerian tablet

“Most people don’t think about most things most of the time.”

“Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting, “Holy Sh.., what a ride!” “

“I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit.”

Greek proverb

“The only thing American politicians care about is money.  You have one country that is telling everybody else what to do, without any concern for what it means for our grandchildren.”

            German electrician,  New York Times, July 16, 2000

“If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision.”

-US vs Moylan, 1969

“So what’s this bill really about? It’s about playing on people’s fears of the “other” during an economic downturn with high unemployment. It’s about playing on people’s resentment of others whom they believe get something for nothing. It’s about racism.”

            SL Tribune editorial Chasing Arizona 8-15-2010

“You can’t wake a person who’s pretending to sleep.”

            Rain forest farmer to Jason Clay of WWF

“An enemy is someone whose story you do not know.”

            Jewish saying

“Jesus, please save us from your followers.”

            anonymous, bumper sticker

“The shadow of the past holds the future hostage.”

            On a poster by www.crimethinc.com end Anonymous

“We fix everything we break.”

            construction worker in front yard.

end Anonymous

Appiah, Kwame Anthony:

“Pretend equality can be excellent practice for the real thing… condescension…”

“Elsewhere has never been more important.”

Anthony, Jason:

mheibes: Iraqis bluffing game…fists, face, hide the pulsing of the carotid artery…

“… the art of peering into people’s faces and uncovering deceit may be honed to astonishing precision…

people who are good detectors of subtle clues…

Anthony, Ole:

via Clay Risen NYT Obit:

‘he believed it was his job to call out religious scam artists…had taken a vow of poverty…garbology…exposed the sins of rich televangelists.’

Atheist Bus Campaign:

“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

            2009, London

Anthony, Susan B:

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

via Kirby

Antoninus, Marius:

”Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.”

Appelbaum, Binyamin:

“Historians make their names by persuading people to see patterns in the chaos.”

“Our stadiums are monuments to the poverty of our civic ambitions and our

inability to summon the collective will to use the land we have for the things we

need. They are distractions from our inability to build anything else.”

Appelbaum, Yoni:

“Democracy depends on the consent of the losers.”

Apple, Inc.:

Apple CEO Tim Cook, who Jobs hired in 1998. “It’s in the hands of the creator whether it becomes good or bad.”

“the purpose of the company is to make the best products in the world that really enrich people’s lives and leave the world better than we found it.”

Applebaum, Anne:

“History will judge the complicit.”

“Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar…

Once certain behaviors become ‘normal’, then people stop seeing them as wrong…

Trump has built a cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs…

he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism…because he found them politically useful and  because they are part of his personal worldview…

The … ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not ‘

America First’, but rather ‘Trump First’…

If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules…

…Vichyite apocalyptic thinking…a biblical moment…the End Times…Marianne Birthler, dissident…Jaeger East german guard…

“Resentment, envy and above all the belief that the system is unfair – not just to the country, but to you – these are important sentiments among the nativist ideologues…

from Bad Guys are Winning, TheAtlantic.

Autocracy, Inc.

“…although Putin varies his tactics, his longer-term goals have been very clear for a very long time. He might use disinformation one year, gas pipeline blackmail another, bribery or violence the next, but the endgame is always the same: reinforce his autocracy, undermine democracy’s – all democracies –and push Russian political influence as far as it will go. Break up NATO. Destroy the European Union. Remove American influence from Europe and everywhere else, forever.”

“…what the Russians do, and now others, they don’t invent political movements – they amplify existing groups.”

The Greed That Binds

writer Timothy Garton Ash has called “emotive imprecision” to evade the subject.

By the time Putin became president, he was well acquainted with the double standards of Western democracies, which preached liberal values at home but were very happy to help build illiberal regimes everywhere else.

World Liberty Congress, a gathering of people who have fought autocracies all around the world.

Bobi Wine, a Ugandan musician – we are not an opposition; we are an option, a better option: “We should adopt positive language. We are not victims.”

Their language sounded almost like a global version of Gene Sharp’s handbook.

Kim Jong Un, offered his full and unconditional support for Russia’s “sacred fight to punish the gathering of evil that claims hegemony.”

In 2023, the U.S. government began to do exactly that. The State Department’s Global Engagement CenterJames Rubin, who has run the GEC since 2022, calls “pre-bunking.”

If the Russian diaspora, the Hong Kong diaspora, the Venezuelan diaspora, and the Iranian diaspora can amplify one another’s messages and ideas, then together they can have a larger impact than any individual group could have by itself.

Good information has to help bring positive change. Truth has to be seen to lead to justice.

The risks of overdependence on trade with Russia, China, or other autocracies aren’t just economic. They are existential.

“Our aspirations have always inspired others, even when we did not live up to them ourselves.”

end Applebaum

Applebroog, Ida:

“I’m more interested in doing something to the viewer than saying something to the viewer.” from Joe – change viewer to reader.        

Aquinas, Thomas:

”…it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly: nor is this properly speaking theft or robbery…this necessity diminishes or entirely removes sin.”          

Arab:

“The mistake of a smart person is equivalent to the mistakes of 10 idiots.”

Aramin, Bassam (via Kristof):

“We must share this land as one state or two states or five states. Otherwise, we will share this same piece of land as the graveyards of our kids.”

Araud, Gerard:

“The Western moment is coming to an end, and we are seeing the appearance of a world of Great Powers, which have to define a balance based on the balance of power, similar to that which Europe knew until 1914.”

“We’re transforming pain to power…”

            Ana Maria Archila

Archimedes – Israeli firm:

outsourcing fake news and voter manipulation…via Bamford in The Nation

“Archimedes Group, a private intelligence company that boasts that it can ‘change reality according to our client’s wishes’…outsourcing fake news and voter manipulation is a growth industry in Israel…”

Ardern, Jacinda:

A Different Kind of Power…

“I’m leaving, because with such a privileged role comes responsibility – the …responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple,”

from NYT review film Prime Minister:

‘Trump-style rhetoric and misinformation from American news media sources and conspiracists had reached into New Zealand.’

“all those traits that you might have believed your whole

life were weaknesses – questioning yourself, the doubt that brings humility,

or sensitivity that comes with empathy – may just be what the world needs

more of.”

“My words will always be the greatest tool I have.”

There was just too much to do to waste time on mistakes.

I was useful. And that made me feel so proud.

Cat Stevens.

tucked underneath me, my blue tartan uniform hanging over my knees, listening as he sang about the edge of darkness and a train that was coming to take us all home again. On one side of me, kids fidgeted and chatted among themselves. Not me. I leaned forward, listening to every word as he sang about “the world as it is.” Something about it felt oddly familiar—the strumming, the urgency in the melody, the chorus of voices. I closed my eyes, trying to drown out the noise of the kids around me so I could hear every verse. Every word. Why must we go on hating?

“That feeling is called impostor syndrome.”

In New Zealand, any member of Parliament can write a piece of legislation, attach a number to it, then put it into a literal biscuit tin,

When there’s an available slot, a number is pulled randomly from the tin, and that bill will be debated in the house to see if it has enough support to become law.

Sensitivity was my weakness, my tragic flaw, the thing that might just stop me from sticking with the work that I loved.

“I want this government to feel different. I want people to feel that it’s open, that it’s listening, and that it’s going to bring kindness back.”

Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has.

Kindness: This would be my guiding principle

The difference between what we are and what we could be is the greatest waste.

Women shouldn’t have to choose—the way our mothers so often did—between being good at their profession and being a good mother, or daughter. There should be support networks, a village, whatever you

call it, that can help them be all of those things without completely losing themselves in the process. That’s what I was blessed to have, at the UN and elsewhere: the love and support of others.

Prophet Muhammad, describing New Zealand’s grief. “When any part of the body suffers, the whole body feels pain.”

perhaps some sadness is never meant to. Perhaps sometimes sadness is what keeps you focused on change.

what would our world look like if, as adults, we met people with the inclusivity we’re born with, rather than the exclusion we are taught?

would rather be criticized than stop being human.

When I’m asked about COVID, people sometimes want to skip to the end. They’ll ask, What did you learn? Or, What would you do differently? Or, if they’re being more direct, What do you regret? And that’s understandable. It was a tough ordeal for everyone, a complete upending of our experience of the world. So I can see why someone would want to cut to the part where it’s all over, where it can be summed up simply, with satisfying hindsight.

If you have impostor syndrome, or question yourself, channel that. It will help you. You will read more, seek out advice, and humble yourself to situations that require humility to be conquered. If you’re anxious, and overthink everything, if you can imagine the worst-case scenario always, channel that too. It will

mean you are ready when the most challenging days arrive. And if you are thin-skinned and sensitive, if criticism cuts you in two, that is not weakness; it’s empathy. In fact, all of the traits that you believe are your flaws will come to be your strengths.

a fellowship on empathetic leadership

end Ardern NZ

Arendt, Hannah:

“To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others…”

…dictators prey on loneliness…

“the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

“Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world?” — Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” 496

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. … And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can do what you please.”

letter on love to James Baldwin. 

“Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive;  you can afford them only in the private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.”

“I can either study philosophy or I can drown myself.”

 “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”

“Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination.”

“…to fear a certainty is wasted energy that syphons life of aliveness.”

“It seems true that America, for historical, social and political reasons, is more likely to erupt into violence than most other civilized countries.”

“…thoughtlessness – the incapacity for sustained critical reflection – has become one of the defining features of our times..”

“the ability to ask “unanswerable questions” is the hallmark of the human mind

“The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.”

“There are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous.”

“…totalitarian ideologies … aim … [to transform] human nature itself.”

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home  and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda – before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world – lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

Hannah Arendt, via C Hedges

see Gessen quote on Arendt

“People deprived of human rights … are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action, not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion. …We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights … only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new … political situation.”

“The modern masses do not believe in anything visible … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumbably part….

And a people that can no longer believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can then do what you please.”

“[Arendt said ] ‘the banality of evil’ was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.”

            via Rebecca Solnit

 “What is most difficultis to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it.”

“During the Vietnam War, … Arendt … noted that government spokesmen frequently had recourse to phrases like ‘monolithic communism’ and ‘a second Munich’. She inferred … that the officials suffered from an inability ‘to confront reality on its own terms because they had always some parallels in mind that ‘helped’ them to understand those terms.”

Robert Leiken

…this country has embarked …on an imperialist course. If it continues on this course, then there will indeed be violence and of a different form and order than what now exists.”

from The Origins of Totalitarianism: 1985 printing

Preface, first edition:

This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. …

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity…

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.

Preface to Pt 3: Totalitarianism:

It is quite obvious that mass support for totalitarianism comes neither from ignorance nor from brain-washing.

Pt.3:

Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of a nontotalitarian world.

An ideology … is  the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history…

The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same ‘law’ …

Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process. … because of the logic inherent ion their respective ideas.

…there [are] three specifically totalitarian elements that are peculiar to all ideological thinking…. total explanation … Secondly … ideological thinking becomes independent of all experience from which it cannot learn anything new…Hence ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a ‘truer’ reality …

Once the movements have come to power, they proceed to change reality in accordance with their ideological claims.

Thirdly, since the ideologies have no power to transform reality, they achieve this emancipation of thought from experience through certain meythods of demonstration. Ideological thinking orders facts into an absolutely logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it; … it proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality. …

The power, which Marx thought was born when the idea seized the masses, was discovered to reside, not in the idea itself, but in its logical process which [in Stalin’s words] ‘like a mighty tentacle seizes you on all sides as in a vise and from whose grip you are powerless to tear yourself away; you must either surrender or make up your mind to utter defeat.’

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (… reality) and the distinction between true and false (… standards of thought) no longer exist.

… what kind of basic experience in the living-together of men permeates a form of government whose essence is terror and whose principle of action is the logicality of ideological thinking.

… terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about …

This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together …; isolated men are powerless by definition.

Isolation and impotence, … the fundamental inability to act at all, have always been characteristic of tyrranies.

… the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man’s capacity for experience and thought …

… isolation in the political sphere is called loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse. Isolation and loneliness are not the same. Isolation is that impasse into which men are driven when the political sphere of their lives, where they act together in the pursduit of acommon concern, is destroyed. Yet isolation, though destructive of power and the capacity for action, not only leaves intact but it required for all so-called productive activities of men.

Tyranny based on isolation generally leaves the productive capacities of man intact.

While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole.

… totalitarian domination … bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of mann.

Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the bread-down of political institutions and social tradiutions in our own time.

Uprootedness can be the preliminary condition for superfluousness, just as isolation can (but must not) be the preliminary consition for loneliness.

Loneliness is not solitude – [it] shows itself most sharply in company with others.

Epictetus … the lonely man (eremos) finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed. The solitary man, on the contrary, is alone and therefore ‘can be together with himself’ …

For the confirmation of my identity I depend entirely upon other people….

Luther: ‘there must be a God because man needs one being whom he can trust’…it is not good that man should be alone. … A lonely man always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst.’

… loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality.

Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction.

… every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; …

This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”

“Totalitarianism is organized loneliness.”

‘incomprehensible triviality’

via Berkowitz Introduction:

“It is questionable whether any universal affirmation of the values of human reason and human dignity can offer a meaningful bulwark against the temptations of evildoing.”

…ordinary men can reason themselves into justifying what ought to be unthinkable. …

Reason reasons, it does not think.

…the only reliable source of light in dark times is found in the activity of thinking.

Arendt teaches the supreme importance of thinking – the habit of erecting obstacles to oversimplifications, compromises, and conventions.

…evil might arise in many ways, from fanatical sociopaths and, more likely in our times, from the thoughtless compliance of normal people with systematic evil. (p. 11)

p. 221 of Berkovitz, Drucilla Cornell:

“We have to think big, even if we often feel overwhelmed and powerless before a world that acts from thoughtless myths and the repeated commands of ruthless gods.”

p. 132: Richard J Bernstein:

…by absolute or radical evil, [Arendt] means the evil of making human beings superfluous as human beings.”

and quoting Arendt: “…evil can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface.”

p. 237: Roger Berkovitz:

…totalitarianism depends on thoughtlessness [which is] itself rooted in the experience of loneliness….Arendt writes ‘ Loneliness if the common ground for terror, ther essence of totalitarian government.’

The lonely man is prone to embrace a coherent and stable world offered by ideological extremism.

… in dark and lonely times we must not seek only the company of others in public; just as importantly, we must be vigilent in protecting the sanctuaries of solitude from which the activity of thinking is born.

Thinking is a difficult business. It requires a separation from the world, a passion for truth, and a willingness to let go of the affairs of the world.

Quoting Emerson p. 244: “He only who is able to stand alone is qualified for society.”

Via Bernstein:

“Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even ‘condition’ them against it.”  The Life of the Mind.

on Eichman: “…a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”

Hannah Arendt …once said that the only way to teach people to think is to infect them with the perplexities that one is confronting.

via S Power:

she wrote, quoting Proust, “the question is not as for Hamlet, to be or not to be, but to belong or not to belong.”

“Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimesin the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.”

Arendt had seen the League of Nations simply aggregate the selfishness of its members. Unless the whole concept of the state were rethought, or the new United Nations were given a mind, an army, and a bank account of its own, she was sure paper laws would again yield few concrete dividends.

“The Rights of Man,” Arendt wrote,

had been defined as “inalienable” because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum [international human] rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.

Arendt’s preface to Origins, she noted:

This book has been written against a background both of reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.”

“the point at which”, as she wrote in her 1954 essay on “The Crisis in Education”, “we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it”

Jon Nixon: For her, thinking was diametrically opposed to ideology: ideology demands assent, is founded on certainty, and determines our behaviours within xed horizons of expectation; thinking, on the other hand, requires dissent, dwells in uncertainty and expands our horizons by acknowledging our agency. It is the task of education – and therefore of the university – to ensure that a space for such thinking remains open and accessible.

Writing of those “intellectuals” who justified the war, Arendt concludes: “They needed no facts, no information; they had a ‘theory,’ and all data that did not fit were denied or ignored…. Defactualization and problem-solving were welcomed because disregard of reality was inherent in the policies and goals themselves.”

via Moruzzi:

“The political impetus behind The Origins is simple: to resist the apparent necessity of being overwhelmed, by either the past or the present, through the enunciation of a possibility for political agency.” p. 115

from New Yorker 2-1967 Truth and Politics:

“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one … has ever counted truthfullness among the political virtues…

…from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character. It is … hated by tyrants, who rightly fear ther compertition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize…

…lies … harbor an element of violence; organized lying always tends to destroy whatever it has decided to negate…totalitarian governments have consciously adopted lying as the first step to murder…

…one can spot a lie by noticing incongruities, holes, or the junctures of patched-up places. As long as the texture of the whole is kept intact, the lie will eventually show up as if of its own accord….

Facts assert themselves by being stubborn, and their fragility is oddly combined with great resiliency …

Truth possesses a power of its own…

story and storytellers

Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. “What is most difficult,” Arendt writes, “is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it.”

from Life of the Mind:

“I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives…There was no sign in him of firm ideological conventions or of specific evil motives…it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness….absence of thinking.”

“the cry ‘We are all guilty’ is actually a declaration of solidarity with the wrongdoers.”

“The Nazi systemrelies not on fanatics, nor on congenital murderers, nor on sadists; it relies entirely upon the normality of jobholders and family men.”…“for the sake of his pension, his life insurance, the security of his wife and children, such a man was ready to sacrifice his beliefs, his honor, and his human dignity….they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

ressentiment, via Arendt: ‘a tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else’. via Mishra

via review of Kohn book: “… politics is something that humans do together, thatrequires and thrives on the vast differences among humankind…

…deliberative politics is a deeply enriching activity essential forthe freedom of  human beings – may mean accepting that the aim of legalrules and institutions should not be to constrain political action but to encourage and improve it.”

“We know from experience that no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it.”

“Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.”

“…Nazi ideology rendered human beings superflous.” via Larry May, Jerome Kahn, eds.

“…truth [is] what we cannot change…the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above…”

“…the surest long-term result of brain-washing is a peculiar kind of cynicism- an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything…our bearings in the real world [become] destroyed.”

via Murphy in Schaap bk:

Arendt explained: Europeans saw revoilution as a reflex of necessity. Americans saw it as a consequence of freedom.labor, poverity vs freedom…   See On Revolution

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the

convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

“A stateless person is not just expelled from one country, native or adopted, but from all countries — none being obliged to receive and naturalize him — which means he is actually expelled from humanity. Deprivation of citizenship consequently could be counted among the crimes against humanity, and some of the worst recognized crimes in this category have in fact, and not incidentally, been preceded by mass expatriations.”

“…totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes.”

Arendt’s verdict, via Scott Samuelson book, p. 89, pdf:

“Politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the Earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

I now see that I simply didn’t understand the complexities in the situation.

“It is far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”

to Eric Hoffer:

“…it is the side of ourselves which must remain dark to us and can appear — shine really — only to others. It is the same sovereignty, the majesty of solitude which shines through every sentence.”

“This business of ‘publish or perish’ has been a catastrophe. People write things which should never have been written and which should never be printed. Nobody’s interested. But for them to keep their jobs and get the proper promotion, they’ve got to do it. It demeans the whole of intellectual life.”

The Human Condition:

“Each time you write something and you send it out into the world and it becomes public , obviously everybody is free to do with it as he pleases…You should not try to hold your hand now on whatever may happen to what you have been thinking for yourself. You should rather try to learn from what other people do with it.”

Intro by Margaret Canovan:

…Arendt is preeminently the theorist of beginnings…

“…thoughtlessness is among the outstanding characteristics of our time.”

The curious sterility of utopias  comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.

…some evils are beyond forgiveness…

Antonia Grunenberg: …there exists an overarching responsibility of citizens all over the world towards each other and not towards a state, or God or a higher reason…

Wolfgang Heuer: “…freedom exists only when it is practiced.”

“…nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings – the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes , and in internment camps by their friends.”

Arendt’s perspective, humans are beginners. It means that they are in the world not to die but to begin and to experience a second birth. The second birth is not a natural phenomenon. Conversely, it is the start of their political and historical life because action creates history and stories. In the same way, it contains the identity of the agents who cannot completely know the effects that their acts and words will generate in the future.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and faction no longer exist.”

“For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth … possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.”— Arendt, “Lying in Politics” via Szalai

via Bret Stephens: a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank and standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.”

Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”

via Rebecca Panovka:

‘Couching an argument in language that sounded scientific, she thought, was a way of claiming the ability to know or predict things that could never be predicted or known. Fact-checking was a part of that larger trend: the practice, she wrote to McCarthy, was a form of “phony scientificality.”’

via Margaret Sullivan:

You don’t need belief. All you need is confusion.

That’s how authoritarian leaders manage to control the populace, the great German political philosopher Hannah Arendt once explained.

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” she said in an interview nearly five decades ago.

When that happens, people lose the capacity not only to act but even to think and judge. “And with such a people,” she concluded grimly, “you can then do what you please.”

via Popova: ‘Arendt identified as the root of tyranny the act of making other human beings irrelevant.’

“Fearlessness is what love seeks… Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”

‘The ability to think across great distances and differences in order to throw light on contemporary events was Arendt’s exceptional skill….She spoke about “the inalienable right to go visiting.”’  Stephen Most

“what binds these men together is a firm and sincere belief and human omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible… the aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any….”

via Peg Birmingham 3-7-2024 Bard talk:

“[World-disclosing passions are measured] not in the force with which the passion aects the soul, but rather by the amount of reality the passion transmits to it”

“only those who can endure the passion of living under desert conditions can be trusted to summon up in themselves the courage that lies at the root of action, of becoming an active being”

humanly speaking, it is endurance which enable man to create durability and continuity”

secularization itself, and not the contents of Christian teachings, which constitutes the origin of revolution”

from pdf notes of Birmingham lecture.

“Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.”

“What really makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other kind of dictatorship to

rule is that the people are not informed. I

“Thinking is the silent dialogue of myself with myself, is sheer activity of the mind

combined with complete immobility of the body,”

The thoughtless are like sleepwalkers: They are without essence; they are not fully alive.

via Hans Jonas: Arendt “considered men on the whole the weaker sex,” wrote Jonas in

1977, “more removed from the intuitive grasp of reality, more subject to the deception of

concept, therefore more prone to illusion and less perceptive of the ambiguity and

admixture of shadows in the human equation.”

Men always want to be influential. … I want to understand.”

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Dr. Arendt warned against trying to avoid unpleasant facts. The totalitarian governments dug, she said, “giant holes in which to bury unwelcome facts and events, a gigantic enterprise which could be achieved only by killing people who had been the actors or witnesses of the past.”

Mary McCarthy, in The New Yorker, said “the combination of tremendous intellectual power with great common sense makes Miss Arendt’s insights into history and politics seem both amazing and obvious.”

via Ann Heberlein

In 1962, Arendt had an accident on her way home to her flat, close to Central Park in New York. The taxi she was traveling in was hit by a lorry and she was promptly taken to Roosevelt Hospital. She described the incident in a letter to her friend Mary McCarthy shortly afterwards: “During a floating moment, I had the feeling that it was up to me to decide whether I wanted to live or die. Even though I did not think that death was terrible, I thought that life actually is quite beautiful and that I like to live a lot.”

Arendt had been reconciled with the incompleteness of life, with the fragility of the world. She believes that it is a duty to love the world. Amor mundi, “love of the world,” means caring for life so that it can continue to exist. We must be able to love the world as it is, in all its brokenness and imperfection. To achieve that requires hope, hope that change is possible, hope for the future.

Hope is necessary. Without hope, without the ability to imagine a life beyond its present circumstances, a person may be prone to give up. But someone who has the ability to embrace that hope may have a capacity to survive atrocities and inhumanity. Despite the resignation Hannah expresses in the letter to Kurt Blumenfeld, she was a woman who had that ability to hope. The hope that there was a life beyond the horrors of the concentration camps helped her to endure the internment of Camp Gurs, the life of the being a refugee, her escape from Europe, the exile in the United States, and coping with a new and unfamiliar language on a professional level.

from

On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt

Heberlein, Ann

“If only world history were not so awful, it would be a joy to live.”—Hannah Arendt, 1952

of amor mundi—love of the world—as her starting point,

To love the world means reconciling oneself with it, in all its imperfection and fragility, because this reconciliation is necessary for one’s continued existence.

Hannah links amor mundi to responsibility, reflection,

judgement. It is a love that presupposes contemplation of one’s own actions and an understanding of their consequences. In this approach, we see parallels to her thoughts on evil. Indifference can, according to Hannah, be fertile ground for evil, while the opposite of indifference is reflection. As a result, everyone has a responsibility to reflect on their own deeds, a responsibility to choose, a responsibility not to simply obey orders and follow the crowd.

Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus. The truth must be told, regardless of the consequences of that truth.

and a scholar’s primary driving force is, of course, the search for the truth.

Hannah’s weapon against evil was her intellect,

Martin Heidegger’spoetry that often focused on life’s impermanence, the longing for a diffuse you, and the search for the self.

Hannah replied … that pain “is only another way of being alive.”

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah describes the totalitarian vision as the urge to “organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all humanity were just one individual.”

Taking away a person’s unique sense of being is, therefore, an important element in preparing a person for war.

It was the indifference of the masses and their failure to take responsibility that made the Holocaust possible, not just the overt cruelty of a small number of people.

Power, wrote Voltaire, “consists in making others act as I choose.”

Arthur Koestler, whose book Scum of the Earth documents his own experiences of being interned at Le Vernet,

an overwhelming sense that the world was beyond saving.

What does a person do if she loses all hope? She gives up. The ability to imagine a future, a situation beyond the present, is vital to the survival of humankind. Only those who retain that ability—that hope—can survive evil and inhumanity.

Viktor Frankl,

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,”

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose,” he

we have seen how quickly eloquent optimism could change to speechless pessimism.

Hannah was able to combine pessimism with an unyielding belief in her own power to change her circumstances. She left nothing to chance.

our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in

Only humankind, Hannah argues, can guarantee human rights to others.

In Escape from Freedom, Fromm argued that the freedoms enjoyed by modern humans produced anxiety, leading to a willingness to subordinate oneself to fascist ideologies.

Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim

thoughts in Surviving and Other Essays,

Judith Nisse Shklar,

human weakness

in other words, as a result of the corrupt human nature that, due to original sin, is inclined toward evil. Humans are weak, and they fall easily into temptation. Because this fallibility is understandable, forgiveness is possible.

Jesus says that there are also those who commit something known in Greek as skandalon—acts so immoral and unbearable that it would be better if the guilty party had never been born. Jesus

there are evil deeds, and evil people, who can neither be forgiven nor punished. Not all evil can be explained in terms of obedience, ignorance, or neglect. There is such a thing as evil that is as incomprehensible as it is unforgivable.

there are crimes which man can neither punish nor forgive. When the impossible was made possible it becameunpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive.

there may be genuinely evil people out there, people driven by a desire to hurt others. That there must be someone leading the way, someone initiating the evil, someone creating the context, ideology, or prejudices necessary for the obedient masses to blindly adopt.

Hannah’s character in one word, I would say that she was responsible.

what surprises and shocks me most of all,” she wrote to Mary in late fall 1963, “is the tremendous amount of hatred and hostility lying around and waiting only for a chance to break out.”

Those in love turn their backs on their surroundings; they become a “we” that no longer needs the outside world. Their love makes them strangers, or perhaps indifferent, to the world

and worldly things.

philosopher Emmanuel Levinas examines

The basis of ethics, according to Levinas, is in an encounter with “the other”; it is only when we really see the other that the conception of ethics awakes. In this approach it is important to see the other as another, as a “You” to relate to.

She writes that infidelity is true destruction because it is only through fidelity that we have any sway over our past: fidelity’s existence depends on us. If the possibility of truth and that which is true did not exist, fidelity would be nothing more than a synonym of stubbornness. If fidelity did not exist, the truth would have no substance

would, therefore, be utterly meaningless.

“True infidelity,” she writes, “is forgetting,” which is “the only real sin, because it smothers the truth and all that is true.”

Hannah, fidelity was about continuity, about loyalty and reliability, about two people clinging on to each other and never letting go; it was about being faithful to what is true, genuine, and important.

the 1920s and ’30s?

People’s lives were marked by uncertainty, by a sense that it could all be over tomorrow. This type of atmosphere gives rise to the impression that you should grab what you can while you still can. Live for today, because you might be dead tomorrow.

she so beautifully describes in The Human Condition.

Heinrich replied

that I too can say: “Where one or some of you are gathered, there is my homeland, and where you are with me, there is my home.”

writes in The Human Condition, “only love has the power to forgive.”

Forgiveness, therefore, is a way to restore someone who has done wrong, and to heal a broken relationship.

the power of forgiveness. If we were unable to forgive one another, unburdening ourselves of the consequences of our actions, our ability to act would be limited to a single deed, and we would be prisoners of its consequences for the rest of our lives. Forgiveness releases that burden and liberates us from the past.

evildoers who bring punishment on themselves through their actions, erasing their own inherent human dignity by violating the categorical imperative. They invalidate their own humanity, meaning there is no longer anyone to forgive.

like Sonia [Orwell] and Anjo Lévi have to be handled with so much tact or rather with so much suppressed impatience that you are never at ease with them. A person does not need to put on airs with a genuine friend; there is no need to weigh your words or worry about putting your foot in it. A real friend has a fundamental faith and belief in you; you can relax and feel comfortable around them, thinking aloud, sharing unfinished thoughts, and expressing all kinds of hopes, fears, and ideas. One of the many topics the two friends discussed in their letters was friendship itself, exploring the importance of conversation in relationships. It is only when you share details of your life with another person, with a friend, that you in some sense come to understand your past and present. Our stories need someone to listen to them, a kind ear to receive them. As Austrian-Israeli philosopher Martin Buber writes, we only become I in the meeting with thou. “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it,” writes Gabriel García Márquez in Living to Tell the Tale.

Hannah wrote to Mary in 1971: “One can’t s

We come into being through our memories and what we choose to remember, how we share them—and with whom.

practical wisdom, or phronesis—good judgement and the ability to make reasoned decisions—

according to Aristotle, only be developed through friendship.

love and friendship in a number of lectures. In Heinrich’s eyes, friendship was like love without

eros (desire). In the very last lecture he ever gave, in 1968, he spoke about friendship, suggesting that it emerges when eros is no longer in the way. The erotic desire that occurred when the two people first met is no longer a driving force—what matters in a friendship is that two personalities respect each other, give each other space, accept each other as they are, and aid the other’s development. Hannah and Heinrich’s family was made up of friends, of people they had known in Germany and others they had met during their exile in France or upon arrival in

What a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroidery,”

friendship: “Trust is not an empty delusion, and in the long run it is the only thing that can assure one that one’s private world is not also a Hell.”

“What ultimately stills the fear of death is not hope or desire, but remembrance and gratitude.” Remembrance and gratitude: these are the cure for a fear of death.

love the world is more about understanding and reconciling oneself with it. Amor mundi is an attitude, a direction of travel that focuses on forgiveness, acceptance, and reconciliation.

On March 19, 1962, Hannah had a premonition of her own death.

for a fleeting moment I had the feeling that it was up to me whether I wanted to live or to die. And though I did not think that death was terrible, I also thought that life was quite beautiful …

Plato’s Apology of Socrates: “But now it is time to go away, I to die and you to live. Which of us goes to a better thing is unclear to everyone except to the god.”

she wrote to Mary: I must admit that I mind this relentless defoliation (or deforestation) process. As though to grow old does not

mean, as Goethe said, “gradual withdrawal from appearance”—which I do not mind—but the gradual (or rather sudden) transformation of a world with familiar faces (no matter, foe or friend) into a kind of desert, populated by strange faces. In other words, it is not me who withdraws but the world that dissolves—an altogether different proposition.

Jean Améry describes aging in terms of alienation.

he writes in On Aging, homeless

in Force of Circumstance: “When I read in print Simone de Beauvoir, it is a young woman they are telling me about, and who happens to be me.”

aging makes her feel invisible.

The Life of the Mind, which would be published after her death. The book is, in essence, an examination of good government.

the concept of gravitas—the weight of the past.

have been surrounded here for weeks by old people who suddenly got very old.”

“…knowledge of the dangers posed by tyranny has never in any

way prevented any tyrant from becoming a tyrant.”

 the “massive intrusion of criminality into the politicalprocess.”

“those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”

“Men in Dark Times”, Hannah Arendt wrote that, “Even in the

darkest of times…illumination may come less from theories and concepts than

from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women,

in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed

over the time-span that was given them on Earth.”

end Arendt

Aristotle

“Excellence…is not an act, but a habit.”

“…the young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine.”

Aristotle described envy not as benign desire for what someone else possesses but “as the pain caused by the good fortune of others.”

“Thought is impossible without an image.”

“The greatest thing by far is to master the metaphor…a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”                                                                      Ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get a hold of something fresh

“…the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.”

“We are what we repeatably do.”

“We are no wiser than Aristotle was more than 2000 years ago.” by Martin Rees.

“Excellence is never an accident. It represents the wise choice of many alternatives—

            choice not chance, determines your destiny.”

Plainly, nobody will be afraid who believes nothing can happen to him.… Fear is felt by those who believe something is likely to happen to them.… People do not believe this when they are, or think they are, in the midst of great prosperity, and are in consequence insolent, contemptuous and reckless.… [But if] they are to feel the anguish of uncertainty, there must be some faint expectation of escape.

Arizmedni, Father Don Jose Maria:

“The position that women have, in any society, is the exact measurement of its level of development.”

founder, Mondragon Cooperatives

Arkin, Alan:

“…a lot of actors “are better at pretending to be other people than they are at being themselves. When things get tense, when I start taking my work a bit too seriously, I remind myself that I’m only pretending to be a human being.”

“We live in a culture where selling is so pervasive. So if you’re authentic, you’re going to be interesting.”

“I piss in dots and dashes…”

Armitage, Mark:

“Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been

removed democratically. Not once. Ever.”

Armstrong, Louis (Satchmo):

“They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched…

lyric:

My only sin

is in my skin.

What did I do

to be so black and blue?”       

Armstrong, Neil:

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

Arnault, Antoine:

“For a dream, there is no price.”

Arnold, Francis:

via Brinkmann-Chen: “Antifragile is more than resilient. A resilientperson can withstand stress and adversity butan antifragile person thrives when faced with stressors.

Brinkmann-Chen marvels at how Arnold has facedhardship repeatedly throughout her life yet has managedto overcome obstacles and excel.She’s used work as

her therapy,” Brinkmann-Chen says.

Arnold, Richard S:

“…people who have never changed their minds may have simply stopped thinking.”

Federal Appeals Court Judge

Aron, Leon:

”The spark that lights the fuse is always the quest for dignity.

Today’s technology just makes the fire much more difficult to put out.”

Russian historian, quoted by TL Friedman, NY Times

Aron, Richard:

“…[those who] believe that people will follow their interests instead

of their passions have understood nothing of the 20th century.”

“Freedom flourishes in temperate zones; it does not survive the burning faith of prophets and crowds.”

Aroneanu, Phil:

“If Wall Street is occupying President Obama’s StateDepartment and the halls of Congress, it’s time for thepeople to occupy Wall Street.”

Arrhenius, Svante:

“We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.”1896

Karen Caldwell’s grandfather?

Arrow, Kenneth:

“To say that I am interested in ethics is probably just to say that I’m a human being.”

…it is extremely difficult to know how to decide since you are balancing evils.”

Asai, David:

“Diversity without inclusion is an empty gesture. Inclusion is a feeling of belonging…creating an empowering, embracing, egalitarian environment…”

Ash, Rick:

“The new mask guidance relies on an honor system. Do we trust each other enough to make it work? Republicans and honor system aren’t a good fit. The current word is that the vaccinated are well protected, so no immediate problems for us. But, having non-vaccinated folks maskless in public seems like a strategy for selecting variants that can evade the immunity of the vaccinated.”

Askin, Arthur:

“I am not about celebrating old stuff.”

on receiving Nobel in Physics.

Ashby, Eric:

“Indecisiveness is contagious.”

Ashdown, Pete:

”…life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”

If capital punishment is not a deterrent and there is potential for a grave nonretractable mistake, then I see no reason to continue its use in America… The financial cost of executing a prisoner in the United States has been shown repeatedly to be far higher than life imprisonment. All issues of deterrence and morality aside, the financial cost is not worth it…. The Bill of Rights should be interpreted broadly for the individual …and not for the government or the corporation…. the Bill of Rights is the foundation for our country and American character, we should apply its ideals not only domestically, but wherever Americans may go…see Copyright in Ashdown platform…Defense outsourcing of war…Land use Federal Babbitt book… Healthcare should be driven by doctors and patients, and not profit…transparency and access: I will post my schedule online so people can see exactly who I am meeting with and why. I will also, with privacy respected, post all communications to my office and their intent…. Domestic benefits should not be dependent on marriage, but should be an individual decision as to where they are placed…. The current patent expiration of 20 years, although better than what we’ve seen in the arena of copyright, is an eternity in technology. Reducing patents on software to five years will encourage enhancements and make better software available to the public… Much of what the Patriot Act does is side-step the Fourth Amendment. I believe the citizen should be opaque and the state should be transparent, not the other way around…. over individual privacy. I believe it should be the reverse. Businesses should have to ask for your permission to share your information. If you don’t give your permission or if you don’t respond, it should be illegal for businesses to share your private and personal information

Asimov, Isaac:

“You can’t take it with you … but you can send it on ahead.”

“When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.” – Isaac Asimov

“A public that does not understand how science works can, all too easily, fall prey to those ignoramuses…who make fun of what they do not understand …The difference… between…understanding and not understanding …is also the difference between respect and admiration on the one side, and hate and fear on the other.”

“The good fight has its own values. That it must end in irrevocable defeat is irrelevant.”

…to weep over what is gone is to have had something prove worth the weeping…

…scientific knowledge has fractal properties; …no matter how much we learn, whatever is left … is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the universe.”

…since I don’t prepare my talks I am guided entirely by audience reaction…I …get more and more funny if the audience laughs…or less and less funny if the audience doesn’t laugh…

…what I listen for that tells me I am exactly right….Silence!”

Chap 21 of It’s Been a Good life by Janet Asimov is titled ‘On Prolificity’

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

“Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.”

“There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.”

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny…’”

“…science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

“…the book was based … on the testimony of those least qualified to serve as historians … children and morons; and was probably edited and re-edited through the cycles….the book can’t help but be a mass of distortion, even if it is based in fact.”

on the Book of Revelations in story Night Fall.

Aslan, Reza:

“…there is only one way to win a cosmic war; refuse to fight in it.

A state has borders; it can be geographically defined.

A nation is borderless; it is an ‘imagined community.’

It is a battle that will be waged not against men with guns but against boys with computers, a battle that can be won not with bullets and bombs but with words and ideas.

…both religion and violence function as durable markers of collective identity: the simplest, most effective means of saying who is us and who is them.

Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity; it defined your politics, your economics, and your ethics. More than anything else, your religion was your citizenship.

Religions become institutions when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (…myths) and orthopraxy (…rituals)…

“Religion is not faith…it is the story of faith.”

The clash of monotheisms occurs when faith … becomes entangled in the gnarled branches of religion.”

“It is we who have fashioned God in our image, not the other way around.”

Aspect, Alain:

re: quantum entanglement…

“…shut up and calculate…school.”

Asperger, Hans:

”For success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential.”                      

Arizona State Law:

1886: “ʻPersonʼ includes a corporation, company,partnership, firm, association or society, as well as anatural person.”

Assange, Julian:

“Journalism is not a crime. It is a pillar of a free and informed society…

I’m free today…because I pled guilty to journalism.”

“As Joseph Heller said when people said he hadn’t published anything as good as‘Catch 22’: ‘Neither has anyone else’.”

Aster, Ari

“We live in a world where nobody agrees about what is happening. We’re living in this age of hyper-individualism, and for the last 20 years we’ve been on this track.”

Covid felt like an inflection point, where the link to the old society we lived in was finally cut. That old idea of democracy being something that could be any sort of countervailing force to power and tech and finance, it went away completely at that moment, and it’s where I think we became fully isolated.

We’re looking at the world through strange, old windows, but we can’t experience the present. What are we moving toward?

We end up amplifying each other’s paranoia and fear because there’s nothing in the ether to hold us together anymore

most of us are in the same situation: We’re powerless, we’re afraid and we’ve been cut off from the idea of changing the world, the idea of a countervailing force against power.

Atangana, Abdon:

“… we use mathematics to try to capture and understand nature, but nature is complex, and nature is above mathematics.”

Atkins, PW:

I wonder whether fractal images are not touching the very structure of our brains. Is there a clue in the infinitely regressing character of such images that illuminates our perception of art? Could it be that a fractal image is of such extraordinary richness, that it is bound to resonate with our neuronal circuits and stimulate the pleasure I infer we all feel?

From Gailileo’s Finger, 2003:

“Aristotle…magnificently intellectually fertile and magnificently wrong…”

The Second Law:

“We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.”

Atkinson, Anthony B:

“Government should provide public sector jobs at minimum wage to those who want them, in areas such as meals-on-wheels, elderly care, child care…

Personal income taxes should be made more progressive, with a maximum rate of 65%…”

“… higher marginal income tax rates… progressive property tax rate … use inheritance taxes to finance a minimum inheritance…”

Atkinson, Philip:

“…a community is a unique shared understanding held by a particular racial group, which can only exist as long as the majority of its citizens are unselfish. For the moment the majority become selfish, traditions are discarded along with concern for their racial character. That is, the community loses both its sanity and its racial identity: its nationality.”

in response the A Toynbee

“Philosophy is defined in many dictionaries as the love of wisdom or knowledge, but wisdom is recognising right from wrong while knowledge is recognising truth from falsity; two very different concerns which belong to two separate institutions, religion and science. .. However to understand anything is to combine both wisdom and knowledge: so philosophy can be defined as the study of understanding; or the study of a particular understanding…

ability to recognise good from evil—which is wisdom…

A civilization is the tangible creations of a communal understanding…

Atlantic Monthly:

”If a reform program is revealed gradually, a free press will dissect it and create opposition to it.  Because one sector of society will support one reform but not another, a reformer must work by stealth, isolating one set of issues from the next, and often relying not on the media but on the gaps in communication that exists within a society. ” quoted in  an article in December 2001, page 78

Atlas, Charles:

“As I get older, without wanting to, I find myself thinking about bigger things…

In a way, it’s a self portrait of my brain.”

Via Stuart Comer: He understands how to activate architecture.

Atlas, James:

”History is a series of random events organized in a seemingly sensible order.”

Attali, Jacques:

“He’s not prolific, he’s incontinent.”

French critic commenting on writings of Jacques Attali

Attenberg, Jami:

“I write fiction because it is a beautiful place to hide.”

“Poetry does something wonderful to my brain that is different than the kind of wonderful thing prose does.”

Attenborough, David:

”We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.”

“…we’ve stopped evolving….we’ve stopped natural selection.”

Atwood, Margaret:

“A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.”

“…however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.”
““There must have been a chandelier, once. They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to.”  sher says she writes ‘speculative fiction’.  Twitter WattPad

“…the lecture itself is like watching someone unreeling from her mouth a very long spool of blank paper … that frightens me—that I am going to be up in public, unravelling from my mouth a long spool of blank paper.”

“Prophecies are really about now. In science fiction it’s always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many possibilities…”

…it is all about power for a lot of people. A lot of these things don’t come out of a wish for power, they come out of fear….Social mobbings on Twitter are about being “on the side of those doing it rather than on the side of those having it done to them”.

“I’m more interested in what’s going on in the world than I am in myself,” she says drily. “I’m not much interested in my deep, dark psyche, fascinating though it may be.”

On writing: “I’m not a perfectionist. That’s one clue.” And she’s not fussy about when or where she writes. “I’m a downhill skier. I get to the bottom. Once I’ve gotten to the end I do a lot of rewriting. I start rewriting from the front while I’m still writing at the back, just to remind myself what I’ve written.”

she plots graphs for each character from the year they are born. “I want to know how old they are exactly – so I don’t mess up.”

“We are capable of the most amazing altruism and wonderfulness and we are also capable of the most vile atrocities and horrible acts. It’s not news. We behave well when times are good.”

“[Dystopian is] a society which we find less preferable than the one we’re living in, and utopian is one in which we assume that things will be better than the one we’re living in.”

“She explains that “creative anger” occurs when you’re able to channel it “without panicking,” and create a system, a series of steps to achieve a goal outside of anger. But “destructive anger,” she tells me, is when “you shout out all around you” and direct your feelings of rage and anger at an object “which doesn’t deserve it.”

via interviewer Collier Meyerson

“In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.”

limiting power quote in Great American Read episode 5 interview, re: Handmaid’s Tale

“I planned my death carefully…the trick was to disappear without a trace, leaving behind me the shadow of a corpse, a shadow that everyone would mistake for solid reality.”

beginning of Lady Oracle.

“Why do men want to kill the bodies of other men?

Women don’t want to kill the bodies of other women.

By and large, as far as we know,

Men’s bodies are the most dangerous things on Earth.”

“I was asleep before,” said Elisabeth Moss’s character, Offred. “That’s how we let it happen.”

by Michelle Goldberg, review: ‘That’s the point of dystopias – to figure out where society might be going.’

protest sign: ‘Make Margaret Atwood fiction again.’

on saving old loveletters: “I don’t think it matters whether they speak to me or not. Whether they speak is more interesting.”

Slow walking leads to rumination, which leads to poetry.

I’m going to be dead soon, so good luck with it all’

“If writing wasn’t a pleasure, I wouldn’t doit.”

“I don’t have a job, so I can’t be fired.”

“…I’m very willing to listen to other people’s points of view, but I am not willing to be scammed.”

“Everything in nature is on a bell curve. We have this two-box thinking [about gender] because it’s biblical, so wool over here, linen over there,”

via Graeme Gibson, husband, on dementia: ‘I no longer know their names, but then, they don’t know my name either,’

via Hadley Freeman review:

When she writes her books, she types up yesterday’s handwritten pages and handwrites the pages for tomorrow.

…Some people won’t really discuss things with me because they are intimidated. I agree with Orwell: the truth does matter.”

natural law: placental mammals will abort in the face of resource scarcity.

No one is forcing women to have abortions. No one either should force them to undergo childbirth. Enforce childbirth if you wish but at least call that enforcing by what it is. It is slavery: the claim to own and control another’s body, and to profit by that claim.

first line of chapter 2, The Handmaid’s Tale:

“There must have been a chandelier, once. They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to.”

“Is life a waiting room or a journey?”  death?

course: “Practical Utopias,”

“Virgule – after the French word for comma, indicating a pause for breath,”

“It is not unusual that writers tell stories. It’s unusual that other people stop.”

“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it.

Water does.”

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

“How do I know so much? It accumulates as time passes, like fluff under the sofa. I’ve

always been curious.”

end Atwood

Auden, W H

Partition

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,

Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition

Between two peoples fanatically at odds,

With their different diets and incompatible gods.

“Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It’s too late

For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:

The only solution now lies in separation.

The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,

That the less you are seen in his company the better,

So we’ve arranged to provide you with other accommodation.

We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,

To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.”

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day

Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,

He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate

Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date

And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,

But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect

Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,

And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,

But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,

A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget

The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,

Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

End Partition.   Via Simon Winchester

“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”

“Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.”

“No tyrant ever fears

his geologists or his engineers. “

Auden’s (from The Dyer’s Hand): “Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”

‘He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

and snow disfigured the [ublic statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a darkcold day…’

‘In memory of W. B. Yeats’

Audette, Kouakou Amoin:

“My retirement will come the day I’m buried.” Ivory Coast grandmother

Augstein, Jakob:

”…the United States…has more in common with a failed state than a democracy…America is no longer a Western nation….the nation is moving even farther away from the core of democracy. It is losing its ability to compromise….America has changed….reason has been replaced by delusion. The notion of tax cuts has taken on a cult-like status, and the limited role of the state a leading ideology….America’s fate should serve as a warning: We must protect our political culture, our institutions and our state.”

in der Spiegel

Augustine, St.:

”There is another form of temptation even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity.”

“All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons.”

Aurelius, Marcus:

“Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under your observation in life.”

Austin, J. L.:

“…comments on comments, criticisms of criticisms, are subject to the law of diminishing fleas…”

Australia:

“We deserve the chance to figure out who we are without algorithms telling us what to like, what to think and how to feel.”

FLOSSIE, a 12-year-old girl from the state of Tasmania, on Australia’s sweeping measure that bars those under 16 from having social media accounts.

Avvakum:

one of the most important texts in Russian literature: “The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, Written By Himself”. Avvakum was a 17th-century cleric and religious dissident who defended his faith. He was twice banished, imprisoned in Siberia and eventually executed by being burned alive. Avvakum entitled his book zhitie—which can be translated as “life” and interpreted as “hagiography”. A heretic in the eyes of the church and state, Avvakum wrote a book that prepared him for sainthood.

Avksentieva, Sardana V:

“I realized that I was 48 years old and I had not done anything of which I could be proud.”

Mayor of Yakutsk, Russia

Avnee:

“…where you are at the present is the most important, but at the same time it’s essential to not let go of where you’ve been. You should not have to let go of your roots to be part of American Society.”

            Avnee, British- and Indian-American, ny times 9-21-2014, p-SR 7

Avila, Teresa de:

“Thank God for the things I do not own.”

Avineri, Shlomo:

“…pessimistic prognosis…”

Aviv, Rachel:

[an eerie voice she heard in hospital as a six-year-old]: “I sometimes think of that voice as a potential entry into a different realm of experience, an alternative path that for reasons I don’t fully understand I never took…” in Strangers to Ourselves

Axelrod, Daniel:

“… being a sociopath really works for [Trump].”

“They rode the tiger. And now the tiger is eating them.”

“Trump is Pavlov. We are the dogs.”

on GOP, via Coates

Ayad, Moustafa:

“The far right, the alt-right, are all sort of galvanized by the Taliban essentially running roughshod through Afghanistan, and us leaving underneath a Democratic president.”

Ayers, Bill:

from Bill Ayers’ Demand the Impossible, 2016, own bk:

quoting Che Guevara: Be realistic. Demand the Impossible.

quoting Norm Chomsky: ‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.’

quoting Czeslaw Milosz:

            ‘In a room where

            people unanimously maintain

            a conspiracy of silence,

            one word of truth

            sounds like a pistol shot.’

quoting Mikhail Bakumin: ‘… freedom without socialism is a license for privilege and injustice, while socialism without freedom can become slavery and brutality…’

quoting George Orwell’s torturer in 1984:

‘Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.’

Ayers:

“Where do we go from here? A season of light or a season of darkness? Chaos or community? Barbarism or socialism? …

The private-public partnership boils down to this: private profit, public cost. …

quoting the Onion: ‘An estimated 20 million U.S. children suffer from a poorly understood neurological condition called YTD, or Youthful Tendency Disorder.’ …

It doesn’t take perceptive young people any time at all to sniff out the duplicity and the dirty-dealing …, and to conclude that all schools lie. Teachers lie. Parents lie. … the whole edifice of adult society  is a complete phony, a tangled fraud sailing smoothly along on a sea of silence. …

quoting William Deresiewicz: ‘These enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality is very different … Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea of why they’re doing it.’

quoting Madeline Albright: ‘ We are the indispensable nation.’

quoting Camus: ‘Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.’

quoting John Dewey: ‘…appreciate at every turn the opportunity which chaos affoeds.’

end Ayers

Ayres, Ian:

”…the Brandeis Ratio — the ratio of the average income of the nation’s richest 1 percent to the median household income — has skyrocketed since Ronald Reagan took office. In 1980 the average 1-percenter made 12.5 times the median income, but in 2006 (the latest year for which data is available) the average income of our richest 1 percent was a whopping 36 times greater than that of the median household.”

… we have reached the Brandeis tipping point.

… we propose an automatic extra tax on the income of the top 1 percent of earners — a tax that would limit the after-tax incomes of this club to 36 times the median household income.

Importantly, our Brandeis tax does not target excessive income per se; it only caps inequality. Billionaires could double their current income without the tax kicking in — as long as the median income also doubles. The sky is the limit for the rich as long as the “rising tide lifts all boats.” Indeed, the tax gives job creators an extra reason to make sure that corporate wealth does in fact trickle down….

our goal is to change the way politicians speak about income equality…

or the sake of democracy, to end the continued erosion of economic equality in our nation.

With  Aaron S. Edlin

Azel, Joseph:

“The United States sees itself as “number one” and China sees itself as the center of the universe. Americans core value is freedom, for the Chinese it is order. We view government as a necessary evil, for the Chinese government is a necessary good. We are inclusive, they are exclusive. Our time horizon is now, for the Chinese it is infinity. Our form of government is a democratic republic; China is an authoritarian/totalitarian regime. We anchor government legitimacy in the will of the people; for the Chinese legitimacy emanates from performance. And, in the context of international relations, we aspire to an international order based on the rule of law. China aspires to an international order in which China rules in harmonious hierarchy.”

review of Allison

Aziz, Omer:

“The Civil War was a second American founding…The United States is a nation with two radically different ideas at its heart: white supremacy and equality under the law.”

reviewing Whitman Hitler’s American Model

Azmanova, Albena:

Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia (New Directions in Critical Theory) Book

The concept of crisis would be the signature of a last symptom, the convulsive effort to save “a world” that we no longer inhabit.—Jacques Derrida,

To be radical is to grasp things by the root.—Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy

This book is about the possibilities for radical change, of unsettling and unseating capitalism, despite its thriving through seemingly endless crises.

Our discontent was imbued with a sense that the everyday reality we inhabited was somehow pathological, as it deviated much too far from the ideals of humanism, fraternity, and decency the system purported to embody.

The current state of capitalist democracy contains a tangible potential for overcoming capitalism by subverting it.

Introduction: “How Come?” Asked the Befuddled Left

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.—Paul Valéry,

precarity capitalism in order to highlight one of its distinctive features—the universalization of insecurity, which is now afflicting the majority of the population, almost irrespective of employment type and income level.

To be radical is to grasp things by the root.—Karl Marx, “A Contribution

a significant, yet gradual metamorphosis of the social order, a process the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci described as a “passive revolution.”

it is exactly the “growing of the pie” that is destroying the very conditions for humanity’s continuous existence on earth. Prosperity for all will destroy the planet.

the “politically hopeful.”

Accountable Capitalism Act that Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced in the U.S. Congress in August 2018) would hamper, if not completely disable, the structural mechanism through which ownership generates economic power and political influence

sense, the acute economic uncertainty that marks contemporary capitalism has a stabilizing effect on the system, even though it is detrimental not only to individuals and society, but to its very engine of prosperity, the market economy.

we need to build socioeconomic certainty—what I will proceed to describe as a “political economy of trust.”

the political economy of trust has two components. The first regards global economic integration (globalization), the second, domestic social and economic policies.

it is within the internal contradictions of contemporary capitalism that an emancipatory potential resides.

Obtaining social justice in this context is, to a great extent, a matter of maximization of voluntary employment flexibility.

“universal minimum employment”

in the Netherlands, where part-time employment is highly regulated).

neither the eligibility for social insurance nor its amount should be sourced from the employment contract, as in the Bismarckian welfare state, because this discourages labor-market exit. Rather, it should be based on national citizenship or, even better, denizenship, emulating the Scandinavian form of welfare provision. The main value of this model lies in securing every citizen a place in the productive economy yet decoupling sources of livelihood from one’s entrapment in the process of economic production.

James Chamberlain has argued in a compelling way in his Undoing Work, Rethinking Community (2018).

Azoulay, Ariella:

“It is our historic responsibility, not only to produce photos, but to make them speak,”

Babones, Salvatore:

The goal of a Tobin tax on financial transactions is not to take from the rich and give to the poor. It’s to prevent the rich from destroying the economy for the rest of us. Tobin taxes are meant to slow down runaway markets, to let a little air out of inflating bubbles and in general to give people and governments just a little more time to respond to economic problems before they get out of hand. Tobin taxes give the real economy just a miniscule edge over the speculative economy.

Bacall, Lauren:

“…the trip…helped those of us at the time who wanted to fight for what we thought was right and against what we knew was wrong…you know what you learn if you’re a New Yorker? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing.”

Bacevich, Andrew:

“…a radically redefined conception of individual freedom, heavy on rights and privileges, exceedingly light on duties and obligations…

citizens…[must start acting like citizens again]… accepting duties and obligations in every aspect of American life.”

“Absent reflection, learning becomes an impossibility.”
“The United States leaves Iraq having learned nothing.”

via Hedges: Bacevich wrote in The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. “The Big Lies are the truths that remain unspoken: that freedom has an underside; that nations, like households, must ultimately live within their means; that history’s purpose, the subject of so many confident pronouncements, remains inscrutable.

the absence of self-awareness that forms such an enduring element of the American character persists.”

Bach, Richard:

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world,

the master calls a butterfly.

Bachelet, Michelle:

“Governments which try to rule through fear will fail, because people like you will resist them.”

Bachman, Michelle:

“The Lord said, ‘Be submissive’.

Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands,’”

Bachmuth, Hannah:

“I take all the stress and bad things that happen over the day, and I lock them in a box.”

12 years old, 11-11-2009 to the NY Times

Bacigalupi, Paolo:

“…the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.”

Backman, Fredrik:

in Anxious People:

:…humor is the soul’s last line of defense, and as long as we’re laughing, we’re alive…

…a book…written by a woman, so it didn’t need hundreds of pages to say things…”

Bacon, David:

Illegal People:

“Today working people of all countries are asked to accept continuing globalization, in which capital is free to go wherever it wants…migrants must have the same freedom.”

quoting Max Frisch: “We called for workers, and there came human beings.”

…agribusiness…learned that … keeping people on the move was much preferable to a labor force with roots from which a strong union could grow…

quoting Close to Slavery report: “These workers are not treated like ‘guests’ … they are … the disposable workers of the U.S. economy.”

quoting Howard Berman: “Growers always scream ‘shortage’…what they want is an oversupply of labor to keep wages down and discourage unionization.”

see Smedley Butler quote in book, p. 70

“It would be more accurate to call these people migrants and the process migration.”

A globalized political and economic system creates illegality by displacing people and then denying them rights and equality as they do what they have to do to survive – move to find work.

Bacon, Francis:

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

“If a man shall begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties…”

“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.”

“It would be madness and inconsistency to suppose that things not yet done can be done, except by means not yet tried.”

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

“We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hands – and melting like a snowflake.”

“If a man shall begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties…”

“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.”

“It would be madness and inconsistency to suppose that things not yet done can be done, except by means not yet tried.”

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

Bad Bunny:

The fact that he never sings in English could be seen as an act of protest in and of itself…

Badanin, Roman:

“It is Putin’s behavior away from the cameras that speaks much more about his real worldview than speeches,”

Putin’s eldest daughter, Maria Vorontsova, a trained endocrinologist,

Badinter, Robert:

“Hatred was never so frightening as when it wore the mask of justice. Badinter had seen enough of hatred to know that.”   Economist obit regarding guillotine.

Badiucao:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvlrQHD1etM

tankman courage

‘…it’s not me finding the buttons, it’s them offering the buttons to me’

on Sisyphus…

Baer, Robert:

“…it’s always the evil we refuse to see that does us the greatest harm.”

in See No Evil, 2002

Baehr, Peter:

“Freedom carries obligations…the first of which is to grow up.”

discussing Rebecca West

Baez, Joan:

“…real meditation is when you’re looking out the window at the leaves while the teacher’s talking. As a child, I was engrossed in what was going on outside, somewhere else…

I write words backwards as a form of therapy when I need to get to the root of a blockage or calm the buzzing heat of a panic attack…

my subconscious  appears to be preoccupied with the white male ego and its contribution to darkness…

I think courage is contagious. I think violence is really contagious. It’s easier than nonviolent action. It’s gotten so that if somebody shoots something up, well, the police shoot him, of course. They kill him, of course. It’s just a given. What kind of insanity is that?

“What was more conscious was trying to make an album that was in some musical way trying to make some beauty in the face of — well, of evil, really,”

She called the current political climate the result of “a battle with 40 years of think tanks for the right wing — conservatives learned how to talk, how to lie, how to switch things around in a way that liberals and progressives never did.”

“It’s not big, but I don’t think we can think in big terms now, or we’ll just get under the covers and never get out,” she said. “The little stuff almost becomes more important right now, because you have a chance at it. The world we are living in is being made horrible and is going to need every little victory — that your family and friends feel some kind of support, some kind of goodness.”

 “When I go onstage, I don’t make history, I am history,” she wrote. “Perhaps it’s enough for me be up there reminding people of a time when we had the music, the cause, the direction, and each other.

…there is virtue to having carried the flame, and grace now in passing the torch.”

“If there were a call to arms, or to non-arms, or some wonderful festival in a place I’ve never been, I would go.”

via Dave Itzkoff NYT

“…the clearest vision I ever get about myself is when I see myself most clearly connected with all the rest of humanity…people walk around blind…[It’s not] enough if some of us are able to have some kind of vision, unless other people also have that same thing.”

End Baez

Bagehot, Walter:

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. ..

We must not let in daylight upon magic.” on British monarchy.

Baggott, Mathew J:

“MDMA produced a prosocial syndrome that seemed to facilitate emotional disclosure and that appears consistent with the suggestion that it represents a novel pharmacological class…..see pdf     

Bagley, Pat:

“I make no apologies. Quotation is not defamation.”

“It will begin as a noble experiment in quasi-theocratic communitarianism.

Then we’ll end up selling multilevel marketing crap to each other.”

“Bible Belch”.

Bagley, Sharon:

“The mind sees patterns in random data, which is why the sky is speckled with bears and big dippers.”

“…our neurons’ habit of filling in the blanks.”

Newsweek, 11-5-07

Bagley, Will:

“Shortly before she died, my Mormon mother said: ‘I know it’s all a lot of hooie – but I like it anyway’.”

“I find the more I find out, the more I need to find out.”

 Dale L. Morgan (via Will Bagley)

Baier, Annette:

“We inhabit a climate of trust as we inhabit an atmosphere -and notice it as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or polluted.”

Baier, Robert (Bob): see Obrigado memoir.

Bail, Chris:

Golbeck review of book:

‘…the structure of social media is designed to amplify extreme voices and make moderates nearly invisible, shifting the discourse.

…they twist reality, refracting our view (hence the eponymous “prism”) and distorting

our understanding of ourselves and others…

 these factors can refine and polarize our perception of ourselves without us even knowing that it is happening…the appearance of polarization feeds itself.’

Bailey, JE:

“Formulation of such a mathematical model forces the modeler to identify explicitly the key components, the key reactions, the key interactions, and also to describe their quantitative interconnections.  This exercise in systematic organization of assumptions and key features of the metabolic subsystem of interest can be a critically important contribution of the modeling effort to the intuition and insight of the researcher, almost independent of the consequences of the modeling calculations,  The modeling exercise enforces a high level of intellectual rigor, careful study of prior work on the system, and systematic thought about its most important features.”

Baillie, Bruce:

“It is as if there is a void, a nothingness, that lies behind all things.”

Fred Camper in NYT obit for Bruce Baillie

Bailyn, Bernard:

“Like a novelist, the historian must conjure a non-existent, an impalbable world in all its living comprehension, and yet do this within the constraints of verifiable facts.”

Bain, Donald:

“I’ve attacked every book with the philosophy that it’s the most important book I’ve ever written, and maybe the last I will write, no matter whose name is on it.”

from NYT obit Margaret Truman’s ghost author on writing

Oppenheimer, J Robert:

‘Now we are all sons of bitches.’

Via Kenneth T Bainbridge, responding to “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Baird, Chris:

“I personally believe that oil shale and tar sands projects in Utah are highly speculative in a myriad of ways. It would be wise for the state of Utah to consider this in

appropriating water rights to the most beneficial use. The cost-benefit

scenario for such projects are also highly questionable, and that isn’t even

considering the environmental costs.”

Grand County Council, Utah

Baker, Howard, Jr.:

“Two things I do not understand: the Middle East and the House of Representatives.”

quoted by NY Times obit story 6-27-2014

Baker, Josephine:

“I don’t lie. I improve on life.”

Baker, Norman:

“For weeks at a time there was no sign of man. Just his garbage.”

Ra II crew, obit

Baker, Peter:

“…an implacable opposition with little if any real interest in collaboration, a news media saturated with triviality and conflict, a culture that demands solutions yesterday, a societal cynicism that holds leadership in low regard…

“…whenever crisis visits a given community, the fundamental reality of that community is laid bare…[crises]..rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds…

 suddenly the question of what was feasible felt different…”

President Trump…an Axis of Autocrats…via Susan Rice

Baker, Peter C:

Re: conspiracy theory viral videos: “The absence of evidence is food [or grounds] for conspiracy.”

Bakkan, Joel:

”…the corporation’s built-in compulsion to externalize its costs is at the root of many of the world’s social and environmental ills.”

“[The corporation must be] reconstituted to serve, promote, and be accountable to broader domains of society than just themselves and their shareholders.”

Bakker, Karen:

“‘insubstantiating’ – the concept of bringing an idea into being.”

Bakula, Daniela:

“55% of the variation in human life span is explained by genetics…the heritability of aging.”

Bakunin, Mikhail:

“I shall continue to be an impossible person so long as those who

are now possible remain possible.”

Balaji, Suchir:

“When a system like GPT-4 learns from data, it makes a complete copy of that data.”

Baldwin, Alec:

“Alec Baldwin… is socially aware, but only to a limit. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and that’s a big problem.”  Via Jessica Coen

 “[Baldwin is] a hypocrite and Trump’s a hypocrite. Technically, he might be the best person to capture the hypocrisy.”   via Nell Scovell

Baldwin, James:

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

“It is their innocence which constitutes the crime …You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity … that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make piece with mediocrity…”

“…ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

“…the rulers of the ‘higher races’, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life upon this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.” via Mishra

“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, as men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to  keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

“In America … life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet.”

“The incoherence of the country is due to the incoherent nature of our …??? Studs Terkel interview

I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”

People can cry much easier than they can change.”

“I … do not bring down property values when I move in. You bring them down when you move out.”

“It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

“It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.

“It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime”

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

“White is a metaphor for power.”

“… moral monsters …”

“What I’m trying to say to this country, to us, is that we must know this, we must realize this, that no other country in the world has been so fat and so sleek, and so safe, and so happy, and so irresponsible, and so dead for twenty years.”

from Nobody Knows my Name:

review in Kansas City Star: “If it can’t arouse the American conscience, then there isn’t much hope for America.”

“I still believe that the unexamined life is not worth living….One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.”

“… almost everyone … loves a man who loves to listen.”

“… it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free – he has set himself free – for higher dreams, for greater  privileges.”

…the word ‘majority’ doers not refer to numbers…it refers to influence.

…we have …to create a country in which there are no minorities…

…freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be…

We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.”

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

James Baldwin said in 1963, “The only people in the country at the moment who believe either in Christianity or in the country are the most despised minority in it.”

“…a society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”

 “I will flatly say that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long.”

“people are as free as they want to be”.

“It is very nearly impossible…to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”

“What is ghastly and really almost hopeless in our racial situation now is that the crimes we have committed are so great and so unspeakable that the acceptance of this knowledge would lead, literally, to madness. The human being, then, in order to protect himself, closes his eyes, compulsively repeats his crimes.”

“When I was a kid, the world was white, for all intents and purposes, and now it is struggling to remain white — a very different thing.”

And [they] have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white.

in ‘On Being White … and Other Lies’, 1984

The powerless must do their own dirty work.

The powerful have it done for them.

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anyone has ever said about it. What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.”

“It is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he has set free – he has set himself free – for hirer dreams, for greater privileges.”

“1948: I didn’t know what would happen to me in France, but I knew what would happen to me in New York.”

via Montefiore: “An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in the season of drought drought.”

“…an artist’s role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.”

James Baldwin captured another aspect of the Black-Jewish schism in his April 1967 essay in The Times, “Negroes Are Antisemitic Because They’re Anti-White.” “The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro’s understanding. It increases the Negro’s rage. For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is slaughtered. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him.”  via Bergner

“I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me.”

in Viseu: “It may, of course, be the other way around. Columbus was discovered by what he found.”

“I have always felt that a human being could only

be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But

I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”

“The place in which I fit will not exist until I make it. … What artists and prisoners have in common is that they both know what it means to be free.”

“Letter from a region in my mind.”

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love – whether we call it friendship or family or romance – is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other other’s light.”

James Baldwin’s line that, “This color [this Blackness] seems to operate as a most disagreeable mirror.”

“Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection,…[I] want to rob them of the jewel of [their] naïveté, to grab them by the lapels and drag them kicking and screaming before the mirror of history and have them look and see what they truly are.”

“In this world there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.”via Springsteen.

see also Menand.

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all..”

end Baldwin, James

Baldwin, Matt and Mark Short (via MAPS):

“We have consistently found that when music is thoughtfully combined with the correct psychedelic medicine, it is able to turn just about anybody into what is known as a deep listener, that rare kind of person who has powerful visionary and transformative emotional experiences simply from listening closely to a piece of music.”

Balestrini, Nanni:

“I am interested in collective characters … The collective character struggles politically, together with others like him, in order to transform society. Thus his own story becomes an epic story.”    on writing.

Balko, Radley:

Rise of the Warrior Cop.

“…the purpose of federal law enforcement [today, 1-25-2026] isn’t to uphold the rule of law or promote public safety but to enforce the will of a single man.”

Ball, James:

The Other Pandemic:

“… conspiracy theories must be considered from a public health standpoint…

There is no subsection of society with total natural immunity to conspiratorial thinking…

4Chan and its ilk are the digital equivalent of real world viral reservoirs…

The vector here tends to be influencers…

Getting someone to drop a conspiracy theory takes months or years, and may never succeed.… Prevention is the only option and hope…

A digital public health system…”

Ball, Patrick:

”You can do precise statistics about what’s in your database and may be completely wrong about the world.”

Ballerini, Edoardo:

“…he takes great care to master the small choices that help keep his most profitable instrument in form. On recording days (most weekdays), he avoids foods that make his mouth pasty (like cheese or yogurt) and passes up drinks (like espresso) that make his stomach noisy. He takes regular sips of water, during breaks, to keep saliva at optimal flow.

He soothes his vocal cords, some nights, with a small amount of whiskey; his children run little risk of being yelled at by their father, as he protects his voice from that kind of stress. About a year after “Beautiful Ruins,” he temporarily lost his voice, so much so that he sounded, he says, “like a dying frog.” To make sure that did not happen again, he sat in on a workshop taught by another well- admired narrator, Robin Miles, who helped him learn to take small, subtle intakes of air through the nose as he exhales, so that he is never entirely without breath; the approach resembles, he says, his own past experience with meditation, which also helped him with the focus he needs for the long hours of sometimes monotonous reading — not every book is to his taste.

Even when the subject fails to intrigue him, though, the play of the language itself serves as a point of engagement. As the child of a poet who was always hosting spirited dinner parties with other poets, Ballerini grew up among conversations that were not just wordy, but were about the sound of words. His fascination with prosody frequently carries him along; when he reads aloud, he often appears to be conducting with one hand. “I’ve always heard language in terms of sound as much as meaning,” he says. “A phrase like ‘A bird flew through the window’ is as much about the internal rhyme, ‘flew through,’ as it is about the action described, and I pay attention to both.”

via The Voice of God NYT Mag, May 17,2020 by Susan Dominus

Balzac, Honore de:

“Memories beautify life, but only forgetting makes it bearable.”

Balzac used to imbibe coffee grounds dry, on an empty stomach, in order, he wrote, to “quick march ideas into motion” as “the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a

magnificent gallop”

Bamford, James:

“In his 1941 story, ‘The Library of Babel’, Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world’s knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood.”

The Nation-The Candidate and the Spy:

“Archimedes Group, a private intelligence company that boasts that it can ‘change reality according to our client’s wishes’…outsourcing fake news and voter manipulation is a growth industry in Israel…

‘Team Jorge’ – a secretive organization whose specialty was weaponizing disinformation world-wide ‘to covertly meddle in elections without a trace’.”

“tailored avatars – thousasnds of phony social media accounts…”

Ban Ki-Moon:

“We mined our way to growth. We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences. Those days are over…”

UN Secretary General, quoted by Ehrlich Paul

“We need a revolution. Revolutionary thinking. Revolutionary action … It is easy to mouth the words ‘sustainable development’, but to make it happen we have to be prepared to make major changes – in our lifestyles, our economic models, our social organization, and our political life.”

Banerjee, Abhijit:

“The only recourse we have against bad ideas is to resist the seduction of the ‘obvious’, be skeptical of promised miracles, question the evidence, be patient with complexity and honest about what we know and what we can know.”

Bani-Sadr:

“I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.”

Banks, Elizabeth:

“Irresponsible ejaculation is the cause of all unwanted pregnancy.”

Bannister, Steve:

“…population growth has minimal influence on per capita income…choosing fewer children is better — for individuals, society, and the planet.”

UPEC Board

Bannon, Steve:

“Life is a battle of good and evil … history repeats itself.”

“I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

“In the White House I had influence. At Breitbart, I had power.”

“…we are going for a nationalist message”

“Persuasion is highly over-rated.”

“…Nancy Pelosi… is a master,and she is teaching a master class.”

Bannon toke inspiration from Hoffer, who observed that true believers were prone to conversion from one cause to another since they were driven more by their need to identify with a mass movement than by any particular ideology.

“Musk is a truly evil person who has the maturity of a child”

“technofeudalists” re Thiel, etc.

Barash, David P:

“There is a story, believed to be of Cherokee origin, in which a girl is troubled by a recurring dream in which two wolves fight viciously. Seeking an explanation, she goes to her grandfather, highly regarded for his wisdom, who explains that there are two forces within each of us, struggling for supremacy, one embodying peace and the other, war. At this, the girl is even more distressed, and asks her grandfather who wins. His answer: “The one you feed.”

Barba-Kay, Anton:

“I think a new kind of human being is taking shape, under the presumption that what

most counts about us can be quantified and codified…”

“The point of CAPTCHA is to test for universal humanity in a manner that is rote,

unambiguous, and in no way context-dependent. Yet tasks that are

rote, unambiguous, and in no way context-dependent are precisely the sort of thing

that automation does best. Which is why each time we succeed in establishing that

we are human through CAPTCHA we take one more step toward obsolescence.”

Barbazon, Michael:

“…Kim’s heaven-sent conviction that he alone can save humanity .”

Barber, Benjamin:

“Jihad: war not as an instrument of policy but as an emblem of identity, an expression of community, an end in itself….It appears all too easy to throw the historical gears all into reverse and pass from a Communist dictatprship back into a tribal state…’Jihad’ is a rich word whose generic meaning is ‘struggle’ – usually the struggle of the soul to avert evil…

Neither McWorld or Jihad is remotely democratic in impulse. Neither needs democracy; neither promotes democracy…the Articles of Confederation…Democrats need to seek out indigenous democratic impulses…There is always a desire for self-government…

“If we export capitalism without democracy, we breed anarchy and terrorism,”

“…the ancient Greek term for the politically uninvolved person was idiot.”

“… global warming recognizes no sovereign territory … AIDS carries no passport …technology renders national boundaries increasingly meaningless …  the Internet defies national regulation … oil and cocaine addiction circle the planet like twin plagues and … financial capital and labor resources, like their anarchic cousins crime and terror, move from country to country with ‘wilding’ abandon without regard for formal or legal arrangements—acting informally and illegally whenever traditional institutions stand in their way.’

… Declaring our in- dependence in a world of per- verse and malevolent inter- dependence foisted on us by people who despise us comes close to what political science roughnecks once would have called pissing into the wind. …

Power confers responsibility. The power en- joyed by the United States bestows on it obligations to address conditions it may not have itself brought into being. Jihad in this view may grow out of and reflect (among other things) a pathological metastasis of valid grievances about the effects of an arrogant secularist materialism that is the unfortunate con- comitant of the spread of consumerism across the world. It may reflect a desperate and ultimately destructive concern for the integrity of indigenous cultural traditions that are ill equipped to defend themselves against aggressive markets in a free-trade world. It may reflect a struggle for justice in which Western markets appear as obstacles rather than facilitators of cultural identity. …

the truly desperate may settle for terror as a response to our failure even to ask such questions. …

The war on terrorism must be fought, but not as the war of McWorld against jihad. The only war worth winning is the struggle for democracy.

“Democracy grows from the bottom up and cannot be imposed from the top down. Civil society has to be built from the inside out.”

end Barber,Benjamin R.

Barber, James Davis:

“The President is not some shapeless organism in a flood of novelties, but a man with a memory in a system with a history.”

“Active-positive Presidents want to achieve results. Active-negatives aim to get and keep power. Passive-positives are after love. Passive-negatives emphasize their civic virtue.”

“…character has its main development in childhood, world view in adolescence, style in early adulthood.”

“…the climate of expectations at any given time is the political air the President has to breathe.”

 “Every story of Presidential decision-making is really two stories: an outer one in which a rational man calculates and an inner one in which an emotional man feels.”

“Style is his way of acting; world view is his way of seeing.”

“Character is the way the President orients himself toward life.”

“When we citizens vote…we make, in effect, a prediction…in a situation of immense uncertainty.”

“From the beginning, even geography had to give way to the force of myth….The pictures in our heads conquered the ground beneath our feet”

Journalism…is history in a hurry. Haste fights reflection.”

“Biography brings theory down to earth, history to focus, fantasy to reality.”

Barbour, Ian:

“…we can accept the central biblical message without accepting the prescientific cosmology in which it was expressed … theologians have to recognize the changing historical contexts of theological reflection.”

Barclay, William:

”There are two great days in a person’s life—the day we are born

and the day we discover why.” 

Bardi, Jennifer:

“…the real pandemic is a virus of the mind…”

Barghouti, Mourid:

            After the death of the horseman

            The homeward-bound horse

            Says everything

            Without saying anything.

Barkan, Ady:

“The work of democracy is about trying to do together what we cannot do individually. And so for me the best way to escape my disintegrating body is to engage in this collective struggle…There is a better way to structure our society, a better way to care for one another, a better way to use our precious time together.”

“That’s the paradox of my situation. As my voice has gotten weaker, more people have heard my message. As I lost the ability to walk, more people have followed in my footsteps.”

dying of A.L.S.

Barkan, Ross:

“…The novel can do only so much to approximate reality’s madness.”

Barkholtz, Tim:

Exxon PR stationed within Princeton U:

“The system is just too big to be flipped.”

Barnard, Mary:

“…the drug plants were there, waiting to give men a new idea based on a new experience. The experience might have had … an almost explosive effect on the largely dormant minds of men, causing them to think of things they had never thought of before.”

Barnes, Ben:

“History needs to know that this happened…it’s so significant … we’ve got to get it down some way.” on subverting Jimmy Carter, NYT.

Barnes, Peter:

Capitalism 1.0…Capitalism 2.0   Capitalism 3.0

Barnhill, Kelly: on writing…

“The healing from a neural injury is tremendously taxing — it’s why so many of us are tired all the time….

Our memories feed our imaginations. Our imaginations fill in the gaps for our memories.

Barnosky, Anthony:

“We can see it coming. That’s the difference. The dinosaurs couldn’t see it coming.”

Barnum, PT:

“Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.”     

Baron, Ella:

Cartoons offer a rare opportunity to put the powerful into close proximity on the page with the people whose lives they dictate – it’s a way of holding that power to account…

the expression of a caricature, where the thickness and angle of an eyebrow can be the

difference between a smile and a frown…

A cartoon can’t encapsulate the news, but I think it can cut through it. It is

hypothetical: a twist on reality that makes you look back at it from a different

perspective…

It’s a way to undermine his ego, like plucking the feathers off. I think

the best caricatures capture not just a politician’s face but their whole body

and its movement…

Baron, Martin:

“We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work.”

Baron-Cohen, Simon:

“Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.”

“empathy erosion”

Barrett, Justice Amy Coney:

“My goal today is to convince you that the court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

Barrett, Lisa Feldman:

“Anger is a form of ignorance…”

Barrie, JM:

“I’m not young enough to know everything.”                   

Barrow, John:

“Human minds have…long and tortuous histories….they have made their way from the past to the present by an erratic path of trial and error…All our present abilities are inheritances from the past.”                   

Bart, Pauline:

by Katharine A McKinnon: ‘Pauline took the insights of the women’s liberation movement and turned them into knowledge. She took the insights from consciousness raising and made them into scholarship…’

“…fake orgasms … innocent simulation…Everything is data, but data isn’t everything.”

Barthes, Roland:

“A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

Barry, John:

“…people died because of cynical decisions made by shortsighted politicians drawing on bad science.”

on Katrina and New Orleans

Barry, Maryanne Trump:

“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”

Barry, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president. “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”

“I stand second to none in condemning sexual harassment of women,” she told the Interagency Committee on Women in Law Enforcement in 1992. “But what is happening is that every sexy joke of long ago, every flirtation, is being recalled by some women and revised and re-evaluated as sexual harassment. Many of these accusations are, in anybody’s book, frivolous.”

from her NYT obit.

Bartlett, Albert:

“Modern agriculture is the use of land to turn petroleum into food”

Bartlett’s Laws of Sustainability:

Seventh Law: A society that has to import people to do its daily work (“We can’t find locals who will do the work,”) is not sustainable.

Eighth Law: Sustainability requires that the size of the population be less than or equal to the carrying capacity of the ecosystem for the desired standard of living.

Twelfth Law: When large efforts are made to improve the efficiency with which resources are used, the resulting savings are easily and completely wiped out by the added resources that are consumed as a consequence of modest increases in population.

Thirteenth Law: The benefits of large efforts to preserve the environment are easily canceled by the added demands on the environment that result from small increases in human population.

Baruch, Bernard:

”…all economic movements, by their  very nature,  are motivated by crowd psychology….the periodic madnesses which afflict mankind must reflect some deeply rooted trait in human nature.”

Barzun, Jacques:

“The soul of the spy is somehow the model of us all.”

“…these arts…cannot be taught in the air but only through the difficulties of a defined subject; they cannot be taught in one course in one year, but must be acquired gradually in dozens of connections.”

Bastiat, Frederic:

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

Basu, Balaka:

“… young readers are trying to understand the world and their place in it…dystopian writing engages with pressing global concerns: liberty and self-determination, environmental destruction and looming catastrophe, questions of identity, and the increasingly fragile boundaries between tectnology and the self…”.

Via Thomas J Morrissey: “YA dystopias … touch upon complex and frightening issues in a manageable [and entertaining] format …[they are] invitations to action.”

Batali, Mario:

”…“the people that are going to get hosed are the education and the health people first, just kind of like in our system.”

“The way the bankers have toppled the way that money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands,  is as good as Stalin or Hitler, the evil guys”

NYC chef

Batchelor, Stephen:

”We are our own jailers.”

Batman:

“…some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn…”

            in Batman, Dark Knight, Alfred Pennyworth, via T Friedman

“When a forrest grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable and natural.” via Batman Begins, Ra’s al Guhl to Bruce Wayne.

Battelle, John:

‘The tech community doesn’t have a good perspective on itself. We aren’t humanists or philosophers. We are engineers. To Google and Facebook, people are algorithms’.

Baudrillard, Jean:

”Dying is pointless. You have to know how to disappear.”

Baum, Dan:

“… the Nixon White House … had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. … We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

John Ehrlichman to Dan Baum (in Legalize it all).

John D Rockefeller: “Only as the profit motive is eliminated is there any hope of controlling the liquor traffic in the interests of a decent society.”

Baum, L. Frank:

The Wizard of Oz

Wicked Witch of the West chanting “Poppies. Poppies will put them to sleep. Sleeeep. Now they’ll sleeeep.”

Bauman, Yoram:

… economists and economics students appear to be especially likely to free-ride and act in ways that are “anti-social” rather than “pro-social.”

… economics education could do a better job of providing balance. Learning about the shortcomings as well as the successes of free markets is at the heart of any good economics education, and students — especially those who are not destined to major in the field — deserve to hear both sides of the story.”

“Evil is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the authority of the logic of self-preservation. It shows it for what it is in the end – a choice. One wonders how many people must defy that logic for evil to be incapacitated. Is there a magic threshold of defiance beyond which the technology of evil grinds to a halt?   retrotopia                                        Zygmunt Bauman

Baumeister, Roy F:

“Future generations are likely to look back on people living now as evil … When future centuries say that the twentieth was the age of supreme evil, they will be referring … also to the selfish, reckless consumption of energy and the destructive pollution of the air and water….Future populations [are] our victims … people will look back on our era as the culprits responsible for their suffering….The future will have its own version of Satan, and it is likely to be you and me …”

“…[There is a] universal tendency for negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones…” with John Tierney

Baumol, William J:

“…the nation, mistakenly thinking it must rein in runaway costs, will curtail valuable health services and render them inaccessible for the less affluent. Well-meaning reformers may take the same misstep in education, law enforcement and other handicraft services.”

Baunov, Alexander:

“Legitimacy is a perennial problem for dictators.”

Bazawule, Blitz:

“When I’m working, I work a lot. And when I’m not doing the most, I’m doing the least. That’s it. I don’t drink. I don’t do much of anything. I stay at home. I sleep. A lot.”

Bazelon, Emily:

“It’s not about where you come from, it’s that you came at all. The Bible is … is a cacophony of voices and perspectives, often in conflict with one another… the literature now in our Bibles was thousands of years in the making.  Could all those many, many people involved in the development of biblical literature and the canon of Scriptures have been so blind, so stupid? It’s modern arrogance to imagine so. The Bible interprets itself, argues with itself, and perpetually frustrates any desire to reduce it to univocality.  The Bible is not a book of answers but a library of questions….It is faithful not to the answer but to the question that takes you to the edge of knowing….long live the Bible. Not as the book of answers but as a library of questions, not as a wellspring of truth but as a pool of imagination.”

Bearman, Joshua:

from article on Silk Road, WIRED 5-2015, about Ross Ulbricht:

“The thing about taking on a new identity is that it is fundamentally a lie. To the world at first. And then to yourself. …Like so many revolutionaries before him, the idealist became an idealogue, willing to kill for his beloved vision. …Moral choices blur when your identity is shifting…”

Beattie, Darren:

“…competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work…”

Becerra, Xavier: 

“I can’t go toe to toe with social media,”

Beck, Glenn:

 see Berlet

Beck, Jerome:

and Marsha Rosenbaum, quotes from Pursuit of Ecstasy, 1994:

“I was taking it to open myself up. And it did its job. It would be redundant if I took it now.”

“My heart opened up…I had incredible feelings of joy and bliss.”

“…it lowers incredibly your sense of fear….You feel like telling the truth. You feel like being honest. And you know you can say some even very delicate things without hurting people, and therefore you can speak the truth…

“It makes things a little better…It’s enhancing your perceptions…It enhances your emotional state…your emotional well-being….a real flavor enhancer for life…”

“It’s incredibly smooth…It feels like there’s a wind blowing through you. There’s a breeze … flowing through you. You feel just cleansed.”

“…you feel so good and you’re able to function, and you’re glowing.”

“…a profound feeling of connectedness with all of nature and humankind.”

“…it started a process going that is real healthy. And I say ‘is’ because its ongoing.”

“MDMA … removes the fear barriers to remembering and to insight, …but it does not remove caution. Just ordinary common sense, caution, remains completely intact and the person is not divorced from their ordinary judgment. In fact, the judgment seems to be to some extent clarified and sharpened.”

“It certainly makes me feel … in the balance of the life of man and the life of other forms on earth…certainly that man is part of the web of life on earth.”

“MDMA is the ideal medicine for our ailing society.”

end of Beck on Ecstasy MDMA

Beck, Julian:

“…if you could put it [LSD] into the water system, everybody would wake up and we would be able to realize the changes we were dreaming in terms of societal structures. People wouldn’t be able to tolerate things as they were any longer.”

Beck, Julie:

“…four “basic” emotions…: happy, sad, afraid/surprised, and angry/disgusted are our biologically based facial signals…these four emotions are the basic building blocks from which we develop our modern, complex, emotional stews.”

Becker, Ernest:

Escape from Evil, 1975:

“My previous writings did not take sufficient account of truly viscious human behavior…there is nothing or nature which would prevent us from taking some control of our own destiny and making the world a saner place for our children…There is a distinct difference between pessimism, which does not exclude hope, and cynicism, which does.…Once you start an arms race, you are consumed by it. This is the tragic fatality of power, that it leads to a fundamental distortion of the reality of man’s relationship to nature – and so can undermine his own well-being…transference is a reflex of the fatality of the human condition.”

“The domains of psychiatry and religion are truly inseparable.”

Beckerman, Gal:

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas

Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.—Neil Postman

You can’t just keep on yelling.—Barack Obama

In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution.

Marshall McLuhan’s great insight: the transition from oral to written to electronic culture brought along a shift in the way human beings processed reality, and it changed them.

Neil Postman felt television was adversely affecting the public discourse. “Its form excludes the content,”

The platforms dominate.

they only allow ideas to flare and return to darkness.

“The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past,” wrote Robert Darnton,

These pre-digital forms of communication demanded patience. Because they took time to produce and time to transmit from one person to another, they slowed things down, favoring an incremental accumulation of knowledge and connection. They also lent coherence, a way for scattered ideologies and feelings to be shaped into a single compellingly new perspective.

EVA LEE “We cannot prepare for the future by acting in the future, we must be rolling it out now. There’s no harm in doing it, but there will be a lot of regret if we don’t.”

the daughter of Korean immigrants—and what it felt like to cut

open a patient’s shirt on an operating table to discover a swastika tattoo.

MISKI NOOR

“It’s created a landscape where our movement is more about death than about life,” Rachel said.

a “trauma porn” that “spectacularizes Black death.”

Social media was about “followship and diffusion of responsibility.” Real leadership would come off-line.

IN THE HUMAN CONDITION, her 1958 philosophical treatise, Hannah Arendt fretted about the eventual disappearance of what she called “the common world.”

Mark Zuckerberg

“People increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room.”

MIT Center for Civic Media, Zuckerman

Taiwan has been conducting an experiment with just the kinds of platforms I’d been looking for. It all started in 2014 with the Sunflower Movement,

a platform that would facilitate communication with Taiwan’s youth.

vTaiwan, a social media tool for bringing a wider swath of the population into the legislative process. And powering this tool was a platform called Pol.is, which seemed to flip social media on its head by both incentivizing the expression of a wider range of views and helping to create consensus. In one of the

Marlinspike’s app allows people to control the size of their rooms and who can get in. It ensures that the walls are soundproof. For a group of dissidents, this is a wonderful thing. But it’s also useful for any group of people who need to figure out how they are going to challenge a status quo, or even just convince themselves that they can.

Stacey Abrams

“… novelists can treat history in ways that neither historians nor politicians ever could.”

end Beckerman

Beckert, Sven:

“No religion, no ideology, no philosophy, has ever been as all-encompassing as the

economic logic of capitalism,…the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital.”

Beckett, Samuel:

”Fail again. Fail better.”

“After one fails, one can go on and fail better.”

Beckstead, Robert:

Sunstone Symposia. “ Joseph Smith [was] frequently intoxicated on alcohol. The evidence is clear that he was. …  alcohol is an excellent vehicle to administer both Amanita and Datura. That Joseph Smith was knowledgable about the use of medicated alcohol is found in the Book of Mormon….Intoxication and visionary experience is hinted at in the Book of Mormon. A more through discussion of the ‘bitterness’ or bitter taste of psychedelics and the “opening” of one’s eyes was tangentially expressed by LeMar Petersen….visions associated with the ingestion of wine argue strongly for the surreptitious inclusion of an entheogen such as the visionary Datura plant. … cites Dan Merker … Joseph Smith was frequently intoxicated while translating. It is possible that Joseph was not intoxicated as much with wine as with Amanita Muscaria mushroom. …  Amanita Muscaria is known to increase physical strength, aggressiveness and confidence to the point of grandiose behavior all defining characteristics of Joseph Smith’s personality. … How does one get from mystic experience to an established religion? My one-word answer is: inevitably. What makes the process inevitable is that we do with our mystical experience what we do with every experience, that is, we try to understand it; we opt for or against it; we express our feelings with regard to it. Do this with your mystical experience and you have all the makings of a religion.”

Beckwith, Ryan:

“Roosevelt had the radio. Kennedy had television. Barack Obama, as it turned out, had memes.”

Bedi, Kiran:

”We’re not anti-capitalism, we’re pro-integrity.”

Beebe, George:

“This book is a premortem: an examination of a failure that has not yet happened…

Hitler…Putin…

Beeman, Richard:

”Madison’s Constitution was certainly no divinely inspired text delivered directly from heaven.”

Beethoven:

”Art demands of us that we shall not stand still.”

Beetles:

”You tell me it’s the institution

Well, you know,

You’d better free your mind instead.”

Begala, Paul:

“I expected him to be stupid. I expected him to be chaotic. I

expected his team to be a bunch of sycophants and nincompoops. I expected

the tariffs and trade war.

“Here’s what I didn’t expect. For me, the defining word of these 100 days has

been betrayal. A good politician takes office and tries to expand beyond his

base; an average politician tries to reward his base; Trump is the first

politician who’s screwing his base, betraying his base. I honestly don’t

understand it.”

Beha, Christopher:

re AI: “… the last remnants of human exceptionalism will be snuffed out…

 the obsolescence of human culture will almost certainly not come to pass…

The root of this worry is not an overestimation of technology but a radical

underestimation of humanity…

Socrates concluded that he was ahead of the pack only because

he recognized his own ignorance…

…great art — the kind that could transform us rather than simply entertain us —…

Geniuses act not by science but by inspiration…

We’re living in a thoroughly fraudulent era whose signature

figures…have made the claim of genius central to their frauds…

genius might visit any of us at any time.

There is a voice waiting to whisper in our ears.

Everything about our culture at the moment seems designed to eliminate the

space for careful listening, but the first step in restoring that space might be

acknowledging that the voice is out there and allowing that it might have

something important to say.”

Behbahani, Simin:

Iranian poetess

“My Country, I will build you again,

If need be, with bricks made from my life

I will build columns to support your roof

If need be, with my bones.

You may wish to have me burned,

            or decide to stone me

But in your hand match or stone

            will lose their power to harm me.”

Behne, Adolf:

“photography plus dynamite”

Beinart, Peter:

“Stanley is trying to spark public alarm. He doesn’t want Americans to respond to Trump’s rascist , authoritarian offenses by moving their moral goal posts. The greater danger isn’t hyperbole, it’s normalization.”

in NYT review of Stanley, Jason; How Fascism Works

“…axis of authoritarians…binds the governments of Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba … common aversion to democracy.” 7-6-2023 ‘Common Foes’ NYT         

Belkin, Lisa:

“…prosecutors learn to shut the mental gates against doubt….

it takes absolute certainty to go to work every day and send people to prison for up to a lifetime. And certainty is tricky to surrender. Allowing for the probability that you were wrong once allows for the possibility that you have been wrong often, and opening that door is often unthinkable.

Bell, Alexandra:

Doomsday Clock, threat, risk…

“It’s important to listen to the echoes of history, to be informed by the past, but not shackled to it…. The nuclear issue is a matter of minutes… If we get the nuclear problem wrong, nothing else matters…. Climate-change isn’t a matter of belief… I guarantee that your insurance company believes in it..”

“… Finnish ethos of ‘sisu’ – unstoppable grit in the face of extreme adversity.… We’ve inherited a mess, and we have to work together to clean it up..”

Bell, Daniel:

”…the three realms – the economy, the polity, and the culture – are ruled by contrary axial principles: for the economy, efficiency; for the polity, equality; and for the culture, self-realization (or self-gratification), The resulting disjunctions have framed the tensions and social conflicts of Western society in the past 150 years….

Today that manifest destiny is shattered, the Americanism has worn thin, and only the hedonism remains.

Bell, David:

“By its nature, A.I. responds to almost any query in a manner that is spookily lucid and easy to follow — one might say almost intellectually predigested.”

Bell, Jeff:

”Democrats paid their bills, most Republicans didn’t.”

“The whole lands thing is a boondoggle – just to enrich a few people.”

House candidate Dist 43 UT

Bell, Vaughn:

”My belief is my identity…

…revelation – the understanding that our most cherished beliefs could be wrong.”

Bellah, Robert:

“We are concerned that this individualism may have grown cancerous – that it may be destroying those social integuments that de Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentialities, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.”

in Habits of the Heart, 1985; NY times obit

Beller, Alexandra:

“Whatever space we’re in before consciousness or birth, babies are as close to that space as anyone will ever come — and when they move, I think we see that most clearly,”“Maybe watching them dance helps us learn something about the before, the between or the unknown, the thing we call the soul.”

Belloc, Hilaire:

“All these have never yet been seen—

but scientists who ought to know,

Assure us that they must be so…

Oh! Let us never, never doubt

What nobody is sure about!”                     
“…the main social event of our generation was the destruction of freedom through the universal growth of Capitalist monopoly, and the ruin of economic independence in the mass of private citizens.”

Bellow, Saul:

Saul Bellow quotes Samuel Daniel: “While timorous knowledge stands considering, audacious ignorance hath done the deed.”

“Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness.”

Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Only art penetrates… the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”          

Beltagy, Mohamed:

”To me, implementing Islam in public life simply means trying to create justice and good standards of living, happiness for the people. It is not about restrictions or misery.”

Beltrao, Magarida (Batatas, Porto, TikTok):

“It’s wherever the wave takes me”.

Belzer, Richard:

“The greatest thing for me is when I make the audience laugh in a moment that could only happen that night with that audience…Sometimes I laugh with the audience because I’m hearing the joke the same time they are.”

Benanav, Aaron:

“The era when manufacturing could provide mass employment is over.”

Bender, Larry:

“You can’t just bring the audience’s intellect on the journey—you have to bring their hearts as well.”

producer of An Inconvenient Truth.

Benedict, Richard:

ozone treaty: ‘I don’t think it would have happened without him.’ via John D. Negroponte, then an assistant secretary of state who was Mr. Benedick’s supervisor.

Ben-Giat, Ruth:

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

Italy, the birthplace of Fascism,

“It’s hard to explain madness,” the politician Boris Nemtsov.

IN 1938, GEORG ELSER, decided he would kill Hitler.

missing his appointment with death by 13 minutes.

The history of strongmen is also the history of their opponents’ efforts to remove them from power. Assassination is an occupational hazard of all political leaders,

“The bullets pass, Mussolini remains,” the Italian leader wrote

“the White Rose Society,”Hans and Sophie Scholl

an anti-Fascist social network.

“I am invulnerable. I am immortal,” a dazed Führer repeated to the doctor who treated him right after the explosion.

A conspirator concluded ruefully that Hitler had a “guardian devil” keeping him alive.

The Baltic Way human chain formed by 2 million people who joined hands across Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania in 1989 to protest Soviet rule

“Wanting to intimidate society, the authorities only make it more angry,” wrote the jailed twenty-one-activist Yegor Zhukov to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta in 2019.

May 2017 “Pay Trump Bribes Here” action onward, reach the public

“Where there is Imamoğlu . . . there is hope.” Campaign slogan, 2019.

“You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you,” said the president, who

“I follow my instincts, and I am never wrong,” said Mussolini,

Laura Fermi observed that without his audiences, Mussolini was merely an empty “shell.”

This is true of every ruler in this book,

scientists call this phenomenon “gambling for resurrection,”

It is convenient as well as cathartic for the nation when the leader dies. Since he claimed a unique ability to rule the nation, he can be blamed for its sorry fate, assigned all responsibility.

strongmen do not vanish with their exits from power, but instead remain as traces within the body of their people. The muscle memory to salute and sing the songs can be hard to shake.

As the anti-Fascist Carlo Rosselli testified in court in 1930:

I had a home: they destroyed it. I had a newspaper: they suppressed it. I had a professorship: I had to abandon it. I had, as I still have today, ideas, dignity, an ideal: to defend them, I had to go to prison. I had teachers and friends—Amendola, Matteotti, Gobetti—they killed them.

having it all is never enough for men who live in a secret state of dread at losing everything.

Even as the strongman proclaims his infallibility, he is pursued by the demon of fear. He’s wary of the people he represses;

The strongman’s trick is to seem exceptional and yet to embody the national everyman,

“There is a little piece of Putin in everyone,” says the Nobel Prize–winning author Svetlana Alexievich,

Curzio Malaparte’s

Like all dictators, Hitler loves only those whom he can despise. 11

Transparency International

Too often, we have left the work of shaping emotions—including patriotism, our love for our country—to democracy’s enemies.

“If you don’t dominate, you are wasting your time,” Trump said

“Keep your heart a desert,” said Mussolini to a journalist who asked him the secret of his success, noting that friendships get in the way of the exercise of power.

It is [fear] that makes people so willing to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues . . . capable of cleansing the world of the vague, the weak, the uncertain, the evil. Ah, to give oneself over to their direction—what calm, what relief. Highlight(orange) – Page 13 · Location 279

“A DICTATOR IS IN GENERAL a man who comes from below and then throws himself in an even deeper hole . . . the world watches him . . . and jumps into the void after him,” said Charlie Chaplin in 1939,

“trenchocracy,” an elite made by combat rather than aristocratic birth. These men knew that “he whom you cannot teach to fly you must push, that he may fall faster,” as Mussolini had concluded from reading the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,

a slimmer edition of Mein Kampf between 1930 and 1933.

Hitler had secured the ability to govern without any checks on the exercise of his authority. His fascist takeover surpassed Mussolini’s in its speed and intensity. As the Italian exile Giuseppe Borgese observed, a cat had birthed a tiger.

new authoritarians use elections to

keep themselves in office, deploying antidemocratic tactics like fraud or voter suppression to get the results they need.

prosecutor Francesco Borrelli issued an ominous statement: Those who want to become political candidates should look within themselves. If they are clean, then they should go ahead serenely. But if they have skeletons in their closets . . . they should open their closets now and stand aside from politics, before we get there.

“The worst thing about Communism is Post-Communism” was the rueful saying. 19

“It’s hard to explain madness,” the politician Boris Nemtsov

“For Russians, the strong state is not an anomaly to fight against . . . [but] the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any change.”

Mussolini told

1927 Ascension Day speech placed

“We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person,” he concluded chillingly.

protecting the nation by confining the unhealthy or helping

them to perish: this was the Fascist logic of reclamation (bonifica)

Giulia Veronesi noted the “deepening discomfort” among her peers as “the compromise in which we live” became harder to sustain. 82

Highlight(orange) – Nine: Resistance > Page 202 · Location 3283

executed. “I am invulnerable. I am immortal,” a dazed Führer repeated to the doctor who treated him right after the explosion. For

Highlight(orange) – Nine: Resistance > Page 202 · Location 3284

protection. A conspirator concluded ruefully that Hitler had a “guardian devil” keeping him alive.

“Where there is Imamoğlu . . . there is hope.”

Aging and the ebbing of virile powers is difficult for leaders whose “entire sense of self is bound up in being revered,” in psychological profiler Jerrold Post’s words.

Laura Fermi observed that without his audiences, Mussolini was merely an empty “shell.” This is true of every ruler in this book,

having it all is never enough for men who live in a secret state of dread at losing everything.

Even as the strongman proclaims his infallibility, he is pursued by the demon of fear. He’s wary of the people he represses;

He channels his brutality into humbling their pride, crushing their freedom of conscience, diminishing their individual merits and transforming his supporters into flunkeys stripped of all dignity. Like all dictators, Hitler loves only those whom he can despise. 11

Transparency International

Too often, we have left the work of shaping emotions—including patriotism, our love for our country—to democracy’s enemies.

filmmaker Alberto Lattuada, who grew up under the dictatorship. In 1941,

The absence of love brought many tragedies that might have been averted. Instead of the golden rain of love, a black cloak of indifference fell upon the people. And thus people have lost the eyes of love and can no longer see clearly. . . . Here are the origins of the disintegration of all values and the destruction and sterilization of conscience.

Yegor Zhukov, who

“Love is trust, empathy, humanity, mutual aid, and care. A society built on such love is a strong society—probably the strongest of all possible societies.”

The Chilean opposition’s “joy is on the way” 1988 campaign that drove Pinochet out of office

the “radical love” platform that lifted Ekram Imamoğlu to victory in 2019 as Istanbul’s mayor

solidarity, love, and dialogue are what the strongman most fears.

end Ben-Giat, Ruth

Bengio, Joshua:

“…today’s frontier AI models are growing dangerous capabilities and behaviours, including deception, cheating, lying, hacking, self-preservation, and more generally, goal misalignment….

deeply concerned by the behaviors that unrestrained agentic AI systems are already beginning to exhibit—especially tendencies toward self-preservation and deception.”

Bennett, Geoff:

“…the coarsening of public discourse and the degree of rage many Americans feel over the deficiencies of the U.S. health care system.”

Bennett, Jessica:

re: Kamala: she’s aspiring to be the first post-gender POTUS…Other people can talk about history; she’ll be too busy making it.”

Benniof, Marc:

“…to build trust, companies need a purpose beyond profit.” Book Trailblazer

Benjamin, Lakecia, saxaphonist:

“Your presentation is a representation of your music before it’s heard.”

“I’m trying to highlight people so they get their flowers while they’re still alive.”

Benjamin, Walter:

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,”

“…humankind needs periodic rites of regeneration to avoid maniacal episodes of destruction.”via Martin Lee, p. 48

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

Benner, Steven:

“…when a reality is too complex to meet our constructive needs:

we ignore it and continue with a simpler, if arguably false, view”

Bennett, Catherine:

“Low compliance with containment measures was directly associated in one study with ‘antisocial traits, especially lower levels of empathy and higher levels of callousness, deceitfulness and risk-taking’.”

Bennett, Cherie:

”There is only a public self—there is no sense of a private self.”

see Reviving Ophelia

Bennett, James:

“Journalism, like democracy, works best when people refuse to surrender to fear.”

“One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that,…you are always right about everything, and so you are justied in shouting disagreement down. In the face of this, leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around. This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles….the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

Bennett, Jane:

“You have to love life before you can care about anything.”

Bennett, Jessica:

“…you know that saying about how “you can’t be what you can’t see” — or, perhaps more accurately, that you can be what you can see?

on Wonder Woman film nyt op-ed

Bennett, Robert:

”The Constitutional Convention was filled with one compromise after another.”

Bennett, Tony:

“Through song and art, I can communicate what I believe is the essence of life – truth and beauty.”

Bennetts, Marc:

I’m Going to Ruin Their Lives: Inside Putin’s War on Russia’s Opposition

‘The freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, the freedom of the media and property rights, these fundamental principles of a civilized society will be protected by the state,’ he declared, a Russian flag to his right.

As ideological and economic uncertainties ravaged Russia, a centuries-old belief in

the supernatural and the occult re-emerged to fill the gap left by the sudden collapse of the Soviet system.

‘Everything our leaders told us about communism was false. But it turns out that everything they told us about capitalism was true,’ Russians joked bitterly.

‘Russians have had no sense of stability for the past ten years,’ Putin told state television in a wide-ranging interview less than two months after taking over from Yeltsin. ‘We hope to return this feeling.’‌

Russians had never had it so good.

‘People agreed on a pact with the devil,’ said Oleg Orlov,

‘What good is freedom of speech if my fridge is empty?’ an elderly woman asked me in the central Russian

‘Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people,’ said Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

When Putin first came to power in 2000, he was concerned with resolving concrete issues. Now, he believes he is writing history.

Putin will require more than war in Ukraine to distract Russians from growing domestic woes.

Bennhold, Katrin:

“[They are] seduced by a narrative that put them at the center of a greater cause and offered them what they craved most: a sense of belonging and a plan to act on their resentment.”

on neo-Nazi and radical Muslim. terrorism

Benscoter, Diane:

“…easy ideas to complex questions are very appealing when you are emotionally vulnerable…compromised ‘immune system’…circular logic…God will fix all this – it becomes impenetrable…what happenned to my brain?…A viral mimetic infection.”

ex-Moonie TED 2008

from Shoes of a Servant bk:

“The human mind is susceptible to exploitation. …the pathways leading to the part of the brain where rational thought takes place can be detoured to an area where nearly inescapable cicular logic controls cognitive processes…

you will see hoe my cognitive processes were infected with a memetic virus by someone claiming to be God.

Research must be done to identify the characteristics that contribute to [that] kind of vulnerability and rational thought…

God had a plan. There was a chilling relief in giving up my autonomny to someone I believed was God. To simply walk, as I pledged over and over, in  the shoes of a servant, freed me of life;’s complexity…”

“Easy answers to hard questions were very appealing to me as a confused 17-year-old.”

Benson, Steve:

“An editorial cartoonist throws the first punch in a bar fight and then sits back and watches everyone fight.” Bagley friend

Berenson, Michael:

“Everything [Leonardo] touched turned to eternal beauty.”

Beres, Derek:

book “Conspirituality…the intermarriage of conspiracy theorism and wellness culture…”…K…

Berezow, Alex B:

“…the seductive allure of libertarianism relies on its simple assumptions: People should be as free as possible. Our laws should reflect reality. Government policies should be analyzed using logic, not ideology. There are no grand appeals to shaping the world in America’s image, no quixotic promotion of economic equality and no obsession over the moral character of the nation.

In a nutshell, scientists and libertarians deal with the world the way it is, rather than the way they want it to be.”

“The World of Law and the World of Science use different systems of logic and speak different languages.”

Berg, Anastasia:

Quoting colleague: “Our students are about to turn subcognitive,” re AI use.

“…something far more fundamental is being put at risk…-  the development of

our capacity to think.”

Berger, John:

“Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.”

“The past is never there waiting to be discovered,

to be recognized for exactly what it is.

The past is not for living in…

“It’s about reducing barriers to action. Once you understand that, you can change anything.” in wsj review of The Catalyst .

Berggruen, Nicolas:

via Steinberger NYT Mag pdf billionaires:

‘wants to “empower ideas with an emphasis on courageous or creative thinking.…to celebrate love of knowledge, critical knowledge.”

’a kind of latter-day Medici’…

books: Intelligent Governance, and Reinventing Democracy… both with Gardels.

‘…provide the money and space for others to ponder the major issues of our time…’

Damasio is an advisor, as well as Gardels…

Berg Inst exec VP is Dawn Nakagawa – Transformations of the Human Project

Ingemar Bergman, via Linn Ullmann

“…well into his 80’s, [Bergman] began to refer to the life that he was now experiencing as “the epilogue”. Lying in bed in the mornings, he would tot up his ailments, allowing himself one per decade: if there were fewer than eight, he would get up; if there were more, he would stay put. But these strategies denoted realism rather than appeasement, and his determination to continue work remained largely unshaken.”

Bergman, Romen:

Rise and Kill First –

Meir Dagan   assassination

“…perpetually in danger of annihiliation….the banality of evil.”

Bergson, Henri:

“… laughter is a corrective evolved to make social life possible for human beings.”

via Walter Lippmann: ‘He is popular because he says with splendid certainty what thousands of people have been feeling vaguely.’   Time

Economist review: ‘Bergson used a musical example: a note has meaning only because of the notes that precede it.’

 “The pure present is the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future..”

Bergstrom, Carl:

Calling Bullshit book Kindle

[Bullshit is] “language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade or impress an audience by distracting, overwhelming, or intimidating them with a blatant disregard for truth, logical coherence, or what information is actually being conveyed.”

Liars have little incentive to shut up.

The popular platforms exploit humanity’s need for social validation and constant chatter, a product of our evolution.

Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it.”

Berkovitch, Zhenya:

“… my work is a modest personal survival mechanism… It is not a case of choosing between culture and conscience: you should always choose both.”

“Russian reality is in fact a mix of off-the-scale cruelty and kindergarten idiocy, and sometimes one saves you from the other,”

“Putinism isn’t a geography, it’s a time. You can try to close your window to stay warm, but it will still be cold on the street outside.” 

Berkovich, Yevgenia

When violence becomes the norm, the display of normality is a crime.

“Every boy you’re serving as cannon fodder/

Once used to be a tiny, soft, little son.”

Berkowitz, Roger (Arendt):

“Arendt responds to … the light of the public that obscures everything … ‘incomprehensible triviality’…

Four Prejudices talk:

“Liberalism opposes and suppresses the coarser elements of democratic freedom.

…Politics is that centripetal force, a magnetic or charismatic center, around which a diverse and chaotic multitude gathers and is held together. And the politician is that person who speaks or acts in such a way as to enable the people to say what they share in common in spite of their di erences.

Arendt on Crisis: “The opportunity provided by the very fact of crisis— which tears away façades and obliterates prejudices —[is] to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter…. A crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices.”

Prejudice 1: democracy by its very nature is liberal

…a particularly liberal idea of democracy carries with it a democratic de cit that can contribute to right-wing and also left-wing anti-establishment populist parties.

Prejudice 2: collectivist nationalism is ‘bad’.

politics must not only feed the people bread but also must inspire and give them meaning.

Prejudice 3: Political antagonists are evil.

Prejudice 4: Preference for security over freedom.

Arendt:  “Underlying our prejudices against politics today are hope and fear: the fear that humanity could destroy itself through politics and through the means of force now at its disposal, and linked with this fear, the hope that humanity will come to its senses and rid the world, not of humankind, but of politics. It could do so through a world government that transforms the state into an administrative machine, resolves political con icts bureaucratically, and replaces armies with police forces.”

Arendt: Bureaucratic crisis:  “Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely a ected by the disease from which the party system su ers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.”

Civil disobedience is an act of citizenship by which minorities can change the minds of majorities. Thus, disobedient minorities—those groups who collectively dissent from majority opinion—are not traitors or rebels, but are part of the fabric of democratic government.

…see those with whom you disagree as your adversaries rather than your enemies.

“What convinces masses , and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumbably part.”

“This freedom is what Arendt calls the ‘treasure’ of the public space where people act together. …

As de Toqueville wrote, the American town governments may have been the locus of American freedom, but they were also coarse and resistant to civilized restraints. There is  always a desire on the part of elites, Tocqueville argues, to restrict the freedoms of the townships in the name of civilization.”

“The danger of lying is not that the lies will be believed–it is that the world we share, the public world in which unique people gather around common ideas and aspirations—wobbles and begins to shatter.”

“…the logic of the mob: to unite and embrace extra-legal criminal means to fight a perceived threat that is so dangerous as to justify a quasi-criminal response.”

“totalitarianism…is a

form of government founded upon a mass loneliness.”

After four years of Donald Trump, over 60 million Americans still believe it is acceptable to be governed by a con man and fraud, a broken human being, someone who fundamentally believes that he has the power to define, redefine, and build the reality that suits his own political and personal interests.— Roger Berkowitz

“If the world is against you, what Hitler offered is a solidarity in justified anger and a plan to remedy that injustice

“…true political freedom relies on a strong, grounded sense of self.”

“Parties represent interests. Movements appeal to a mood.

The problem with anger is that while it is activated by injustice it rarely leads to the doing of justice.

Trump is a small-time crook who surrounds himself with other crooks.

Sometimes We Have to Choose Humanity Over Justice:

When I think about the humanities, I’m reminded of how Hannah Arendt defined thinking: we think in solitude, which is not the same as being alone. When you’re alone, you feel abandoned. But in solitude, we can experience what she called “the two-in-one”—a conversation with ourselves. In this two-in-one, we challenge our prejudices and “stop and think,” freeing ourselves from conformity and clichés, learning to think for ourselves by testing our thoughts in conversation with others.

And that’s very much what I mean by the humanities—thinking with a public community about the books, actions, and artworks that manifest the greatness, dignity, pain, and joy of human life.

end Berkowitz”

Berlant, Lauren:

“Cruel optimism referred to “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing…the tools we depend on to achieve “the good life” — a safety net, job security, the meritocracy, even “durable intimacy” in our romantic lives — have degenerated into “fantasies” that bear “less and less relation to how people can live.”

Berlet, Chip:

“Satan means enemy.”

“…the scapegoating and conspiricism of right-wing populism…is not on the margins of U.S. political traditions, but is too close for comfort.”

“Fascism … is the most virulent form of far-right populism.”

You don’t build a campaign of prejudice out of thin air. It has to be rooted in the culture. So you start out with a rhetoric of us versus them: We’re good; they’re bad. We’re going to save America; they’re going to destroy it. Then you take all the problems of society and blame them on a scapegoat. In Germany it was the Jews. In India today the conservative Hindu groups blame the Muslims. So you pick a group that’s already resented, and you blame them and demonize them. They’re not just bad; they’re evil. In some cases this involves religious beliefs.

Once you’ve done the demonization and the scapegoating, you come up with conspiracy theories that portray “them” as dangerous enough to hurt “us.” And then the final question is: “Why should we wait for them to attack? Let’s get them before they get us.”

There is a maxim in sociology called the “Thomas Theorem,” which says that situations defined as real are real in their consequences. If you believe something to be true, you’re going to act on it. Even the wildest belief can lead people to act not just in voting booths but with guns.

Glenn Beck. Ten years ago no one had ever heard of him. What’s his background?

He comes out of a religious, paranoid conspiracy culture

There’s also a double standard in coverage of violence on the Left versus violence on the Right. Violence on the Right is always unfortunate or understandable or maybe crazy, whereas if somebody on the Left throws a brick through a window of a shop, it’s terrorism.

The Right has maintained a massive network of corporate and philosophical foundations that pulls the Republican Party to the right. Liberals do not fund a similar network on the Left. They tend to fund band-aid fixes. Liberal foundations will say, “We fund activists, not media and conferences and think tanks.” But activists without direction and without ideology are at a loss to confront the right-wing activists who have a road map drawn up for them.

Weimar Germany in the 1920s and 1930s comes to mind, as political theorist Noam Chomsky has observed. The political scene was gridlocked, and there was talk about the destruction of the nation of Germany. There was a point when many middle-class, moderate voters — the “burghers,” they were called — were so fed up with the system and so surrounded with conspiracy theories about the collapse of the country that they voted for Hitler, not because they liked the National Socialists but because they had just had enough.

When a large group of people who already have excess power and privilege become afraid the government and minorities will take away their power, that’s an explosive situation. Moderate voters begin to vote to overturn the system just to shake things up.

when you build a major social movement around scapegoating and resentment, things can move quickly in a bad direction.

end Berlet, Chip.

Berlin, Isiah:

“Liberty for the wolves means death for the lambs.”

re; FDR: ‘Roosevelt stood out for his astonishing appetite for life and by his apparently complete freedom from fear of the future.’

Wit and Warmth: Berlin’s was a sparkling intellect

“I’m afraid of dying, for it could be painful. But I find death a nuisance. I object to it… I’m terribly curious. I’d like to live forever.”

Berlinerblau, Jacques:

The Secular Bible, Cambridge U Press, 2005, ILL:

“A biblical scholar is a person who has devoted his or her life to reasoning with a madman…

…one must be willing to abandon modern notions of authorial intentions and the author’s ability to determine  a text’s meaning. Scripture came together in ways that almost all of its contributors never have foreseen. Contingency, accident, unintended consequences – those are more a part of the Bible’s story than many want to acknowledge.”

…the burden of proof lies on those who believe this to be true.

Why is it unreasonable to claim that certain phrases in the witness are mere gibberish, that they have been edited into grammatical and syntactical senselessness. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is a complex, paradoxical, ambiguous, and at points incoherent text.

They open the book having already invested their faith in the proposition that it is underwritten by God.

The Qur’an:

“The possibility that their ancient ideology of martyrdom might one day ‘shake hands’ with modernity’s arsenal of apocalypse is enough to make all civilized persons edgy, especially that majority on nonextremist Muslims residing in their immediate vicinity….The real Islam has been hijacked. The authentic message of the Qur’an has been distorted.

…the inevitable trespass that occurs whenever reasoned inquiry is asked to visit religious belief.

…Americans returned in droves to their houses of worship in the aftermath of an atrocity that illustrated (yet again) the absolute worst that religion has to offer.”

end Berlinerblau

Berlioz, Hector:

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”

“They want a score that, like a plate of macaroni, can be assimilated immediately without their having to think about it or even pay attention to it.” referring to Parisian audiences.                 

Berman, Eli:

Radical, Religious and Violent, MIT Press, 2009:

“the rise of radical Islam looks like the twentieth-century version of a familiar story, a predictable reaction of traditional communities to the slow incursion of market economies and political emancipation into their lives.

Radical religious groups, or sects, operate as economic clubs…when Islamic radicals are subsidized, religiosity can increase quickly.

There are broad parallels between religious radicalism in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Al Qaeda does not fit the club mold: it does not provide social services to members the way Hamas does.

…suicide attackers disproportionately attack members of other religions.

…choose suicide attacks against hard targets and conventional attacks against soft targets.

…suicide attacks tend to be concentrated in places with a foreign occupier.

Berman, Sherri:

”…Europe was the most turbulent region on earth…Yet, during the second half of the twentieth century, it was among the most stable, a study in democracy, social harmony, and prosperity. How can we understand this remarkable transformation?”

“…social democracy should be seen as the most successful ideology and movement of the twentieth century…by reconciling things that had … seemed incompatible: a well-functioning capitalist system, democracy, and social stability.”

“…social democracy’s other core principle: communitarianism.”

“…the most important thing politics can provide is a sense of the possible.”

Bernal, Gael Garcia:

“If this pandemic has made me learn one thing, it is that I have to work less. I need to nurture and have something to say.”

Bernard, Claude:

“…stasis is achieved through dynamism…constant change is a form of equilibrium…to be ordinary is an outrageous extreme…limitation can be freedom.”

“Art is myself; science is ourselves.”

Bernardi, Daniel…:

“…rumors in a war zone operate very much like narrative IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in that they are relatively low-cost weapons that circulate unexpectedly among lay peoples.”

Berners-Lee, Mike:

A Climate of Truth: Why We Need It and How To Get It

via NATURE review:

“…techno-optimism is the new face of climate denial…

three intersecting values needed for humanity to thrive in the Anthropocene: respect for the environment, respect for others and respect for the truth. The final few chapters focus on the most crucial lever: truth…

enticing ‘bullshit’ propagates: sometimes owing to self-interested cynicism, but often owing to simply to wishful or uncritical thinking…

Honesty can have a chance only if there is a high price to pay for deceit…

“…we need to move away from an ‘attention economy’ , where everything is vying for our clicks, to an ‘intention economy’.”

Truth is essential to any progress we seek to make. It is the foundation on which all other progress rests.

if we can get right to the poisoned heart of the problem we might, for the first time, be in a position to start getting somewhere.

take a moment to reflect on any biases that you may be bringing to your interpretation since, as we’ll challenge from a few different angles. Breaking a Habit There are many, many people like me who are trying to help the world get to grips with impending environmental breakdown. But we have been stuck in a routine. We keep on working in our own different ways. We keep complaining at the failure of the world to listen properly and to act in a commensurate way.

…spotting the dysfunctional cycles of failure and changing them.

If what you are doing is consistently not working, it is time to do something different.

An alternative perspective is that we are negative achievers, that technology without sufficient wisdom has made us the most destructive species on Earth.

crises we face are so pressing, that the space tourism hobbies of the over-rich have to be seen as an extreme dereliction of the responsibilities that come with wealth.

the ‘Jevons paradox’,

We can get far more honesty into our culture. All we have to do is notice the difference and insist on better.

There is no such thing as ‘my truth’, distinct from ‘your truth’.

Honesty is a little bit more than truthfulness. Honesty means communicating in a way that is intended to enable others to get a clearer view of reality as you see it.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.

Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. Harry G. Frankfurt…

bullshit as a blend of fact and fiction that has been concocted to persuade,

believable. Skilful bullshit is a tasty mix of honey and poison.

bullshit merchants use truth as camouflage. Once we hear a few verifiable facts, our trust goes up and our guard goes down.

whole storyline falls apart, along with, we must learn to insist, the credibility of the perpetrator Before leaving the subject of bullshit, I’ll say that not all of it is entirely conscious. Sometimes the accomplished bullshit artist initiates an enchanting narrative that spreads through society. Some people propagate it with deep cynicism, but for the most part, wishful thinking is all it needs.

our skill at identifying them needs to be higher than their skills of disguise.

Peter Oborne’s 2005 book The Rise of Political Lying.

Peter Oborne in a further book, The Assault on Truth, and his website political-lies.co.uk–both highly recommended.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, Isabel Hardman describes the process of becoming an MP in the UK–the need for personal finances,

When the truth breaks down, anything goes. Absolutely anything.

Five Criteria for Assessing a Politician’s Honesty

kindness. I think we should be asking very carefully how confident we are that the person we might vote for genuinely cares about all the other people in their country and in the world.

honesty and kindness usually go pretty well hand in hand; if you care about other people, you can afford to be honest with them and transparent in your dealings, because

Peter Oborne, creator of Political-Lies.co.uk, is clear in his book The Assault on Truth that ‘Proven liars can never be trusted. Someone who lies once will lie again.’

The Times and Sunday Times, the Sun and Fox News. All of these are owned or controlled by the Murdoch empire which has been successfully pushing a hard-right agenda on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Metro, and now sadly New Scientist are owned by billionaire Lord Rothermere (Jonathan Harmsworth),.

not to trust either that paper or its sister publications.

The Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator are owned by the UKIP-

If we want humanity to stand a chance of thriving in the Anthropocene, all readership of the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun, the Express and the Daily Star, for example, needs to be challenged.

The Guardian is a not-for-profit B Corp, overseen by the Scott Trust, which has been carefully set up to ensure editorial independence. It is funded through endowments and reader contributions. There is some paid content which is very clearly labelled as such. Digital and print subscribers receive their content advert-free. It has a very strong history of investigative journalism and usually cites its sources, which generally turn out to be robust. Overall, in my view, they have a good track record of care with the truth. Errors are visibly corrected, and there is a clear process by which readers can highlight possible errors for investigation.

Financial Times: A for-profit publication, owned by the Japanese company Nikkei, which, in turn, is owned by its employees. Both the FT and Nikkei stake their entire reputation on the trustworthiness of their content, for which they are both highly regarded

Byline Times: A monthly paper, also available online,

Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian, and now editor of Prospect magazine,

the British weapons manufacturer BAE Systems

of £ 2.7 billion on record sales of £ 25.3 billion in 2023. BAE Systems is one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers.

Sustainability for the aviation industry involves some contraction. Anything else is a lie.

The core questions for each industry remain the same: is it benefiting humanity as a whole, and is it helping to restore the planet?

Greenwashing is the ever-more-sophisticated artform of making a company look as though it is respecting the environment more than it does. It is the business version of bullshit,

Salvation Army, but it stands out perhaps more than any company I can think of for the consistency with which it applies its positive values to absolutely everything it thinks, says and does.

Global Returns Project is not about financial return at all, but helps people to give money away more effectively.

A massive collective wake-up is needed, without waiting until it is too late, followed by a significant cultural leap for humankind.

For something to be a lie it needs to be clear-cut untrue, and the person who says it needs to know that it is false.

you only have to identify one definite lie on a policy issue to establish that the perpetrator is totally unfit for a job in politics, and that any colleagues who fail to call them out if they know about it are also unfit.

end Berners-Lee , Mike

Berners-Lee, Tim:

“…social networks … are manmade. If they are not serving humanity, they can and should be changed.”

Berns, Greg:

”We like to think that seeing is believing. But the study’s findings show that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe.”

Bernstein, Carl:

“… a haven in reporting, …proceeding without judgment or predisposition to wherever the facts and context and rigorous questioning lead, to some notion of the truth in all its complexity.”

Bernstein, Leonard:

“I believe in one God,

but then I believe in three.

I’ll believe in twenty gods

if they’ll believe in me.”

From ‘Mass’

Bernstein, Peter L:

Against the Gods “The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome and the linkage between effect and cause is hidden from us.”

            “Uncertainty makes us free.”

Bernstein, Richard J:

Radical Evil:

“Radical Evil [refers to] the evil of total domination….

the banality of evil presupposes radical evil.”

We must rethink the very meaning of responsibility.

We have a responsibility to preserve the conditions for life … on this planet.”

from The Abuse of Evil, 2005

Arendt discussion, quotes…

“…today, the appeal to evil is being used as a political tool to obscure complex issues, to block genuine thinking, and to stifle public discussion and debate. … what we are now confronting  is a clash of mentalities, not a clash of civilizations. A mentality that is drawn to absolutes, alleged moral certainties, and simplistic dichotomies stands in contrast to a mentality that questions the appeal to absolutes in politics, that argues that we must not confuse subjective moral certitude with objective moral certainty, and that is skeptical of an uncritical rigid dichotomy between the forces of evil and the forces of good…

There is no place for absolutes in democratic politics…

The clash of mentalities cuts across the religious/secular divide.

Radical evil is making human beings superfluous as human beings.

…mentality … a cast of mind or way of thinking that conditions the way in which we approach, understand, and act in the world…. Mentalities also arrive at different stages … we need to inquire why they arise  and why they fade away…

Bernstein, Robert:

“…evil does not awe or paralyze him.” (Toni Morrison

on Robert Bernstein).

Bernstein, William J:

“…testosterone causes three problems …: it decreases fear, increases greed and very much  contributes to overcondifence….It…doesn’t do much for judgment….

In finance if you’re centrain of anything, you’re out of your mind.”

Berra, Yogi:

“We’re lost, but we’re making good time.”

“You can observe a lot by watching.”

Berrigan, Daniel:

The notion that one has to achieve peace of mind before

stretching out one’s hand to one’s neighbor is a distortion of our human experience, and ultimately a dodge of our responsibility. Life is a rollercoaster, and one had better buckle one’s belt and take the trip. This focus on equanimity is actually a narrow-minded, selfish approach to reality dressed up within the language of spirituality.”

“The only way to be hopeful is to do hopeful things.”
“When madness is the acceptable public state of mind, we’re all in danger; for madness is an infection in the air. And I submit that we all breathe the infection…”

“One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something; and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.”

Berrell, N J:

“Nature, in the intimate and in the vast, is not designed. It is designing. Our own nature confirms it.”

Berry, Joe, via Ehrlich:

“Trump is trying to demonstrate that he has the power to  step into a war and stop it by force of his personality.  By pushing Zelensky aside and dealing directly with the Russians, he sees that he can stop the war – but at Ukraine’s expense.  All of the lives, treasure and courage that have gone into Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion could be for naught.  This is exactly what happened when Trump negotiated with the Taliban to end the Afgan war.  He excluded the Afgan government from the talks and dealt directly with their enemies.  He did not stand up for the government and the new Afgan society that we put so much treasure (and many lives and limbs) into nurturing.  The collapse of the Afgan government that followed was a direct result of being undercut in Trump’s negotiations.  He sacrificed many wonderful people who believed in us – for his EGO. Zelensky understands what Trump is up to.”

Berry, Thomas:

“History is governed by those overarching moments that give shape and meaning to life by relating the human venture to the larger destinies of the universe.”

“We must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”

Berry, Wendell:

”Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

“…Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a …mess of which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators….There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands…an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom – a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom – and all of us are involved in it.”

“…the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed…looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity.”

“Ignorance, arrogance, narrowness of mind, incomplete knowledge, and counterfeit knowledge are … dangerous; they cause destruction. When united with great power, they cause great destruction.”

“We don’t have a right to ask whether we will succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is, what’s the right thing to do?”

“People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us.”

“Take a simpleton and give him power and confront him with intelligence — and you have a tyrant.”

How could a human being do that? How could anybody take a machine and destroy the world with it?

via Renkl: “Much protest is naïve; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and

gives up when such improvement does not come. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance.

History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any

use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of

public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and

spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

end Wendell Berry

Bertocci, Peter:

“The meaning of life is to do the best you can with what you’ve got.”

philosopher

Bessner, Daniel:

“…history won’t just be written by the victors; it’ll also be written by the well-to-do.

If Americans don’t seriously invest in history and other humanities disciplines, we encourage … a historic ignorance…”

Besson, Luc:

“It’s always the small people who change things. It’s never the politicians or the big guys. I mean, who pulled down the Berlin wall? It was all the people in the streets. The specialists didn’t have a clue the day before.”

Beston, Henry:

“What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity.”

Bestuzhev, Yevgeny:

“I understood we were already living in a fascist state, under a terrorist dictatorship.

But for a long time I still didn’t believe we would end up in a state comparable to Orwell’s dystopia in ‘1984.’ In these conditions, dialogue, expressions of opinion are impossible. The only path now is resistance.”

Bethea, Charles:

“Really repulsive meme-ing, the stuff that makes you laugh, makes you remember,…The right .. is great at it instinctively. Whether it’s a 4chan board or basement neckbeards, they nail it. They can distill a huge talking paragraph into a cat picture.”

quoting a lawyer source.

Bettany, Paul (on Unabomber Ted Kaczynski):

“He just felt furious and alienated and there was no place for him in the world. He didn’t fit into it and it made him angry.”     

Bettleheim, Rabbi Alfred:

 “Prejudice saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking.”

Bevan, James:

“It’s basically toxic for [the United States] to engage in any kind of effort to trace weapons because they have a huge domestic opposition to linking weapons with people. Their attitude to personal gun possession extends to international trade.”

Bezos, Jeff:

“… a focus on the long-term and a willingness to be misunderstood.”

“I gave up on being well understood a long time ago.

To be understood is too difficult. It’s hard enough, by the way, to be well

understood by your loved ones, by your kids and your closest friends. It takes a lot

of energy. If you think you understand any public figure, you probably don’t.”

“It’s all about the long term…

we are willing to invent…

we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time…

we’re signed up for this to be hard.”

“[…fast, quality decisions often can be made when about] 70% of the information you wish you had [is available]….

Waiting for 90% means going too slow.”

(recall Jinn Nan Lin).

Bharara, Preet and Margaret Garnett:

 “Rules can operate to shape culture…”

Bhargava, Deepak:

”…it takes social movements that exhibit intensity, tenacity, and imagination to get big things done in our country.”

Bhogal, Gurwinder (Unherd):

“If TikTok is not a murder weapon, then it’s a suicide weapon.”

digital dementia…digital opium…

…we are living through an intellectual obesity crisis.

Bhutto, Fatima:

“We heard the story all the time, told as a warning: When man first set foot on Earth, all the winged animals flew high into the sky, and the fish dived deeper into the sea, scattering in fear because they knew the destroyer of the world had arrived.

What is folklore but prophecy?”

from Ahsan Iqbal: ‘the irresponsible development of the developed world.’

Biao, Xiang:

“People realize that material betterment is no longer the single most important source of meaning in life.”

Bible, Jesus, God:

Genesis: re: Babel – “look, they are people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”

Apostle

Paul in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave

nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ

Jesus.”

Bickmore, Barry:

 “When you have someone who doesn’t care about the quality of their arguments, it usually means they don’t care about the quality of anyone else’s.”

Biden, Joe:

‘Inshallah…God plans, and man laughs.” via Tamara Qiblawi

Biden noted that he had “looked into Putin’s eyes and saw no soul.”

“We reject … the tired theory that our values and our interests must compete for influence over our politics,” Biden told students at Moscow State University on his 2011 trip.

“What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill someone?”

“I held my arms up, I said: ‘It’s amazing what capitalism will do’ …

 I said, ‘Mr President, I’m looking in your eyes and you have no soul.’ And he looked back at me and he said: ‘We understand one another.’”

            Joe Biden to Putin

“Don’t judge me against the Almighty;

judge me against the alternative.”

“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.”

“The presidency is a duty to care.”

“We should know the good, the bad, everything. That’s what great nations do: They come to terms with their dark sides.”

“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments. They embrace them. Great nations don’t walk away, they come to terms with the mistakes they’ve made.”

“Fighting for the sake of fighting, power for the sake of power, conflict for the sake of conflict gets us nowhere” 

“There is no place for political violence in America.”

“Democracy must not be a partisan issue. It must be an American issue…We must see each other not as enemies, but as fellow Americans. We are a good people, the only nation in the world built on an idea.”

via Jennifer Rubin: “He signaled an end to the era of catering to the irrational and coddling the selfish.”

Biden to Israel?:

via Biden – “You cannot think straight when you’re in pain. That’s truer still when the pain is combined with fury at those who caused it. There’s a reason we speak of “blind rage”: when anger descends, we cannot see what’s in front of us. And if that’s true of individuals, it’s truer still of nations”

at DNC 8-20-2024 American Anthem…

Last UN addreess:

“My fellow leaders, let us never forget. Some things are more important than staying in power…

There is nothing that is beyond our capacity if we work together.”

“…raw politics has infected the justice process, and it lead to a miscarriage of justice.”

end Joe Biden

Biello, David:

Entrepreneur is just a fancy French word for a salesman,  David Biello

Bienvenu, Ugo:

“If we want better things to happen, we have to imagine them first.”

Bierce, Ambrose:

The Devil’s Dictionary.

Bigelow, Gordon:

“For [Adam] Smith, the pursuit of wealth was a grotesque personal error, a misunderstanding of human happiness.”

The core assumption of standard economics is that humans are fundamentally individual rather than social animals.”

Poverty was not understood as a problem to be fixed. It was a spiritual condition.”

…a pure free-market ideology can be logically sustained only if it is based in a fiery religious conviction.”

The crisis in Ireland between 1845 and 1850 – the Great Hunger – remains one of the most striking illustrations of the incapacity of markets to run themselves.”

“…’political economy’ …began to connote a cruel disregard for human suffering. ..a generation later…the term…was simply junked. The new field was called ‘economics’.

The evangelicals believed that the market was a divine system, guided by spiritual laws. The ‘scientific’ economists saw the market as a natural system, a principle of equilibrium produced in the balance of individual souls.”

(see pdf Let There be Markets (economics religion).

Bigelow, Kathryn:

“I want audiences to leave theaters thinking, ‘OK, what do we do now? This is a global issue, and of course I hope against hope that maybe we reduce the nuclear stockpile someday. But in the meantime, we really are living in a house of dynamite. I felt it was so important to get that information out there, so we could start a conversation. That’s the explosion we’re interested in — the conversation people have about the film afterward.”

Biko, Steve:

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

Biles, Simon:

“Because I can.”

“When you’re reaching for things, you’re going to fall short, and yes,

sometimes you’re going to fail…When – not if, but when – this

happens to you, just learn from it, and move on to Plan B. If plan B doesn’t

work out, then make a Plan C, and then guess what – there’s the rest of the

alphabet. The key to success is the willingness to always find a way.”

…Be the greatest you of all time.”

Bilger, Burkhard:

“What seemed like pretension was just a mind delighting in its own connections.”

Billinghurst, Rosa May:

wheelchair suffragette, NYT obit:

“They may even kill me in the process, for I am not strong, but they cannot take away my freedom of spirit or my determination to fight this good fight to the end.”…

“We are not hooligans seeking to destroy, but we mean to wake the public mind from its apathy.”

Bin-Laden, Osama:

Osama bin Laden later boasted that he was the only one in the group’s upper hierarchy who had anticipated the magnitude of the wound that Al Qaeda incited on America, but he also admitted that he was surprised by the towers’ collapse. His goal, for at least five years, had been to goad America into invading Afghanistan

“All that we have to do is send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘Al Qaeda’ in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note ….”

            Osama bin Laden via Joe Quinn NYT

Birthler, Marianne:

dissident, via Applebaum

“You want to do something for yourself – to respect yourself.”

Bishop, Averie:

Ms Texas 2023: “Another day, another snake at the Texas state Capitol.”

“Y’all means all”.

Bishop, Bill:

“…extremism is a consequence of the company we keep.”

Bishop, Rob:

…comparing the large tracts of public land that exist out West to the Soviet Union, Bishop told the conservative crowd, ‘I defy you to find anywhere in the Constitution where this is allowable.’

Biskupic, Joan:

“At the Supreme Court those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know.”

Bismarck, Otto von:

”…divine providence protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.”

“If revolution there is to be, let us rather undertake it, not undergo it.”

“Wars are not won by generals, but by schoolteachers and parish priests.”

Biss, Eula:

“I want my son to know the difference between compliance and complicity.”

also German Schuld – guilt – and Schulden – debts.

“I had the uncomfortable suspicion that my good life … might not be entirely good. … I was pestered by the possibility that [it] was built on a bedrock of evil and that evil was running through our groundwater.”

“’Evil’ is how slaves describe their masters.”

see pdf white debt

Biss, Jonathan:

Interpretation – of Mozart or the Constitution – is neither mechanical reproduction nor unfettered creativity. It is about using your eyes and ears and lived experience and education and critical lens and passion and skepticism and, above all, humility, to tease out the text’s infinite implications, and in doing so, to come closer to its essence.

Bittman, Mark:

”…a lack of idiocy is not the same…as a presence of wisdom.”

“…solar power will be to the electrical grid what PCs were to mainfames … a technology that will simply kill its predecessors. Coal and nuclear power are both doomed, and the profit-making power grid with it. That’s all to our benefit.”

quoting Wes Jackson: “The plow has destroyed more options for future generations than the sword. But soil is more important than oil, and just as nonrenewable.”

“If you think you’re going to complete your life’s vision in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”

Bitner, Jochen:

“Lennonism has several key principles. … borders are an artificial concept. Every human is a citizen of the world, and it is a universal right for anyone to live wherever he or she wishes to.”

Bjork (Björk Guðmundsdóttir):

“If it’s not dangerous, it’s not worth doing.”

“If optimism ever was like an emergency, it’s now. Instead of moaning and becoming really angry, we need to actually come up with suggestions of what the world we want to live in, in the future, could be.”

“Future Forever…

Imagine a future and be in it

feel this incredible nurture, soak it in.

Your past is a loop – turn it off.”

“I love that in Iceland we don’t give a fuck about celebrities. You will meet the president in the supermarket.”

Bjornerud, Marcia:

from Reading the Rocks, 2005:

Nothing is permanent, and yet because of this, everything is eternal.

If there is stability in nature, it is not static, but a far subtler dynamic, impermanent constancy.

…in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the true horror and tragedy arise from the monster’s awareness that he has no kin, no memory, no sense of his own history.

…variability on every time scale, high-frequency wiggles on waves riding swells, the characteristic sound of the terrestrial philharmonic.

…like spoiled children, we routinely overestimate our importance on the planet but underestimate the destructiveness of our self-absorption.

…consciousness can become a pathological condition if it gives us delusions that we have somehow been exempted from the rules that have always governed the biosphere. The belief that we can engineer what evolution has done in 4 billion years – and expect the results to be predictable and controllable – is a sign of our youth and ignorance. Native tinkering with such ancient systems is foolish, arrogant, and dangerous.           

Black, Barry C:

“Save us from the madness. …Deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being unreasonable.”

Senate chaplin

Black, Justice Hugo:

”The Fourteenth Amendment followed the freedom of a race from slavery. ..the amendment was intended to protect the life, liberty, and property of human beings. The language of the amendment itself does not support the theory that it was passed for the benefit of corporations.”

“Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

Black, Lewis – comedian:

“Trump is good for comedy in the way a stroke is good for a nap.”

Blackhawk, Ned:

“How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?…Indigenous dispossession facilitated the growth of white male democracy and African American slavery.”

Blackmore, Susan:

“…the whole of human culture can be seen as a vast new evolutionary process based on memes…Human beings are the meme machines…

Blackmore, William:

”…[there is] no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land…”

Blake, Ed:

“A journalist sees an event through a dirty window and attempts to clarify the view and find the truth in what is really happening.”

Exhibit  No Such Address at The Leonardo

Blake, Heidi:

“Every dead body sent a signal. If you cross Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, there is no safe place for you on earth.

Blake, George – spy:

“I justified it in my mind by believing that I was helping, in a small way, in building a new society in which there would be equality, social justice, no longer any war, no longer any national conflict — that was my dream, as it were. I think it’s quite conceivable that, in time, all nations will live in that kind of world.”

Blake, William:

”As a man is so he sees.”

And man walks forth from midst of the fires, the evil is all consumed.” via Dan Brown

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. (influenced A Huxley).

“Time and Space are real Beings, a Male and a Female. Time is a Man and Space is a Woman.”

“I must Create a system, or be enslav’d by another Man’s.”

“Both read the Bible day and night;

but you read black where I read white.”

“What is a church and what is a theatre?”

“What is now proved was once only imagin’d.”

“Forgive what do you not approve and love me for this energetic exertion of my talent.”

Blanchett, Cate:

“…we have a responsibility to all those who will come after us. This is part of what it means to light a fire, and go to work. But the underpinning of it all is to be oneself…

I’ve spent a lifetime getting comfortable with the feeling of being uncomfortable.”

Blanco-Elorrieta, Esti:

“I think the importance of being bilingual is being able to communicate with two cultures and two ways of seeing the world.”

Blanco, Hugo:

“One hundred more years of rule by transnational companies and they’re going to exterminate the human species as they’ve exterminated other species….

We have reached a situation in which the ‘private ownership of the means of production’ has been turned into the ‘private ownership of the means of destruction,’ which will plunge us into the abyss,”

Blas, Javier:

The World For Sale, 2021, K.

Blechman, Andrew D:

“Over the course of the past one hundred years, we humans have grown in population at a rate rarely seen outside of a petri dish.”  Orion, re:  Alan Weisman

Blewett, Duncan:

“The psychedelics offer the hope that we are on the threshold of a new renaissance in which man’s view of himself will undergo dramatic change. Alienated and encapsulated, he has become trapped by his history in outmoded institutions which disfigure him with the creed of original sin; corrupt him with fear of economic insecurity; dement him with the delusion that mass murder is an inevitable outcome of his nature; debase him to believe that butchery in the name of the state is a sacred duty, and leave him so crippled that he is afraid to seek self-understanding or to love and trust himself, his neighbor or his God….

Only the psychedelics offer the hope that man can grow rapidly and fully enough to meet the challenge mounted by his technical accomplishments.

    The models of man and the frames of reference involved in our technologically centered society are proving increasingly inadequate in the face of the profound, revolutionary transformation of the times in which the dividing walls of social, political and economic structures are rapidly being eroded. A new morality is called for in a world in which conception is becoming voluntary; genetic structures are becoming open to deliberate manipulation; socialization can be controlled to fit a “Brave New World” and traditional sex roles are proving unacceptable. New political institutions are required in the face of the power to exterminate the race, the immediacy of communication, the emergence of political awareness among all the peoples of the world, and the need to protect democracy against the consequences of specialization. New economic structures are demanded to balance supply with actual demand rather than with purchasing power; to permit the distribution of constructive, nutritive, helpful things with the same level of organization and skill with which we are able to distribute deadly and noxious things in time of war, and to permit men to find a sense of dignity, worth and accomplishment in an automated world….

  The creative potential of the psychedelics lies in the fact that they change one’s relation to one’s self….

—an unhabitual, unified and undistorted “new look” which is the basis of the creative capacity and the problem-solving ability which the authors have clearly described and carefully documented.

    The transcendent process also lies at the core of the therapeutic use of the psychedelics. When the defense mechanisms are obviated, one sees one’s self objectively. One is, as it were, emotionally naked to one’s own gaze. This is the confrontation of the self with no means left to defend against one’s own scrutiny and one’s own enmity. This is the crux of the process which transforms the value system and hence the man. In this defenseless and indefensible state one cannot fight, and surrender alone is possible. In this case it is self-surrender—a process which leads to being “born again” or of “finding” one’s self. It is the final and ultimate acceptance of reality, including the self, as it is in essence. In this way one learns to accept the self; to be content to be one’s self and to find one’s self an object of his own compassion. The importance of this process is evidenced in that our self-concept conditions our thinking. It makes us respond with trust, understanding, love-and affection or, conversely, with suspicion, prejudice and hostility toward ourselves and toward others….

The psychedelics, by inducing these levels of consciousness which are vast extensions and enlargements of normal experience, provide a microscope for the psychologist through which the details of structure and function of personality can be clearly observed.

    Science requires the objective observation of the elements which comprise the field of study. Among the sciences the study of the human mind encounters the unique problem that the mind itself is simultaneously the observer and the observed….

end Blewett

Blight, David W.:

“… culture wars are won by fueling them, not by seeking harmony.”

“It’s what the Nazis did. It’s what Spain did. It’s what Mussolini tried. This is like

the Soviets: they revised the Soviet encyclopedia every year to update the

official history. Americans don’t have an official history; at least we’ve tried

never to have.”

Blinken, Antony:

“Music is the most powerful connector. It transcends virtually any kind of barrier you can think of.”

Blitzstein, Joseph:

“Math is the logic of certainty, and statistics is the logic of uncertainty.”

Block, Fred:

”…the United States  (has) been influenced by market fundamentalism – a vastly exaggerated belief in the capacity of market self-regulation to solve economic and social problems…(leading to) dramatic increases in economic inequality and heightened economic security…”

“…linguistic larceny plays a big role in politics.”

“…the market fundamentalist history of the U.S. economy before the New Deal is

basically fanciful.”

“For Polanyi, …a commodity is something that has been produced for sale on a market. ….land, labor, and money are fictitious commodities because they were not originally produced to be sold on a market. Labor is simply the activity of human beings, land is subdivided nature, and the supply of money and credit in modern societies is necessarily shaped by governmental policies.”

“Modern economics starts by pretending that these fictitious commodities will behave in the same was as real commodities, but Polanyi insists that this sleight of hand has fatal consequences. It means that economic theorizing is based on a lie, and this lie places human society at risk.”

“In Polanyi’s view the fascist impulse – to protect society from the market by sacrificing human freedom…”

End Block, Fred

Block, Herb:

“The worst form of corruption is acceptance of corruption.”

“[to politicians:] Harry Truman said, ‘The buck stops here.’ Anything for a buck stops now!”.

The way to defend freedom of the press is to use it.” (paraphrase for tenure).

“I want people to walk on him.”

to his father of chalk drawing sidewalk of German Kaiser.

Block, Stefan Merrill:

“…the paradoxical political stability ancient Athenians discovered in surrendering some of their governance to the forces of randomness.” in his review of Bridle book.

Blom, Philipp:

“The vision they discussed … was one in which women and men would no longer be oppressed by the fear and ignorance instilled by religion,”

Desire … would make their world beautiful and rich; empathy would make it kind and livable; reason would allow an understanding of the world’s immutable laws.

There is something like a stock market for reputations…”

Bloom, Harold:

challenged most existing biblical scholarship by suggesting that even the Judeo-Christian God was a literary character — invented by a woman, no less, who may have lived in the court of King Solomon and who wrote sections of the first five books of the Old Testament.’

great literature is an act of rebellion against the writers who came before.

            via Dinitia Smith in NYT obit.

“Our Great Emancipator of Selfishness, President Ronald Reagan, refreshingly evaded the rhetoric of religion, but has been

appropriated anyway as the archangel of American spiritualized greed….

A dark truth of American politics in what is  … that so many

do not vote their own economic interests. … they march

onward to their own deepening impoverishment….

Jorge Luis Borges shrewdly classified all theology as fantastic literature…

Though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints no longer openly describes their innermost beliefs, they clearly hold on to the notion of a plurality of gods. Indeed, they themselves expect to become gods, following the path of Joseph Smith….

Bloom, Howard:

The Lucifer Principle, 1995:

“The Lucifer Principle contends that evil is woven into our most basic biological fabric….

Never be complacent about barbarians….

…there are barbarians – people whose cultures glorify the act of murder and elevate violence to a holy deed. …Certain Islamic societies tend to be high on this list…

Moslem jurists … declare that there are two worlds: The world of Islam … and the non-Islamic world. These two spheres…are in a state of perpetual war.”

“Explained the young Egyptian, ‘Islam is a tree that feeds on blood and grows on severed limbs.’”

“The importance of hugging”, suggested that “Islamic cultures treat their children harshly, they despise open displays of affection … the result is violent adults”, and as a consequence, “An entire people may have turned barbaric for the simple lack of a hug.”

Bloom, Paul:

“…civilized beings: social creatures who can experience empathy, guilt, and shame; who can override selfish impulses in the name of higher principles; and who will respond with outrage to unfairness and injustice.

You won’t find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice. These universals make evolutionary sense.”

 “It is through our imagination, our compassion and our capacity for rational thought that we can transcend the primitive sense of morality we were born with, becoming more than just babies.”

“Empathy is a poor moral guide. It is biased, shortsighted, and innumerate. We are better off without it.”

Bloomberg, Michael:

“… capitalism allocates resources through markets, whereas democracy allocates power through votes. … Today, capital markets and capitalists set the rules that democratic governments must follow. …For the British journalist Paul Mason, that question is closed: capitalism’s current condition is terminal. … The roots of capitalism’s demise, Mason argues, lie in the 1980s … , when capitalism was taken over by neoliberalism: an ideology and a set of policies that recognize no limits to the commodification of the world. … the central battle will be between those who want to preserve property rights and those who wish to destroy them in the name of democracy. The stakes, Mason argues, could not be higher. Without the revolution he calls for, the world will be vulnerable to a much greater threat: catastrophic climate change…. Mason thinks that climate change may be the one bullet that capitalism cannot dodge. … Capitalism, in its current form, has reached a dead end.”

Blouin, Andree:

“Colonialism was … a system of evil whose tentacles reached into every phase of African life.”  in NYT obit

Blow, Charles (NYT):

“Be warned: There is nothing soothing and uplifting in this column. I will not somberly mourn and point to our better angel and American resilience. This is not that kind of column.”

“stochastic terrorism…””…eat from the same philosophical trough…”

Red Summer, 1919 ref

“…the right’s flimsy fiscal argument – that if we allow fat cats to gorge, crumbs will surely fall.”

There’s something immoral about giving handouts to entrenched corporate interests with armies of lobbyists while seeking to cut those to hungry children, struggling families and frail seniors.”

Poverty is brutal, consuming and unforgiving. It strikes at the soul.”

“…America…a nation about to be plundered and a people laid to waste.”

…it is the child, not the parent, who will be punished most by our current policies that increasingly advocate for ‘unborn children’ but fall silent for those outside the womb.”

“We have not taken care of the least among us. We have allowed a revolting level of income

inequality to develop. We have watched as millions of our fellow countrymen have fallen into poverty. And we have done a poor job of educating our children and now threaten to leave them a country that is a shell of its former self. We should be ashamed.” “There is no right in aligning yourself with a wrong….

…remember that what is right and what is legal don’t always dovetail.”

The country is changing, and that change is creating friction:

between the traditional ruling classes and emerging ones;

between traditional social structures and altered ones; between a

long-held vision of an American ideal and growing reality that its

time has passed.

The Republican-Democratic divide is increasingly becoming an

all-white/multicultural divide, a male/female divide, and a more

religious/less religious divide — the formers the traditional power

classes, and the latters the emerging ones.

Women are under attack. Hispanics are under attack. Minority

voting rights are under attack. The poor are under attack.

Unsurprisingly, those doing the attacking in every case are from

the right.

Seldom is power freely passed and painlessly surrendered,

particularly when the traditionally powerful see the realignment

as an existential threat.

The bullying on that bus was awful, but so is the bullying in our

politics. Those boys were trying to exert power over a person

placed there to rein them in. But bullying is always about power —

projecting more than you have in order to accrue more than your

share.

“Part of the job of opinion makers is to be provocative. One could express it this way: illuminate, elucidate and agitate….

people who watched or listened to no news were better informed than those who watched Fox.”

“The true convictions of your heart will, eventually, be betrayed by the disobedience of your tongue.”

“Opposition to Obama is their raison d’etre. America’s national interests are subordinate to their selfish ones.”

“Anger is exhausting. It eventually subsides, memories fade and the media turn away to chase another ambulance.”

“…no one can divest you of your basic humanity without your submission and allowance.”

“ What happens when one desists from dreaming, when the very exercise seems futile?” (see Langston Hughes)

“You don’t have to operate with a malicious spirit to do tremendous harm. Insensitivity and ignorance are sufficient. In fact, intolerance that is disarming is the most dangerous kind. It can masquerade as morality.”

“…the problem, and danger, of people like [Paul] Ryan: There is an ever-swirling mix of inspiration and insult, where the borders between the factual and the fudged are intentionally blurred and cover is given for corrosive ideas.”

“…some Americans seem to live in a world where facts can’t exist.”

“…the exhaling of pain must come before the shaping of policy.”

“And in a few seconds, or fractions of a second, before the conscious mind can catch up to the racing heart, decisions are made that can’t be unmade. Dead is forever.”

“In March, Kevin M. Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University, argued in The New York Times Sunday Review that “the founding fathers didn’t create the ceremonies and slogans that come to mind when we consider whether this is a Christian nation. Our grandfathers did.” This, according to Kruse, began with anti-New Deal business leaders in the 1930s who linked capitalism to Christianity as a public relations move.”

“…fear is winning, as many Americans think crime is up, even though it’s down. This fear is winning as massacres, and the gun violence discussions that follow, don’t lead to fewer gun sales, but more. This fear is winning, following continued violence by antigovernment militias and hate groups.”

“Where you sit on the ideological spectrum dictates whom you see as your Satan and whom your savior.”

“…the people supporting him [Trump}: They know he’s lying, but they so want to believe the lies that they have pushed themselves into a universe of irrationality that is devoid of logic.”

“Trump is the logical extension of the worst of America.

And the Republican Party was just the right place for him to park himself.

Republicans sowed intolerance and in its shadow, Trump sprang up like toxic fungi.”

“…remember that Trump isn’t a reasonable person or even a particularly smart one, which makes him the perfect vessel for Bannon’s pseudo-intellectual vanities….

Trump is Bannon’s puppet, whose … parlor trick is to deliver incoherence with confidence. …

news, by its very nature, is the publishing of that which those in power would prefer to conceal….

Trump simply wants the truth not to be true,…And yet, truth stands, rigid and sharp, unforgiving and unafraid….

The press is the light that makes the roaches scatter….Only people with something to hide need be afraid of those whose mission is to seek [or shine light].”

“Trumpian language … is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance….

America is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent….

… people expect a political lie to sound slick, to be delivered by intellectual elites spouting $5 words. A clumsy, folksy lie delivered by a shyster using broken English reads as truth.

…easy lies sound more true than hard facts.

… interviews … paint a terrifying portrait of a man who is simultaneously unintelligible in his delivery, self-assured in his ignorance and consciously bathing in his narcissism.

…In Trump world, facts don’t matter, truth doesn’t matter, language doesn’t matter. Passionate performance is the only ideal. A lie forcefully told and often repeated is better than truth — it is accepted as an act of faith, which is better than a point of fact.

“Trump is bombastic and abrasive with his lies. Pence cleverly delivers his with earnestness and solemnity. But a lie is a lie.”

“Trump himself is the offense. Everything that springs from him, every person who supports him, every staffer who shields him, every legislator who defends him, is an offense….His tweet was just another pebble on a mountain of vulgarities. This act of coarseness was in fact an act of continuity. Trump was being Trump: the grossest of the gross, a profanity against propriety….moral impotence…”

“[Trump’s] usage isn’t only idiosyncratic or some act of bungling idiocy, although it is surely both. But his usage is also a way of reducing language to the point that it is meaningless because the use of it is mindless, and in that compromised state, language becomes nearly worthless. As a consequence, truth becomes relative, if not altogether removed.”

“…the Trumps lie in two ways: first, by directly and intentionally saying things they know well aren’t true, and second, by obfuscating with linguistic obtuseness, by overusing a nebulous relativism and by spouting an excess of superlatives to stand in for meaningful description and disclosure.”

“[Trump weaponizes] untruth. It is the use of the lie to assault and subdue. It is Trump doing to political ends what Hitler did to more brutal ends: using mass deception as masterful propaganda.”

“When you bend to lick a boot you relinquish the posture required to stand and tell the truth.”

“…my focus now is on protecting the country from Trump.”

“the Republican Party stands for … regression, wealth worship, nationalism and white supremacy.”

“The pre-Trump Republican Party is dead; The zombie Trump party now lives in its stead, devoid of principle, feasting on fear and rage, foreign to moral framing….

When supposedly religious conservatives were able to look past Trump’s bullying, his clear lack of religious conviction, his appearance in pornos, his lying, his provocations to violence, his adultery, his three marriages and his professed — taped — propensity for sexual assault, they became blind to bawdiness. That was when the hands that toted the Bibles stopped toeing its line….

Republicans have surrendered the moral high ground they thought they held, and have dived face-first into the sewer.”

The problem for America is that men pretending to be strongmen will always yield to stronger men. They will always bow to the men they want to be. In the presence of the real thing their mimicry is made mockery. As we would say in hip-hop, Trump is faking the funk.

“Trump … is a fighter…not…because he is fearsome or brave. Trump fights for vanity.”

In [Trump’s] opera of demons, the lesser evils are part of the phalanx standing between us and the greater evils… The enemy of my enemy is my temporary tool [or fool].…

Trump’s fortress of fraudulence is showing cracks….Trump is a man who has lived a life evading justice, using the legal system and the threat of legal action against people. For him, the justice system is a tool at the disposal of the wealthy and the ruthless, one to be used against anyone of lesser means and lesser fortitude….his entire life has been controversial …he only sees things through the lens of winning or losing. There is no other measure of success or failure. If you win, you were right.”

“The founders, a bunch of rich, powerful white men, didn’t want true democracy in this country, and in fact were dreadfully afraid of it…

Now, a bunch of rich, powerful white men want to return us to this sensibility, wrapped in a populist “follow the Constitution” rallying cry and disguised as the ultimate form of patriotism.”

“You must be driven toward a concept of what you want this country to become, and not just driven by a fear of what the country could descend into.

…There are two ways to drive turnout: excitement or incitement. Voters can either be animated by hope or fear, optimism or angst.

…Make no mistake: Trump’s strategy will work. He now knows the people who support him very well. He has never stopped playing to them and campaigning for them. They are family. They feast together on hatred and intolerance.”

“…damage is certain.”

Trumpism is bigger than Trump. It is a rebranding of a consistent and increasingly resurgent strand of white American anxiety about primacy, privilege and displacement.

“…the enemy of the people is ignorance…

Corruption depends on concealment…

The weaker the media, the stronger the demagogue. The road to authoritarianism winds its way through darkness.”

“A President does not have immunity after he leaves office.” The report continues:

“And if individuals other than the President committed an obstruction offense, they may be prosecuted at this time. Given those considerations, the facts known to us, and the strong public interest in safeguarding the integrity of the criminal justice system, we conducted a thorough factual investigation in order to preserve the evidence when memories were fresh and documentary materials were available.”

“… [a letter] signed by at least 800 former federal prosecutors states:

‘Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.’”

Concealment makes the soul a swamp; confession is how you drain it.

“…you can’t hold your own halo. You have to be able to see that you can still do harm when you mean well.” re: Biden

“For Trump, truth is like Play-Doh: You can shape it however you want, squash it or ignore it all together. It is a thing to be toyed with.”

“Trump has confessed to the central allegation…He did it. ..[Trump] developed a kind of Superman syndrome, in which the more crises he survived, the more he came to believe that he was invincible.”

“Trump didn’t change, but his relationship to power did: when he won, he had it, and the Republicans swarmed to him like moths to a flame, or more like vultures to a corpse.”

“Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact.”

“Rage has ascended to my position of primacy…Now rage is the only language I have left.”

“…never – ever – underestimate white supremacy.”

“…white displacement and dimishment…” re: culture wars

write what you know. Write about some of your most intimate experiences, the things that you can’t stop thinking about no matter how hard you try.

The other was that columnists should be like an orchestra, each playing a different instrument, but together making music…I decided that in that orchestra I was going to play the banjo.

…They weren’t highly educated, but their use of metaphor was exquisite and their ability to reduce a complex idea into a compact phrase was unmatched.

“There is a collective consciousness in blackness, born of the white supremacist erasure of our individuality.”

“…white supremacy is only one foot of the beast. The other is anti-Blackness. You have to fight both…the browning of America does not succeed in wiping away its racial prejudices…

Colorism and racism are cousins, and both are a pestilence.”

“…an indelible American truth: No civil rights are inviolable and permanent. Every right you win, you must defend. Rights, unfortunately, can be withdrawn.”

“Giving so few parents so much power to take educational options away from other parents and children runs counter to the spirit of democracy and free inquiry, and enshrines a form of parental tyranny of the hypersensitive, the inexplicably aggrieved and the maliciously oppressive.”

“He’s not the center of attention, the impresario of the event; no, he must sit silently in lighting not intended to flatter and in chairs not intended to impress.

Courtrooms humble the people in them. They equalize. They democratize.”

…a disease, the descent of liberalism into a form of cultural insanity driven by an obsession with identities and protection of the perverse…

the effort to assist and support the underrepresented — turns out to be the ultimate target….

see Kimberle Crenshaw quote.

Black women …The issue is not that the bar is lowered for them to succeed but rather raised so that any imperfection can be inflated into a fundamental flaw. These women are trapped in prisons of others’ demands for perfection…the Wonder Woman requirement.”

end Blow NYT

Blue, Robbie:

“It was always like the moves don’t matter. You

have to have something to say. That’s how you hook people.”

Blum, William:

“If I were the president I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize — very publicly and very sincerely — to all the widows and orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism.

Blume, Judy:

Forever documentary:

Jason Reynolds:

“Judy didn’t set out to make her books timeless; she made them timely, and that’s what makes them timeless.”

Blumstein, Alfred:

“Guns transform what is widespread teenage behavior into disasters.”

Blunt, James:

“Language is sometimes limited, in describing a feeling, but music does it beautifully and instantly. One stroke of a string on a violin or a cello will make you feel something.”

Boccaccio, Giovanni:

The Decameron: “Nothing is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.”

Boedy, Matthew:

“The Breitbart doctrine is now the Turning Point doctrine.”

Boehner, John:

”I reject the word [compromise].”

“…a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.”

in a democracy, you can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.”

Boeree, Lis:

Mooloch: The God of Unhealthy Competition

“Don’t hate the players. Change the game!”

AARGH: Algorithmically Amplified Rage and Hatred

Boff, Leonardo:

“The logic that exploits classes and subjects peoples to the interests of a few rich and powerful countries is the same as the logic that devastates the Earth and plunders its wealth … the cry of the poor for life, freedom, and beauty, and the cry of the Earth groaning under oppression. Both seek liberation.”

Boghossian, Peter:

the university had been changed from “a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division…diversity-industrial complex.” see pdf

Bogo, Bence:

“Conversation with a trained chatbot can reduce conspiratorial beliefs…a scalable intervention to recalibrate misinformed beliefs may be within reach.

Bohachenko, Natalya :

“Russia evolves backward.”

“…the open society should recognize that openness is one of its strongest weapons.”

Bohannon, Cat:

“In the evolutionary sphere, diversity is a feature, not a bug…

I realized we needed a kind of user’s manual for the female mammal. Something that would tear down the male norm and put better science in place…

While it is true that not everybody works around the sciences, everybody lives in a body. How your lived experience of being freakin’ born and living your life is absolutely authentic and true and authoritative, and you know better than anyone in the world what it’s been like to live in your body…

200 million years ago, she was the first mammal to nurse her young… [recall Sam Magruder book!]

[Bohannon also worked as the unofficial poet-in-residence at Plastination City in Dalian, China, where bodies were being preserved and displayed as art by plastination’s inventor, the German anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens. [BodyWorlds] “Shipwreck,” an essay she wrote on von Hagens’s work, was published in The Georgia Review in 2005.]

via Advait Jukar, a paleontologist at the University of Arizona who worked with Bohannon on the paleontological component of “Eve,” called it a “remarkable and important book — one of the first times we’re telling the evolutionary story of women to the general public through this lens.

Cat has dabbled in a lot of things throughout her life and she’s written a lot of fascinating articles, but her ability to talk to people like me, and to talk to molecular biologists and physiologists and geneticists and piece all that together in a way that is both entertaining and accessible, is a rare gift. She’s got a beautiful mind.”

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility…. He was already telling me about [it]—with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.—REBECCA SOLNIT, MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.—JORGE LUIS BORGES,

every power men have ever had over women is something we gave them. We just forgot.

end Bohannon

Bohm, David:

“Bohm dialogue, a discussion practice intended to unveil our attachment to presuppositions and from wich creativity can emerge.”

“For  fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of a general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them. . . .  The notion  that all  these fragments are separate existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion.” 

Bohr, Niels:

“When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as poetry.”

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question…is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement—the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

Niels Bohr argued that “causality, determinism, and necessity of laws belonged to the categories of ‘our necessarily prejudiced conceptual frame’.” via Berkowitz, Arendt

Bok, Derek:

”If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Boli, John:

The invisible hand is a mystical god, working in mysterious … ways with more than a touch of miracle to produce a holistic beneficence that is not predictable from the unholy motivations of the self-interested actors.

quoted by Sedlacek

Bollas, Christopher:

“the fascist state of mind,” which tries to “empty the mind of all opposition.”  “simplifying violence.”

Bollyky, Thomas J

“Plagues put a mirror to the societies they afflict.

starting with the first major Black Death epidemic in the fourteenth century, the need to control plagues helped create the modern state…

[coronavirus] reveals ..the political systems that respond to it.”

Bolsonaro:

Bibles, bullets, and beef…

Bolton, John:

“The Monroe Doctrine is alive and well. It’s our hemisphere.”

“[Trump’s] not smart enought to be an authoritarian.”

Bolton alleged Trump intervened in U.S. law enforcement and practiced “obstruction of justice as a way of life.

Ultimately, Bolton suggests, Trump’s strategy was only based on his personal agenda

and reelection.

Bonano, George A.:

“PTSD is what happens when traumatic stress doesn’t go away,

when it festers and expands and eventually stabilizes into a more enduring state of

distress,”

Bonaparte, Napolean:

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

“Never ascribe to malice that which be adequately explained by incompetence.”

“There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind.”

“He who saves his country does not violate any law.”

Bond, Ian:

Via NYT: “If you have nuclear weapons you can get love letters from the president, and if you don’t, your generals can get killed.”

Bond, James:

Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997:

“We’re both men of action, but your era . . . is passing. Words are the new weapons, satellites the new artillery. . . . Caesar had his legions, Napoleon had his armies. I have my divisions—TV, news, magazines.”

“Go ahead and kill me – 008 is waiting to take my place.” Bond to Goldfinger, via Bill Maher.

Bone, Eugenia:

“Sad as death is, it is also about opportunity…

“…under the influence of psilocybin the brain temporarily behaves in a new way …”

“Sad as death is, it is also about opportunity…

There is life after death.”

Bongino, Dan:

“Power. That is all that matters.”

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich:

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil.”

“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved

…the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self- satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”

“If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature,”

stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.”

Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.

…every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity.”

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was hanged in a Nazi concentration camp. “God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo:      

“..racism without rascists..”

Bono:

“… Life changes. Perspectives shift. Emotions spiral. Walking into the wind feels a little harder each year.”

“America is like the best idea the world ever came up with, but Donald Trump is potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America.”

“…life is the creative act. The great canvas is all the things you do with that life.”

Booker, Cory:

“We can’t allow our inability to do everything undermine our determination to do something.”

            “You can’t have freedom and justice in this country if you can’t breathe your air, if you can’t open your window because of the toxic smells,”

“It may not be a billy club that is hitting you or a dog that is tearing your skin — those images from the Civil Rights movement — but it is violence to the body.”

Boorstin, Daniel:

“The greatest obstacle to knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.”

“The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age.

“An image … becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.” Historian Daniel Boorstin calls this the Age of Negative Discovery, “a realm no longer of answers but only of questions.”

Boot, Max:

“Only if the GOP as currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be any chance to build a reasonable center-right political party out of the ashes.”

“Every abuse of power, when left unchecked, leads to a bigger abuse…”

“…why targeted killings are seldom decisive.”

Borger, Julian:

“…efforts to tug at the sleeve of a blithe nation.”

Borge, Victor:

“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” via Alan Alda

Borges, J L:

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

“It is known that personal identity resides in memory, and that the annulment of that faculty is known to result in idiocy.” 1936

“Each writer creates his precursors.” on discussing Kafka

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.  

Bork, Robert:

”Every generation constitutes a wave of savages  who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches…”

“The Second Amendment works to guarantee the right of states to form militias, not for individuals to bear arms.”   Bork, 1989, via Jill Lepore.

Borland, Hal:

“If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.”

When the legends die, the dreams end.

“Memory is fallible and can be shaped to hope’s convenience.”

Borlaug, Norman:

“There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.”  1970 Nobel Prize

Born, Max:

“The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all the evil that is in the world.” 

Borosage, Robert L:

No one is confused about the message. Wall Street got bailed out; Main Street was abandoned. The top 1% rigs the rules and pockets the rewards. And 99% get sent the bill for the party they weren’t even invited to.”

“Movements aren’t tidy. They aren’t organized. They unleash energy. They inspire ordinary people to leave their daily routines and do extraordinary things. They inspire; they insult; they mortify. They disrupt business as usual. And if they touch a chord,

they grow, and they force politicians and citizens to decide.”

Borsellino, Rita:

“There are still people in Palermo who don’t have the gift of speech.”  NYT obit

Bos Peter A, et al:

“…oxytocin increases trust in humans. However, oxytocin also makes individuals susceptible to betrayal, because under influence of oxytocin, subjects perseverate in giving trust to others they know are untrustworthy…..Testosterone, a steroid hormone associated with competition and dominance, is often viewed as an inhibitor of sociality…. testosterone downregulates interpersonal trust in an adaptive manner.”

            Peter A. Bos,a David Terburg,a and Jack van Honka,b,1

            Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 June 1; 107(22): 9991–9995.

10.1073/pnas.0911700107

Boss, Devin:

“I created this film  [What We Lost Along the Way] during a time when I was “brimming with pain, and had nowhere to put it.”

Boswell, Davidson:

“It’s absolutely a brutal time to be even remotely intelligent.”

Botstein, Leon:

“…émigrés came to the United States and developed a love affair, if not with America then with the political ideal of America, since it was a nation in which citizenship could be acquired by anyone and was defined by loyalty to a form of government and the rule of law, not blood or soil…citizens…were not born. They had to be made. Education made children into citizens…the fatal flaw in American education was that people were encouraged to think for themselves, but they knew nothing. So what could they think about? They were taught how to express themselves, even though there seemed to be insufficient substance; this sustained a curious American innocence, a reductive pragmatic outlook, and a lack of skepticism. ..What a common public school ought to teach therefore is the capacity for disagreement, contest, and compromise. This is most relevant with regard to that basic and fundamental democratic process: free elections…A shared language that derives from a shared educational experience prior to adulthood might facilitate that essential public conversation…Technology aggregates prejudices and dresses falsehood (e.g. the connection of vaccines to autism) with a veneer of respectability by generating a virtual community that shares the same distorted views…the mass of data, with its allure of easy access, creates a semblance of sufficient understanding. This has made the conversation about negotiating different points of view harder, not easier. It has also given a kind of intellectual respectability to purely personal prejudices…

“Too many of our wealthiest universities have made their

endowments their primary object of protection.”

“Capitalism is a rough system,”

Boucher, Claire:

“As soon as A.I. starts engaging, it puts responsibility on all of us to become better humans…”

alias Grimes

Boucher, Larry:

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

Boulanger, Nadia:

 “Anyone who acts without paying attention to what he is doing is wasting his life. I’d go so far as to say that life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.”

Boulding, Elise:

How could we work to bring about something we could not even see in our imaginations?

African metaphor, via Maruyamah, re: Malinke culture:

‘’Look at your hand. All fingers are different; that is why a hand can do its work. If all fingers are the same, your hand cannot function.’ 

UNPL one-third world;  jubilee 2000; Imagining a world without weapons; Earth Charter;

If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future.”

Boulding , Kenneth:

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

The dangers and the difficulties of the present time are great…. The troubles of the 20th century are not unlike those of adolescence — rapid growth beyond the ability of organizations to manage, uncontrollable emotion, and a desperate search for identity. Out of adolescence, however, comes maturity in which physical growth with all its attendant difficulties comes to an end, but in which growth continues in knowledge, in spirit, in community, and in love; it is to this that we look forward as a human race. This goal, once seen with our eyes, will draw our faltering feet toward it.

“…a ‘cowboy economy’…you take what you can and ride on. What’s left behind is left behind…”

Bouie, Jamelle:

“…think of the New Deal as a third founding moment in the history of American democracy.”

These are not just attacks on individual teachers and schools; they don’t stigmatize just vulnerable children and their communities; they are the foundation for an assault on the

very idea of public education, part of the long war against public goods and collective responsibility fought by conservatives 

“we are moral agents, responsible for our decisions, even if we can’t fully escape the matrix in which we make them.”

Permissive gun laws and ubiquitous open carry are more than a challenge to law enforcement; they’re a challenge to the very possibility of an open, democratic society.

“…Roberts has claimed judicial independence in order to circumvent an investigation into judicial independence…our Supreme Court does not exist in the constitutional order as much as it looms over it, a robed tribunal of self-styled philosopher-kings, accountable to no one but themselves.”

“I am reminded here of George Wallace, the infamous and influential Alabama governor who rode the anti-civil-rights backlash to the highest reaches of American politics. In 1958, however, he was a racial moderate, running for governor against a virulent segregationist who, he said, was “rolling with the new wave of the Klan and its terrible tradition of lawlessness.” Wallace lost. And when he returned to the stage four years later, he did so as an even fiercer segregationist than his former opponent. Asked to explain his terrible transformation, he was blunt.

“I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes, and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.”

If Republican politicians have nothing to say of substance, it is because Republican voters don’t want substance. They want to stomp the floor.”

“Either democracy was on the ballot in November or it wasn’t. And if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.”

“…what can be done. The sad answer is: not that much. Those with the direct institutional power to slam the brakes lack the will, and those with the will lack the power….Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.”

Trump’s war on DEI is a war bon the civil rights era itself…

merit is a product of your identity and not of your ability…the right’s accusation that diversity means unfair preferences masks a confession of its own intentions.”

“A world in which the White House and its allies have

successfully arrested and reversed the march toward greater inclusion is a world

in which they have reinscribed old patterns of privilege and subordination. They

will have revitalized the worst hierarchies our society has produced, and those

hierarchies will shape how ordinary people view their own position and potential

allegiances. We should remember that it was not all that easy to build solidarity

under Jim Crow.”

“… he wants to inflict pain, not just on a specific set of individuals, but on the entire nation… Richard Nixon, a nearly Shakespearean figure of great talent and ambition, whose paranoia, personal demons, and lust for power, proved to be his downfall… Trump, by comparison, is not a complicated man…His every executive function exists to satisfy his ego… A nihilistic drive to cause as much damage and to make it as irreparable as possible… demand that readers administer a self lobotomy.”

“The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of

any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a

status game, a competition for dominance…

Trump’s desire to dominate others is the driving psychological force of his

administration. His obsession with territorial conquest … is an obvious

product of his predatory approach to human interaction.”

Trump aims to make the United States a personalist autocracy, where his

whims are policy and his will is law.

“Our history says that we struggle to hold the powerful accountable… a sickness eating away at American democracy is its culture of elite impunity… Trump hopes to institutionalize impunity.”

end Bouie

Bourgeois, Julien:

“We remember that the revolution started over the price of bread.”

Bourla, Albert:

“We move with the speed of science.” CEO Pfizer

Moonshot: Inside Pfizer’s Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible

“Excellence is never an accident. It represents the wise choice of many alternatives—

            choice not chance, determines your destiny.”—Aristotle, 384–322 BC

Pfizer’s new culture

COURAGE: challenging convention.

EXCELLENCE:

EQUITY

JOY

We succeeded not because we were lucky. We succeeded because we were prepared.

Kennedy said he chose the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard:

“Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,

 because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

the story of our moonshot—the challenges we faced,

the lessons we learned, and the core values that allowed us to make it happen—

in hopes that it might inspire and inform your own moonshot, whatever that may be.

“What matters is not what happens to you, but how you react to it.”—Epictetus, AD 50–135

…mRNA teaches the body to make its own vaccine.

“Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but we aim too low and hit.”—Aristotle, 384–322 BC

Mar. 19, 2020: “Project Lightspeed,”“Operation Warp Speed”

Time is life—was the most important success factor for this project.

Setting goals that are very aspirational, goals that someone has never achieved before,

can unleash human creativity

It was clear from the beginning that incremental improvements would not make the cut.

They needed to completely rethink

“The greatest pleasures come from the contemplation of noble works.”—Democritus, 460–370 BC

“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not,

 but rejoices for those which he has.”—Epictetus, AD 50–135

people will tend to underestimate what they can achieve,

and in an organization like ours, the people below them will underestimate a little more.

You have to extend yourself. You can do more than you think you can.

People can push themselves more than they think possible.

Manufacturing the vaccine had left us with a product as fragile as a snowflake.

a temperature-controlled thermal shipper that could transport and store the vaccine anywhere in the world.

In a pandemic, we are all only as protected as our closest neighbors.

“The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.”

—Socrates, 470–399 BC

Equity doesn’t mean that we give everyone the same.

Equity means that we give more to those who need more.

the price for the wealthier nations—the high-income countries—

would be the “cost of a simple meal.”

The upper-middle-income countries would be offered vaccines at approximately half of this price.

And the lower-middle-income and low-income countries would receive the vaccine at a not-for-profit price.

COVAX missed the point that “equity” doesn’t mean doing the same for all

but rather means doing more for those who need more.

Edward Jenner famously writing to his colleagues that the “sciences are never at war.”

We have always tried to keep it simple—

follow the science wherever it takes us and

be candid with the public about what we are seeing.

Trust is bedrock.

At a time when things are most uncertain,

we turned to the most certain thing there is, science.

first anniversary of the WHO declaring the pandemic, 3-11-2021, we broadcast a documentary, Mission Possible, with National Geographic to give the public a behind-the-scenes look at our work  and a chance to see the faces and hear the voices of those who’d made the vaccine possible.

Popularity is fleeting, but a commitment to public trust is permanent.

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone

monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”—Pericles, 495–429 BC

I look forward to the day when schoolchildren are as familiar

with the names and faces of our leading scientists as they are with celebrities and sports stars.

“Science Will Win” became our mantra across Pfizer over these past eighteen months.

impactful change was the cultivation of a purpose-driven culture.

ask yourself the following three questions during every step of your journey:

Am I being true to my purpose?

Have I aimed high enough?

Do I have the right mindset?

president Jimmy Carter’s words:

“I have one life and one chance to make it count for something.”

end Bourla

Bourne, Randolf:

“War is the health of the state. The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear towards the society of which he is a part.”

Bowden, Charles:

“I want to write something that matters. In order to do it you have to get rid of yourself.

“Who’s the most fucked-up person here? I got to go talk to him.  [On looking for a good source].

I’d have to go away for a week or two and kill through violent exercise the things that roamed my mind. It was during this period that I began taking 100 or 200 mile walks in the desert, far from any trails.

People don’t tell you anything worth knowing until they trust you.

PS to Blood Orchid:

“Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse effect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned. Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can affect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness … then what are we to do?”

[refer to Koestler, Janus: Memoir p. 262]

Juraez is not a backwater, but the new City on the Hill, beconing us all to a grisly state of things.

 There aren’t any Mexican stars or American stars [on border issues].

‘You don’t simply read Bowden, you become a Bowden addict, and the addiction is not always pleasant.  Jim Harrison

‘…the reporter’s job is to see for the unseeing and to become a public observer for the benefit of those who cannot observe.’ quoted by Lawrence Downs in obituary for    Bowden:

“We are at the crucial moment in the commission of a crime. Our hand is on the knife…We are trained to kill. We are trained to turn the earth to account, to use it, market it, make money off it. To take it for granted. Logically, we will never be able to reverse this part of our culture in enough time to stop that knife in our hand. But that is the task at hand – to cease this act of violence.”

‘[He] walked out while defending his dissertation, frustrated with what he felt were uninformed questions from his review committee.’ from ny times obit

“Environmentalism is an upper-middle-class, white movement aimed at absolution and preserving a lifestyle with a Volvo.”

“They want to know what can be known but they do not want to know what can’t be known.”

“We do not know in any convincing fashion why we are alive or why life itself exists.”

“[The problem] goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization. …our civilization, our governments are sick and … we are mentally ill and spiritually dead…all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness…” in Blood Orchid

I look … at a battered land, the ground on fire, the streams boiling, the sky black with dread, birds falling dead from the heavens…”

“…we created national parks and monuments, wildlife refuges, swatches of wilderness, all as bulwarks against ourselves…The sanctuaries have become internment camps where other creatures do time until they are crushed by our numbers and our habits.”

            Charles Bowden via High Country News 10-2014

referring to Abbey’s interest in perhaps running for something:

“…his party’s symbol on the ballot will be a large monkey wrench on a field of black.”

“In a nation of overweight people who are inwardly starving…”

“…in those hallows there was a palpable sadness that nothing could ever overcome…that ground was defeated and it seemed to bequeath to the people a permanent cast of defeat.” referring to Abbey’s Appalachian homeland.

“…the doc told him he had maybe six months . He supposedly said, ‘Well, I guess I don’t have to floss anymore.’”

“Whether it’s called capitalism or socialism makes little difference. Both of these oligarchic, militaristic, expansionistic, acquisitive, industrializing, and technocratic systems are driven by the same motives; both are self-destroying….I predict that the military-industrial state will disappear from the surface of the earth within a century. That belief is the basis of my inherent optimism, the source of my hope for the coming restoration of a higher civilization: scattered human populations modest in number that live by fishing, hunting, food-gathering, small-scale farming,and ranching, that gather together once a year in the ruins of abandoned cities for great festivals of moral, spiritual, artistic, and intellectual renewal, a people for whom wilderness is not a playground but their native home.”

“I’m only alive when I walk into something I don’t know…

Nothing’s worth writing about unless it changes the writer…

I don’t like boundaries..no borders..

I love to cook…cookbooks are my pornography…

Writing never ends…

I’m not good at listening to whining…

I write about the history that isn’t being written…

What is explained can be denied; what is felt cannot ever be forgotten.”

Fabrizio discussion:

https://radiowest.kuer.org/post/writer-and-journalist-charles-bowden

See also Dead When I Got Here a 2015 documentary film directed, produced, and filmed by Mark Aitken. The film focuses on Josué Rosales, a man who, after decades of drug addiction and crime, ends up at the “Vision en Acción” mental asylum in Juárez, Mexico—a place run by its own patients. Bowden was co-producer.

“We are at the crucial moment in the commission of a crime. Our hand is on the knife, the knife is at the victim’s throat. We are trained to kill. We are trained to turn the earth to account, to use it, market it, make money off it. To take it for granted. Logically, we will never be able to reverse this part of our culture in enough time to stop that knife in our hand. But that is the task at hand — to cease this act of violence.”

‘When I’m dead, and when everybody reading this is dead, the only thing that matters is ground.’

from posthumous Dakatoh, 2019.

from Terry Tempest Williams, Foreward:

‘[Bowden – ] a reporter who knew how to track down a scent that smelled like a lie. And when he found the lies, he exposed them, all of them, in bare-boned language of the desert itself…

He shocks us into the realization that if we are alive then we must feel both the pain and the beauty of the times we are living in…

“You live, you love, you learn, you die, and let’s hear no complaining….

I suck in scent before words and words before speech…

a contrary memoir…

I know you didn’t ask…but I did.”

Bowden,  Lies in the Desert, 2003 Ken Sanders special edition; SLC public library dedication:

“That’s what I do. I put words down on pieces of paper. I may not be the best person for the job, but frankly, I’ve never seen the job listed in the classified ads. I kind of made up the job as I went along. I use this place, this desert, as my springboard, because here the past is rich, the ground is honest and the future is as naked and plain

as the broken fence we call our border, as naked and plain as the dead rivers, as naked and plain as the butchered desert disappearing under a pavement. You can live here and lie, but still, it is not easy to live here. Here lies are more naked, the earth itself rebukes the lies. Here you can see what is happening. The light is very bright here and

you either look at things clearly, or you turn your back and close the shades. But you can hardly say you don’t know what is going on. That is the blessing of this place. And in the end the duty this place imposes on each and every one of us who lives here.” Feb. 2003

Some of the Dead are still Breathing:

via Scott Carrier: ‘Bowden’s method of reporting … was to become the people he was writing about. He would enter their minds and bodies to see and feel the world as they did…Bowden thought forgetting was a sin. So he tried to write in a way that you couldn’t forget…he couldn’t write unless he thought it was music, thatv way he beat back his own cowardice…The focus on the natural rhythms of speech coming up from the ground, you can feel it in Twain, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway. These writers make us feel the landscape through the rhythm of speech…’

“How do you live a moral life in a culture of death?…

…this land is your land, this land is my land, this land is gone…

words are all I have, my skills are limited and the words at best are a veil, maybe even a shroud, between us and this world we touch but cannot embrace…

We can’t wrap our minds around the vast dying now taking place, the exit of plants and animals  without even a goodbye note as they leave us behind….

People, we can’t talk about people, people everywhere, crowding the beaches, jamming their lives into the canyons, smearing the plains with their houses and ribbons and bows, terracing hillsides with shacks that barely get them through the lonely nights. We cannot say this thing about people, that there are too many of us and not enough of everything else…Soon, as more cities go dead, we will struggle to remember their names. Just as the vanishing beasts are nowhere on our tongues…

I believe that resources are limited and that no existing or imagined energy system can sidestep this fact.

I believe that the increase in human numbers inhales ever more resources.

I believe no energy system will deliver the punch of our declining fossil fuels at the same price.

I believe that no energy system will solve our problems since the problems come from within us…

I want to walk across a bridge to the place where the loneliness ends…I sometimes think Beethoven willed himself into deafness so that he could finally taste the vibrations playing across his flesh…

I lack any sense of hierarchy in the natural world, regardless of the charts drilled into my head since boyhood of the odyssey of evolution. I don’t see my species as the culminator of anything…

I cannot seem to feel alive unless I am alert and I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control…

In free time, things do not have to be rational or irrational. They can simply be…

I make myself into the odd man out. I seek out cafes that do little business. On my first visit, I will bring a book, sit in the corner, barely look at the menu, place my order, and avoid any conversation. I tip generously and after maybe two visits no one ever tries to talk with me and I no longer need to bring the book along. Soon I am invisible, and that is when I cease to be alone…

…the future has begun and fear of the future is no value because it cannot be avoided, negotiated, rejected. Or embraced…

I do not fear the cataclysm. The past is nothing but vast die-offs, violent weather, seas rising and receding, hot rocks falling from the sky and obliterating huge families of life.

What we fear has already happened and will happen again.

There is just one world. In this one world, fluids flow, a protoplasm that grows in the dark, a surge of energy flaming through the black air. And yet these acts violate no time, require no stopwatch, have no beginning and no end, are never young, never grow old. …I hear this world in music, though not often. And I hear it in the silence between the notes…Sometimes I hear it in the moments when I do not speak, not even in the quiet of my mind…

When you live under a code of silence, talk is difficult, but eventually the silence becomes the real difficulty, the reality of never writing down what you do, of never seeing your actions on paper, of never repeating what you know to be true…

There is a line between us and them that we must not cross, or if we do cross it, we must accept our peril. They are other nations and these nations must be accepted and approached with caution. But there is an even greater risk: not crossing that line.

I want to cross bloodlines. I want to risk my life for another organism. I want to shed my culture and join another culture, to meld with the beasts…

I am chasing the words. Not a sentence or a vocabulary but a strand of words that would freeze the blur into a clear frame…

Melville in Moby-Dick asks ‘why all the living so strive to hush all the dead’…’Evil is unspectacular and always human’.

I once believed that a little learning could fix things, temper the lust for dwindling pools of oil, for the last forests, for the frightened schools of fish in the dying seas. I saw reason as a possible tool. I no longer do…

I have a dream, that all this talk of markets and cities and nations and alliances, all those long words and meetings of leaders are footprints in mud that will eventually be found like dinosaur tracks and create speculation about what beasts could have created such a thing…

I stopped trying to fix things. I moved into some other country where there were fewer problems. I ceased trying to figure out how to supply a growing and endless human appetite for flesh, metals, fuels, and weapons…

There is in my culture a fetish made of rules to live by and these rules are all about individual happiness and freedom from anxiety and want. They have little or nothing to say about other forms of life and thus have little or nothing to say about life itself…

…the facts must be honored even as they are erased…

…good questions do not have answers, they can barely break themselves into words….

I wrote embraced by music…

I could explain what I was doing only by writing it down.

Some of the Dead are Still Breathing is the end of the matter for me.

The answer, as best as I can see it or feel it or taste it or say it, is on the page. (2009)

“It’s a kind of strange movie God created, that nobody gets out of life alive.

Even when you start this movie, you know how it’s going to end.

You die. That’s why humor is essential – and red wine…

I’m patient. I believe in the future. Look, I get tired of people afraid of the future.

It’s the only goddamn place we’re going. That’s all that’s left to you and the rest of your life.  And if you’re afraid of it, go to hell.”

from Wrenched book 2020  ‘interview’:

“the Monkey Wrench Gang is an incendiary device bound as a book, but

 it’s a ribald, comic novel so the reader will accept it….

The people that own countries use the word terrorism to denounce the people who don’t own countries…

The biggest drug in my country isn’t alcohol. It isn’t marijuana. It isn’t heroin. It isn’t cocaine. It’s fear.

We have a country dominated by fear… our politicians feed it, our politicians now run for office on fear…

I am patient. I believe in the future. Look, I get tired of people afraid of the future.

It’s the only goddamn place we’re going. That’s all that’s left to you and the rest of your life. And you’re afraid of it…

America’s Most Alarming Writer: Essays on the Life and Work of Charles Bowden, 2019

Broyles, Bill; Dinges, Bruce J.

“If we are to make the good life, we must make it where we now stand, not somewhere else. . . . We do it here and we do it now or not at all.”

Sitting here, the fire crackling, I quietly watch the past flowing into a future that cannot accommodate it, or stop its intrusion.”

His father exploded, threatening, “Don’t you ever say that again. You’re not honest because it’s going to benefit you. You’re either honest or

you’re a God damned liar.”

The music stopped the mental chatter and redirected the neurons. We saw colors. We saw visions. We had feelings we couldn’t explain. I guess we were high on the music.

he would listen obsessively to a piece that seemed to help illuminate or clarify whatever he was working on.

The music inspired the writing; the writing influenced his listening tastes.

Tucson Citizen published a feature article, written by Lifestyle editor Dick Vonier, on what a great institution the library was. To this day, after thirty years as a library manager, I haven’t read a better article about the role an outstanding public library.

He was one part poet, one part novelist, one part conservationist, one part dirt-digger, and one part bottom-feeder, scraping literary insights from the dregs of the earth.

MOLLY MCKASSON: his mind was always herding the details into a bigger picture without ever losing the inherent untidiness and unfinishedness that is reality.

he was unique for a guy; he genuinely seemed to enjoy thinking and feeling at the same time.

He respected readers as much as he respected writers. “Your second paragraph gets right to it.”

Chuck had a good thing going; he regularly checked in with his conscience,

Ken SANDERS:

Chuck had a unique ability to be almost invisible while he was scratching down his notes in his little pocket notebook.

Chuck had what we call in Texas “a good heart,” that—he had a good soul.

He went to dangerous, dark places, where evil lurked—real evil. He went without weapons, and he never tried to hide his agenda, which was to be the advocate for human beings who suffer.

knew that evil begins when one turns a deaf ear to the soft whisper in our souls—

Money allowed him to scribble incessantly and feed the birds, listen to music and drink red wine. Chuck walked in wilderness unknown to most and understood by very few.

For a while I worked for a newspaper and the main thing I learned

was that most people are born blind and prefer to remain in that condition.”

My work on the border and on the drug wars is a kind of detour that happened because I was appalled by the denial of the murder of Mexico.”

“The desert, the big empty where humans do not dominate, is necessary to slow down my velocity, to rid the clutter from my brain. But it is too late for me. I am too long out of the Stone Age and I can only visit the past.”

as he grew older he kept moving farther away from people he considered were living in a world of denial.

Chuck’s point about feeding birds was that you did it, not because

they needed you, but because you needed them.

He could write ten thousand or so words before breakfast and revise the manuscript and lose half of those words later the same morning.

the backyard was crammed with cactus, succulents, and native vegetation, all designed to attract as many birds as possible.

“Book Collecting: The Last Refuge of the Illiterate,”

he was bilingual in words and images, understanding how those two languages can “brush up against each other” (as he might put it), realizing a power together that neither might achieve alone.

What alleviated the darkness for him?

Leonard Cohen’s Ten New Songs.

plea for a human conscience.

simple provocation to his readers: Take a stand. Make a difference.

his sheer height set my eleven-pound defender off into an outburst of growls. Chuck immediately lay down on the floor. Ella, still unconvinced, climbed onto his stomach and paced up and down his entire body many times, thereby establishing her dominance over him (at least, that was what Chuck told me her intention was). Hilarious as the performance seemed to me, it was plainly a very serious ritual for the two of them.

“I like to stay in the ones with the hidden cameras,” Chuck drawled, when I gave him my report. “They’re in the alarm clock.” It hardly mattered if he was kidding or not.

his characteristic uncapitalized style—he believed hitting the shift key was a waste of time and energy):

Follow the line of a feeling to evoke a greater whole, rather than the straight arrow of time along a single narrative line.

Describe from scratch. Bowden’s evocations of place are masterpieces of synesthesia, meticulously observed and composed. From A Shadow in the City: Listen as the air brakes jack the ear on the big roads lacing the city and moving its blood like sludge, hear the horns, the choppers—whomp whomp whomp—overhead on their secret errands, the shout of children racing through the back lanes, the chirp and crackle of birds stalking the crumbs and garbage, the click of keys in the towers, the hum of overhead lights in the caves of work, the soft rich vowels of Spanish in the back rooms of businesses, the chords of a blues guitar asking for someone to consider

the question, long sigh of a zipper down the back before the dress melts to the floor, the bark of angry dogs, the slippery song of knife sliding into flesh, blade warming itself with blood, the lights at night fighting the prairie, beams, shred, slabs, towers, beacons of light that only seem to underscore the loneliness as people pull the shades in their houses and lock doors and scurry down darkened walkways and pray for dawn.

Be willing to offer yourself up in order to implicate the reader.

Go all the way. Evoking and describing are not enough. Take the leap, connect story and meaning, show and tell, pronounce. Dare to think and

feel—even exhort and instruct—from the page: We wish to live forever

 and because of this desire we hardly live at all. (Blues for Cannibals) We waste too much time on arguments about nothing.

If I had my life to live over, I would live very, very little of it the same. When people say they would change nothing in their life, I think they are either liars or fools. Life is about learning, and if you respect life and learn from it, you would of course not do things the same way.

one of the most disciplined writers I’ve ever edited. “To sleep in is a grievous sin,”

from Hemingway: It’s this way, see—when a writer first starts out, he gets a big kick from the stuff he does, and the reader doesn’t get any; then, after a while, the writer gets a little kick and the reader gets a little kick; and finally, if the writer’s any good, he doesn’t get any kick at all and the reader gets everything.

Chapter organization. That’s just marketing.”

“For my entire life I have hungered for the smell of earth and lived on carpets of cement and asphalt,”

Moderation in all things, including moderation, as my doctor says.

central message remained constant up until the end: the world is a catastrophic mess, Chuck told us, and we are all complicit in its destruction—

the poet laureate of the dead

new way to write with a pure burning spirit that no one had captured before.

Chuck—never Charles—didn’t write for money,

Chuck’s writing was better when a few layers of machismo were pared away—

it was his decision to tell the story through the eyes of the street photographers—

documenting the carnage ripping through Juárez that gave the piece real power:

This future is based on the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and industrial growth producing poverty faster than it distributes wealth.

I do not want to leave my work at the office. I do not want to leave it at all. I have entered a world that is black, sordid, vicious.

he liked a good story, even if it came from a “bad” person,

there’s no good or bad on the border; “there is only this fact: We either find a way to make their world better or they will come to our better world.”

Chuck talking about writing in a short film by Lisa Miller; every writer should watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ollB5EQggg

“A literary career should be not a career but a passion. A life. Fueled in equal parts by anger and love.” So wrote Edward Abbey in “A Writer’s Credo,” one of Chuck’s touchstones.

“He wanted me to do it, he wanted other people to do it, because he didn’t want to be alone out there,” says Scott. “I’d ask: ‘Why do you do this?’ And he was like, ‘Why the fuck don’t you?’ He didn’t say that out loud. He never did. To me or to anyone. But I think he thought that all the time.”

JACK DYKINGA

Chuck hunched down, almost on his stomach, doing an interview with a tire, carefully writing down “Lifesaver Radial” and its size.

memory was photographic, but he certainly had one of those garbage-can minds—whatever goes in, stays in.

My initial respect for him was as a journalist and his basics: tell the truth and confirm. But that, combined with his sense of seeing, made him extraordinary. I don’t know any other writers who saw as well as he did, and as clearly.

Neurosis is thwarted nature.

feeling safe and secure is an illusion.

Chuck, who had a way of never not talking, said North Dakota

a place that’s so cold in winter the locals consider the forty-below weather a kind of God-given electrified fence that “keeps the riffraff out.”

He did the talking. It was as if he

couldn’t help himself; anything he’d have on his mind at any moment would pour out of him like steam from a kettle.

soaring; he was the best storyteller I’d ever heard.

Bowden’s Need to Walk >

his dissertation with its tough Chuckesque title: “Broke Bodies: A Look at Nineteenth-Century Notions of Health.”

“We have created a kind of pornography that fantasizes a natural world that barely exists

any longer and that we do not live in. And this is dangerous for us and dangerous for the tiny islands of wild ground that survive.”

the debris that defaced the mountain—earthmovers at its base, town homes crawling up its side like skin cancer.

Bowden walked: “I shoulder a pack and start walking and looking for those things that are hard to name but easy to feel.

My work has become my religion and I use it to keep at bay all demands and duties.”

“Dead Minds from Live Places.”

forget everything you think you know about the Border.” He says this last word with contempt, “Now forget everything you think you know about drugs, about drug habits, and things like rational explanations for all of this . . . that’s right, forget it, forget it all, and just listen to me tell you a story for awhile.”

his voice beckons them to look for the first time at darkness they are conditioned to deny,

they are never again comfortable with their own ignorance.

it’s his voice that gets them every time.

his literal, spoken voice.

His cadence, the rhythm of

speech, the way in which his pronunciation and expression betray a fatigue of the ignorance of our times, a hard-earned impatience for imbecility and a contempt for what passes as common sense.

listen to his voice, let that rhythmic, cotton-soft southwestern rasp and the fatigue of the ignorance of our times saturate their consciousness, and then, just read.

My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea . . . and then nail the door shut. I want them to look at a forty-year war on drugs that has created a police state in the United States, the largest prison population per capita on Earth, and slaughtered tens of thousands of Mexicans. I want them to taste it, not just read some policy statement. And that’s why it’s disturbing—’ cause I want people to be disturbed, it seems to me that’s the only way things are ever going to change.

he invites us into his space with the smooth cadence of his voice, then nails the door shut behind us and forces us to reckon with that which we’d sooner deny.

he strips away layer after layer of unexamined assumptions; the way he excavates meanings long buried and forgotten;

students reluctantly give up the remaining shreds of innocence begat by ignorance.

we need to have as insatiable an appetite for dark quiet nights as we have for bright lights, frenzy, fury, fame, and fortune.

felt safe with Muir, and unsure with Abbey, I was at times downright scared to be with Bowden.

a world where pure evil hovers in the darkness,

the illegal drug business is the essence of capitalism at its amoral best.

something has changed inside, something in a deep part, near

that place we can never locate but often claim is the core of our being,” he wrote.

“Here the land always makes promises of aching beauty, and the people always

fail the land.” Bowden’s metaphor

Bowden is an elegant stylist, but then the paragraphs unroll like a bail of razor wire to keep you inside them.

Read him at your risk. You have nothing to lose but your worthless convictions about how things are.

SCOTT CARRIER

Time and space got bigger when he was around.

He says he can’t write unless he thinks it’s music,

that Bowden was happiest by himself, lost in thought. He socialized for the sake of getting details for stories—it must have been a great relief to be alone in a solitary space—

I can only make a stab at writing the truth if I tell others it is fiction—that way no one gets upset with me. I can only start writing if I think of it as music—that way I can beat back my own cowardice. I can only write if I don’t think at all. I have changed the names to protect the guilty. But everything happened as it is reported in this book, including things scheduled for tomorrow or the day after that.”

Bowden. When I was a boy, I thought the world would get better if people took a good long look at it. Now no one seems to look. CB is a complex character.

He said something about Boulder being an amusement park for rich people and that it had trucks gluing up picturesque claptrap all over town to make those people feel special.

A sense of mortality that shadows the pages like the slow creep of dusk sliding over the desert.

not in every book or utterance, certainly a master of audacity. He fought to maintain his integrity. He always tried to tell the truth, even when he lied.

he always seemed to catch the drift, the songline of where the singer was going, no matter what the language.

Bowden’s writing gives off heat. It’s the heat of the desert, the

He interrogated everything, following the evidence, hoping to “locate some kind of heartbeat beneath the modern world I live in.” He was born in Illinois in 1945,

Bowden was drawn mothlike to the darkest flames, not just to feel the burn, but to tell the story of their kindling,

“How do you get people to see what’s there? It’s nearly impossible.”

Who is sane? Who is not? The boundaries blur. Cruelty and loss abide. Joy, fleeting, has to be tackled and held.

Follow the money: Americans import drugs, and in exchange they export anarchy, corruption, guns, and terror, not intentionally, at least not most of the time, but as a by-product of their appetites and careless wealth.

What gets to me is the tenderness Bowden finds among the iron-bar realities of el desierto. I read him with a pencil in hand, so I can mark the moments:

miracles are necessary, because few can stay sober without sometimes being drunk.

Chuck taught me that all good writing endangers the writer. Otherwise, it ain’t worth shit.

Death is the ultimate sign of life.

Bowden is a third kind of witness. He sees reality, and sees that there is no knowledge in it, no discernable purpose.

He started taking hundred-mile hikes through the desert mountains to work off the poison, a habit he maintained for the rest of his life.

a voice that sounded like a good imitation of Zeus pronouncing your fate, and icy blue eyes whose stare seemed capable of penetrating solid lead. What they did

he possessed the device Hemingway termed an essential in the writer’s toolkit—a built-in, shockproof bullshit detector.

Chicago, home of the then-biggest stockyards in America, a city that knew bullshit when it smelled it.

an impression that maybe I ought not to look at it as a problem, which implies that there is a solution somewhere.

his concern with moral evil. He was, I think, fascinated with it—the heart of darkness, the abyss.

a man with a heart, dedicated to speaking truth to power.

hard-nosed reporter who wrote like a poet or a fire-breathing prophet, and seemed wired into the deepest currents of his time.

I had never met anyone whose senses were so hungry and alive.

he disapproved strongly of air-conditioning, because it cocooned people from the physical reality of where they lived.

He craved sensory bombardment and loved everything that amplified the feeling of being physically alive, right here, right now, in the present moment. Television bored him.

Chuck’s sensory awareness offered a kind of

refuge, a last-ditch hope of an honest connection to a real, living world.

The people with the sharpest senses of all are those still using them for their original purpose.

To them, I was an oaf who stumbled around half-blind and half-deaf in a kind of fog.

I never called him on his rudeness. It was part of

his arrogance, and he needed every ounce of arrogance to keep doubt away and keep writing what he truly believed.

Words flowed out of him relentlessly. One reason he drank so much wine was to staunch that flow, and get some respite.

He had the most interesting and original mind that I ever got to know well. It cut right through the conventional wisdom and surface veneer to the stark uncomfortable truth.

He loathed hypocrisy, pretension, piety, and smugness, especially when they emanated from the rich and privileged.

Finding of fact was his foundation; the rest was gorgeous interpretation.

It was part of his duty, he felt, to expose the comfortable reader to the nastiness that lay out of sight:

teaching history at the University of Illinois–Chicago Circle. That last job was not for him—too much pretense, not enough grit.

“the Bowden sentence”—his immediately recognizable mixture of the

tactile, the prophetic, and the doomed.

one of the most blindingly original literary voices of the last century.

Chuck made the point that he was always careful, never brave.

We averaged between two and three hundred guests a year—but I only counted the ones who had something to drink or eat.

Chuck always carried small spiral notebooks for his interviews. He rarely made notes while he talked with people. Instead, he would sit down afterward and record the conversation in his notebook.

desert walks were his meditation. Taking a sleeping bag and a small backpack containing water, a little food, a one-cup espresso pot, and a good thick book, he would drive far out to where he’d never see another person.

just before he woke, he could see words

scrolling across a computer screen. When that happened, he would leave our bed, make coffee that a spoon had no trouble standing up in, and walk out through the garden to the computer waiting in his backyard office.

Bowden Literary Trust, Project MUSE

He would fade away reading a cookbook—“ my idea of pornography,” he’d

say—

I learned the boredom of dense colonies of humans.

They lived with threats of death but they were free.

My father when he was old and dying told me that about the time you figure out life, you die. I think he did not get it quite right. I think a person can actually figure out life early on, but the trick is to act on this knowledge.

You either try to make things better or you wind up living without joy or much hope.

Nothing I have done has really pleased me. I can’t believe that I will ever do anything that lives up to my hopes. And everything I am working on at the moment captivates me.

I am not of sound mind. I cannot seem to stop moving…I am always hungry.

I can only make a stab at writing the truth if I tell others it is fiction…

I’ll be dead by 30 if I don’t write. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ollB5EQggg

end Bowden died 2014.

Bowe, Constance M:

“We need to be teaching them how to learn…to create more of a stem cell—the kind of cell that can become any other kind of cell.”

Bowie, David:

re The Man who Sold the World:  “That song for me always exemplified kind of how you feel when you’re young, when you know that there’s a piece of yourself that you haven’t really put together yet. You have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are.”

“Never play to the gallery… Always remember that the reason that you initially started working is that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations — they generally produce their worst work when they do that.”

“It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations” – via popova:

David Bowie on Creativity and His Advice to Artists

Bowler, Peter:

“Gaia represents the kind of hypothesis that can only be taken seriously by scientists who have transcended the modern tendency to break everything down into discrete units.”

Bowman, Robert:

Via Zinn. ”We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedon, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations.”

Boyd, Andrew:

“Truth is a virus whose aim is to subvert the corporate mememachine with a sly guerrilla war of signs.”

Boyd, Danah:

Poe’s Law…signals that it’s hard to tell the difference between an extreme view and a parody of an extreme view on the internet…

 It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fiction, what’s cruel and what’s a joke. ..

I don’t want a world full of sheeple…

fascinating campaign by Russian Today (known as RT). Their motto for a while was “question more.”…

…unquestionable misinformation…they know it’s bullshit. Or they don’t care whether or not it’s true. Why do they post it then? Because they’re making a statement…

a conspiracy theory that was created to dismiss them. A conspiracy theory that undermines their message from the get-go…

once instilled, self-doubt is hard to overcome….

there are a lot of assumptions baked into how we approach educating people about sensitive issues and our current media crisis has made those painfully visible….

we need to develop antibodies to help people not be deceived….

we trust people who we invest our energies into understanding. That’s why bridging difference requires humanizing people across viewpoints….

separate the different signals. Just read the text rather than consume the multimedia presentation of that. Narrow the scope….

an extension of empathy into a practice that is common among ethnographers. It’s also a skill that is honed in many debate clubs. The goal is to understand the multiple ways of making sense of the world and use that to interpret media.cognitive strengthening exercises…

Economic structures built on value extraction cannot enable healthy information ecosystems…

FIRE industries…Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate [are] extractive ones. ..

the system isn’t set up for you to build a business and pay back the bank, pay a reasonable rent, and develop a valuable asset. You are simply a pawn in a financialized game between your investors, the real estate companies, the insurance companies, and the bank, all of which want to extract as much value from your effort as possible. ..

Untangling our country from this current version of capitalism is going to be as difficult as curbing our addiction to fossil fuels…

U of Utah talk 2-13-2020:

Ronald Coase- If you torture the data long enough, they will confess to anything.

…moral crumple zones…

Virginia Eubanks

Data have …  data by coercion

Orwell 1984

Census

data voids

Frank Luntz

Agnotology and Manipulation

manufacturing doubt

anti-vaccination

boomerang facts doubt

Francesca Tripodi

how technical and social come together….ethics

ethics is about struggle…

capitalism

I love seatbelts…

nation states???
My ? Trust  nation-states Capitalism   Vaclev Havel The Art of the Impossible 1990-1995 

redundancy

wasn’t that bad…

don’t do evil

point of democracy?

from her blog:

“ I obfuscated my history to make others more comfortable…

I am here today in-no-small-part because I benefited from the generosity of men who tolerated and, in effect, enabled unethical, immoral, and criminal men. And because of that privilege, I managed to keep moving forward even as the collateral damage of patriarchy stifled the voices of so many others around me….

if my recognition means anything, I need it to be a call to arms. We need to all stand up together and challenge the status quo. …

“Move fast and break things” is an abomination if your goal is to create a healthy society….

 accountability without transformation is simply spectacle…

diFranco lyrics

from Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On

apophenia: making connections where none previously existed.

Tweet: Agnotology is the study of ignorance. We often think of ignorance as what we don’t know, but people can manufacture ignorance through manipulation of knowledge.

“The key to equality is to incite young people to engage with new people….many young people lack any meaningful form of agency in their lives, and they crave it desperately…via Lady Gaga..Born This Way Foundation.

end danah boyd

Boyd, Col. John R:

“People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy. They are wrong.

The Pentagon does have a strategy; it is: ‘Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it’.

Boyd, Valerie: bio of Hurston

via Clay Risen, NYT obit: ‘Every Sunday she would buy a family-size bag of salad greens, enough to provide her lunch during the week, so that she hardly needed to pause during her marathon stretches of writing. At the end of each day, as a reward, she would take a walk on the beach.’

Boylan, Jennifer Finney:

“It is one more way of being human. And the proper response to our children’s humanity should be love. That’s true whether they turn out to be trans, or gay, or straight, or even Republican. They are not here to live our version of who we think they ought to be. They are here to be themselves.   When my child raised a hand to wave at me, my first thought was that my son was saying goodbye. I was wrong.  It was my daughter, saying hello.”

Boym, Svetlana:

All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions…

“Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy….

[our] global epidemic of nostalgia, [is] an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.      

Bozell, Jr., L. Brent:

Theocracy Now! (via The Nation); magazine Triumph advocated a Catholic theocracy.

Bradatan, Costica:

“Nothing breeds more failure than an obsessive quest for purity. The closer you get to perfection, the more abject the failure.

…Once in utopia, you are doomed; you carry its nothingness in your bones wherever you go.

…Behind the optimistic veneer there lies an extraordinary fear of failure: the horror of going down and going under, of losing face and respectability, of exclusion and marginalization. It’s not success but failure — the savage fear of it — that lies at the heart of the American dream.”

Bradbury, Ray:

“I can’t do science, but that’s my loss.”

‘BACH quartet – Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, and Robert Heinlein

“We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered. About something important, about something real? … If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. … There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches. Every minority … feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted to become a non-book….It’s my game. I pitch. I hit. I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or loss. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try.”

            Fahrenheit 451

“…in order to convince your reader that he is there, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture….

…it is all mulch…

…my subconscious is doing most of the ‘sponging’ and it will be years before any usable impressions surface…

I blundered into creativity…

…what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it?…I must remember that.”

Why and how? Because I say it is so.”

Metaphor is the medicine.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art.

No tension…must be built which remains unreleased. Without this, any art remains incomplete.

I ask only for proper endings based on proper assessments of energy contained and given detonation.

We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through.”

Zen in the Art of Writing

“What you try to do when you adapt anything, is get it into your bloodstream, get it into your subconscious. You can’t intellectualize about it; that won’t work. But if you read a book 80 or 90 times, which I did — and some sections 120 times — and you put that all into your bloodstream, and then you ignore it and let it come to the surface, emotionally, passionately, you become the chaser and the chased. You have to be as impassioned writing the screenplay as Ahab was chasing the whale….”

“…I jumped to my typewriter each morning to find what rare new thing my Muse was willing to deliver.”

“I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.”

“It’s part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality.”

end Bradbury

Braddock, Kurt:

via Economist: “…it might be more effective to prebunk…Provide someone with a refutation and they’re more likely to resist disinformation.”

Bradlee, Ben:

“As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.”

“The only way to protect the right to publish is to publish.

Bragg, Rick:

“…so much poison spewed from so many courthouses, political platforms, and Klan picnics, it was a kind of poultice that should have drawn out that meanness.”

on To Kill a Mockingbird.

Brahe, Tycho:

“I am trying to find the meaning of the Universe and I haven’t found it yet.” via Ben Ferancz in Watchers of the Sky, end.

Brahic, Michel:

“The prion story teaches us, once again, the power of pure curiosity to change our understanding of the world.”

Brahimaj, Edmond (Baba Mondi):

“God does not forbid anything; that is why he gave us minds…

We deserve a state. We are the only ones in the world who tell the truth about Islam…don’t mix it up with politics.”

Brahms, Johannes:

“I was working on my symphony. In the morning I added an eighth note. In the evening I took it out.”

Braman, Donald:

“Culpable mental state causing harm is criminal conduct, and if they kill anybody, that’s homicide.”

“Homicide is a catchall term that includes charges ranging from manslaughter to murder. The former is a lesser charge where death was caused without intent, while murder is reserved for cases where the defendant either had knowledge that taking a specific action could kill someone or engaged in a premeditated killing.”

Branch, Keith:

“I don’t get it. We went to war to fight extremism. I don’t understand why we can’t find common ground.” quote of day NYT 10-5-2020

Brand, Stewart:

“We are gods and we might as well get good at it.”

“1963, while on LSD, I realized that if we could see Earth from space, it would change our perspective of everything…”

NASA photo, cover of Whole Earth Catalog.

“The Whole Earth Catalog offered access to a multitude of alternative

lifestyles. “It opened doors for people in a way that invited them to consider, ‘maybe

I could just build a guitar, or live offthe grid.’ And so it had the impact of conferring

agency,”

“My deity is weather. It’s the only one that I actually believe in.”

“…you can’t control the future for 10,000 years.”

“Most of the developed world is run by lawyers, who make a living on disagreement.”

“It could be that someday all walls will be made of engineered living tissue that takes up carbon dioxide and replaces it with nice, clean oxygen while keeping the temperature of the room comfortable for humans and allowing all the microbes in the room to do their jobs.”

“Like it or not, computers are coming to the masses…Information wants to be free.”

SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking – Brand, ed.:

Brian Eno The Long Now
empathy in space has not been matched by empathy in time. ..empathy for people to come has decreased. ..The present generation enjoys the greatest power in history, but it appears to have the shortest vision in history. That combination is lethal.

Peter Schwartz The Art Of The Really Long View

“The future is the ONLY thing we can do anything about.”—Hillis

Jill Tarter slides quoted cartoonist Walt Kelly (via Porkypine): “Thar’s only two possibilities: Thar is life out there in the universe which is smarter than we are, or we’re the most intelligent life in the universe. Either way, it’s a mighty sobering thought.”

Phillip Longman The Depopulation Problem

Some people will still have children. They just won’t be people highly motivated by material concerns or secular values. Disproportionately, the parents of the future will be people who are at odds with the modern environment–people who either “don’t get” the new rules of the game that make large families a liability or who, out of religious or chauvinistic conviction, reject the game altogether. In short people like Mormons. “

Ken Dychtwald The Consequences of Human Life Extension
“People vote their age. 30% of 30-year-olds vote. 50% of 50-year-olds vote. 70% of 70-year-olds vote. We have a gerontocracy.”
“The old do the least volunteering of any age group, and for every 11 cents that children get from government, the old demand and get a dollar.

James Carse Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game

“There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
“War is the ultimate finite game. Religion is the ultimate infinite game,”

“Evil does exist: it is when an infinite game is absorbed utterly in a finite game. All evil is an attempt to eliminate evil.”

how the hell do we keep anything digital usable beyond ten years?

Sam Harris The View from the End of the World
“Martyrdom in jihad is not a fringe doctrine; it is believed by millions of Muslims.” It’s not a question of ignorance—two-thirds of al Qaeda operatives are college educated.
“Faith is a declaration of immunity to conversation. To make religious war unthinkable, we have to undermine the dogma of faith. The continuance of civilization requires not moderation, but reason.”

Jimmy Wales Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture
“The design of Wikipedia is the design of community.”
The secret of Wikipedia’s content-generating process is the nurturing and shaping of trust.
“If you prevent people from doing bad things, you prevent them from doing good things, and it eliminates opportunities for trust.”
The best way to keep Wikipedia deeply radical is to keep its process deeply conservative.

Larry Brilliant, Katherine Fulton, Richard Rockefeller The Deeper News About the New Philanthropy

Many who became adults during and after Ronald Reagan seem to have no framework at all for giving.”

Philip Tetlock Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs
“Partisans across the opinion spectrum are vulnerable to occasional bouts of ideologically induced insanity.”

Brian Fagan We Are Not the First to Suffer Through Climate Change

There are two kinds of historians, parachutists and truffle hunters. Parachutists command an overview of the landscape, while truffle hunters dig deeply to uncover marvelous treasures. Fagan is a parachutist

Steven Johnson The Long Zoom Consilience defeats miasma … another word for the long zoom perspective is “consilience”—a fine old word, revived by Edward O. Wilson, that links multiple disciplines and multiple levels into a whole body of knowledge with extra benefits the separate disciplines lack.

Juan Enriquez Mapping the Frontier of Knowledge
“All life is imperfectly transmitted code and it is promiscuous.”

Portugal had colonies throughout the world, he said, but they never respected the natives enough to help educate them, and so left intellectual blight behind them and at home. London and Paris are full of Indian and Chinese restaurants, but there are none in Portugal…Portugal—We were a world power for about 15 minutes.”

Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito At the Edge of Art

Art, like the antibodies in our immune system, creates alien forces in service of the whole. It anticipates threats and models them. It is a diversity agent.

Paul Saffo Embracing Uncertainty: the secret to effective forecasting

Science fiction … plants idea bombs in teenagers, which they make real 15 years later.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought

“Never take advice from someone wearing a tie…Pay attentive heed to tradition and old people—they have experienced more Black Swans.”

Niall Ferguson, Peter Schwartz Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress

“Historians commune with the dead. We re-enact their thoughts, in their context and ours.” Schwartz plans to write a book titled The Case for Optimism were derailed by reading Ferguson’s The War of the World. He’s been grappling with the issues Ferguson raised for 18 months. “You do alternative pasts, I do alternative futures. Where historians commune with the dead, futurists have imaginary friends.” Schwartz“Powerful technology in an unjust world is likely to exacerbate the injustice.”

Stewart Brand Rethinking Green

Nuclear spent fuel is tiny in quantity, and you know exactly where it is, whereas the gigatons of carbon dioxide from coal burning goes into the atmosphere, where it stays for centuries making nothing but trouble.

Lera Boroditsky How Language Shapes Thought

“To have a second language is to have a second soul,” said Charlemagne around 00 AD. “Each language has its own cognitive toolkit,” said psychologist/ linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.

Brewster Kahle Universal Access to All Knowledge

the Internet Archive offered music makers free unlimited storage of their works, forever, and the music poured in. The Archive audio collection has 100,000 concerts so far (including all the Grateful Dead) and a million recordings, with three new bands every day uploading.
Moving images. The 150,000 commercial movies ever made are tightly controlled, but 2 million other films are readily available and fascinating—600,000 of them are accessible in the Archive already. For backup, the whole Internet Archive is mirrored at the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt and in Amsterdam.

Jim Richardson Heirlooms: Saving Humanity’s 10,000- year Legacy of Food

In Peru, where potatoes originally came from, Richardson visited a field at 14,000 feet where 400 varieties of potato (with names like “Ashes of the Soul” and “Puma Paw”) are grown in just two acres. The local 1,300 varieties of potato are managed by a “Guardian of the Potatoes,” whose job it is in the community to know the story and uses of all the potatoes.

Edward O. Wilson The Social Conquest of Earth

“History makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology.”

Steven Pinker The Decline of Violence

Violence is 1/ 500th of what it used to be…the zero-sum game of plunder was replaced by the positive-sum game of trade. ..Voltaire wrote: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

George Dyson No Time Is There-

Big data is what happened when the cost of storing information became less than the cost of making the decision to throw it away.”

Nicholas Negroponte Beyond Digital

“start-up businesses are sucking people out of big thinking. So many minds that used to think big are now thinking small because their VCs tell them to ‘focus.’””Nationalism is the biggest disease on the planet…Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing.”

Craig Childs Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth

“The force of the living is more cunning than any devastation, ready to explode on whatever it touches.”

Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow

“Fast thinking is something that happens to you. Slow thinking is something you do.“
It is a case of System 2 training System 1 to act in restricted circumstances with System 2 thoroughness at System 1 speed. It takes years to do well.

Sylvia Earle, Tierney Thys

We no longer commercially harvest wildlife on land. Why do we do it in the sea?

“bioluminescence is the most common form of communication on Earth.”

via brother Mike: ‘Stewart has always wanted to be at the cutting edge – and he is trapped there.’

from Markoff, John – Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

“Throw a Brand in the river and they will float upstream.”—Brand family wisdom

Steve Jobs

found inspiration in the closing page of Brand’s Whole Earth Epilog.

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

it is so difficult to put him in a box because he has such an uncanny knack for seeing the world from outside the box.

Brewster Kahle in 1996 created the Internet Archive as a nonprofit repository for the world’s digital information.

long-term THINKING—where you set in motion a framing of events

that a process is made intensely adaptive, preserving and indeed increasing options as time goes by,”

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, had created the Breakthrough Institute

“Is Environmentalism Dead?”

In May 2005, Brand added his own voice to the growing debate with an article titled “Environmental Heresies,”

“The scale of the climate challenge is so vast that it cannot be met solely by grassroots groups and corporations, no matter how Green. The situation requires Government fiat to set rules and enforce them.”

he was calling for a new “turquoise” movement that would blend Green activism with what he described as a blue planet–friendly attitude toward science and technology.

Brand turned first to his friend James Lovelock,

first proposed the Gaia theory in the CoEvolution Quarterly.

Paul Griffith had introduced him to the idea of Renewistan, the land area needed for renewable power sources like wind and solar to generate enough power for the world’s population.

“I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear,” Brand quoted David MacKay, a British physicist and Griffith ally, as saying, “I’m just pro-arithmetic.”[ 14] (Significantly perhaps, a number

Peter Coyote, challenged his “We are as gods” hypothesis. “Idiot savants,” Coyote proposed instead. “We’re highly developed, we have these great skills, this technological cleverness, which is completely untethered to wisdom.

Brand’s motto became “Live small, so you can live large.”

“ ‘These are the poetical efforts of a prose writer trying to plant a burr in the mind as it goes by in great haste,’

“We shape our buildings, then they shape us.” (Winston Churchill)

“Most of adulthood and its skills consists of adventure prevention.”

“If I get to heaven, and it’s not a library, I’ll be very disappointed.

“Rushing is at the root of all lack of quality.”

“Buildings are like people—Not yet smart when they’re beautiful, no longer beautiful when they’re smart.”

end Stewart Brand

Brandeis, Lewis D, Justice:

“They control the people through the people’s own money.”

“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

“…in most matters it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than it be settled right.”

“We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of the few or we can have democracy, but we can’t have both.”

“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

“…rights declared in words might be lost in reality.”

Branson, Richard:

“I find being Dr. Yes instead of Dr. No has been a lot more fun,” he noted. “It’s partly because of my inquisitiveness that we have gone into so many areas. When I was 27, I was taking a trip to the British Virgin Islands to see a very beautiful woman, and while I was waiting to board the plane, American Airlines decided they hadn’t sold enough tickets or something and they cancelled the flight, but I very much wanted to see the lady.

“So I went over to another counter and rented a plane, then made up a fancy name like Virgin Airlines and on a bit of blackboard I wrote out a price of $29 one-way, and went around to everyone like me who had been cancelled out. And filled my first plane. And the woman in question and I just celebrated our wedding anniversary, more than 30 years later.”

Brantley, Bern:

“It is a continuing astonishment to many a sensible adult that anyone who survived adolescence takes Ayn Rand seriously.”

Bratton, Elegance:

“Crisis reshuffles the deck that we call society, so there’s an opportunity now for meaningful social progression and change.”   

Brazil:

A fabrica esta fechada.” Brazilian woman regarding family size. Population, Natl Geog. 9-2011

Brecht, Bertolt:

“The war is over, beware of the peace!”

“One of the main reasons for the poverty of science is that it is supposed to be rich. The aim of science is not to open the door to everlasting wisdom, but to set a limit on everlasting error.”

in Life of Galileo

“…hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”.

“Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

To Posterity – Poem by Bertolt Brecht (via Berkowitz Thinking Hard Times on Arendt)

1.

Indeed I live in the dark ages!

A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens

A hard heart. He who laughs

Has not yet heard

The terrible tidings.

Ah, what an age it is

When to speak of trees is almost a crime

For it is a kind of silence about injustice!

And he who walks calmly across the street,

Is he not out of reach of his friends

In trouble?

It is true: I earn my living

But, believe me, it is only an accident.

Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.

By chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me

I am lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!

But how can I eat and drink

When my food is snatched from the hungry

And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?

And yet I eat and drink.

I would gladly be wise.

The old books tell us what wisdom is:

Avoid the strife of the world

Live out your little time

Fearing no one

Using no violence

Returning good for evil —

Not fulfillment of desire but forgetfulness

Passes for wisdom.

I can do none of this:

Indeed I live in the dark ages!

2.

I came to the cities in a time of disorder

When hunger ruled.

I came among men in a time of uprising

And I revolted with them.

So the time passed away

Which on earth was given me.

I ate my food between massacres.

The shadow of murder lay upon my sleep.

And when I loved, I loved with indifference.

I looked upon nature with impatience.

So the time passed away

Which on earth was given me.

In my time streets led to the quicksand.

Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.

There was little I could do. But without me

The rulers would have been more secure. This was my hope.

So the time passed away

Which on earth was given me.

3.

You, who shall emerge from the flood

In which we are sinking,

Think —

When you speak of our weaknesses,

Also of the dark time

That brought them forth.

For we went,changing our country more often than our shoes.

In the class war, despairing

When there was only injustice and no resistance.

For we knew only too well:

Even the hatred of squalor

Makes the brow grow stern.

Even anger against injustice

Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we

Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness

Could not ourselves be kind.

But you, when at last it comes to pass

That man can help his fellow man,

Do no judge us

Too harshly.

translated by H. R. Hays

only Brecht could have written—without irony: “I have feelings only when I have a headache—never when I am writing: for then I think.”

“Neither is Hitler a great man nor an idiot. He was a small-time crook who became a great crook.”

end Brecht

Breen, Benjamin:

Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science

We are faced with the problem of building a new world.—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, 1942

Diego Rivera

Man at the Crossroads had the potential to be remembered for the next hundred years. More than remembered. It was an artwork that seemed to predict the coming century.

It was this figure, this cosmic engineer, who seemed to control the painting’s machinery. Our technology would make us gods, Rivera seemed to be saying. And as humanity entered the crossroads of a new world, the cruelties of past centuries would be magnified along with our power.

like Rivera’s mural, the legacy of psychedelic science has been painted over.

before it became a failed utopia, it was a beautiful dream.

“She was truly interested in everything,” one of Mead’s friends remembered. “It was a radically original mind.” In

Mead’s primary goal in life, she once said, was “to keep the future safe.” Achieving this, she believed, meant enlarging the collective “awareness” of the human species so that we could “learn consciously to create civilizations within which an increasing proportion of human beings will realize more of what they have it in them to be.”

a Macy Foundation executive named Lawrence Frank.

the world, Frank declared, was “a sick society in need of treatment.”

Mead and Bateson saw their science not just as a tool for diagnosis, but as a treatment in itself. They imagined the creation of a new, global culture built on vast diversity rather than uniformity.

Mead and Bateson saw themselves as intervening in a unique moment of global crisis, one that would forever afterward “define the paths along which future generations will be able to advance.”

Carl Sagan was once asked why we should expect that extraterrestrial life might be sending signals into deep space. “All they need is one Margaret Mead,” he replied. Mead saw herself as “a listening post,” collecting and synthesizing information from every domain, like a central computer.

Ruth Benedict.   Franz Boas

How can we recognize the shackles that tradition has laid upon us? For when we recognize them, we are also able to break them.”

what later scholars have called “salvage anthropology,”

Benedict saw the study of culture as a way of moving beyond racism, beyond the dangerous myths of blood.

“The purpose of anthropology,” Benedict once said, “is to make the world safe for human differences.”

Mead never returned to the study of peyote. But the core insight of that encounter stayed with her. The peyote research of 1930 was a step toward what she came to see as her life’s goal: creating a new culture that expands humanity’s collective consciousness.

Mead and Bateson, as they later wrote, came to believe they were engaged in “building a new world” that would synthesize “the old values of many contrasting and contradictory cultural systems into a new form which will use but transcend them all.”

humanity’s potential that fascinated Mead—and, even more, her own potential role in fulfilling it.

Fortune was drawn no less powerfully to humanity’s latent evil.

Ruth Benedict,

“no one civilization can possibility utilize in its mores the whole potential range of human behavior.”

“a new formulation of the relationship between sex, temperament, and culturally expected behavior.”

Mead would return again and again to the idea of humanity transcending nationalism, racism, and polarization by establishing “a new kind of consciousness.”

In early 1933, Adolf Hitler and the brown-shirted bigots who had inhabited Munich’s seedy underworld were unexpectedly elevated to national power. Germany itself had become schizophrenic. And Kraepelin’s students—including

To Mead, Bateson, and many of their scientist peers, this seemed exactly right. Hitler was driven by his unconscious mind, they believed—and he was also tapping into the unconscious drives of his followers. This interpretation made the science of consciousness surprisingly important. If science could learn how to better integrate the conscious and unconscious minds, perhaps Hitler’s hypnotic hold over the German people could be broken.

Mead and Bateson focused their attention on a new organization known as the Committee for National Morale—

Lawrence K. Frank,  in 1936, Frank had proposed that society itself was now the “patient” that scientists possessed the power to cure—

They were “mobilizing attitudes,” as Mead put it in a letter to Bateson’s mother in the spring of 1941, to “avoid the paralyzing apathy-producing effects of propaganda.”

Godfrey and his assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming,  Fleming’s passing fancy that day became the seed for the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale.

Bateson later explained, was intentionally vague: “Cerebral inhibition,” he said, was actually “a respectable word for hypnosis.”

Mexican neurologist Arturo Rosenblueth, the co-discoverer of “sympathin,” a mysterious hormone that was thought to shape human behavior.

Milton H. Erickson. Born in a silver-mining camp in the scrubland of eastern Nevada, Erickson had an uncommon gift for observing elements of human behavior that others missed. As a child he had struggled with dyslexia and polio, and the adult Erickson believed that his remarkable ability to induce hypnosis grew out of these early challenges—a kind of superpower gleaned from his observation of hidden “tells” and unspoken cues. To

Winston Churchill’s. “A Respectable Word for Hypnosis” (1939–43) > Page 50 ·

the entire world would fall “into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science.”

Stanley Lovell, began to dream up ideas for weaponized altered states.

first formulation of the concept of a “Manchurian candidate.”

After exploring mescaline as a potential truth drug, the team settled on another experimental drug—THC—that had been isolated from cannabis plants just three years earlier.

In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains, On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him.—J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1945

The film, Hitlerjunge Quex,  Bateson believed it revealed the heart of Nazi psychology: the worship of death as a pathway to a false utopia.

“Man, the mechanical puppet,” Bateson wrote, buffeted by psychological manipulation, “is endlessly liable to be swept off his feet into some sort of whirlpool.”

temporary posting convinced that the film displayed a frighteningly sophisticated understanding of mass psychology.

Julia Child’s time in the OSS,

It was also in 1946 that they joined with Albert Einstein and other atomic physicists in pushing for a world state.

Perhaps assuring human survival meant developing a new science of sanity, a new set of tools for reprogramming minds and societies stuck in self-destructive feedback loops.

Bateson set about researching methods to cure the world’s “addiction” to war.

I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons.—Aldous Huxley to George Orwell, 1949

Alfred Kinsey.  “It is desperately strategic,” Kinsey wrote, “that our civilization realize something of the diversity in human sex behavior, and acquire some sympathetic understanding of that which is different from one’s own.”

were the cutting edge of science. Sex hormones and psychedelic drugs were linked in the midcentury scientific imagination due to the perception that these two categories of drugs, uniquely, had the ability to reshape one’s core identity. This was not a transient alteration of consciousness; it was not the treatment of a symptom. It was an explosive, self-directed transformation, an atom bomb for the self.

Sandoz-branded LSD. Delysid bottles

the belief that LSD and other psychedelics could open a new world of experience that would help redirect global culture away from its pathological addictions to nationalism and violence.

Harold Alexander Abramson. “Those who control the weapons of hostility and those who understand the psychomotive forces originating hostility,” he said, “must meet on common ground as soon as possible… if man is not to destroy himself.” Abramson

Bateson had.   that manipulative science, a science of narrowed consciousness, might be a weapon more powerful than any conventional army.

a tuning fork for the era, resonating back the frequencies of a newly experimental, pharmacologically adventurous postwar culture.

MKULTRA was launched in 1952

Sidney Gottlieb,

The very term “psychedelic,” coined a few years later, encapsulated the tension between the promise and the peril of these substances. Literally, it means “revealing the mind.” Humphry Osmond, the civilian scientist who invented the word, assumed that this was an inherently benevolent goal.

project of revealing the mind resembled the ancient Roman god Janus.

Janus was the god of transitions, passageways, new ideas, and new historical epochs. And his two faces looked out on both war and peace.

Allen Dulles Sr.,

Carl Jung, great friend and rival of Sigmund Freud.

Jung’s “highly classified” work, which involved constructing psychological profiles of Nazi leaders.

By November 1952, then, Dulles had already been thinking for a decade about what he called “brain warfare.”

earth—a man who believed the Cold War was being fought in the fields of consciousness itself.

Cerebral Inhibition (a “respectable word for hypnosis,”

MKULTRA was a profoundly ambitious attempt to learn how to alter human consciousness in ways that had implications not just for individuals, but for the fates of nations.

Mead told

written. The ego motivations of the silly petty little academic world of credits and rivalries have nothing to do with SCIENCE except to muddle and mar it.”

There had indeed been a revolution in consciousness in Manus.

homegrown religious movement that attempted to attain transcendence through the destruction of “everything belonging to the past.” Some on Manus called it the Noise. In 1947, a prophet had emerged

The Noise was, in some sense, an acting out of this belief on a grand scale. Now it was colonialism itself whose powerful ghost was being pushed into the lagoon.

The Noise fascinated Mead. In the aftermath of World War II, the people of Manus had been forced to develop a new social order in a matter of months, not decades or centuries. Mead believed that a similar dilemma—the dilemma of how to adapt to rapid technological and social change while retaining at least some cultural traditions—would in time confront all human societies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Would adaptation to rapid change be mystical and sudden, trancelike, potentially violent? Or could it be measured, reasoned, led by scientists rather than prophets? Or might it be some combination of the two?

The adman’s call was a reminder of how interconnected the world was becoming. But it was als

Murray Jarvik, a research assistant of Abramson’s during the 1953–55 LSD trials, recalled him this way in a published reminiscence: Dr. Harold Abramson… was very smart but somewhat peculiar. He was a physical chemist, a psychiatrist and an allergist, all rolled up into one. I remember that he had interesting connections. Margaret Mead used to visit him. He would invite us to his rather palatial house out in Huntington, Long Island. I spent one summer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories looking at the effects of LSD on snails and fish and other things.

Margaret Mead thought he was brilliant.

New Lives for Old would be the title, and it would describe the Noise

For Mead, this was not just a matter of survival in one village on one island. All human societies, everywhere, needed to learn to change in similar ways and with similar speed, avoiding the excesses of what she called “the apocalyptic cult aspect” but also recognizing that, as she later put it, “conscious intervention in the process of cultural evolution and human survival” was now the most urgent task that humanity faced. This was the goal of her science. And the things she saw and heard in the spring and summer of 1954 made her think that psychedelics might be part of it.

Perhaps LSD could speed up the rate by which global culture adapted to rapid change. Perhaps, as she wrote to herself in June 1954, the drug could be a “short cut” for pulling society “away from mysticism and escape.”

with Einstein’s death in 1955, Mead became the world’s best-known living scientist.

What drove Mead’s popularity was her ability to wed an urgent call to action—humanity needed to expand its “awareness,” its collective consciousness, in order to survive—with an implicit optimism. A young Carl Sagan was among Mead’s avid readers. As a student at the University of Chicago, he became fascinated with the ways her work “gave you a view of the arbitrariness of cultural mores, cultural systems.” Sagan was drawn to the “tremendous optimism” of “the idea that you weren’t jostled about by the winds of the world. That you could do something” to change the future. When an eighteen-year-old Sagan wrote his first piece of popular science writing, a radio script called “Ad Astra,” he dreamed of scoring an interview with Mead.

The Noise, Mead wrote, was just one part of a continuum of “conversion experiences”:

All involved “the complete destruction of the past.”

Rhoda Métraux

account of this period of their lives: “Margaret Mead was a realist who mastered the dark side of her vision.”

In the end, Mead appears not to have taken LSD.

Mead directly

the exigencies of the mid-twentieth century when each one of us—at least those of us who are

Margaret Mead,

the goal that continued to define her life: leveraging the power of science to help create a new culture capable of adapting to rapid change, a culture that used science to ensure collective human flourishing and expand the limits of conscious experience rather than as a way of asserting power.

Margaret Mead believed at that time, in 1955, that mescaline or LSD might allow the user to “reorganize” themselves in such a way that they could better adapt to a rapidly changing social order,

Humphry Osmond

Osmond had a new metaphor to contextualize both his own experiences with psychedelics

Psychedelics, he said, are “more like the radar telescopes now being built to scan the deeps of outer, invisible space. They are not convenient. One cannot go bird watching with them. They explore a tiny portion of an enormous void.”

“I believe that these agents have a part to play in our survival as a species,” Osmond concluded.

Sputnik had heralded a new era of exploration in the deep space of the cosmos. Now the emergence of psychedelic therapy promised to reveal the depths of the human mind.

Sidney Cohen.

Betty Eisner

first research subject for the LSD trials of a young UCLA professor: Sidney Cohen.

the minute that one tries to go someplace or to ‘be’ someone or something, then one is not content to let things be.”

Santa Cruz Mountains,  The Sequoia Seminars

at Stanford in 1958 was Frank Barron,

hoping to study ways of fixing the communication breakdowns and conflict that he believed were contributing to the nuclear arms race between the Soviets and the Americans.

He believed that psychedelic drugs could save the world, in a literal sense. He came to see them as the trigger for a mystical transition in human consciousness, a moment when history would turn on a hinge and everything would be different, ending wars and unlocking a new renaissance of creative expression.

“Captain” Al Hubbard.  the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD” and. “set and setting.”

Part III THE NOISE (1959–80)

Cary Grant credited psychedelic therapy with a personal and professional breakthrough. “All the sadness and vanities were torn away,” he told Hyams. “I was pleased with the hard core of the strength I found inside of me.

Christine Jorgensen,

James Terrill

much of the beneficial effect of LSD was due to a person’s having faced a stressful and ambiguous situation and worked it through satisfactorily.”

Betty Eisner was among the most ardent backers of this view. By the spring of 1958, she had decided that psychedelics were genuinely revolutionary substances that “speed up the process of evolution” by helping their users achieve a state of “clear”—a mind that had been expanded via the integration of repressed unconsciousness traumas into conscious experience.

This idea of a “chemical key” pushed into the mystical for psychedelic researchers like Betty Eisner. “I think of it like a very rusty door which has never been opened before consciously,” she wrote. “There are many keys to the door: stress, solitude, meditation, limited sensory environment, drugs, etc. But these don’t seem to work until the rusty door has been forced open once. That is what LSD or mescaline can do.”

Frank Barron,

only psychology, by effecting a fundamental reprogramming of the human mind,

could prevent a nuclear holocaust.”

then, psilocybin mushrooms really do “talk” to us, joining some small part of themselves to our brains and altering our conscious experience in unpredictable ways.

thirty years before Leary’s first trip, Margaret Mead was living among the Omaha people in Nebraska, collecting information about peyote and its role as an engine of consciousness expansion and cultural change. This was such a common experience among the students of Franz Boas that it was almost a rite of passage.

Leary and the group gathering around him began working to actively transform global society b

Margaret Mead was one of the most hopeful scientists in history.

Mead had learned from past experience to fear shortcuts to utopia.

she described her fear that “new drugs” could “provide new temptations to exploit other men.”

Mead, who had again fractured the ankle she had broken in New Guinea decades earlier, began carrying a curious forked wooden staff called a “thumb stick.” When it was pointed out that her stick made her look like a shaman or “mythical sage,” she admitted that this was intentional. “In Israel I look like a prophet,” she said. “In Greece, like Tiresias from Oedipus Rex. I can fit into their myths.”

armed with charts showing human sexuality as a spectrum rather than a binary, Mead challenged the notion that homosexuality and transgender identities were “unnatural.”

the Jacques Cousteau factor. Lilly

Margaret Mead described the “massive evolutionary change” that would be necessary for ensuring human survival, change that would come from “clusters of human scientists… communicating with one another simultaneously at many levels and within different sensory modalities.”

the science of communication

humanity itself, threatened first by the spread of Fascism and then by the advent of atomic warfare. They regarded both as a product of “pathogenic” cultural patterns—ideas that drive you insane.

young Harvard assistant professor named Carl Sagan arrived for a tour. Not yet famous, but already a brilliant writer, he and Lilly belonged to the same secret society.

Sagan founded a whimsical scientific fraternal organization, the Order of the Dolphin, that was partially inspired by Lilly’s own work.

Sidney Cohen, Aldous Huxley, and Betty Eisner.

Eleusinian Mysteries

Bateson’s former students at Stanford: Stewart Brand,

“With man one is sometimes very much limited by some very stringent legal and social considerations,” Lilly told

One can do certain things with animals that one couldn’t possibly do with man at the present time. We are in this position with the dolphins.

Gregory Bateson

The conference was titled “The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation,”

“What I’m mainly interested in is a formal description of the ways in which human planning and applied science tend to generate pathology,” he said at the outset, “in the society or in the ecology or in the individual.”

Mead: Always read things into the tape.

her typewriter still overflowing with her habitual five or ten thousand words a day,

a woman who once declared that eleven was her “true, spiritual age,” this was a fact that was hard to face.

those “who take refuge behind the great good that [they are] doing.” In such people, “the need to justify demeaning other human beings… is compensated for by another kind of delusion of grandeur: that of becoming someone who benefits mankind on a large scale.”

May 1970, Ralph Blum, Mead’s closest confidant about psychedelic science during her LSD summer of 1954, published a thriller about a government mind control program closely modeled on MKULTRA. Blum’s novel, The Simultaneous Man, interwove a standard techno-thriller plot with details torn from the real history of the CIA’s early experiments with LSD.

science itself was now falling from its pedestal. And

John C. Lilly,

“When I look back into my apparent past life, I find faulty recordings in my mind,” he said to himself. “All my work was illusory.”

Steve Jobs remembered the series, created by Stewart Brand, as “sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”

Taken together, the Whole Earth Catalog defined a cultural moment of “off the grid” communal living, concern for planetary ecology, and a melding of spirituality and science.

1971. That year saw the publication of an unusual book, coauthored by Mead and James Baldwin and based on a long conversation between the two, called A Rap on Race.

Bateson and Lois moved into a farmhouse on a semi-commune in the Santa Cruz Mountains, just down the road from Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

Mead made a pitch for a “cosmic” and “planetary” sense of our collective destiny, for a move away from nationalism and toward “a concern for the earth’s atmosphere” and “new political forms” that could bring together the “irreversibly interdependent planetary community.”

And if you read between the lines You will find nothing there.—from Gregory Bateson’s unpublished poem “The Manuscript” (1978)

MKULTRA. the new MKULTRA revelations were breaking, Margaret Mead was being feted at the first ever Margaret Mead Film Festival.

Bateson signed off his letter, following a vague allusion to “those who get cubed (i.e., receive a dose without knowing it).”

Bateson put it, “It is said secretly that men, pigs, trees, grass—all the objects in the world—are patterns of waves.”

In September 1980, for instance, two months after Bateson’s death, Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan, premiered the first episode of their television documentary Cosmos. In the years to come, it would go on to be viewed by over five hundred million people, a sizable percentage of the world’s population. “So much of what we did—Cosmos, Contact, and so many books—was stimulated, inspired, by many psychoactive substances,” Druyan told me, relaying her experiences using substances from cannabis to MDMA to ayahuasca with Sagan.

Druyan said, because they were both “realistic utopians.” And their shared credo, she said, could be summed up quite simply: “Life is not perfectible. But it could be so much better.”

end Breen, Benjamin Tripping on Utopia

Bregman, Rutger:

Moral Ambition, Humankind books

a smoke ring, “a circle spreading outward into nothingness.”

“… a basic income – venture capital for the people…”

“…’bullshit jobs’ considered meaningless by the people doing them…”

“Poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.”

… he attempts to meet the current moment by redirecting self interest into social good — to turn away from meaningless and hollow white collar jobs in favor of far more exciting work that aims to solve society’s toughest problems.

The School for Moral Ambition.

moral envy.

People have the right to be boring.

It’s important to be aware of how privileged you are, but it’s also important to use it.

American Freshman Survey… this is not human nature. It is culture. It can change.

Breitbart:

“Politics is downstream from culture.”

Breivik, Anders:

“He who saves his country, violates no law.”

Bremmer, Ian:

“…China is developing, a system that allows state officials to assess a person’s financial data, social connections, consumption habits and respect for the law to establish the citizen’s ‘trustworthiness.’   A good social credit score could lead to a promotion, a raise, a better apartment, admission to a good school, access to state-approved dating websites, better stores, better doctors, the right to travel, a more generous pension and important opportunities for your children. A bad score could put you in jail….the plan by China’s State Council says it is intended as a safeguard against, among other things, ‘conduct that seriously undermines … the normal social order’ and ‘assembling to disrupt social order [and] endangering national defense interests.’ The plan’s ultimate purpose, according to Chinese officials, is to ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.’ For Westerners, this is a shocking abuse of state power and an unthinkable invasion of personal privacy. In China, these are the tools officials will use to build a more ‘harmonious society.’”

in TIME 11-2017

Brennan, Caleb:

the multitude of failed assassination attempts against oil baron John D. Rockefeller in 1914

Brennan, Emily:

“The black church dominated  because it was the one independent black institution allowed under Jim Crow laws, providing free spaces for African-Americans who otherwise faced arrest for congregating in public.”

Brennan, Jason:

“…democracy is the rule of the ignorant and the irrational, and it all too often falls short. … political participation and democratic deliberation actually tend to make people worse—more irrational, biased, and mean. …a new system of government—epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable—may be better than democracy.” See K

“Many of my fellow citizens are incompetent, ignorant, irrational, and

morally unreasonable about politics.”

Brennan, Sean:

“It’s scary to be in a position where we have an executive who is prioritizing acts of

retribution and is doing it in creative ways that bypass traditional safeguards and

norms,…And often, by the time it can be challenged in court, the damage is done.”

Brennan, Justice William:

“…liberty is a fragile thing.  You can’t give up.”

Brenner, Sydney:

“…the only way to encourage innovation is to give it to the young. The young have a great advantage in that they are ignorant. …ignorance in science is very important….If you know too much you can’t try new things.  I always work in fields in which I am totally ignorant.”     

“Occam’s broom – to sweep under the carpet what you must to leave your hypothesis consistent…”

On administration: “You become a mediator between two impossible groups – the monsters above and the idiots below.”

Breslin, Jimmy:

“Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

Bretecher, Claire (NYT obit):

“I’m from a family where women are strong and men are weak.”

Breyer, Justice Stephen:

“…liberty means not only freedom from government coercion but also the freedom to participate in the government itself.”

“Learned Hand once compared the task of interpreting a statute to that of interpreting a musical score.”

“First unwritten rule is that nobody speaks twice until everybody speaks once at the conference. Great rule. Everybody feels they’re treated fairly. Second: Tomorrow is another day.” …referring to the private meetings where the justices cast their votes

quoting Camus:

“…the plague never dies nor does it disappear. It waits patiently in our bedrooms, our cellars, our suitcases, our handkerchiefs, our file cabinets. And one day, perhaps to the misfortune or for the education of men, the plague germ will reemerge, reawaken its rats, and send them forth to die in a once happy city.”  in the context of the law and a lawful society.

Brickman, Marshall:

“There’s always a little bit of therapy involved in writing.”

Bridges, Ruby:

“None of our babies come into this world knowing anything about racism. We come into the world with a clean heart, a fresh start. Racism is a grown-up disease and we should stop using our kids to spread it.”

Bridle, James:

:…[abandon our limited, Western ideas about what constitutes intelligence.. look] “beyond the horizon of our own selves and our own creations to glimpse another kind, or many different kinds, of intelligence.”

Brilliant, Larry:

“Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional.”

Bringhurst, Maggie:

(she wrote opinion pieces to) “clear the cynicism from my system.”

Brink, Bridget A.:

former ambassador to Ukraine:

“Peace at any price is not peace at all — it is appeasement.”

Brinton, Henry G:

“…the Constitution … never mentions God or Jesus, and forbids the establishment of religion. .. we will never be a Christian nation…[but we are] a biblical nation.”

“We live in a culture of fear (and) an idolatry of safety…We worship the god of security… a false god.”

Britton-Purdy, Jedediah:

 “…For every human being, there are over 1,000 tons of built environment…a technological exoskeleton for the species…

You cannot change the climate impact of Americans without changing the built American landscape…”.

“Here is a definition of barbarism: a system that makes people into one another’s enemies, victims, and oppressors. . . . A second definition of barbarism: a system that keeps its people in the dark and gives them no way out. A system, that is, that makes the world as it is both inescapable and unintelligible. . . . Democracy should be a political rejection of barbarism in both aspects. It is an order premised on the equality of everyone who lives in it and the embrace of a shared fate. It is the way—the only one we have—for people to choose the terms of their shared lives, the shape of their mutual vulnerability and entanglement.”

barbarism: a system that makes people into one another’s enemies, victims, and oppressors. ..a system that keeps its people in the dark and gives them no way out

…Democracy [is the] political rejection of barbarism ..

Brockes, Emma:

…sometimes reality threatens my political maturity…

I felt a visceral dislike for the men grilling Biden’s supreme court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson…

Jackson herself was almost supernaturally composed,

occasionally letting a pause extend a beat beyond normal to indicate

the scale of the resources required to stay calm.

Elon Musk used to give a good impression of being relatively normal…now

a kind of madness…chasing the highs of owning the libs…

Kennedy, Caroline: on RFK Jr.: Caroline then flatly informed … that her cousin was a “predator”, who, “no surprise”, keeps birds of prey and – who saw this detail coming? – once “put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed his hawks”.

We look forward to the Republican-run Senate confirming RFK Jr to take his rightful place alongside Kristi Noem, the freshly confirmed homeland security secretary,

who admitted in her recent memoir to having shot her dog.”

Brode, Doug:

”…the whole concept of the Force comes from Rod Serling.”

with George Lucas. (Star Wars)

Brodie, Bernard:

“Good strategy presumes good anthropology and sociology. Some of the greatest military blunders of all times have resulted from juvenile evaluations in this department.”

Brodie, Richard:

Virus of the Mind

“…mind viruses are the price of one of the freedoms most dear to us: freedom of speech…

The meme is the secret code of human behavior…opening up such sophisticated new techniques for mass manipulation…

A meme is an idea …that forms itself into a distinct memorable unit…

People’s drive toward making sense of senseless things leads to a type of cultural virus known as conspiracy theory…

People outgrow their belief systems, like butterflies leaving the cocoon…

Brodsky, Joseph:

“What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good….

evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another…”

“Political court trials are criminal by definition. The trial of a poet is an offense — one that is not merely criminal, but above all anthropological. It is a crime against language, against that which raises human beings above the animal world.”

Brody, Jane:

“My advice [on turning 80]…: Try to combine your passion with your talent…[for a] rich and rewarding career.”

Broe, Carolyn:

“We raised them to be freethinkers not realizing how free they were going to be.”

Brokman, Isabelle:

Sobriety is not the end of abundance, it is the end of our unsustainable addiction to

overconsumption. Sobriety is not the end of carelessness, but the rediscovery of cooperation and conviviality. It is doing less, but better.” see Jancovici

Bronowski, Jacob:

“…the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.”

These are the marks of science: that it is open for all to hear, and all are free to speak their minds in it. They are marks of the world at its best, and the human spirit at its most challenging.”

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not.”

“Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.”

“Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions.”

The Ascent Of Man:

Foreword by Richard Dawkins

drawing of the baby in the womb introduced the television version of The Ascent of Man:

Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvellous plasticity of mind.

‘Knowledge … is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.’

the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

The University is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it.

Science is the poetry of reality.

end Dawkins intro to Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

As a mathematician trained in physics,

cast a personal biography of ideas in the form of television essays.

discoveries are made by men, not merely by minds, so that they are alive and charged with individuality.

Unlike a lecture or a cinema show, television is not directed to crowds. It is addressed to two or three people in a room,

this series presents a philosophy rather than a history, and a philosophy of nature rather than of science.

There cannot be a philosophy, there cannot even be a decent science, without humanity. I hope that sense of affirmation is manifest in this book. For me, the understanding of nature has as its goal the understanding of human nature, and of the human condition within nature.

Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape–he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and in

mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home in every continent.

Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it.

…that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment, is a different kind of evolution–not biological, but cultural evolution. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.

Man is distinguished from other animals by his imaginative gifts.

what interests me is the history of man’s mind as an unfolding of his different talents.

Two million years ago we were not yet men. One million years ago we were, because by one million years ago a creature…

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

Hunting cannot support a growing population in one place; the limit for the savannah was not more than two people to the square mile. At that density, the total land surface of the earth could only support the present population of California, about twenty million, and could not support the population of Great Britain. The choice for the hunters was brutal: starve or move. They moved.

For a biological adaptation is an inborn form of behaviour; but a culture is a learned form of behaviour–a communally preferred form, which

biological differences do exist between groups of men, as we all know. We call them racial differences, by which we mean exactly that they cannot be changed by a change of habit or habitat.

Iceland because it is the seat of the oldest democracy in Northern Europe.

this began about AD 900, before Christianity arrived, at a time when China was a great empire, and Europe was the spoil of princelings and robber barons. That is a remarkable beginning to democracy.

No animal is faced with this dilemma: an animal is either social or solitary. Man alone aspires to be both in one, a social solitary.

justice is part of the biological equipment of man. And yet it is exactly that thought which took me out of physics into biology,

the brain and the baby is exactly where the plasticity of human behaviour begins.

We have to put off the decision-making process, in order to accumulate enough knowledge as a preparation for the future.

…that is what childhood is about, that is what puberty is about, that is what youth is about.

The fact is that Hamlet as a youth is simply not mature. Intellectually or emotionally, he is not ripe for the act that he is asked to perform. And

man, before the brain is an instrument for action, it has to

be an instrument of preparation.

the longest childhood has been that of civilisation, learning to understand that.

‘Now you have reached the last commandment: Thou shalt not question’.

what every strong intellect wants to be, is a guardian of integrity.

There is an age-old conflict between intellectual leadership and civil authority.

Jesus took, and saw the first glimpse of Jerusalem on the skyline as he saw it going to his certain death. Death, because Jesus was then the intellectual and moral leader of his people, but he was facing an establishment in which religion was simply an arm of government.

It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without

in a sense all science, all human thought, is a form of play.

Abstract thought is the neoteny of the intellect, by which man is able to continue to carry out activities which have no immediate goal (other animals play only while young) in order to prepare himself for long-term strategies and plans.

Johnny von Neumann

‘Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games’, he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.’

John von Neumann carried this subject into what I call his second great creative idea. ..He distinguished between short-term tactics and grand, long-term strategies. Tactics can be calculated exactly, but strategies cannot.

his last years he wrote a beautiful book called The Computer and the Brain, the Silliman Lectures that he should have given, but was…

brain as having a language in which the activities of the different parts of the brain have somehow to be interlocked and made to match so that we devise a plan, a procedure, as a grand overall way of life–what in the humanities we would call a system of values.

‘Oh no, no, you are not seeing it. Your kind of visualising mind is not right for seeing this. Think of it abstractly.

..we must be a democracy of the intellect. We must not perish by the distance between people and government, between people and power,

if knowledge sits in the homes and heads of people with no ambition to control others, and not up in the isolated seats of power.

A scientific society is one in which specialists can indeed do the things like making the electric light work. But it is you, it is I, who have to know how nature works, and how (for example) electricity is one of her expressions in the light and in my brain.

Our actions as adults, as decision makers, as human beings, are mediated by values, which I interpret as general strategies in which we balance opposing impulses.

Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures. You cannot possibly maintain that informed integrity if you let other people run the world for you while you yourself continue to live out of a ragbag of morals that come from past beliefs. That is really crucial today.

We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.

…filming. It’s what I have to do.’

We are all afraid–for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilisation, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.

end Bronowski

Bronson, Rachel:

“President Richard Nixon went to Saudi Arabia and Israel in June 1974 to change the domestic narrative and score an international victory; it failed spectacularly. He resigned a month later.”

Brooking, Emerson T:

With Singer The Atlantic pdf

“…’motive attribution asymmetry’ – Each side thinks it is driven by benevolence, while the other is evil and motivated by hatred…

contempt is a noxious brew of anger and disgust…

What we need is not to disagree less, but to disagree better.”

Like War – The Weaponization of Social Media

Brooks, Arthur C.:

“…conspiracy theorists are outsiders — pessimistic about the future, negative about others and feeling victimized by people in power…

In a society based on the free flow of ideas, twisting information to create suspicion and rage among the powerless is morally akin to swindling poor people out of their savings.”

‘Francis’ secular admirers often stumble at his apparent preoccupation with evil. In an impromptu speech to schoolchildren in Harlem, he disconcertingly asked: “But who is it that sows sadness, that sows mistrust, envy, evil desires? What is his name? The devil.”

The word “devil” comes from the Greek verb diabolos, meaning “slander” or “attack.” And “demon” comes directly from the Greek root meaning “to divide.” For Francis, happiness comes from unity, both with God and with one another. Unhappiness comes from division from either — which comes from the Dark One.’

“Bigotry’s cousin is contempt. …Polarization – and thus contempt – leads to permanent enmity. … Rejecting polarization … is an exercise in self-respect.”       

Brooks, Bianca Vivion:

“Good art must do more than reflect our own images back at us. It must move us to a place beyond our obsession with identity, sense of tribalism and fear of others.”

Brooks, David:

“I experienced the solace of being seen.”

Attention is a moral act.

Re appeal of Trump: “It’s an advantage to have no conscience…no concern for or conception of right and wrong.”

Farewell from NYT:

“…cultural change precedes political and social change. You need a shift in thinking before you can have a shift in direction. You need a different spiritual climate…

Sometimes it feels as if all of society is a vast battleground between the forces of dehumanization on the one side — rabid partisanship, social media, porn, bigotry — and the beleaguered forces of humanization on the other…

I’ve found a project and a cause that are worth devoting the final chapter of my career to.”

1-1-2021:

Gordon Allport wrote about the contact hypothesis, that doing life together with people of other groups can reduce prejudice and change minds. It’s how new emotional bonds are formed, how new conceptions of who is “us” and who is “them” come into being.

5-22-2020: existential security…safe…the humanity of shared vulnerability…The superficial way to change minds and behavior doesn’t seem to work, to bridge either racial, partisan or class lines. Real change seems to involve putting bodies from different groups in the same room, on the same team and in the same neighborhood. That’s national service programs. That’s residential integration programs across all lines of difference. That’s workplace diversity, equity and inclusion — permanent physical integration, not training.

“Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project. … some of the current political problems are influenced by fundamental shifts in culture, involving things as fundamental as how we appraise ourselves. Addressing them would require a more comprehensive shift in values.”

“The American education model, saysShimon Waronker, was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model designed to create docile subjects and factory workers.”

“Emotions assign values to things and undergird reason.”

“The future has no union.”

The United States, as you know, was founded as a republic, not simply as a democracy. The distinction has been lost over the past few decades, but it is an important one.

The believers in a democracy have unlimited faith in the character and judgment of the people and believe that political institutions should be responsive to their desires. The believers in a republic have large but limited faith in the character and judgment of the people and erect institutions and barriers to improve that character and guide that judgment.

The first citizens of this country erected institutions to protect themselves from their own shortcomings

The democratic triumph has created a nation that runs up huge debt and is increasingly incapable of finding a balance between competing interests. Today, the country faces three intertwined economic challenges. We have to make the welfare state fiscally sustainable. We have to do it in a way that preserves the economic dynamism in the country — that provides incentives for creative destruction. We also have to do it in a way that preserves social cohesion — that reduces the growing economic and lifestyle gaps between the educated and less educated.

It will be enacted when voters realize we need to build arrangements to protect ourselves from our own weaknesses.

“We have a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed.”

One reason many politicians behave badly these days is that we spend less time thinking about what it means to behave well.

In the progressive era, the economy was in its adolescence and the task was to control it. Today the economy is middle-aged; the task is to rejuvenate it.

The United States spends far more on education than any other nation, with paltry results. It spends far more on health care, again, with paltry results. It spends so much on poverty programs that if we just took that money and handed poor people checks, we would virtually eliminate poverty overnight. In the progressive era, the task was to build programs; today the task is to reform existing ones.

The country needs a productive midlife crisis.

“Liberal economists … reduce the rich texture of how disadvantage is actually lived to a crude materialism that has little to do with reality….the amputation of sociologic, psychological and cognitive considerations makes good policy impossible….It’s not enough just to have economic growth policies. The country also needs to rebuild orderly communities…Social repair requires sociological thinking.

“[The] Hamiltonian alternative: centralize the goals, but decentralize the means people take to get there.”

“Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map…Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.”

“Your moral standards will gradually slip as you become more and more comfortable with your own rationalizations.”

“…the single biggest problem with the tax code…is that it rewards consumption and punishes savings and investment.”

“…people who, absent other attachments, have fallen upon partisanship to give them a sense of righteousness and belonging.”

Government is the hard work of creating a background order.”

Politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen’s mind.”

“Citizens are formed, not born.”

Brooks quoting Haugen and Boutros: “The relentless threat of violence is part of the core subtext of their lives, but we are unlikely to see it, and they are unlikely to tell us about it. We would be wise, however, to not be fooled — because, like grief, the thing we cannot see may be the deepest part of their day.”

“…a bureaucracy can’t see or account for the complexity of reality. It tries to impose uniform rules on the organic intricacy of human relationships…This is what George Orwell noticed about the authoritarian brutalists: They don’t use words to illuminate the complexity of reality; they use words to eradicate the complexity of reality.”     

“We tend to assume that the primary problems of politics are economic and that the injustices of the world can be addressed with economic levers…. They live within a contagion of chaos. They live where the primary realities include violence, theft and radical uncertainty. Their world is governed less by long-term economic incentives and more by raw fear…. The primary problem of politics is not creating growth. It’s creating order. Until that is largely achieved, life can be nasty, brutish and short.”

“…people in the midst of difficulty begin to feel a call … They can’t determine the course of their pain, but they can participate in responding to it. … Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.”

“You can get a lot of facts wrong if you get your story right.”

“…the two great vices of foreign affairs [are]the desire for regional dominance and the desire to eliminate diversity. Throughout recorded history, large regional powers have generally gobbled up little nations. Powerful people have generally tried to impose their version of the Truth on less powerful people. But, over these centuries, civilized leaders have banded together to restrain these vices.”

“…the nation is tired, distrustful, divided and withdrawing….Instead of worrying about spreading democracy, we’d be better off trying to make theocracies less beastly.”

“…people have actively lost trust in big institutions. Strangers don’t seem especially risky by comparison…fertile ground for peer-to-peer commerce.”

“…creative people organize their lives according to repetitive, disciplined routines. They think like artists but work like accountants…order and discipline are the prerequisites for creativity and daring….The best life is a series of daring excursions from a secure and orderly base.”

Brooks in Lady Gaga column – see pdf:

“Living with [passion] requires a courage that takes two forms. First, people with passion have the courage to dig down and play with their issues….and often discover themselves through play.

Second, people with passion have the courage to be themselves with abandon. We all care what others think about us. People with passion are just less willing to be ruled by the tyranny of public opinion. As the saying goes, they somehow get on the other side of fear. They get beyond that fog that is scary to approach. Once through it they have more freedom to navigate. They opt out of things that are repetitive, routine and deadening. There’s even sometimes a certain recklessness there, a willingness to throw their imperfect selves out into public view while not really thinking beforehand how people might react.”

“…Fiorina simply refused to adopt a defensive posture. She ignored the challenges and just hit … harder. The factual issue sort of got lost in her torrent.”

“Fear is an emotion directed at a specific threat, but anxiety is an unfocused corrosive uneasiness…. You can’t beat moral fanaticism with weak tea moral relativism. …People are only fulfilled when they make deep moral commitments.

“…the beauty of politics … an endless conversation…  

a group of people who are against politics  … they don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize  restraints. They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.  This antipolitics tendency has had a wretched effect on our democracy.

Trump is the culmination of the trends we have been seeing for the last thirty years. … Trump represents the path the founders rejected. … Trump’s supporters … are looking for a superhero.

Politics is in retreat and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. The answer to Trump is politics.”

… compare Donald Trump’s speaking patterns to a Robin Williams monologue, but with insults instead of jokes.”

“…the decline in social trust has correlated to an epidemic of lonliness.

The rise of distrust has corroded intimacy.

…fear is the great enemy of intimacy.”

“if you didn’t throw yourself in some arduous way at the big questions of your moment, you’d live a meager life, and would have to live and die with that awful knowledge.” reviewing Anthony Kronman book.

“Moral capital is the set of shared habits, norms, institutions and values that make common life possible. … people in decent societies agree on a million informal restraints … that girdle selfishness and steer us toward reconciliation. … This year Trump is dismantling those restraints one by one.

“Today, when you hear affluent people express worry, it’s usually related to the fear of missing out, and the dizziness of freedom. The affluent often feel besieged by busyness and plagued by a daily excess of choices. At the same time, there is a pervasive cosmic unease, the anxiety that they don’t quite understand the meaning of life…”

…people who experience social exclusion have a tendency to slide toward superstitious and conspiratorial thinking. …

Anxiety changes people.”

“Bigots turn multidimensional human beings into one-dimensional creatures. …A single identity walls off empathy and the imagination.. … People’s classifications now shape how they see the world.”

“Their lives weren’t so much shaped by decisions as by rapture. They were held rapt by each other’s minds. … They succeeded not because they were master decision-makers but because of their capacity for zealous engagement. … We don’t decide about life; we’re captured by life. …  maybe we should look less at decision-making and more at curiosity.”

on Kahneman and Tversky

“The Trump project…. asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs.”

Lionel Trilling’s old distinction, sincerity is what you shoot for in a trusting society. You try to live honestly and straightforwardly into your social roles and relationships. Authenticity is what you shoot for in a distrustful society. You try to liberate your own personality by rebelling against the world around you, by aggressively fighting against the society you find so vicious and corrupt.

“If you give them an opening, you’re just going to give them room to destroy the decent etiquette of society. Civility is not a suicide pact…defeat a dark passion and replace it with a better passion….They are lonely and sad, their fanaticism emerging from wounded pride, a feeling of not being seen. ..90 percent of the time the next email is totally transformed. The brutal mask drops and the human being instantly emerges.”

“[On line] technologies are extremely useful for the tasks and pleasures that require shallower forms of consciousness, but they often crowd out and destroy the deeper forms of consciousness people need to thrive….Online is a place for human contact but not intimacy. Online is a place for information but not reflection.”

“…Facebook and ther social media companies are feeding this epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.”

“…nations and people have to grow a soul big enough to enclose the traumas that haunt them.”

“No wonder our society is fragmenting. We’ve taken the lies of hyper-individualism and we’ve made them the unspoken assumputions that govern how we live.”

“Vulnerability is the only means we have to build relationships, and relationships are the only means we have to experience joy.”

“plague rules…embrace the uncertainty…we just can’tknow…undergoing deeper reflections…”

“The tension between good and plenty, God and mammon, became the central tension in American life, propelling ferocious energies and explaining why the U.S. is at once so religious and so materialist.

Americans are moral materialists; spiritualists working on matter.”

            “…the more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to prostelytize in favor of them.”

“…they regard candidates the way adolescents regard parents: if they are not perfect then they must be irredeemable.”

Some people suffer from Motivated Blindness; they don’t see what is not in their interest to see. Some people don’t look at the things that make them uncomfortable….people are really good at self-deception.”

” Grover Norquist’s tax pledge isn’t really about public policy; it’s a chastity belt Republican politicians wear to show that they haven’t been defiled by the Washington culture.”

“Optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.”

“[There is] a crisis of legitimacy. The game is rigged. Social trust shrivels. Effort is no longer worth it.”

“Scientists are leaping in where philosophy and theology have atrophied – they’re drilling down into an explanation of what man is.”

 ( consilience,  Harris)

“[Trump] has no experience being accountable to anybody. …His statements should probably be treated less like policy declarations and more like Snapchat. They exist to win attention at the moment, but then they disappear.”

“American culture is overobsessed with personal freedom…people are unhappy and spiritually stunted.”

            David Brooks on Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

“…Reagan’s dominant emotional note was optimism. Trump’s is fear.”

“The deal [the GOP] struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul. …the Trump administration … is an ethnic nationalist administration.

… the aroma of bigotry infuses the whole operation….tainted by cruelty.”

“… Trump is ripe to be played.”

“We badly want to understand Trump, to grasp him,” David Roberts writes in Vox. “It might give us some sense of control, or at least an ability to predict what he will do next. But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there is no there there?”

“… the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence.”

“… movements fueled by alienation are bound to fail. …alienation breeds a distrust that corrodes any collective effort. …[there] is no reason for lazy cynicism or self-righteous despair.”

“Trump is … plagued with a self-destructive form of selfishness. He is consumed by a hunger for affirmation, but, demented by his own obsessions, he can’t think more than one step ahead….

the Trump administration will probably not be brought down by outside forces. It will be incapacitated from within, by the bile, rage and back- stabbing that are already at record levels in the White House staff, by the dueling betrayals of the intimates Trump abuses so wretchedly….The Trump death march will be slow, grinding and ugly.”

“… voters may votre against their economic interests, but they vote for their emotional interests…[although] big government would provide short-term assistance,…it would be a long-term poison to the values which are at the core of prosperity.”

“Trump is a man who has been progressively hollowed out  by the acid of his own self-regard.”

“Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness…Freedom without connection becomes alienation.”

“…our political conflict is primarily a rich, white civil war. It’s between privileged progressives and privileged conservatives….

… ideas really do drive history. Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives organize around coherent philosophical narratives. These narratives aren’t visions of a just society. They are narratives of menace — about who needs to be exorcised from society….

There’s little evidence of individual thought, just cult conformity. The current situation really does begin to look like the religious wars that ripped through Europe after the invention of the printing press, except that our religions now wear pagan political garb.

The good news is that once you get outside these two elite groups you find a lot more independent thinking and flexibility. This is not a 50-50 nation. It only appears that way when disenchanted voters are forced to choose between the two extreme cults.”

moral corrosion  morally numb  conscience Steinbeck in East of Eden  evil

paraphrasing Rauch: ‘…emotional polarization is on the rise. We don’t necessarily disagree more. We perceive our opponents to be more menacing. We see more fearfully.’

‘Trump .. went from idol to scapegoat in an instant.’ vision of 2020 election.

on Wisdom:

“Wisdom is different from knowledge…Wise people don’t tell us what to do, they start by witnessing our story…They … understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth…

People only change after they’ve felt understood…

It is this skillful, patient process of walking people to their own conclusions that feels like wisdom.”

“…allow theocracy to shrivel under the weight of its own flaws.”

“This is what it feels like to live in a society that is dissolving from the bottom up as much as from the top down.”

“Planting the seeds is like establishing a democracy…democracy is not natural…It takes a lot of cultivation…”

Reality has changed, but my mental frameworks just sit there. Worse, they prevent me from even seeing the change that is already underway — what the experts call “conceptual blindness.” I’m trying to address one period’s problems through the last period’s frameworks….

I saw but I didn’t see…the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.

“We’re mimetic creatures…”

As people without a college degree have flocked to the G.O.P., people with one have flocked to the Democrats.

on education: “In normal school, the whole class studies a subject for a fixed period, then there’s a test that serves as an autopsy on how well the students learned.”

“I sometimes feel I’m in a daily struggle not to become a shallower version of myself. The first driver of shallowization is technology, the way it shrinks attention span, fills the day with tempting distractions. The second driver is the politicization of everything. ..

So I’m trying to take countermeasures. I flee to the arts…

it’s more accurate to say that a piece of art has quieted the self-conscious ego voice that is normally yapping away within…”

“For many people, trauma became their source of identity. People began defining themselves by the way they had been hurt…

Maturity, now as ever, is understanding that you’re not the center of the universe. The world isn’t a giant story about me.

Maturity in this alternative ethos is achieved by getting out of your own selfish point of view and developing the ability to absorb, understand and inhabit the views of others.

“aggressive amoralism…”

“People are dying to tell you their stories. Very often, no one has ever asked about them….

My view of wisdom has changed over the years…”

D.E.I. curriculum: Diversity Equity Inclusion

Students have gotten the message that they are not on campus to learn; they are there to express their certainties and to advance a rigid ideological formula.

…in a liberal society we beat bad ideas with better ideas….pluralism…

demonize, demean and divide?

Populism thrives on a zero-sum mind-set.

“… there is something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself… There is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect. Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism.… Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America, and maybe the world, shaking everything loose.… But in chaos, there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trump and political, economic and psychological assault.”

“… another crisis of authority. Our system has not managed to keep up with the average inequalities of the information age – especially between the college educated and the less educated.”

:…the organizing principle of Donald Trump’s life [may be] a third rate, schoolboy version of magnanimity…Trump

practices “patrimonialism.

” He acts as if he is the nation’s all-powerful father . The

state is an extended household. He treats government as his own personal

property, his own family business. Everything revolves around him.

All magnanimous men have large and healthy egos, but Trump’s narcissism is the

elephantiasis of egotism.

“… Life is at its highest when passion takes us far beyond whatever evolution requires, when we’re committed to something beyond any utilitarian logic.”

Henry Moore quote.

“…Donald Trump’s tariff policy…Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book,

decades of being impervious to evidence.”

Trumpism – make the earth a playground for ruthless men…Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit —

learning, compassion, scientific wonder , the pursuit of justice…

Trump is about power . The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power…

If you create an organization in which everybody has to flatter the ruling narcissist, then stupidity will be the result.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies…Trumpism is a giant effort to narrow the circle of concern to people just like us.

…Deneen [Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009] and Vance stain the memory of the men who fought in that war, especially the men who fought to preserve the Union. Perhaps they are simply extrapolating from their own natures, rather than acknowledging that there are people who put ideals over self.

America … was founded to embody and spread the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.

If America is an idea, then Black and brown people from all over the world can become Americans by coming here and believing that idea. If America is an idea, then Americans have a responsibility to promote democracy. We can’t betray democratic Ukraine in order to kowtow to a dictator like Vladimir Putin. If America is an idea, we have to care about human dignity and human rights. 

Cultural elitism is more oppressive than economic elitism… The populist era is driven by social resentment, more than economic scarcity… Every society has a recognition order, a diffuse system for out attention and respect.”

“…sometimes it’s more important to defeat a

narrative than to defeat an army… our enemies are truly our enemies. In the 1930s a great portion of the British establishment traipsed over to Germany and returned claiming that Hitler was a decent enough chap you could do business with. They simply could not acknowledge to themselves the evil inherent in that man, even though he declared it openly in speeches and writings.

from Mixed Motives oped:

…the dragon of ambition…

The struggle between gift love and need love. In his book “The Four Loves,” C.S. Lewis observes that some of our loves emerge from a fullness and some emerge from a void. 

Gift love is essentially delighted with the world; need love is voracious, insatiable and laced with a fear of failure. 

The struggle between excellence and superiority. Some people’s longings are noncomparative. If they are good at something, that satisfaction is its own reward. Other people’s longings are primarily competitive. It’s not enough for them to be good; they need to be better than. They need to come out on top of someone else.

Miroslav Volf writes in “The Cost of Ambition,” “Frustrated striving for superiority often seeks relief in the form of aggressive self-deception in which the superior is cast as morally deficient, arrogant and oppressive.” It’s not enough that I be built up; others must be torn down.

we in the West have aggressively embraced values that when taken to excess

are poisonous to our well-being.

Let’s be clear about what’s happened here: greed. Americans have become so obsessed

with economic success that we’ve neglected the social and moral conditions that undergird human flourishing.

We all need energy sources to power us through life, and love is the most powerful energy source known to humans.

Love is a motivational state. It could be love for a person, a place, a craft, an idea or the divine, but something outside the self has touched something deep inside the self and set off a nuclear reaction. You want to learn everything you can about the thing you love. (They say love is blind, but love is the opposite of blind.) You want to care for and serve the thing you love. Your love is propelling you this way or that. You want communion with the thing you love.

It is one of the weird paradoxes of life that the constraints you choose are the ones that set you free.

A great wave of savagery has been released, foreign and domestic…

Re: Niehbuhr: he said

“An ideal democratic order seeks unity within the conditions of freedom; and maintains freedom within the framework of order.”

The Niebuhr book I quoted from above is called “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.”

The children of darkness, in his telling, are the moral cynics who believe life is all about

power. The children of light are those driven by ideals to build a just civilization.

while the children of light are admirable but naïve about entrenched human selfishness:

“The children of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are

wise, though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest. The children of light

are virtuous because they have some conception of a higher law than their own will. They

are usually foolish because they do not know the power of self-will.”

The children of darkness have advantages in their struggle against the children of light.

They know what they want and don’t have to worry about nuance. It’s easier to destroy a

social order than to build one. They capitalize on an elemental human reality: Humans

fear death and their own insignificance. They compensate for their fears of insignificance

by asserting their pride, by seeking power and control, if only vicariously through some

strongman.

“The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the

serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of light must be armed with the

wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice.”

Niebuhr called, in another work, “a sublime madness in the soul” — the kind of

madness that arises from a fervent commitment to liberal ideas and institutions that

constitute the decent drapery of a civilized life… “Nothing but such madness will do battle

with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places,’” end re: Niehbuhr

end Brooks, David

Brooks, Michael:

”Scientists trample our taboos into the dust and lead us beyond the borders of the forbidden.”

Brooks, Rosa:

“… we are no longer living in a time of normal politics. Trump and Bannon have told us as much.

Broome, Brian:

“Amid the opioid epidemic, white means victim, black means addict

America’s social hierarchies rule everything even the opioid epidemic. You don’t have to dig deep to find the hypocrisy and insult to people of color…”

Brotherton, J:

”My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants.”

Brous, Sharon:

“Err on the side of presence…

One of the great casualties of tribalism is curiosity.”

Browder, Bill:

“And so [Putin] became the richest man in the world in that moment.”

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath

What saved me was Twitter…. Russians to act the way they do. Their society is so harsh and unforgiving that in order to get through life, most people are either getting screwed or screwing someone else—and often both. …There are few rewards for doing what is right.

FARA…Foreign Agents Registration Act, which says that anyone trying to influence US policy on behalf of a foreign government is legally required to register with the Department of Justice. FARA is a criminal statute.

…almost everyone behaves rationally. If someone does something that appears irrational,

 it just means you don’t have all the information.

…people, along with many others, lubricate the machine that allows Putin and his cronies to get away with their crimes.

end Browder

Brown, Alton:

“Friends don’t eat friends.” re octopus

Brown, Charlie

“You know how I always dread the whole year? Well, I’ve developed a new philosophy… this time I’m only going to dread one day at a time.”

Brown, Dan:

“Religion has the power to make you think nothing is random.”

“Religion: Because thinking is hard.”

“In the Beginning, Man Created God.”

Brown, Dee:

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Joseph replied that the Nez Percés did not want the white man’s schools. “Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked.

“They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered. “Do you not want churches?” “No, we do not want churches.” “Why do you not want churches?” “They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph said.

“We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.”

Brown, Forrest (Long Now):

“When we are bound in a system of reciprocity, not return on investment, we will be closer to being the kind of ancestors future people need.”

Brown, Lester:

Plan B: “The economy is part of the environment. The economy must be designed so that it is compatible with the ecosystem of which it is a part.”

“Accounting systems that do not tell the truth can be costly. …Economic prosperity is achieved in part by running up ecological deficits, costs that do not show up on the books, but costs that someone will eventually pay.”

Brown, Phil:

“We cannot fight the fire by feeding the flames.”  

letter to SL Tribune in regards to Legacy Highway

Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co.:

memo, 1969: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the public mind.”

Brown, Rita May:

“Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people came from and where they are going.”

Brown, Sherrod:

“How in the world can these senators walk around here upright when they have no backbone?…

 Fear has a way of bending us…

Brown, Wendy:

Walled States…2010:
“When do the new walls become like the confining walls of a prison, rather than the comforting walls of a house? When does a fortress become a penitentiary?…

Walls built around political entities cannot block out without shutting in, cannot secure without making securitization a way of life, cannot define an external ‘they’ without producing a reactionary ‘we’, even as they also undermine the basis of that distinction…

…walls are potent organizers of human psychic landscapes…

Nation-state walls are modern-day temples housing the ghost of political sovereignty….

They produce not the future of an illusion , but the illusion of a future aligned with an idealized past….[via Freud:] Must not the assumptions that determine our political regulations be called illusions as well?’.”

Machiavelli: ‘Fortresses are generally much more harmful than useful.’

Shimon Peres: ‘We need soft borders, not rigid impermeable ones…At the threshold of the twenty-first century, we do not need to reinforce sovereignty.’

Browne, Ivor:

Music and Madness, memoir, 2008:

Accusation is so often confusion.

‘Double blind’ communication between members in a disturbed family …can be found in virtually any form of psychiatric disorder where the family is ‘enmeshed’ and has failed to free the offspring to leave and lead a separate life.

ketamine…LSD…psilocybin…mescaline

Teilard de Chardin, Prigogine, thermodynamics, …

Prigogine: ‘Dissipative structures are islands of order in a sea of disorder…

Today, the world we see outside in the world we see within are converging. This conversion of two worlds is perhaps one of the important cultural events of our age. … Our vision of nature is undergoing a radical change towards the multiple, the temporal and the complex.’

Abraham Lincoln: ‘we may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood…

it has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is  destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.’

…corporate personhood…

Rutherford Hayes: ‘This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations.’

Esalen…Stanislaw Grof…holotropic therapy…

Evidence  Biased Medicine…

…a closed delusional system…

… we are always involved with the ‘now’; the ‘frozen present’, what is stored in our memories, in our bodies, our attitudes and behaviour…

Rupert Sheldrake …morphic fields…

Breuer, Freud, Janet…

… when a formed memory of this kind is retrieved, it is reassembled from a number of inputs all over the brain, from various times in the past, and therefore is essentially a new creation. It is therefore quite unreliable as a factual record of the past.

… the activation of frozen experience is of great significance…

NDE…near-death experience…

…psychotherapy… helping them to reach adult independence in the first place…

they have failed to reach maturity at all.

… we actually hallucinate the world around us.

…when someone becomes psychotic? Here there appears to be a failure to differentiate mental activity that is initiated by a sensory stimulus from outside from that which originates from our own thoughts internally.

… the very problem that all of us face in the process of development: to learn to recognize what originates within us from that which is initiated from outside

… a therapeutic intervention I would propose is to help them to undertake the work of separation from their family of origin, in which many of them are trapped, including therapy for the family where appropriate, thus to enable them to move from a child to an adult position, from dependence to a reasonable level of independence.

The worst instances of institutionalization I have come across have been persons incarcerated within their own families…

…what institutionalization actually is – a state of dependency, not being in charge of one’s own life and destiny, it is clear that in this state everything is controlled and managed by others. It is in essence a state of learned helplessness.

Ram Chandra: ‘Philosophy is a subject, not based on reason but based on intuition. It starts not from doubt, as most of the Western philosophers hold, but from wonder.’

Heart: ANF…atrial natriuretic factor.

Hindu tradition…

telepathic ability…

The more the ego is cleared out, the more sensitive you become…

I now see psychotherapy more and more as rough work to remove gross impressions. This prepares the way for a subtler cleaning, and for further spiritual development.

In the end, perhaps the most beautiful music of all is the ‘music of silence’.

The Writings of Ivor Browne: Steps Along the Road: The Evolution of a Slow Learner

Fintan O’Toole, Foreword:

his ideas took him from the centre to the margins of his profession.

…he combines calm rationality with a fearless questioning of received wisdom

about how humanity works and what happens when it doesn’t.

‘the more society tries to get rid of something which is a part of itself and

sweep it under the carpet, the more that problem will grow.’

philosopher Philip Pettit has defined freedom as ‘non-domination’,

 the state of not being subject to the arbitrary will of another.

…the heart of Browne’s approach to psychiatry is the idea of arrested development,

the belief that illness arises ‘when the natural drive to mature, to become independent and self-directing, is frustrated’.

mental health–‘a state of independence’–we will have to make it for ourselves.

Last Chapter 41 Psychotherapy: What is it?

he began to realize that there are two forms of thinking–‘directed’ thinking and ‘fantasy’ thinking,

one verbal and logical, the other passive, associative and imagistic;

the former characteristic of ‘science’ and the latter of ‘mythology’. ‘Directed’.

when directed thinking was put aside fantasy thinking came to light.

Joshua Bierer: ‘I believe there is no “cure” without change, there is no change without incentive,

there is no incentive without meaning, the new meaning of life has to be experienced, and

there is no experience unless patients are helped into a position where they can do things for themselves and

carry the responsibility for their own mistakes.’

Over and over again I find that below the level of all the problems that life throws up,

there is the question of meaning: ‘Why am I here? Is there any purpose to all this struggle?’,

end Browne, Ivor

Browne, Jackson:

“There’s a shadow on the faces /

Of the men who fan the flames /

Of the wars that are fought in places /

Where we can’t even say the names”.

Browning, Diminique:

“Forget the Anthropocene. We are in the Obscene Era.”

Browning, Robert:

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”

Browder, Bill:

“What saved me is Twitter.”

“This is a defining moment in our history. We can either allow savagery to rule the  world, or use the tools we’ve created to maintain civilization and stability.

Western powers must impose Magnitsky sanctions on the Saudi officials who carried out and authorized this atrocity [Khashoggi] – even if the buck stops at the very top.”

“There is no endgame. This is just [Putin] staying in power.

There is no reasonable way for this thing to end. There’s only an unreasonable way.

Continuing to do business in Russia after this invasion is the equivalent of continuing to do business in Nazi Germany when Hitler started persecuting the Jews. It’s the same thing.”

Brower, David:

“The secret to the world’s problems is to turn around and take a step forward.”

Brown, Bertram:

“Exercising power is the most effective short-range antidepressant  in the world…”

Brown, Brene:

“Shame – fear of disconnection..sense of worthiness..

courage to be imperfect..

embrave vulnerability..we numb vulnerability..

make uncertainty certain..courage is teachable..

boundaries..

stories are data with a soul>”

see Ted Talk: The power of vulnerability..”

— “When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending.”

via book reviewer Diane Donovan

Brown, Dan:

            “The point of the novel is this: Prior to 2,000 years ago we lived in a world of gods and goddesses. Today we live in a world solely of gods. Women in most cultures have been stripped of their spiritual power by our male-dominated philosophies and absolutism with a long history of violence and bloodshed.” from Cracking the da V Code film, 2004, ML.

“If I’m not at my desk by 4 AM, I feel like I’m missing my most productive hours. In addition to starting early, I keep an antique hour glass on my desk and every hour break briefly to do pushups, sit-ups, and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood (and ideas) flowing.” on writing

from a newspaper review:  ‘It is terribly written, its characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is excruciating in places and, a bit like a computer manual, everything is overstated and repeated — but it is impossible to put the bloody thing down.’

from Cracking the da V Code film:

‘He [Peter] hates all my sex’ Mary Magdalen (Last Supper discussion)

“Revelation replaced investigation…

To permit ignorance is to empower it…

Not until we purge our species of superstitious thinking can we embrace all that our minds have to offer…

Kirsch in Origins.

Missa Charles Darwin

see Brown’s Churchill quotes…

and Blake quotes: evil, consumed,

end Brown, Dan

Brown, Fred:

There is nothing constructive or creative you can do with a gun. You can’t build a house with it, you can’t fix your car with it. Guns have only one function and that is killing. If you are not going to kill someone you don’t need a gun. If you are going to kill someone, you should be locked up.

Brown, Jerry:

”If raising taxes is a nonstarter in this environment, change the environment.”

Brown, Lester R:

“In the 1940s the challenge was to save the democratic way of life. Today the stakes are far higher. It is civilization itself that is hanging in the balance.”

Brown, Peter G:

“…all persons are created equal … -benefitting from the earth while leaving it intact for the future – defines the relation of those people to the world, that those who lead hold a sacred trust, and that the only way that that trust can be earned is through the development and preservation of free men and women, capable of governing themselves, not through ‘free’ markets.”        

Brown, Thomas Kingsley:

“Psychoactivity is part of the healing – it’s part of the recovery.”

Horizons 2017 video ibogaine

Brown, Tina:

“During thousands of years of civilization, women have evolved to deal with the intractable perplexities of life and find means of peaceful coexistence where men have traditionally found roads to conflict.”

Brown, Wendy:

“…the tendency to throw up walls is a classic symptom of a nation state’s looming impotence in the face of globalization – a waning sovereignty.”

Brown-Worsham, Sasha:

“…hell hath no fury like a teenage girl who is awake and aware and done with your bullshit.”

Bruce, Lenny:

“Today’s comedian has a cross to bear that he built himself. A comedian of the older generation did an ‘act’ and he told the audience, ‘This is my act.’ Today’s comic is not doing an act. The audience assumes he’s telling the truth.”

via Chris Kelly NYT

“…liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.”

via Dannagal G. Young

Brueggman, Walter:

“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.”

Bruenig, Elizabeth:

“Capitalism is an ideology that is far more encompassing than it admits, and one that turns every relationship into a calculable exchange. Bodies, time, energy, creativity, love — all become commodities to be priced and sold. Alienation reigns. There is no room for sustained contemplation and little interest in public morality; everything collapses down to the level of the atomized individual.”

“What is bad faith? It’s a term coined by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that means, in the helpful gloss of George Mason University anthropologist Roger Lancaster, when you tell a lie and you start to believe it, then forget it was a lie.”

Brundtland Commission:

“Sustainability: Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Bruneau, Emile:

“When considering an enemy, the mind generates an empathy gap. It mutes the empathy signal, and that muting prevents us from putting ourselves in the perceived enemy’s shoes.”

Brunetiere, Ferinand:

 “intellectual…the pretension of raising writers , scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of supermen…[who] treat our generals as idiots, our social institutions as absurd and our institutions as unhealthy.”

1898, via Chomsky.

Bruni, Frank:

“…growth is the one putative solution that asks nothing of us: no trade-offs, no sacrifices. It perpetuates the seductive and irresponsible illusion that we can get our house in fiscal order without any terrible inconvenience after all.”

…a master class in wishful thinking.”

…politicians sell us low-tax, no-pain fantasies. They traffic in vagueness and treat us like toddlers.”

“…scalping has come out of the closet, louder and prouder in an age of unapologetic elitism.”

“Count to ten before you speak. …slowing things down often classes them up. …people are more likely to be moved by information that challenges their prejudices if they’re prevented from responding to it straightaway and it has time to sink in, to steep.”

“”How a country so rightly anxious about the days ahead stays fixed in the days behind is the great paradox…”

“Exceptionalism doesn’t mean picking and choosing when to be big and when to be small.”

“…that’s actually his secret. That’s his means of survival: the warp speed and whirl of it all. He forces you to process and react to so many different outrages at such a dizzying velocity that no one of them has the staying power that it ought to or gets the scrutiny it deserves….

[it’s ] orchestrated chaos …

The world he genuinely cares about ends at the tip of his nose….

Each fresh Trump astonishment overrides an old one, as if it were a new file on a hard drive that has reached storage capacity. And the accumulation of astonishments lowers the bar for what’s expected of him and turns all the astonishments into a blur.”

“Words, like monuments, matter. They nudge. They shape. That’s true when they elevate what shouldn’t be elevated, encouraging complacency or evil, and that’s just as true when they show us a better way and help us get there.”

“Trump stares into every mirror he passes.”

“America right now … is a country surrendering to a new identity and era, in which optimism is quaint and the frontier anything but endless….

There’s a feeling of helplessness…

Conventional wisdom has seldom been so useless…

They’re hungry for hope…

…this isn’t just about the economy. It’s about fear. It’s about impotence.”

“I never would have had the strength, drive or fearlessness to take such a risk if I hadn’t been rejected so intensely before. There’s a beauty to that kind of rejection, because it allows you to find the strength within.”

            Jenna via Frank Bruni

“…this portrait of life as a sadistic lottery and poverty as a hopeless torture chamber has resonance, which means it also has merit. That’s a bullet to the soul.”  on the Squid Game.

“We are not teenagers. We are lifeless bodies in a system which breeds competition, hatred, and discourages teamwork and genuine learning.”

            Carolyn Walworth via Frank Bruni

“…there’s a climate in the country…a mood of overarching uncertainty and profound anxiety…pessimistic about the country’s future – and their own.”

“…erudition in the age of cyberspace: You surf until you reach the conclusion you’re after…

the Internet … is not just a magnet for the curious. It’s a sinkhole for the gullible.”

“…no candidate wears a mask as thick as Ted Cruz’s. …his mother … majored in mathematics…the disparities between his branding and his reality.”

“Prominent men on the edge of obsolescence have never acted so wounded, so angry, so desperate. …

Over so many of Clinton’s travails hangs a cloud of testosterone.”

“For Trump, bragging is like breathing: continuous, spontaneous. …

And when his audience is a group of people, like us, who haven’t clapped

the way he’d like? He sands down his edges. Modulates his voice. Bends.

… Will he tilt in whatever direction, and toward whichever constituency, is the surest source of applause? Is our best hope for the best Trump to be so fantastically adulatory when he’s reasonable that he’s motivated to stay on that course, lest the adulation wane?

There was a lesson here about his desire to be approved of and his hunger

to be loved. There was another about the shockingly unformed, pliable nature

of the clay that is our 70 year old presidentelect.

… the most influential voice in Trumplandia is the last one he happened to listen to.”

“I see [Trump] in a highchair, keeping his audience guessing about just how much ice cream he’ll fling against the wall.”

“…social media…can make some kind of immediate response seem almost compulsory… It’s a midwife to bad judgment and a narcissism multiplier, with its promise of likes and shares.”

“What an education: ‘We have to be comfortable in ambiguity,’Jack Isenberg, Senior

“Graham is special. He really is. I can’t think of another Republican whose journey from anti-Trump outrage to pro-Trump obsequiousness was quite so illogical or half as sad, and his conduct during the war over Kavanaugh completed it. For the president he fought overtime, he fought nasty and he fought without nuance.

In so doing, he distilled our rotten politics — its transactional nature, its tribal fury, its hysterical pitch — as neatly as anybody in the current Congress does.”

“…he could scream his resentments in a theater that did the opposite of repudiating them. It echoed them back. It validated and cultivated them. It took something dark and colored it darker still.”

“[Republicans have traded] the elixer of hope for the toxins of fear.”

“…sometimes a hashtag distills a bottomless sea of disgust into a few acid droplets.”

“Hate is the thing with tentacles. It holds people tight and refuses to let go.”

on Pompeo:

“…the teeming crowd of sellouts and suck-ups who eagerly traded principle for position…They must have broken necks from their moral whiplash…proof that the lure of power can overwhelm any call to conscience…Trump administration diaspora…moral surrender…

Better to be a wretched part of history that no part at all.”

“This isn’t a re-election campaign. It’s a tape loop.”

“Exceptionalism doesn’t mean picking and choosing when to be big and when to be small.”

“He’s editing out the core of his identity. He’s muffling his soul.”

            Frank Bruni on Mitt Romney

“…that’s actually his secret. That’s his means of survival: the warp speed and whirl of it all. He forces you to process and react to so many different outrages at such a dizzying velocity that no one of them has the staying power that it ought to or gets the scrutiny it deserves….

[it’s ] orchestrated chaos …

The world he genuinely cares about ends at the tip of his nose….

Each fresh Trump astonishment overrides an old one, as if it were a new file on a hard drive that has reached storage capacity. And the accumulation of astonishments lowers the bar for what’s expected of him and turns all the astonishments into a blur.”

“Words, like monuments, matter. They nudge. They shape. That’s true when they elevate what shouldn’t be elevated, encouraging complacency or evil, and that’s just as true when they show us a better way and help us get there.”

“Trump…only as big as his ability to make his underlings look small.”

“…the great advantage of the truly immoral: They’re liberated from any tug of conscience.”

“Americans have long turned to firearms as both a last (if not first) resort for addressing uncertainty, precarity and insecurity in a country that largely lacks a collective social safety net.”

“…see more clearly…[seeing the pain of others]. the beauty of dusk…

“…the Republican Party … now confuses

outrageousness with intrepidness,

offensiveness with independence,

provocation with cunning and

puerility with defiance…”

“… in the DNA of every Democrat lurks the temptation to overthink and over complicate things… Earthiness… hardly a proxy for worthiness.  Encourage random acts of arithmetic… Call this by its name: sadism….wonder if Americans are comfortable with such cruelty.”

“I joke to cope. But this pageant of peculiarity isn’t a laughing matter. It reflects Trump’s confusion of nonconformity with boldness.” 

end Bruni, Frank

Bruno, James:

“Media titan Alfred Hugenberg, who owned half of Germany’s newspapers, gave Hitler positive news coverage in his conservative-friendly publications. He also connected Hitler with wealthy industrialists and financiers who then helped fund the Nazi Party, key to its eventual ascendance to power….

In Germany, “the typical Nazi voter was a middle-class, self-employed Protestant who lived on a farm or in a small community,” according to sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset.

Trump-friendly media outlets — especially Fox News and Breitbart — reenact the role that media mogul Hugenberg played in boosting Hitler. …

sometimes I throw my hands up and recall a quote from a war refugee in the movie Casablanca: “The devil has the people by the throat.”

Bryan, Richard:

“…finance and the state are hand in hand, but they’re arm-wrestling for control.” via KSRobinson

Bryan, William Jennings:

“The first thing to understand is the difference between the natural person and the ficticious person called a corporation. They differ in the purpose for which they are created, in the strength which they possess, and in the restraints under which they act.

…Man acts under the restraints of conscience…A corporation has no soul and cares nothing about the hereafter…”

“…the avenging wrath of an indignant people.”

Bryson, Bill:

”…we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.”

Bryson, Lyman:

“The method of freedom is the method of science.”

Brzezenski, Zbigniew:

“History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.”

 “…a totalitarian dictatorship is characterized by an ideology, a single party led by one person, a terroristic police, government control of all communications, a weapons monopoly and a centrally controlled economy.”

Buberl, Thomas:

“…not sustainable and therefore also not insurable.”

Buchan, John:

“I was brought up in times when one was not ashamed to be happy, and I have never learned the art of discontent. It seems to me that those who loudly proclaim their disenchantment with life have never been really enchanted by it.”

Buchanan, James M.:

“Precepts for living together are not going to be handed down from on high. Men must

use their own intelligence in imposing order on chaos, intelligence not in scientific

problem-solving but in the more difficult sense of finding and maintaining agreement

among themselves. Anarchy is ideal for ideal men; passionate men must be

reasonable. Like so many men have done before me, I examine the bases for a

society of men and women who want to be free but who recognize the inherent limits

that social interdependence places on them. Individual liberty cannot be unbounded,

but the same forces which make some limits necessary may, if allowed to operate,

restrict the range of human freedom far below that which is sustainable.”

Buchanan, Mark:

in Ubiquity.”Our human longing for explanation may be terribly misplaced, and doomed always to go unsatisfied.”

Buchheit, Paul:

 “… increased wealth causes people to turn inward, to believe in their own ‘superior’ traits,and to care less about the feelings and needs of others.

upper-class individuals tend to be narcissistic, with a clear sense of entitlement…

money pushes people further to the right, making them less egalitarian, less willing to provide broad educational opportunities to all members of society…”

Disposable Americans, 2017.

Buchner, Georg:

via Werner Herzhog – spoken by Kinski: “Every human being is an abyss, you get vertigo looking into it.”

Bucinca, Zana:

“…’cognitive forcing’ may lead AI users to perform better, but will be less popular. People do not like to be pushed to engage.”

Buck, Holly:

“Hydrogen – call it the little molecule that can do it all.”

Buck, Pearl S:

“The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.” Nobel lecture.

Buckley, Christopher:

via Ron Charles’ review: ‘Christopher Buckley is not angry about Donald Trump. He sounds instead as delighted as a fly discovering the world’s largest pile of manure.’

“Any person finding any resemblance between themselves and persons depicted herein should probably be ashamed.”

Buckley, Jamie:

“Me and a light-bodied chilled red [wine] are currently dating and in a very serious relationship.”

Buckley, Julia:

Heal Me memoir.

“Chronic pain isn’t just pain that doesn’t stop. It puts your entire body in a chrysalis and morphs you into a monster.”

Buckley, Jr., William F.:

“…stands athwart history, yelling stop.” National Review’s mission statement.

Can Americans see “the irrelevance of prideful exercises, suitable rather to the peacock than to the lion, to assert our national masculinity.”

Buckman, Robert:

“If the limbic system is activated…the person will have an experience of the…divine.

God is literally a state of mind.  Some of us are highly predisposed to religious experience and some are not. It is possible to see both superstitions and religion as manifestations of the same animistic belief system.

“The God of Abraham, the protector and guide of a tribe of nomads wandering along the Sinai peninsula.

…the concept of God started out as a repository for the things we didn’t understand.

Budda:

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

The keys to heaven also open the gates of hell.

            Buddhist koan

Buffett, Howard Warren:

“We’re looking at the long-term horizon and investments that are doing more than avoiding bad, but are actually trying to improve the world. It’s about taking the potential for capitalism to the next level.”

grandson

Buffett, Jimmy:

“My gummy just kicked in.”

Margaritaville, Dowd

Buffett, Peter:

“[I’m] not really calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism.”

I know a whole lot more bankers than consumers, but they’re [consumers] the ones that need the help.”           

Buffett, Warren:

“Remember that the stock market is manic-depressive.”

 “…derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction. Wealth amounts to a giant pile of claim checks on the world’s resources.”

“Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise. Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy.”

“There’s class warfare, all right, but’s it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

“…financial weapons of mass destruction.”

“I’ve reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the portfolio after my death – abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term ‘thinking outside the box’.”

“It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.

“…approval is often counter-productive because it sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to new facts or a re-examination of conclusions formed earlier.”

“Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing. “

end Buffett, Warren

Buffy St. Marie:

“Sometimes you have to leave a space in your life for life to happen.”

Bugliarello, George:

“The purpose of the humanities is to understand and civilize man; that of science is to understand nature…The arts complement the humanities by being sensory inspirers of reflections and emotions.”2001

Bugliosi, Vincent:

“The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, misunderstandibng, or slight discrepancy to defeat 20 pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a proveable nut, as being far more credible than 10 normal witnesses on the other side; treats rumors, even questions, as the equivakent of proof; leaps from the most miniscule of discoveries to the grandest of conclusionsand insists …that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained.”

Bukovsky, Vladimir:

Judgment in Moscow, 1996

 a warning to Yeltsin’s team: “Look, it’s like a wounded animal: If you don’t finish it off, it will attack you.”

Bulatov, Erik:

“To draw without permission — that was where our freedom lay,”

Bullough, Oliver:

via 60 Minutes Londongrad story:

“This is London’s core industry. This is what we do – Transforming thugs into aristocrats – 24 hours a day.”

“Offshore is an idea: a parallel legal system for corporations, kleptocrats, celebrities or anyone else who can afford it. Offshore gives

the wealthy a way to avoid taxes and regulations and to obscure their identities, thus undermining the ability of governments to keep them in check. “

Bunch III, Lonnie G.:

History often teaches us to embrace ambiguity, to understand there aren’t simple answers to complex questions…The challenge is to use history to help the public feel comfortable with nuance and complexity.

…use the statues as teachable moments…

about finding a more accurate history…

museums have a social justice role to play…

I want museums to be a place that gives the public not just what it wants, but what it needs.”

“One can tell a great deal about a country by what it chooses to remember. One can tell even more by what a nation chooses to forget…

Bunting, Eve:

“I think we have to try somehow to extend their understanding of the difficult problems we have. Children can deal with the truth if they have a caring person to help them try to understand it. I don’t want to write down to children at any age.”

Bunuel, Luis:

“God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.”

Spanish film director

Buolamwini, Joy:

“The metaphor becomes the truth. You have to fit a norm, and that norm is not you.”

Burbank, Luther::

Garden of Invention book: Edison growing goldenrod for oil;

“Those who would legislate against the teaching of evolution should also legislate against gravity, electricity, and the unreasonable velocity of light.”

The training of the human plant, 1907

Table of Contents

The mingling of races.         

The teachings of nature.     

Differentiation in training.  

Sunshine, good air and nourishing food.  

Dangers.        

Marriage of the physically unfit.     

Heredity        

-predestination         

training.         

Growth.         

Environment the architect of heredity.     

Character.     

Fundamental principles.

Burbank, Stephen:

“Trump’s business is infecting the people around him … he’s a form of contagion …”

Burdick, Alan:

“…an organism, or whatever the right word is, ideally adapted to human conversation, the louder the better. Our communication is its transmission… Not even song is safe anymore.

To know SARS-CoV-2 is to know ourselves in reflection. It is mechanical, unreflecting, consistently on-message — the purest near-living expression of data management to be found on Earth. It is, and does, and is more. There is no “I” in a virus.

We are exactly its opposite: human, and everything that implies. Masters of information, suckers for misinformation; slaves to emotion, ego and wishful thinking. But also: inquiring, willful, optimistic. In our best moments, we strive to learn, and to advance more than our individual selves…

Burger, Chief Justice Warren:

”The NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment  was one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud’, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

via Jill Lepore New Yorker

Burke, Edmund:

“… To be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; … to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; … to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man. …”

“The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself.”

“Society is … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

“I dread our own power and our own ambition…I dread our being too much dreaded.”

“Society is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born.”

“Where mystery begins, justice ends.”

“The great error of our nature is not to know where to stop…to lose all we have gained by an insatiable pursuit after more.”

“Men of intemperate minds cannot be free.”

“Manners are what vex or soothe,

corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us,”

Burke, Kenneth:

“If decisions were a choice between alternatives, decisions would come easy.

Decisions are the selection and formulation of alternatives.”

Burke, Peter:

“Leonardo syndrome… a defect in polymaths whose intellectual restlessness prevents them from finishing things properly.”

Burke, Tom:

“To believe that market forces can be used to fix climate change is to believe in magic.”

Burlioni, Roberto:

“The world has changed…Science needs to find a new voice—not the language of scientific congresses, but a language that’s understandable, passionate, and convincing.”

On bullshit

Burnett, D Graham:

“…the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.

we must make attention itself the thing being taught.

attensity, the capacity for attention. What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.

attention activism…

Burnett, Frances Hodgson:

“‘Is the spring coming?’ he said.

‘What is it like?’…

‘It is the sun shining on the rain and

the rain falling on the sunshine…’”

Burningham, Kim:

“At least 81 cents of every $1 donated to lawmakers came from special interests that often have business before the Legislature.” 

Burnham, Walter Dean:

“Political parties realign periodically in tectonic shifts –  America’s surrogate for revolution.”

Burns, John F:

“I carried back…an abiding revulsion for ideology, in all its guises. …there is no limit to the lunacy, malice and suffering that can plague any society with a ruling ideology.”

Burns, Ken:

“The thing that I’ve learned is that there is no ‘them’. It’s just us.”

From Ken Burns talk 8-28-09:

            Re our digital divisions in society:

            Too much pluribus, not enough unum Arthur Schlesinger

            Judge Leonard Hand: Liberty is knowing that you are never sure you’re right.”

Hugely important and hugely dangerous medium: televsion.”

“emotional archeology”

existentionalism: a tension between being and doing.

“We figured if we failed, we didn’t try hard enough. We didn’t do anything different the next year, we just tried harder.” farmer in The Dust Bowl.

“Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined”.

“The black-white rift stands at the very center of American history. It is the great challenge to which all our deepest aspirations to freedom must rise. If we forget that–if we forget the great stain of slavery that stands at the heart of our country, our history, our experiment–we forget who we are, and we make the great rift deeper and wider.”

“It’s important to understand the fragility of our institutions and the fragility of our civilized impulses….

It’s been very eerie to see the past echoing louder and louder.”

A psychologist friend: ‘You wake the dead.’

end Ken Burns

Burns, Robert:

”O would some Power the gift to give us

To see ourselves as others see us!

It would from many a blunder free us…”

Burns, Scott Z:

“These viruses are tracer bullets through our society. They illuminate a lot of the problems that we have. One of the things I didn’t anticipate was that we would have an issue with how truthful and on top of things our administration would be. I remember being most concerned that the spread of misinformation could be as prolific and dangerous as the virus.”

writer of Contagion

Burns, William J.:

Putin is “an emperor who is not quite fully clothed,”

“Putin’s intimidating aura is often belied by his

controlled mannerisms, modulated tone, and steady gaze. He’ll slouch a bit and look bored by it all if not engaged by the subject … and be snarky or bullying if he’s feeling pressed.”

“I think Putin, and I have heard him say this many times in the past, believes that Ukraine isn’t a real country, that it is weak and divided. And what Ukrainians have

done is demonstrate that real countries fight back.”

Burr, Chanler:

The Emporer of Scent Random House 2002  page 303

“There is really only one  great scientific discovery: the scientific endeavor itself, the idea that that there is a way of generating knowledge that, objectively, irreversibly modifies our view of the world. “

Burr, Thomas:

“Lugenpresse – lying press…

we are all the media…”

“There are no alternative facts!”

Bush, George H W:

“I am an environmentalist. Those who think we are powerless to do anything

about the greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect.”

Bush,George W.:

see speechwriter Gerson.

“Can you believe this? I’m the President of the whole fucking United States!” 

 to R Perry Dec., 2000

“Wall Street got drunk.”

“The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.”

“…it is tempting for those born on third base to believe they’ve hit a triple.”

“We do not talk to evil.”

“I rely on my instincts.”

“If the self-evident truths of our founding are true for us, they are true for all.. p. 316 Overthrow.

declared in his second inaugural address that “the calling of our time” was to support “the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

“Our war is against evil, not against Islam.”

via Hasan pdf

“I have opinions of my own—strong opinions—but I don’t always agree with them.”

Quoted in a British newspaper, 9/2/01

“…we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality…

we’ll act again, creating other new realities…you…will be left to just study what we do.”

            Bush-Cheney admin spokesman

Bush, Jeb:

“The sound of our guns is the sound of freedom!

 to NRA, 2003

Bush, Susan: band lyrics Triolo

“How do you move a band of collective fools?”

Bush, Vannevar:

“Science cannot live by and unto itself alone.”

Bushnell, Aarom:

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow south? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”  -self-immolated at Israel Embassy, DC

Busis, David:

“Harry Potter is about the life of a young wizard and his friends. But it’s also about the wish to be special — and the fear of being ordinary.”

Bustillos, Maria:

“..books liberate us from the prison of our own temporality.”

via Popova

Butler, Octavia:

I got my idea for the Xenogenesis books… from Ronald Reagan because he was advocating this kind of thing. I thought there must be something basic, something really genetically wrong with us if we’re falling for this stuff [winning a nuclear war]..…

“We are a naturally hierarchical species,. When I say these things in my novels, sure I make up the aliens and all of that, but I don’t make up the essential human character.”

…our hierarchical tendencies are older …they drive us to use our intelligence to try to dominate one another.

“I wonder whether the human species will ever grow up enough to learn to communicate without using fists of one kind or another….

From Speech Sounds:

“The illness, if it was an illness, had cut even the living off from one another. As it swept over the country, people hardly had time to lay blame on the Soviets (athough they were falling silent along with the rest of the world), on a new virus, a new pollutant, radiation, divine retribution…The illness was stroke-swift in the way it cut people down and strokelike in some of its effects. But it was highly specific. Language was always lost or severely impaired. It was never regained. Often there was also paralysis, intellectual impairment, death.”

“I’ve written five world-saving novels…The world doesn’t want to be saved….let’s put it this way,…George Bush is President….

I absorb a lot of stuff that you really have to find some outlet for or it festers…novels were kind of my outlet.”

quoting Steve Biko: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the opressed.”

:…it takes very little to set off young men who want to feel powerful and important…Testosterone poisoning.”

Lauren Oya Olamina, Earthseed, Parable of the Talents:

“To survive,

know the past.

Let it touch you.

Then let

The past

Go.”

“Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”

comment on Parable of the Sower via Danielle Moodie:

‘…cultural and political norms were slowly erased. There was no major war, no invasion; instead, a sense of collective lethargy set in across the nation, and things went from bad to worse. Religious fundamentalism seized the country, slavery was reintroduced, water was scarce, and all the social safety nets that the government once provided were rolled back in favor of privatization. If you could afford police protection, health care, the creation of roads and bridges, great—if not, you were out of luck. Butler was clearly ahead of her time. She combined her brilliant imagination with a keen understanding of human behavior to illustrate where the U.S.A. was headed if we continued our ostrich behavior of sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that what was unfolding before our eyes wasn’t happening.

via Avital Percher: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, for example, is a masterful story of lurching decline. It describes 2020s America as an unraveling society where remnants of wealth and innovation coexist with mass migration, riots, and the collapse of cities. Though written 30 years ago, its predictions are startlingly prescient in some ways and compel readers to reflect on the cultural forces we see in today’s world.

via Popova:

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

via Lynell George, NYT:

‘…she described herself as “a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles — a pessimist if Iʼm not careful, a feminist, always a Black, a quiet egoist, a former Baptist and an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive.”

As a Black woman and a writer, Butler demolished walls that seemed impermeable, writing on themes that seemed uncategorizable.

On bus…Sitting high above the cars, she could take in the shifting landscapes: It gave her a window into different worlds. ..almost any bus ride will be a long one..The time proved perfect for writing. Her bus rides also allowed her to make sketches of potential characters. “I especially collect people — those who stand out in some way,” she said.

“I donʼt write about heroes,” Butler once said. “I write about people who survive and sometimes prevail.”

Butler saw history itself as an otherworldly landscape to be explored: foreign yet familiar.

The past reaches out to the present.

Fiction was more than ‘stories’, she felt. It was a way to acquire a new set of eyes – to effect change.

from Sower…

“…people who have no homes will build fires…

“I have a character in the books who is … taking the country

fascist and who manages to get elected president …Here is one

of the things that my character is inspired to write about this

sort of situation. She says:

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.

To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.

To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to.

To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”

she described herself as “a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles — a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, always a Black, a quiet egoist, a former Baptist and an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive.”

 “I seem to be saying something without trying,” she wrote. “That Black women are survivors, that they have to be strong because so much is demanded of them,” 

I don’t believe we can do anything at all without side effects–also known as unintended consequences.

where we stand determines what we’re able to see. 

our tomorrow is the child of our today.

To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.

Parable of the Talents, 1998

hyperempathy syndrome.

parables—stories that taught, stories that presented ideas and morals in ways that made pictures in people’s minds.

these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.

Help us to make America great again.”

Chaos Is God’s most dangerous face—Amorphous, roiling, hungry. Shape Chaos—Shape God. Act. Alter the speed Or the direction of Change. Vary the scope of Change.

Recombine the seeds of Change. Transmute the impact of Change. Seize Change. Use it. Adapt and grow.

God is Change, And in the end, God prevails. But meanwhile… Kindness eases Change. Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful Positive obsession Blunts pain, Diverts rage, And engages each of us In the greatest, the most intense of our chosen struggles

a network of truths that she has simply recognized.

Bookmark – Page 46 · Location 643

“God is Change,” she says and means it. Some of the faces of her god are biological evolution, chaos theory, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and, of course, the second law of thermodynamics. “God is Change, and, in the end, God prevails.”

Earthseed, there is no promised afterlife. Earthseed’s heaven is literal, physical—other worlds circling other stars. It promises its people immortality only through their children, their work, and their memories. For the human species, immortality is something to be won by sowing Earthseed on other worlds.

Today we gave the Noyer children oak seedlings to plant in earth that has been mixed with the ashes of their parents. We do this in memory of our own dead, present and absent.

“We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.”

“Darkness Gives shape to the light As light Shapes the darkness. Death Gives shape to life As life Shapes death. God And the universe Share this wholeness Each Defining the other: God Gives shape to the universe As the universe Shapes God.”

To shape God With wisdom and forethought, To benefit your world, Your people, Your life, Consider consequences, Minimize harm Ask questions, Seek answers, Learn, Teach.

work

Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God.”

People are still impressed, even intimidated, by bound, official-looking books.

Even people who can’t read are impressed by books.

Praying is a very effective way of talking to yourself, of talking yourself into things, of focusing your attention on whatever it is you want to do. It can give you a feeling of control and help you to stretch yourself beyond what you thought were your limits.”

“You’re the one your words reach and strengthen. You can think of it as praying to that part of God that’s within you.”

We’re becoming more and more isolated as a people. We’re sliding into undirected negative change, and what’s worse, we’re getting used to it.

God is Change And hidden within Change Is surprise, delight, Confusion, pain, Discovery, loss, Opportunity, and growth. As always, God exists To shape And to be shaped.

Paradise is one’s own place, One’s own people, One’s own world, Knowing and known,

Chaos Is God’s most dangerous face—Amorphous, roiling, hungry. Shape Chaos—Shape God. Act.

Alter the speed Or the direction of Change. Vary the scope of Change. Recombine the seeds of Change. Transmute the impact of Change. Seize Change, Use it. Adapt and grow.

acorn bread,

Partnership is giving, taking, learning, teaching, offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm. Partnership is mutualistic symbiosis. Partnership is life.

It’s a way of trying to build tomorrow instead of cycling back into some form of yesterday.”

from Isaiah, Chapter One. “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers.”

We can, Each of us, Do the impossible As Long as we can convince ourselves That it has been done before.

People who are intelligent, ambitious, and at the same time, in the grip of odd obsessions can be dangerous. When they occur, they inevitably upset things. In The First Book of the Living, my mother says, Prodigy is, in its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up

To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Beware: Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed.

Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.

When vision fails Direction is lost. When direction is lost Purpose may be forgotten. When purpose is forgotten Emotion rules alone. When emotion rules alone, Destruction… destruction.

The problem with Earthseed has always been that it isn’t a very comforting belief system.

We burned Acorn. No. No, we burned Camp Christian.

things that we had created and loved had already been destroyed. This time, the fires only cleansed.

Christian America was, at first, much more a refuge for the ignorant and the

Remembering wasn’t safe. You could lose your mind, remembering.

Walking, like writing, helps.

Beware: All too often, We say What we hear others say. We think What we’re told that we think. We see What we’re permitted to see. Worse! We see what we’re told that we see.

Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see Even an obvious lie Again And again and again May be to say it, Almost by reflex Then to defend it. Because we’ve said it And at last to embrace it Because we’ve defended it And because we cannot admit That we’ve embraced and defended An obvious lie.

without thought, Without intent, We make Mere echoes Of ourselves—And we say What we hear others say.

one way to make people afraid of you is to have a crazy side—a side of yourself or your organization that’s dangerous and unpredictable—willing to do any damned thing.

religions are ultimately cargo cults. Adherents perform required rituals, follow specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally gifted with desired rewards—long life, honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth, victory over opponents, immortality after death, any desired rewards.

Much of what she had shown me so far was false. She had not lied with her words. It was her manner that was a lie—filled with threads of wrongness. She was not the bored, indifferent person she wanted to seem to be. She was just trying to keep her distance.

“These days, projecting blame is almost an art form.”

It was like a womb with an imagination.

If we were normal we’d be dead.”

“That’s what Earthseed was about,” I said. “I wanted us to understand what we could be, what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires…then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been.”

it will take something as essentially human and as essentially irrational as religion to keep them focused and keep it going—for generations

“I’m not a demagogue.” “That’s too bad. That leaves the field to people who are demagogues—

“We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.”

“Purpose Unifies us: It focuses our dreams, Guides our plans, Strengthens our efforts. Purpose Defines us, Shapes us, And offers us Greatness.”

They followed me because I seemed to be going somewhere.

drawing a person helps me become that person and, to be honest, it helps me manipulate that person. Everything teaches.

She needs purpose as much as I need to give it to her.

tetanus skin tabs.

People ignore one another in self-defense.

“They’re hungry for something to do,” I said, “starved for some kind of real purpose. I think they’ll have some suggestions themselves. They’ll feel better if they make the first suggestions. They’ll feel in control.

In Acorn, the church and the school were the same. They weren’t just the same building. They were the same institution. If the Earthseed Destiny is to have any meaning beyond a distant mythical paradise, Earthseed must be not only a belief system but a way of life.

Octavia E. Butler  a Biography (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)

by Canavan, Gerry

via Greg Tate: “black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine.”

Butler is a deeply ambiguous thinker.

aop that she used ubiquitously throughout her life, standing in for “as opposed to”—

biological terms, her most frequent metaphor is not individualistic competition but mutual interdependence: symbiosis.

fantasies of “aliens” are ultimately borne out of this palpable “need” for otherness, an unquenchable desire for the union of differences that seem innate and insurmountable.

In the Parables series (1993–1998), a world ruined by neoliberal privatization and ecological collapse is given hope by the empathic capabilities of a woman whose psychological dysfunction allows her quite literally to feel another’s pain—a capacity that makes her at once highly

empathetic and extremely dangerous.

the long-awaited Parable of the Trickster

two short autobiographical essays published in Bloodchild, she describes this overawing devotion to her craft as a “positive obsession” and as a “furor scribendi” (a madness for writing). 

Forget talent, forget inspiration, she says in the second of these; writing is about habit, about persistence. Writing was a holy thing for Butler, a constant and daily devotion. When she was still working day jobs—miserable, grinding work she hated—she would get up at two or three in the morning and write. She kept up the practice long after she no longer had to. She wrote through a lonely childhood, through discouragement from family and teachers, through a decade and a half of mounting rejection slips, through bankruptcy, through too many years after that of being underpaid and disrespected on the midlist. She wrote. When she wasn’t writing—when she was stuck, or when she was blocked, or later in her life when her medication seemed to interfere with her creativity—she was miserable. She was only really happy when she was writing.

Butler saw not race but men—masculinity, not just on the level of ideology but on the level of biology—as the real problem to be solved.

the lifelong tension between Butler’s desire to write what she always called a YES-BOOK (a universally loved best-seller) versus the NO stories she felt driven to tell despite her ambition for sales and for fame.

Butler typically edited her writing in order to make it more optimistic.

Writing was an extremely erotic practice for Butler across her life—she saw her sex drive and her writing drive as very tightly linked.

Much of what we get in the published work actually turns out to be a somewhat sanitized version

mingling the events in the stories with events in her real life as if there were no difference between the two;

She was a voracious reader, but a very slow one: she learned better from audiotapes and had very fond memories of her mother reading to her at night. She was a slow writer, too, and by her own admission a very poor speller;

I wanted to disappear. Instead, I grew six feet tall.”

determined she was just “a hermit”: “I enjoy my own company more than I enjoy most other people’s.”

the living body of African Americans had derived from those who had found a way to survive within the machine that was crushing them, doing whatever it took to (somehow) stay alive.

travel trope in science fiction to show the radical embeddedness of the past within the present

the story would not leave me alone. It wanted to be written.”

“history is another planet”—the only one we know to bear any life.

this lifelong interest—in animal subjectivity and animal

language and in the possibilities and challenges posed by interspecies communication—would come back to her again and again over the course of her life, seeding elements of important works to come in Clay’s Ark, “Bloodchild,” the Xenogenesis books, and “Amnesty.” It would even become, albeit mostly in negative, part of the basis for the story that would win Butler her first major prize as a science

1984’ s bleak “Speech Sounds,” in which a human race deprived of its ability to communicate becomes animal-like in that other sense, losing any capacity to

resist its biological and primatological urges to dominate and to kill. “‘ Speech Sounds,’” she would later say in Bloodchild, “was conceived in weariness, depression, and sorrow”

“Lost Races” also mentions the other side of Butler’s critique of race and SF, what she long saw as black people’s lack of interest in the future. She did not blame African Americans for this lack of interest; their lack of inclusion, and the dire lack of writers speaking to their concerns, explained the case. Butler recounts that at times she herself has been very frustrated with SF, both as a future-oriented literary practice that could not move beyond its antiquated assumptions and with regard to fandom circles, where she had often felt like an unwanted outsider. She noted also, with sadness, that the serious problems facing black people sometimes precluded their interest in imagining other worlds, ventriloquizing within

“Lost Races of Science Fiction” piece as a kind of manifesto,

autobiographical essay “Positive Obsession”:

end Canavan bio

“All that you touch you change,” wrote Octavia Butler. “All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”

end Butler, Octavia

Butler, Samuel:

“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”

Butterworth, Jon:

“The Universe isn’t just speaking in numbers: it’s singing and dancing.”

Buttigeig, Pete:

“This isn’t just a policy job, it’s a moral job.”

“It is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away.”on Trump

quoting Truman: ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’

Byars, James Lee:

“To accomplish the extraordinary, you must seek extraordinary people.”

“To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.”

via edge.org  The World Question Center

Buttu, Diana:

via Stack: “… regrets her role in the negotiations. Israel was not bargaining in good faith the talks are a kind of theater to distract everybody while Palestinians literally lost ground. It gave this very false impression that there was movement happening, and it’s served as a great distraction.”

Byoir, Carl:

“American industry–the whole capitalist system–lives in the shadow of a volcano. That volcano is public opinion. It is in eruption. Within an incredibly short time it will destroy business or it will save it.”

Byrne, David on Amalia Rodrigues:

“When I first heard her …  it was as if there was this explosion of emotions that burst out… It was as if she was singing these fado songs about the sadness of the universe, not only about a personal sadness or a tragedy in her own life or in the writer’s life, but she was expressing the sadness of existence.”

Byrne, Gabriel:

“If we don’t get climate change under control it doesn’t really matter what else we aspire to. We need to make people aware of the real danger of annihilation. This is everyone’s responsibility. It’s astonishing how sentient adults can either willingly ignore what’s happening or are ignorant of it. Resting nicely in a cocoon of apathy is such a betrayal of the people who come after us, if they come after us.”

Byrne, Patrick:

“The Chinese have a song, ‘See cat, paint tiger.’”

on exaggeration.

Byron, Lord:

“And history with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.”

Cacioppo, John:

“Loneliness, which compels us to bond with others, gives us what we call Humanity.”

Caddell, Patrick:

“I’ve learned that you should always pay attention to successful ‘clowns.’ “

Cadwalladr, Carol:

“…the world is sick…American capitalism has been the vector that has brought this infection across the globe.”

Cage, John:

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones”

“I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it.”

Cagle, Susie:

“Wealth gleaned by way of tax dodges and monopolistic business practices is wealth stolen from the public, even when it is returned in the form of supposed gifts. Philanthropy has the power to do a great deal of good, but so do tax dollars allocated in an equitable democratic system.”

Cahalan, Suannah: The Great Pretender, 2019 on Kindle (wrote Brain on Fire, see K sample)

quoting film The Shock Corridor:

‘You’d have to be crazy to get yourself committed to a mental hospital.’

Cahill, Desmond:

“…priests are terrorized with their own sexual desire.” celibacy

Cai, Zia:

“Outwardly the party appears unified, but underneath there are turbulent undercurrents. Inside the party school, some have turned against their former liberal ideas to embrace Xi Jinping; some just say as little as possible.”

“Freedom of the press is an inevitable trend,”

Cain, Susan:

”…time to establish a greater balance of power between those who rush to speak and do and those who sit back and think…Introverts…must learn to embrace the power of quiet.”

via review by Judith Warner NY Times Book Rev

Calder, Todd:

“In self-deception we evade acknowledging to ourselves some truth or what we would see as the truth if our beliefs were based on an unbiased assessment of available evidence.”

“…two types of evil characters: moral monsters and moral idiots. Moral monsters are the more basic type of evil character: they simply have a consistent propensity to desire other people’s significant, real harm for an unworthy goal such as their own pleasure or entertainment value. Moral idiots also have a consistent propensity to desire other people’s significant, real harm for an unworthy goal.”

End Calder

Calabro, Elaina Plott:

“I have written about a number of public figures on the right who believe very few of the things they profess to believe, who talk in public about stolen elections and wink at the specter of global cabals, and then privately crack jokes about the people who applaud…

many Americans have embraced conspiracy theories as a way to give order and meaning to the world’s chance cruelties…dim, diffuse paranoia…penchant for conspiracy theories…”

re Laura Logan story in Atlantic.

Caldwell, Christopher:

“The largest country by area on the planet has no reliable exit into the world. The most reliable route runs through the Black Sea, where it crosses the trade routes that link the civilizations of Asia to the civilizations of Europe.”

Talk: ‘How to think about Vladimir Putin.’

Callard, Agnes:

“…cancellation is removal from a position of prominence on the basis of an ideological crime…”

“…the surprise and delight of finding that people thousands of years dead can be one’s partners in inquiry…

The task of humanists is to invite, to welcome, to entice, to excite, to engage.

end Callard, Agnes NYT

Calvert, Brian:

“Dangerous ideas are spreading in a moment of national confusion.”

editor, HCN

Cambodia – Khmer Rouge:

to its citizens:“To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss.”

Camerer, Colin:

”The mind is a charioteer driving twin horses of reason and emotion. Except cognition is a smart pony, an emotion an elephant.”

With George Lowenstein.

Cameron, James:

“…a story of good defeating evil and love triumphing over cynicism.”

“The only thing we truly own is today. Life is precious.”

“My therapist told me ‘you can be right, or you can be married.’ Men are actually trainable.”

On AI: “The fact that so many billions of dollars are being put toward a goal of doing something that might be suicidal for the human race is insane to me.”

“Whenever we think we’ve come up with a new idea, we always find that nature has beat us to the punch by hundreds of millions of years.”

End Cameron

Camoes:

“in various flames he burned in different ways” 

Campa-Naijar, Ammar:

 “…if we have a congressman who can’t follow the law, how can we expect him to enforce the law?”

Campbell, David E:

”…Americans have become slightly more conservative economically…they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics…the Tea Party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.”

with Robert D Putnam

Campbell, Joseph:

The Power of Myth.

”People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.”

“I’ll never forget … Delphi …where the oracle … received inspiration in the fumes … and prophesized and gave statements of destiny.”

“…detribalization…”

“Every life impulse is simple unless you’ve been baptized or circumcised.”

Heaven and hell are within us.

Each religion is a kind of software – stay with the software you’ve got.

The three religions have different names for the same God…but don’t know it.

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you  know it’s not your path.  Your own path you make with every step you take.  That’s why it’s your path.”    

New times require new values – revised religions 

Phil Cousineau to Campbell:

“Be what you is, cuz if you be what you ain’t, then you ain’t what you is.” tombstone in Tombstone, AZ,

end Campbell, Joseph

Camper, Fred:

“It is as if there is a void, a nothingness, that lies behind all things.”

in NYT obit for Bruce Baillie

Camus, Albert:

“Fiction is a lie through which we tell the truth.”

“Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower.”

“Become so very free that your whole existence is an act of rebellion.…

stake everything on a formidable gamble – that words are more powerful than munitions.”

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

 “In the midst of winter, I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.” 

Integrity has no need of rules.  

“Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.”

“The inhabitants, finally freed, would never forget the difficult period that made them face the absurdness of their existence and the precariousness of the human condition. What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves,”

”Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.”

“The only way to fight the plague is with decency.”

«…authors of confessions write especially to avoid confession, to tell nothing of what they know.

I practice the profession of penitence, to be able to end up as a judge.

…the more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.”

“ … the Arabs have acquired the right somehow to slit throats and to mutilate.” via Murawiec, p.295

“In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”

“The important thing is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.”

from The Plague, last paragraph:

“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus [i.e. Fascism] never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years … and that, perhaps, the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth …” see also Marris pdf final quote.

character Rieux: ‘It’s not a question of vocabulary, it’s a question of time.’

The Human Crisis speech (see Marris, pdf):

“…we know perfectly well that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own hearts……this world must cease to be the world of police , soldiers and money, and become the world of men and women, of fuitful work and thoughtful play.”

“All great deeds and all great thoughts have ridiculous beginnings.”

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

in The Myth of Sisyphus

“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy, Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”

“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”

“On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence – … it is innocence that is called to justify itself.”

see longer quote beginning: The purpose of this essay is …

One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be understood… In more ingenuous times, when the tyrant razed cities for his own greater glory, when the slave chained to the conqueror’s chariot was dragged through the rejoicing streets, when enemies were thrown to the wild beasts in front of the assembled people, the mind did not reel before such unabashed crimes, and the judgment remained unclouded. But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgment. On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence – through a curious transposition peculiar to our times – it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.

The Rebel. 1951.

“Justice in the big things only. For the rest, just mercy.”

“Science has many truths but no truth.”

“Life is the sum of all your choices.”
“…it is necessary to keep alive a living society within the shell of the dying one.”

“I have known only one true genius: Jacques Monod,” claimed Albert Camus

““You are in favor of democracy … so please be democratic now and let me speak . . . . Let me finish my sentences, because the meaning of a sentence often isn’t clear until it ends.”

“I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”

“only one honorable choice: to wager everything on the belief that in the end words will prove stronger than bullets.”

Elias Altman about Camus:

“God and history are easily claimed allies, and life is often cheap when either is on your side…. he came to believe that words well-aimed are as deadly as bullets and also the only defense against them… the USSR’s communism and the US’s capitalism both ended up with cost-benefit analyses that rated such truth, beauty, and dialogue expendable…. At his best, in his fiction and nonfiction, Camus placed man in a situation, absurd or otherwise, and tried to show how he might work out his salvation, without God or faith in the progressive nature of history….”

From The Plague:

Rieux says. “It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.”

“…after a too long waiting one gives up waiting…”

…each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it … we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him….it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken….That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague…

when a man has only four hours’ sleep …He sees things as they are…in the garish light of justice….

to see people working from morn to night and then proceeding to fritter away … what time is left for living…

“…the plague never dies nor does it disappear. It waits patiently in our bedrooms, our cellars, our suitcases, our handkerchiefs, our file cabinets. And one day, perhaps to the misfortune or for the education of men, the plague germ will reemerge, reawaken its rats, and send them forth to die in a once happy city.”

via Justice Stephen Breyer

Richard Falk: “Albert Camus says … that the best we can hope for in life is to struggle for what is better, even if while doing so we know that failure is inevitable and hope irrelevant.”

Why Camus chose resistance, via Saul: “The question makes no sense … I couldn’t imagine myself elsewhere, that’s all….I understood that I detested less the violence, than the institutions of violence.”

Camus: “There is no freedom without both intelligence and reciprocal comprehension.”

via Mishra:

Camus defined as ‘an autointoxication, the malignant secretion of one’s preconceived impotence inside the enclosure of the self.’ Camus … saw ressentiment as a defining feature of the modern world where individual dissatisfaction with the actually available degree of freedom constantly collideswith elaborate theories and promises of individual freedom and empowerment.

see Nobel Writers on Writing

letter: “The systematic waste of able-bodied individuals in the county is not only killing the country but also the lively and vibrant ideas that will ensure its future. This is what we must avoid and it’s this situation that we must remind people of every day, every hour if necessary in all articles, all broadcasts, all gatherings, all proclamations aimed at those who set the pace of this war. The rest is up to us.”

via Thomas Chatterton Williams Harpers 6–2020: “ …we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away….

There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

…The Plague offers a uniquely clear, forceful, and meticulous account of the states and stages of inertia, ignorance, denial, learned helplessness, and – when we’re at our best – resistance that we pass through as we’re confronted with an evil as efficient as it is incomprehensible…The only means of fighting a plague is – common decency…the Sisyphean struggle for meaning in a godless, absurdly indifferent universe…

A pandemic, if you are fortunate enough not to be hospitalized or killed by it, wears you down by other, more subtle measures…a kind of spiritual and psychological incapacitation…By stripping you of the most basic knowledge that the world will remain predictable…

the French people have heeded the lessons of The Plague.

Camus, 75 years ago: The men of Europe no longer believe in the things that exist in

the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life.

Camus:

‘The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.’

“real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,”

On Writing:

One must be two persons when one writes… The great problem is to translate what one feels into what one wants others to feel. We call a writer bad when he expresses himself in reference to an inner context the reader cannot know. The mediocre writer is thus led to say anything he pleases.

“Absolute freedom mocks at justice.”

Camus insisted that “works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity,”

“Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish still clutches me, it’s when I feel this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like quicksilver… At the moment, my whole kingdom is of this world. This sun and these shadows, this warmth and this cold rising from the depths of the air: why wonder if something is dying or if men suffer, since everything is written on this window where the sun sheds its plenty as a greeting to my pity?…What counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world?… What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness… I hold onto the world with every gesture, to men with all my gratitude and pity. I do not want to choose between the right and wrong sides of the world, and I do not like a choice… The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair?… In spite of much searching, this is all I know.”

via Popova: second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for literature that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience” – he understood that time, which has no right side and no wrong side, is only ever won or lost on the smallest and most personal scale: absolute presence with one’s own life, rooted in the belief that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”

“You cannot create experience.

You must undergo it.”

“[I]n such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

From Nobel speech: To me art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes…

…true artists scorn nothing. They force themselves to understand instead of judging….

most of us in my country and in Europe rejected that nihilism and strove to find some form of legitimacy. We had to fashion for ourselves an art of living in times of catastrophe in order to be reborn before fighting openly against the death instinct at work in our history.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, ever to be won anew. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to get along with as it is exciting. We must progress toward those two objectives, painfully but resolutely, sure in advance that we shall weaken and flinch on such a long road.

Via Obst: “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth…”

end Camus

Canada, Geoffrey:

”The social contract that we have taken for granted must be updated given our tough economic challenges, and all of us must now pay our great country back – giving more than we anticipated just a year ago. ..All our sacred cows must be reconsidered: Medicare, tax breaks for corporations, Social Security, tax cuts for the wealthy and middle class, military spending, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Convincing people to give your way a try will work if you neutralize – and sometimes you have to cauterize – the ones who really are against change. They’re the kind of person who, if you tell them it’s raining outside, they’ll fight you tooth and nail. You take them outside in the rain, and they’ll say, “But it wasn’t raining five seconds ago.”

I call them adult conversations…

…tell me something they’ve really failed at.”

End Canada

Canales, Carla Dirlikov:

There is a phrase in China, “zhiyin”, used to describe the person who knows you best. The first character means to “know” or “understand” and the second means “music.”

…zhiyin, the only one who could understand the music in him.

cultural diplomacy…

Ping-Pong diplomacy, 1971

Not only are we not listening; we are barely communicating.

special focus on supporting conflict resolution. The State Department last month introduced the Global Music Diplomacy Initiative

…a single song can make the world a little better by helping us to collectively imagine a better future.

we must make the effort to truly, deeply, listen to the song, the singer, the composer, the society from which the music comes. We must make it our mutual goal to become each other’s zhiyin.

Canavan – Octavia Butler biographer – see Butler.

Canto-Sperber, Monique:

”Freedom of thought is the first precondition of any thought process.”

Capa, Robert:

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

Capecchi, Mario:

“The arts feed our soul.

Engagement, content, inspiration – liberate our imaginations”

Remarks at The Leo

Capitola History Museum:

“Providing a future for our past.”

Cardenal:

“I am a revolutionary…I want to change the world…we will continue trying…Those revolutions failed, but others will come.”

“Stardust,” Father Cardenal’s meditation on death. It concludes:

And the galaxy was taking the shape of a flower

the way it looks now on a starry night.

Our flesh and our bones come from other stars

and perhaps even from other galaxies,

we are universal,

and after death we will help to form other stars

and other galaxies.

We come from the stars, and to them we shall return.

end Cardenal, Nicaragua revolution priest

“What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? … intolerable harm … culpable wrongdoing. … not by the psychological states of evildoers but by the seriousness of the harm that is done.”

Claudia Card overleaf to The Atrocity Paradigm, 2002

“… harm must be reasonably foreseeable at the point at which the institution is an evil (rather than, say, just a disaster).”

“I do not believe that evils are extraordinary.”

“… evils have … a harm component and an agency component. … evils do intolerable harm.

… the moral challenge of avoiding evil responses to evil.

… people … can easily be induced … to inflict intolerable harm on others without excuse, without any morally defensible reason – in short, to do evil.”

“[Her definition, 2010]: …evils are reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by inexcusable wrongs.”

In Confronting Evils, Chap 4 pp. 110–119:

6. The ‘Lives’ of Ecosystems, Species, and Gaia:

“Intolerable harm to ecosystems and communities threatens to rob of meaning the lives of the organisms or people who are their members.”

C Card

“…a social practice, is evil if it is reasonably foreseeable that intolerable harm will result from its normal or correct operation without justification or moral excuse…”

C Card via Todd Calder

“Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.”

Bejamin Cardoza, Supreme Court Justice

“The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda…»

Alex Carey

“Evil in that their deliberate,

habitual savagery defies any psychological explanation or attempt at

treatment.”

Benedict Carey, see NYT pdf

“Psychoticism – a pattern of magical thinking that goes well beyond garden variety superstition and usually comes across socially as disjointed, uncanny or ‘off.’…

People often adopt conspiracy beliefs as a balm for deep grievance. The theories afford some psychological ballast, a sense of control, an internal narrative to make sense of a world that seems senseless.”

Benedict Carey NYT

Carey, John:

From a review: ‘“This book is richly stocked with people whom any person of decent instincts will find loathsome.’

His review of a book of essays: “Immortal names drop from him like dandruff so that the airily planted erudition can take on the tone of a sixth-form essay prize.”

His editor: ‘He would never have a semicolon. He tried to have as few commas as possible and as few subclauses as possible. The drive of the style is full stops and a very active voice. Reading him was a joy.’

His last book: The Unexpected Professor, 2014.

Carhart-Harris:

“Carhart-Harris has data suggesting that a single dose of psychedelics can make anybody more open to experience, less authoritarian, more politically liberal, and more connected to nature and other people.” by Graham Lawton, New Scientist

“…relaxed beliefs under psychedelics (REBUS)…via their entropic effect on spontaneous cortical activity – psychedelics work to relax the

precision of high-level priors or beliefs, thereby liberating bottom-up information flow, ..”

“…psychedelics can bring about the revision of other heavily weighted high-level priors,.. such as those underlying partisan and/or overly-confident political, religious, and/or philosophical perspectives.”

“…psilocybin…the most common outcome is a renewed breadth of perspective. ..

Psychedelic therapy seems to catalyse a type of psychological growth that is conducive to mental health, overlapping in many respects with spiritual growth.

New Scientist article:

“…” psychedelics act … from molecular interactions to large networks of brain regions… ‘the relaxation of beliefs under psychedelics’… known as REBUS and the anarchic brain…

What psychedelics do… is make the brain more sensitive to prediction errors, creating a temporary anarchy that allows you to remold your prior beliefs.”

see Neuroscape at UCSF.

2019 paper:

“…entropic brain hypothesis…relaxed beliefs under psychedelics (REBUS) via there entropic affect on spontaneous cortical activity. Psychedelics work to relax the precision of high-level priors or beliefs, thereby liberating bottom up information flow ,particularly via intrinsic sources such as the limbic system….priors…underlying partisan and/or overly-confident political, religious, and/or philosophical perspectives.”

R. L. Carhart-Harris

“Life is short – stay awake”

Caribou coffee ad

“…you can dance in a hurricane

But only if you’re standing in the eye.”

Singer Brandi Carlile, The Eye

Carlin, George:

‘You are all Diseased’

“Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man – living in the sky – who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ‘til the end of time… But He loves you!”

“The American Dream – you have to be asleep to believe it.”

George Carlin

“I have this real moron thing I do? It’s called thinking.”

“Gee, he was here a moment ago.”

George Carlin tombstone wish

“I like to bother people,” he said, adding that he tried to figure out “where the line is drawn, and then deliberately cross it and drag the audience with you. And have them happy that you did it.” “I do it in service of ideas. It’s not just for its own sake, to bother or annoy or shock.”

two-part HBO documentary, “George Carlin’s American Dream,” which will be shown May 20 and 21

Life is Worth Losing special Amazon Prime

Kelly Carlin said her father was “99 percent progressive”

“He taught me from Day 1 that the Black and brown people have always been oppressed, horribly and systematically, by the owners of wealth. He had a pure disdain and loathing for white men in America.”

“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it,” he said.

“The table is tilted, folks,” Carlin added. “The game is rigged.”

Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center:

‘What gave him his potency was that he turned his standup ‘into a call to action.’ Carlin taught everyone where to find the power that they have and encouraged them to use it.’

Via Comedienne Nikki Glaser: “There was never a cruelty to Carlin. He always seemed filled with empathy.”

“Hallucinogens are a value changer…like it or not, it changes your values, it opens up windows, doors of perceptions was what Aldous Huxley called them”

end George Carlin

“American motorists are like addicts, and Detroit is the pusher.”

Gary Carlson, Boise, in Wired, June 05

Carlson, Gretchen:

“Epstein’s story is not really about one man’s depravity. It is about a system – legal, cultural and institutional – engineered to protect the powerful through silence.”

Carlson, Jennifer [Merchants of the Right]:

“Gun sellers enlisted…partisanship…to parse out who could claim the identity of gun owner and all that it implied politically, socially, even morally.”

via reviewer M Lacombe: ‘Conspiracy beliefs provide a way to assert control by explaining otherwise intractable consitions…’

Carlson, Tucker:

NYT profiles anaylsis 5–2022:

“…apocalypse…catostrophe…paranoia…

… on-air technique – gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood…

champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens…

‘Legacy Americans’…

‘the great replacement’…

…lives…in a rural blue-collar corner of Maine…in a carefully constructed bubble of his own -a retreat and a bunker…

Carlson sits in his sauna and thinks about what he wants to say…

Fox’s lawyers acknowledged in 2020… ‘that spirited debate on talk-show programs does not lend itself well to statements of actual fact’ ..

Mother: “When you realize your own mother doesn’t like you … it’s like, oh gosh,… felt all kinds of rage about it…. You should only care about the opinions of people who care about you.”

…A tight bond with his brother and father…

‘Competitive breeding’

“… a kind of meltdown… What had I done wrong, because I had no choice, because I had no money…

I like to have this character, and that character… I always want a fat character, always…

Let’s give people what they want. Whatever is working, let’s give them more of that.”

Regarding mother: “It’s just perfect – she’s a bitch from the grave.”…

 “…our society does not expect older people to be protaganists, when in fact age can bring not only maturity but also a spirit of tolerance and understanding.”

Manuela Carmena, NYT Madrid

“…the man who dies rich dies in disgrace.”

Andrew Carnegie

Carney, Mark:

 “We are no longer relying on just the strength of our values, but also on the

value of our strength…

“The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

Caro, Robert:

“…the quality of the prose is just as important in nonfiction as in fiction.”

“… power reveals…” via Osnos

via NYT profile: ‘grounded in the belief that time equals truth…’

“I try to have nothing in the room that’s not about writing. It’s hard enough to concentrate.” on writing

Carpenter, Amanda:

“Pushing people to the point of hysterics is the goal of gaslighting…

…many times [Trump] is only finding a way to make you spread the gaslighting flames for him…

When Trump is gaslighting, he rarely tells an outright lie….

advance-and-denial…

Start gaslighting a little…take control of the narrative…

invasion of the republican body snatchers…

Trump’s gaslighting cannot be stopped…

via Jonah Goldberg: ‘…a crowd-sourced brainwashing spread across the land like a wet rolling fog.’

Caron, James E:

Satire as the Comic Public Sphere:

“Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand,” famously expressed in an unfinished story by Mark Twain. 2 Although the implication of radical

role of comic laughter as a fundamental

social gesture

how forcefully satire might function as the comic form of what the ancient Greeks called parrhēsia, speaking truth no matter the consequence – but via laughter-provoking mockery and ridicule.

danger arises by exchanging the meaning of consensus – an agreement reached through dialogue and among free agents with reasoning intellects – for a consensus extracted from a media ecosystem, one that can be harnessed to political and economic apparatuses only interested in maintaining and improving their performances – that is, one in service to power. If

potential for comic presentation. These communication platforms blur genres in unforeseen ways through what Geoffrey Baym calls “discursive integration,”

Amber Day

John Oliver (2014–

satiractivism, a turn that can also readily be seen

Juvenal about 110 CE wrote that “it is difficult not to write satire,”

living in a social environment of mendacity and vulgarity, who could resist exposing its folly in the most obvious genre available, satire?

theory of a–musement, or the satire two-step – that is, satire rhetorically asks its audience to muse on or ponder the topic presented after laughing.

the ethical dilemma for satire: Does its brand of critique, its form of speech replete with mockery and ridicule, interfere with the everyday mutual understanding

necessary in the public sphere?

truthiness satire

playing with the news enables a comic critique of truthiness in that cultural moment. That critique makes truthiness satire the most ambitious

and potentially consequential

Johnny Carson

You cannot be both serious and funny.”

serious and funny, which might be the bumper-sticker definition of a satirist. Curiously,

Satire . . . is meant to make us scratch our heads, think, do a double-take, and then think again. – Maajid Nawaz

end Caron on Satire

Carpio, Antonio – Phillipine judge:

“…what is at stake in Ukraine and in the South China Sea are exactly the same.”

«….there’s another term for a gathering of politically committed people who make a lot of speeches and argue endlessly over process without producing much in the way of solutions: Congress….

The country has reached the point where things feel so fundamentally wrong that every suggested remedy seems like a media exercise.”

David Carr, NY Times Media column 11–21–2011

“The polarized political map is now accompanied by a media ecosystem that is equally gerrymandered into districts of self-reinforcing discourse. Justice Scalia and millions of news consumers select and assemble a world view from sources that may please them, but rarely challenge them.”

David Carr

“In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understandings of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

“…the direction and steadiness of our mental gaze are shaped by the ‘continual dance’ between the top-down and bottom-up systems of attention.” (via Daniel Goleman)

Nicholas Carr

Carrère d’Encausse, Helene:

“The history of Russia is first and foremost a continuous history of political murder…

… the lesson bequeathed to them by Stalin, in the place of clear political rules, was that the only choice was either to refuse to use murder or to live eternally in the shadow of its threat…”

Aleksandr Ginsberg: ‘We hate Stalin less than our own silence.’

… Khrushchev … soon discovered that living opponents do not lie down…

In 1961 … Stalin, responsible for so many deaths, was now really dead in the consciousness and memory of his country…

… political death, where a person is dead in the eyes of the world and buried in silence and solitude…

… it was necessary to keep silent not only about Khrushchev but also about Stalin, and to take back the truth from the people and return it to the party..

… aimed principally at silence. The Soviet Union seemed once more to be the country of dead souls..

Gorbachev…Glasnost…

Eleven centuries of a history notable for its murders make Russia unlike any other country…

… nothing has changed in Russia… In the words of a famous grand duke and historian, it is still ‘a tyranny weighed down by assassination’…

.. This tormented history has made the Russians an unhappy people, constantly in search of consoling myths…

Dr. Zhivago

end Carrere d’Encausse

Carrere, Emmanuel:

“What’s insidious about the manic phase is that you don’t realise it’s a manic phase.”

Carrier, Scott:

“People don’t tell you anything worth knowing until they trust you.” from Charles Bowden.

“Is Christianity just science fiction, a ‘branch of fantastic literature’.”

Emmanuel Carriere via james wood review pdf

Carroll, Al:

“Genocide denial in America is a product of cognitive dissonance…

America is mostly a nation in denial about the genocides that took place on its own soil…

Germany is more honest about its history because the Nazis lost power. In the US, genocide perpetrators won, and their descendants remain powerful and prospered unchallenged…

Denialism plagues America…

end Carroll

“I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.’’

Lewis Carroll, The Voyage of the Snark

“There is no use trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Lewis Carroll

“One can’t believe impossible things.” Alice

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice. …Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” The Queen

Humpy-Dumpy and Alice:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “It means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words means so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpy, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll

“It is far better to tolerate the occasional absurdity than to risk excluding the truly visionary.”

Sean Carroll, letter NY Times 11/12/02

Carson, Rachel:

“Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. The rains have become an instrument to bring down from the atmosphere the deadly products of atomic explosions. Water, which is probably our most important natural resource, is now used and re-used with incredible recklessness.”

“Now, I truly believe, that we in this generation, must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

“Knowing what I do there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent … I wish you could feel, as I do, that it is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out – to many thousands of people – on something so important.”

“Conservation is a cause that has no end. There is no point at which we can say, ‘Our work is finished.’»

“I am apt to use what may appear to be a curious inversion of words or phrases but for the most part these are peculiar to my style and I don’t want them changed.”

“Mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery – not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny,”

“man is part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself … and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves”.

“Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called ‘insecticides’ but ‘biocides’.”

“In nature, nothing exists alone.”

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

“If I had influence over the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life…”

“The long trend is toward a warmer earth.” 1951.

The president of another chemical company, one that produced DDT, said Carson wrote “not as a scientist, but as a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature”.

via Popova: Rachel Carson – the poet laureate of nature writing – had just awakened the modern ecological conscience and was using her hard-earned stature to issue the radical insistence that children’s sense of wonder is the key to conservation.

Paul Brooks, in 1987 Foreward to Silent Spring:

‘She succeeded in making a book about death a celebration of life.’

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves. – Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

end Rachel Carson

“There are two lasting bequests we can give our children. One is roots. The other is wings.”

Hodding Carter II, Mississippi editor

Carter, Jimmy:

“…piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

Jimmy Carter, from ‘malaise’ speech

“We have built a haphazard, unsound, undirected, inefficient nonsystem which has left us unhealthy and unwealthy at the same time,”

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. …  So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

“Once we understand, we can care, and once we care, we can change.”

Jimmy Carter, 2002

“Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”

Pres. Jimmy Carter, 1977 cited in Pikhal

“Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

…

You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends. …

We have lost our way … because we have exalted “a mistaken idea of freedom”; our self-indulgence had led us to assert every right as absolute, every form of compromise or regulation as inimical to freedom, and … to elevate the very avatar of self-absorption to the highest office in the land.”

Jimmy Carter

“We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems. We can not afford to do everything.”

Jimmy Carter, Inaugural address.

from Colbert interview:

“I’m against any kind of sanctions that hurt the people that are already suffering under a dictator. Yes.”…cardinlal virtues … faith courage love

“That’s another secret to my suceess…to out live personal enemies and animosities…”

via Kai Bird –

‘Those bright blue eyes bore into me with an alarming intensity’.

…He decided to use power righteously, ignore politics and do the right thing….

The majority of the country rejected him as a president way ahead of his time…

the past 43 years have really been an extension of what he thought of as his unfinished presidency…

obits12–31–2024:

Crisis of Confidence – Malaise – speech, via Ron Lieber, NYT –

“Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does,

but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming

things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

Jonathan Alter: ‘The poliics of candor were terrible.’

Alison Hulme: ‘

“If you have concerns about consumption in society, it’s very difficult not to sound

moralizing and patronizing. The tying together of rights with consumption is absolutely rife. This drives me insane.’

Tim Kasser: ‘…research has shown that higher levels of materialism are associated with societal instability. The pandemic only turned up the heat on a roiling cauldron of social

problems: growing economic inequality, horrific episodes of racism, worsening

political divides and a deep mistrust in the legitimacy of our elections.’

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

“I can’t deny I’m a better ex-President than I was a President,”

end Carter, Jimmy

Carter, Lynda (Wonder Woman):

“If not now, when, in my life and career?” she says. “I’m just not afraid.”

Carter, Joseph – Mink Man:

“You can’t control, you can’t change the genetics of an individual. But you can, with the environment, slightly change their view of life.”

Carter, Stephen L.:

“Impediments to free speech are impediments to free thought.”

«…of course it’s all luck.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Carville, James:

“Ninety-eight percent of people on the Mall on Jan. 6 were elite. We need better white people in the United States.”

“Wokeness is a problem, and we all know it.”

“I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.”

Pablo Casals

Casanova:

“There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.”

“Opioids are like guns handed out in a suicide ward; they have certainly made the total epidemic much worse, but they are not the cause of the underlying depression.”

“…deaths of despair…”

Anne Case and Angus Deaton pdf

“We’ve never really tried getting all our news from our top elected official. It has been tried elsewhere, however. North Korea comes to mind.”

Rick Casey

Casler, Noel:

(the guy who worked on The Apprentice and outed Trump’s drug abuse and diaper wearing) asks, “How come everything the Republican Party stands for involves other people dying?”

“[Trump] thinks the world revolves around him, and he hasn’t learned to master his basic emotions. These behaviors (narcissism, codependent traits and maybe even psychopathy) were passed along from his domineering father, escalated by his brother’s drinking, and aided by his family’s abundant financial resources.”

Greg Cason, behavorial psychologist … al-anon

“…there has been a ‘race to the bottom’ by … states that have enacted corporate secrecy laws to try to attract incorporation fees …the problem is concentrated in Delaware. … … a study by researchers at BYU, … concluded that America was tghe second easiest country, after Kenya, in which to incorporate a shell company….Anonymous corporations are … favored tools of criminals …they facilitate corruption …the United States [is] the favored destination for corrupt foreign politicians opening phantom companies to conceal their ill-gotten gains.”

John Cassara

“ Language and science are abbreviations of reality; art is an intensification of reality.”

Ernst Cassirer, quoted on p. 491.

…there is no major transformation in society without a transformation of values, of mindset.”

Manuel Castells

“The worst thing is to stay at home. Hope is the last thing to be lost.”

Roberta Castillo on Venezeula election nyt

«…the selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is…the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”

Fidel Castro, quoted by Thomas L Friedman

“Unitarians believe that the over-consumption and misuse of finite resources is a form of slow suicide that destroys the land, air and water upon which we rely for our very survival.”

“The primary benefit to the LDS Church is not the converts that the missionaries make…those two years of sacrifice, dedication and effort often engender a lifetime of faithful devotion to the church.”

Jim Catano

Cather, Willa:

“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness,”

“Her voice is deep, rich, and full of color; she speaks with her whole body, like a singer… Whatever she does is done with every fibre,” a Nebraskan journalist observed on the pages of the Lincoln Star after meeting the brilliant and reclusive Willa Cather.

“We must dramatically change the publically traded, limited liability global corporation, just as previous generations set out to eliminate or control the monarchy.”

«…jobs that threaten the environment cannot be considered good jobs.”

John Cavanagh, et al.

“Engineering education fosters a culture of disengagement that defines public welfare concerns as tangential to what it means to practice engineering.”

Erin A Cech

“… people who want to lead a country … [are] people who have certain blind spots, which is essential for their functioning and success.”

Joseph Cedar, writer, director Norman film

Sabina Cehajic-Clancy, a social psychologist in Sarajevo, hatred killing denial:

“It is unbelievable the extent and amount of creativity that people possess when it comes to denying.”

Celenza, Chris:

“No one cares how much you know

until they know how much you care.” quoting someone else.

“…the killing of everything…omnicide.”

Danielle Celermajer

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand :

in Journey to the End of the Night: “The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in.”

“In the end, the most interesting thing about a conscience is how it answers, not whom it answers to.”

`Casey Cep, NYer

Cerf, Moran:

“… with a nice smile, you can get the hardest opposition to listen to you…

Your Brain on Catastrophic Risk…

We know that compressed time is bad for most decisions and most people…

the hierarchical order of speaking affects the outcome of a discussion…

… you could use bets to make people care… Even if you begin as a skeptic, you basically change your own brain without anyone telling you anything…” slovic psychic numbing.

Cervantes:

“Un caballero se averguenza de que sus palabras sean mejores que sus hechos.”

“Too much sanity may be madness – and the maddest of all – to see life as it is, and not as it ought to be.”

Don Quixote by Cervantes

“Para reproducirse como un conejo, uno debe tener un cerebro como un conejo.”

Cervantes 1602, via Ehrlich! (rabbit)

“Cervantes tells us that you can’t live without having hopes, without dreaming of something beyond your everyday reality…”

Jesus Camacho, Cervantes rapper

“Experience is the mother of knowledge.”

“Forgive me, friend, for making yoiu a madman, by persuading you to believe, as I did myself, that there have been formerly, and are now, knights-errant in the world.”

Cervantes, Don Quixote

“[On Don Quixote:] His quest is doomed from the start because he is rebelling against the nature of time, which is irreversible and unconquerable…. The literature of radical Islamism is a nightmare version of Cervantes’ novel.” by Mark Lilla

End Cervantes

Chacon, Raven:

“‘Voiceless Mass’ considers the futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when ceding space is never an option for those in power.”

Chafkin, Max:

reviewing Profits and Persecutiion by Peter Hayes:

“German businessman were skeptical of the Nazis, but tended to approach Hitler’s rise with an eye to the bottom line, seeking to preserve their financial advantage within the regime and, in doing so, slowly acquiescing to its most insidious demands.”

Chait, Jonathan:

“…the interviews that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles gave to Vanity Fair would trigger her resignation, maybe even the president’s impeachment. She admitted that President Donald Trump employs prosecutorial power for “score settling,” called Budget Director Russell Vought “a right-wing absolute zealot,” described Vice President J. D. Vance as “a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and attributed Elon Musk’s erratic style in gutting federal agencies to his “avowed ketamine” use.”

Chakrabarty, Dipesh:

“…the global is a human-centric construction and by contrast, the planetary decenters the human…

The planet is a political orphan…

nations remain mired in the temporality and politics of development.

…the political is provincially, parochially human…

“To encounter the planet is to encounter something that is the condition of human existence and yet profoundly indifferent to that existence.”

Chakravartty, Paula:

“…college should be a time when students are encouraged to ask big questions about justice and the future of humanity and to pursue answers however disquieting to the powerful.

Chaliand, Gerard:

“Felt knowledge is irreplaceable.”

…“The world is no doubt always changing, but there is nothing to indicate that

the course of a history founded on power relationships, where the

well-being of the conquerors is nourished on the blind servitude of

the victims and the pain of the vanquished, can be changed.”

“Over the decades, I’ve seen large chunks of contemporary reality which have

opened my eyes in regard to ideological illusions. I’ve

participated, within the limits of my means and in the manner

which best suited me, in the history of my time.”

From obit: He was addicted to risk…

‘His outlook on 200 years of conflicts is cold and without pathos,

his writing is sharp as a sword, and his irritation total. With their

blindness and their hesitations, the West refuses to give itself the

means, beyond rhetoric, to win its wars, drawing no lessons from

its failures.’

Chalmers, James:

Critic of Paine, said: “… without monarchy, the government will degenerate into democracy”.

Del Chamberlain, Von:

”I felt disillusioned by people whose religious principles claimed honesty to be paramount, yet who exhibited, even publicly, such deceit.”

“It was amazing to observe how frequently such officials abused rules which they. themselves, had put in place.”

Brent Cameron: ‘ …remember that he has a long memory’.”

Epitaph: “The better he knew the cosmos, the more he loved the Earth.”

Von Del Chamberlain

“Electricity is not just my slave; I have also become a slave to electricity.”

Ross Chambless

Chambers, Whitaker:

“… the two certainties for which the mind of man tirelessly seeks: a reason to live and a reason to die.” via Dorothy Thompson

Chammas, Danielle:

Poem re death: Her Defiance

With family at bedside,

and the beau’s guitar filling the room,

the leaf released the tree,

And she knew,

for the briefest of moments,

what it meant to fly.”

poetry.

Chandler, David:

Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society. 2024:

re John Rawls

what Rawls calls a “realistic utopia” – an achievable vision of the best

that a democratic society can be. They are both a vital antidote to

At its heart is the idea that society should be fair, and that to work out what that means we should imagine how we would organise society if we didn’t know our position within it – as if behind a “veil of ignorance.”

we would choose two simple but powerful principles, to do with freedom and equality respectively.

we can combine freedom and democracy with true economic justice.

Political Liberalism, published in 1993,

a further principle of “intergenerational” justice and sustainability.

first principle – the “basic liberties principle” – is what makes Rawls’s theory distinctively liberal, and it provides the basis for designing a democratic constitution and political system.

His second principle, which has two interlocking parts, provides a framework for thinking about our social and economic structures, and it is this principle that gives his theory its distinctively egalitarian flavour. All of us, he argued, would want to live in a society where everyone has a fair chance to succeed in life, irrespective

Alongside these two principles we would recognize our obligations towards future generations by adopting the “just savings principle,” according to which we have an overriding duty to maintain the material wealth and vital ecosystems on which society depends.

Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism”[

the best way to understand the idea of pluralism is to compare it with its opposite: populism.

Martin Luther King’s framing of the U.S. Constitution in 1963 as a “promissory note” on which America had “defaulted.”

Rawls’s ideas is that they are fundamentally hopeful. This is the fifth and final characteristic that should shape our approach to politics

A Rawlsian politics, then, would be principled, pragmatic, pluralist, unifying and hopeful.

we must start by developing a clear moral vision and a transformative practical programme.

end David Chandler, Rauls

Chandler, Len:

Radio show, The Credibility Gap- “Write and sing three songs a day for the show, based on the news. The first…by 9 am, the second by noon, the third by 3 pm.”

via Bob Dylan: ‘He…believed that all of society could be affected by one solitary life.’

Chandor, J.C. (film All is Lost):

Re: Redford:

Robert Redford never gave up. Bob was caring, blunt, kind, frustrating, late, hilarious, brutally serious, sweet, acidic, beautiful, strong and the greatest creative collaborator I will ever have. But in the end what made his life so truly extraordinary was that he was completely and utterly relentless. He often loathed the power that our medium and his celebrity gave him but knew in his heart that great storytelling can be the ultimate equalizer for humanity. So that’s what he did…

He did not obsess over death. It was all quite simple to him. Life was the ultimate gift and you should live and fight for every day till your last. When he laid his head down at night, all he needed to know was that he had given everything he had to all that he loved

End Chandor

“How powerful a presence is her absence.”

Fred Chappell, quoted in ‘The Last Day’, Robin Marantz Henig on death

“The problem is neither the Quran nor the Bible, sleep-inducing, incoherent and badly written novels. The problem is the faithful who read the holy books like instructions for assembling Ikea shelves.”

Charlie Hebdo editor, Stephane Charbonnier

““If I know what I shall find, I do not want to find it. Uncertainty is the salt of life.”

“If oratorios could kill, the Pentagon would long ago have supported musical research.”

“Modern science … resembles … a stock-market speculation [rather] than a search for the truth about nature. …it is the facts that pull the thoughts to the bottom of the sea of oblivion.

when you spend your life watching a bubble chamber … you may become an expert bubbler …/ but there is little likelihood of your thus acquiring much wisdom.

… doctors make patients …”

Erwin Chargaff

Charles, Prince-King:

“My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is. I must find one.”

“What is a soul? It’s like electricity – we don’t really know what it is,

but it’s a force that can light a room.” 

Ray Charles

Charles, Ron:

“comedy is tragedy plus time.”

 Made Politics Funny Again re Buckley

“Boredom is a hard state to portray effectively without succumbing to it “

Chase, Stuart (via Jesse Jennings memoir):

The Tyranny of Words

How often do minds meet; how often do they completely miss each other? How many of the world’s misfortunes are due to such misses?

a little brochure by H. G. Wells, written I believe for the Fabian

Society, which dealt with what he termed “a criticism of the instrument.” The forceps of the mind, he said, were clumsy forceps and crushed the truth a little when grasping it. Hum . . . something in that. Even more unsettling was the profound observation of Lao Tse: Those who know do not tell; Those who tell do not know.

Was I alone at fault, or was there something in the structure of language itself which checked communication?

the apathy of the unconverted was as colossal as it was baffling.

noises came through, but no meaning.

When people can agree on the thing to which their words refer, minds meet. The communication line is cleared.

Labels for essences and qualities, such as “the

sublime,” “freedom,” “individualism,” “truth.” For such terms, there are no discoverable referents in the outside world, and by mistaking them for substantial entities somewhere at large in the environment, we create a fantastic wonderland. This zone is the especial domain of philosophy, politics, and economics.

He is the one creature who is able to accumulate verifiable knowledge about himself and his environment, and yet he is the one who is

habitually deluded. No other animal produces verbal monsters in his head and projects them on the world outside his head.

I was trying to learn how to write, and found myself, for the first time in my life, learning how to read, how to listen, how to interpret language.

I found that greater disorders were constantly arising from defective communication.

But you are going to read a book where the author is at least on the watch for failures of meaning, at least alive to the grave difficulties of communication. That is something you do not encounter every day.

a metaphor widens the base of the reference – which is its

intention – communication may be improved.

with a dreadful irony, we are acting to produce precisely the kinds of things and situations which we do not want.

Something has perverted human-survival behavior. I assume that it is a temporary perversion. I assume that it is bound up to some extent with an unconscious misuse of man’s most human attributes-thinking and its tool, language.

the text of the advertising sections devoted almost solidly to a skillful attempt to make words mean something different to the reader from what the facts warrant.

“A controversy,” says Richards, “is normally an exploitation of a set of misunderstandings for warlike purposes.”

Bad language is now the mightiest weapon in the arsenal of despots and demagogues. Witness Dr. Goebbels.

The Supreme Court crisis of 1937 was due chiefly to the creation by judges and lawyers of verbal monsters in the interpretation of the Constitution. They gave objective, rigid values to vague phrases like “due process” and “interstate commerce.”

Judges and lawyers furthermore have granted to a legal abstraction the rights,

privileges, and protection vouchsafed to a living, breathing human being. It is thus that corporations, as well as you or I, are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

queer creatures created by

personifying abstractions in America. Here in the center is a vast figure called the Nation…

High in the heavens is the Constitution, a kind of chalice like the Holy Grail, suffused with ethereal light.

cowering behind the Constitution is Private Property. Higher than Court, Flag,

or the Law, close to the sun itself and almost as bright, is Progress, the ultimate God of America.

The “capitalisms” and “principles” are created in our heads by language and by language are objectified.

Final identification is achieved only by pointing to the apple, touching it with the hand, seeing it with the eyes, tasting it with the mouth, and so recognizing it as nonverbal.

 passed them through the censorship of my mind – always on the basis of past experience, for this can be my only reference.

Richards says: The mind is a connecting organ; it works only by connecting and it can connect in an indefinitely large number of ways. Words are meeting points at which regions of experience come together; a part of the mind’s endless endeavor to order itself.

Kittens and good scientists tend to let new experience pour in until some kind of workable relationships with past experience are established. They do not pretend to know all about something that they know nothing about.

the infant…arrives from warm, safe shelter…

He brings with him only two instinctive fears,

fear of falling, and fear of some loud sounds.

Most sounds made by an infant are expressions of some emotional state correlated with a definite situation –

Syllables come out of the blur of noises; objects come out of the blur of the world outside.

The word and the thing merge.

For a considerable period, word and gesture language develop together.

Gesture language is clear and effective. After the

child begins to go to school, word language rapidly takes precedence over gesture.

we note the seeds of word magic, in which the name gives power over the person or thing it signifies.

Words mean in so far as they act. With the passing of the years, the child learns to divorce words from direct action,

but the close association at his most formative period makes him a potential candidate for word magic throughout his life.

Language is no more than crudely acquired before children begin to suffer from it,

and to misinterpret the world by reason of it.

The student of semantics is embarrassed with the sheer richness of the evidence that people do not know what they are talking about.

semantic discipline

checks a kind of dangerous hypnotism, abnormal reversals of nerve currents, mental states approaching insanity.

“Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat.”

end Stuart Chase

Chatwin, Bruce:

by N Shakespeare: ‘He thought humans were meant to be a migratory species, and once they settled in one place, their natural urges “found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new”’.

 “Why do men wander rather than sit still?”

from Wiki entry: ‘He preferred to call his writing stories or searches.[186][187] He was interested in asking big questions about human existence, sharing unusual tales, and making connections between ideas from various sources.’

from Songlines:

“The definition of a man’s ‘own country’was ‘the place in which I do not have to ask’…

‘Walkabout’ was, in practice, a kind of … exchange, spreading messages./..

‘The trade route is the Songline…songs are the principal medium of exchange…

A man’s verses were his title deeds…

I am!…the most secret and sacred couplet of the Ancestor’s song…

wherever their tracks led they left a trailmof music…

wealth has to be shared or destroyed…

All she had to know was the song and she knew where she was. To get back, she just sang the song in reverse…

He who has arrived ‘goes back…to your ‘conception site’…

They knew where they were going, smiling at death…”

“The stars know the time when we die…”

from Shakespeare, letter re: Chatwin:

‘He waqs like a little firework all the time. …you can’t be a beautiful firework and live on and on…

the literate adventurer…

Salman Rushdie: ‘he had the most erudite and possibly the most brilliant mind that I ever came across.’

Ruth Tringham on Songlines: ‘an idea nof trying to grasp an entirely different way of thinking about space and time…’

Elizabeth Sifton: ‘People who study Chatwin feel liberated by him…’

Thomas Keneally: ‘Modern fiction is sometimes too house-trained. Chatwin’s fiction was not house-trained…he saw stories as paradigms of humanity.’

“Much has still to be done towards the elaboration of an integrative physiology, i.e. a formalised general physiology. This would call for the development of novel mathematical methods, the interpretation of experimental results, and the construction of appropriate models inspiring further experimentation. Instrumental and technological advances are today producing vast amounts of highly refined data which are far too scattered to be readily encompassed. A formalised integrative physiology may be expected to rationalise this extraordinary diversity of information within a sound theoretical framework, thus contributing to a deeper insight into the wonders of the living organism.”

G. Chauvet (11), Vol. 3, pg. 626.

“The devil came here yesterday, and it still smells of sulfur today.”

Hugo Chavez to UN on G W Bush visit and talk.

“…money available for investment…The world is invested in destruction.”

Robin Chazdon

Che, Michael:

“You know, I’ll bet if someone explained how long impeachment takes to John Wilkes Booth, he’d like say, ‘OK, but where’s he at right now?’”

“For comedy, you have to pay attention. You have to see the things that not everybody sees to make the points that not everybody’s going to make.”

“…the end game wasn’t to convert you. The end game was to talk to you.” on Malcolm X.

Michael Che, SNL

Cheever, John:

“It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.”

Chemerinsky, Erwin:

“Trump’s ‘Compact’ with universities is just extortion.”

 “Slow down and be skeptical.”

“The devil is in the defaults.”

Brian X Chen NYT

Chen, Joanna:

“… the meaning of my essay.. is about holding on to empathy when there is no human decency inside. It is about the willingness to listen, and the idea that remaining deaf to voices other than your own won’t bring the solution.”

“We don’t negotiate with evil. We defeat it.”

“…in our nation’s 248-year history, there has

never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump”…

I have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution”.

Dick Cheney

“Intellectual stimulation is an emotional experience for me, and something will only be a really deeply emotionally experience for me if it engages me intellectually as well.”

Eugenia Cheng

“the more violence a regime uses to survive, the less power it actually has.”

via KSR talk: ‘…radical action might be needed.’

Erica Chenoweth

Cheny,Liz:

“the most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law.”

Cheney declared, “Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”

“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”

Chernobyl (HBO) Valery Legasov,  

“…this new sharing economy is the real deal and will increasingly be a source of income for more and more people…The 21st-century economy will be powered by people.”

Brian Chesky, Air B&B via Friedman

Chesterton, G.K.:

“My country right or wrong,”

 once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”

“There will be mirth or there will be madness.”

“The world will never be safe for democracy – it is a dangerous trade.

“…lunacy dancing in high places.”

“Brave men are all vertebrates …softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle…cowards are all crustaceans; their hardness is all on the cover, and their softness is inside.”

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.”

“All real democracy is an attempt (like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out.”

End Chesterton

Chiang, Ted:

“A magical worldview is one where the universe responds to you in a personal way.”

Magic is evidence that the universe knows that you’re a person. Magic is an

indication that the universe recognizes that people are different from things and that you are an individual who is different from other people.

Belief in magic is a kind of anthropomorphic projection onto the universe as a whole

stories about imaginary science as science fiction, and I’m going to refer to stories about magic as fantasy. Stories about science help us think about the physical world, while stories about magic help us think about our worth as individuals, and we benefit from both kinds of stories

Chib, Vikram:

“The primary symptom of long Covid is fatigue.”

“McCarthy was a demagogue of demagogues. … McCarthy’s power lay in outrage, the big lie, distrust, all political goods that could be brokered in an atmosphere of fear and suspicion….with so little he could do so much.”

Marquis Childs

“He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount.”

Chinese proverb

Julia Ching:

“[The West]…an excessive individualism and a litigious spirit promoting conflict rather than harmony and an increasing gap between rich and poor in capitalist societies. East Asians value what they call humaneness, or human warmth, which they find lacking in a system where human relationships have lost a personal touch. The West may yet have something to learn from the East.”

Julia Ching via Maguire

Chinouriri, Rachel:

“In my early 20s, I was so self-assured of who I was, then my frontal lobe hit…”

«…autonomy is an essential condition for striving for individual happiness.”

«…it is people’s capability for rational thinking and reflective reasoning that makes both autonomy and happiness possible.”

«…some of the personal beliefs, behaviors, and laws central to the smooth functioning of laissez-faire, consumer capitalism do not provide people with optimal experiences of freedom and autonomy.”

V. I. Chirkov

Chisholm, Shirley:

“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair…

unbought and unbossed.”

Chivers, C J :

“… when a new class of weapon succeeds, copycats follow. In this way, revolutionary weapons arrive with a promise of relief and linger for a legacy of horror…

Necessity removed grey, gave license to bloodmath and allowed space for neither hesitation nor regret.”

“… the fertile mental terrain where fear and distrust of authority meet

superstitious folklore.”

‘‘Take a bogus material, give it an enigmatic name, exaggerate its physical properties and intended uses, mix in some human greed and intrigue, and voilà: one half baked scam,’’ the Department of Energy’s Critical Technologies Newsletter.

C J Chivers

Choi, Yejin:

“What we have today is essentially a mouth without a brain.”

on artificial intelligence.

Chomsky:

«….people have an instinct for freedom…they really want to control their own affairs. They don’t want to be pushed around, ordered, oppressed …they want a chance to do things that make sense.”…physics … restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists … and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.”

“The Republican party now has its catechism of things you have to repeat in lockstep, kind of like the old Communist party.”

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.”

Noam Chomsky

Elections are run by the public relations industry. Its primary task is commercial advertising, which is designed to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices – the exact opposite of how markets are supposed to work, but certainly familiar to anyone who has watched television.

Noam Chomsky

Surveying the terrible conflicts in the world, it’s clear that almost all are the residue of imperial crimes and the borders that

the great powers drew in their own interests.

Noam Chomsky

“Before the 1970s, banks were banks….That changed dramtically in the 1970s.”

“Concentration of wealth … doesn’t benefit the economy…Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power.

…the ‘precariot’ – people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society.”

“Occupy … should be regarded as … the first major public response … to about thirty years of a really quite bitter class war that has led to social, economic and political arrangements in which the system of democracy has been shredded.”

Noam Chomsky

“[The Republican Party] – has roots. It’s kind of like jihadis: You have to ask about the roots…. today’s Republican Party qualifies as candidate for the most dangerous organization in human history….

“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”

end Chomsky

«Humans…try to make some sense out of their experience. There are all kinds of ways of doing this: some are called myth, some are called magic, some are called religion.”

“Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science cannot deal with them. The reason why physics can achieve such depth is that it restricts itself to extremely simple things, abstracted from the complexity of the world. ..Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding…”

The task of anyone who wants to uphold intellectual and moral values is not to speak what they regard as truth to anybody – the powerful or the powerless – but rather to speak with the powerless and to try to learn the truth.

The powerful typically know the truth quite well. They generally know what they are doing, and don’t need our instructions.

The right-wing Democrats (mislabeled “moderate”) follow along for their own reasons. These are not hard to discern in some cases: It’s not a great surprise that a coal baron who is Congress’s leading recipient of fossil fuel funding (Manchin) should proclaim the fossil fuel industry’s “no elimination” slogan, or that a top recipient of donations from the pharmaceutical industry (Sen. Kyrsten Sinema) should be holding back badly need drug pricing reforms. That’s normal in a political system mired in corruption.

But the rot runs deeper.

the U.S. has a one-party political system – the business party – with two factions, Democrats and Republicans.

Chomsky:

The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Chomsky, Noam

“It is a great thing to be able to see what is right under your nose.”

What of the responsibility of intellectuals? Those who qualify for the title have a degree of privilege conferred by this status, yielding opportunity beyond the norm. Opportunity confers responsibility – which, in turn, poses choices, sometimes hard ones.

follow the path of integrity, wherever it may lead.

The facts are not in the least obscure.

what then is the responsibility of intellectuals? They always have a choice. In enemy states, they can choose to be commissars or dissidents. In U.S. client states, in the modern period, the choice can be bitter beyond words. At home, they can choose to be responsible experts or wild men in the wings.

Elaine Scarry reminds us, the prohibition of assassination in international law traces back to a forceful denunciation of the practice by Abraham Lincoln, who

condemned the call for assassination as “international outlawry” in 1863, an “outrage,” which “civilized nations” view with “horror” and merits the “sternest retaliation.”

Intellectuals are typically privileged –

Privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

end Noam Chomsky

“Seriously, it looks like we’re planning our extinction.”

“If you look at all the things that are happening, social and economic injustice, mass migrations, pandemics, all of this is a projection of the separate conditioned mind,” he said, referring to the parts of a person’s thought patterns that are shaped by societal norms and cultural beliefs. “And once you have this experience of interconnectivity, it’s kind of abominable to you that you would engage in war or terrorism or destroy the environment.”

Deepak Chopra

Chouinard, Yvon:

“Everyone’s just green-washing. The revolution isn’t going to happen with corporations. The elephant in the room is growth. Growth is the culprit.

It’s impossible to be a public company and be responsible.”

From letter, “The next hundred years” in 1992:

 “I have a little different definition of evil than most people. When you have the opportunity and the ability to do good and you do nothing, that’s evil. Evil doesn’t always have to be an overt act. It can be merely the absence of good.”

“I don’t respect the stock market at all. Once your public, you’ve lost control over the company, and you have to maximize profits for the shareholder, and then you become one of these irresponsible companies.

… every billionaire is a policy failure.”

people keep buying junk. In a world where it’s often cheaper to replace goods than to repair them, we have gone from a society of caretaker owners to one of consumers.

the poor can’t afford cheap goods

Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia

Chowdbury, Rumman:

“The paradigm of social media that we have is not one in which people understand having agency.”

When your time perspective shortens,… you tend to focus on emotionally meaningful goals. When the time horizon is long, you focus on knowledge acquisition.”

Laura Christensen, Stanford U

“Fear is like a currency – you can use it to buy influence and to buy votes.”

V Christensen, Energy Solutions

Christie, Michael:

Character Jake: “Every tree is held up by its own history, the very bones of its ancestors.”

Christian, David – Big History:

“We’re burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the ‘goldilocks’ condition that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years.”

collective learning

lovelock sagan goldilocks Gaia

view from the mountaintop

An origin story for all based on modern science.

increasing complexity – 8 threshholds…

The Big History project on line free

see his 2022 book Origin Story, Kindle (below)

David Christian TED talk, Big History

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

H. G. Wells

There can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas.… With nothing but narrow, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction.

Wells was looking for unifying knowledge – knowledge that links disciplines as well as peoples.

understanding and identity, from the self to the family and clan, to a nation, language group, or religious affiliation, to the huge circles of humanity and life, and eventually to the idea that you are part of an entire universe or cosmos.

many simply lost faith and conviction, and along with them, they lost their bearings, their sense of their place in the universe. That loss of faith helps explain the pervasive anomie, the feeling of aimlessness, meaninglessness, and sometimes even despair

in today’s globally connected world, it is apparent that nationalism divides humanity even as it connects citizens within a particular country.

we moderns are not doomed to a chronic state of fragmentation and meaninglessness.

We arrive in this universe through no choice of our own, at a time and place not of our choosing.

We can build these vast maps of our universe and its past partly because we have large brains, and, like all brainy organisms, we use our brains to create internal maps of the world. These maps provide a sort of virtual reality that helps us find our way.

This book offers a sort of London Underground map of the universe.

one small part of the universe is beginning to look at itself. It’s

specialization makes it difficult for any individual to stand back far enough to see humanity as a whole.

almost all societies we know of have put origin stories at the heart of education.

that leaves us with a fragmented understanding of both reality and the human community to which we all belong.

an origin story for all modern humans, and it builds on the global traditions of modern science.

the modern story is about a universe that just is. Any sense of meaning comes not from the universe, but from us humans.

Joseph Campbell,

It emerged at a very specific time in human history and is shaped by the dynamic and potentially destabilizing traditions of modern capitalism.

The modern origin story is still under construction.

there are still holes in the story, so, like all origin stories, it will never lose a sense of mystery and awe.

Blaise Pascal wrote: “Knowledge is like a sphere; the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown.”

in special and unusual environments such as on our planet, there existed perfect Goldilocks conditions, environments, like Baby Bear’s porridge in the story of Goldilocks, that were not too hot and not too cold, not too thick and not too thin, but just right for the evolution of complexity.

understanding how complex things emerged and what Goldilocks conditions allowed them to emerge is a great way of understanding ourselves and the world we live in today.

thresholds give shape to the complicated narrative of the modern origin story.

we seem to live in a vigorous young universe that is full of creativity. The birth of the universe – our first threshold – is as miraculous as any of the other thresholds in our modern origin story.

Chapter 1 In the Beginning: Threshold 1

a modern Australian Aboriginal saying puts it, nothing is entirely nothing.

Joseph Campbell writes: “As the consciousness of the individual rests on a sea of night into which it descends in slumber and out of which it mysteriously wakes, so, in the imagery of myth, the universe is precipitated out of, and reposes upon, a timelessness back into which it again dissolves.”

Terry Pratchett wrote, “The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”

something really can appear in a vacuum from nothing, though grasping what this means requires a sophisticated understanding of nothing.

it’s as if a vast spring has been uncoiling for more than thirteen billion years.

When we see a new form or structure with new qualities, we are really seeing new arrangements of what already existed.

Innovation is emergence.

changes of form and structure phase changes.

There may be other species of energy.

is present in all of space, so its power increases as the universe expands.

so physicists call it dark energy.

Matter is the stuff that energy pushes around.

Though the fog of energy is always there, the structures that emerged from it will give our origin story shape and a plotline.

The first law of thermodynamics tells us that the ocean of energy is always there; it’s conserved. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that all the forms that emerge will eventually dissolve back into the ocean of energy. The forms, like the movements of a dance, are not conserved.

If there is a bad guy in the modern origin story, it is surely entropy, the apparently universal tendency for structures to dissolve into randomness.

It’s as if, in return for letting things link up to form more complex structures, entropy demanded a complexity tax, to be paid in energy. In fact, we’ll see that entropy has demanded many different types of complexity taxes,

The very act of paying entropy taxes creates more chaos and more waste,

In addition to energy and matter, some basic operating rules emerged from the big bang.

Today, we describe these rules as the fundamental laws of physics.

The laws of physics filtered out those states of the universe that were not compatible with them,

there will be gravity in this universe, and electromagnetism as well, and electromagnetism is going to be 10exp36 times as strong as gravity.”

that leftover stuff is what our universe is made of.

Chance then rearranged things randomly from the possibilities that remained.

Peter Hoffmann writes: “Tempered by physical law, which adds a dash of necessity, chance becomes the creative force, the mover and shaker of our universe. All the beauty we see around us, from galaxies to sunflowers, is the result of this creative collaboration between chaos and necessity.”

seems that the entire universe really did pop out of a sort of nothingness full of potential. Free Energy: The Driver of Complexity

most possible arrangements of matter and energy have little or no structure, and if by chance you do find structure, expect it to decay fast.

gravity likes to herd things. And

gravity provided the activation energy for fusion and star formation and for all that followed.

Increasing complexity is not a triumph over entropy.

Chapter 3 Molecules and Moons: Threshold 4

We humans feel gravity, but in the nano-world where atoms hang out, gravity is not so important.

At the scale of molecules, the electromagnetic force rules.

Molecules and atoms move through a sticky world of electromagnetic hooks, probes, lures, and lassos.

Ernest Rutherford, one of the pioneers of modern nuclear physics, described the nucleus of an atom as “the fly in the cathedral.”

quantum physicists map orbiting electrons onto a sort of “probability mist” that thickens at certain distances from the nucleus and thins out at others.

1788, James Hutton wrote: “We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

Chapter 4 Life: Threshold 5

Energy causes change, so you can usually see it at work, but information directs change, often from the shadows.

In its most general form, information consists of rules that affect outcomes by limiting possibilities.

why more information seems to mean less entropy,

Variation provides multiple possibilities; natural selection uses local rules to pick out those that will work under local conditions. Here is how Darwin put it in The Origin of Species:

This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.

But liquids are like ballrooms, and liquid water, with its whispering hydrogen bonds, offers the best ballroom of all. Atoms can cruise, waltz, and tango, and it’s not too hard for electrons to change partners if they spot something more attractive.

rock guitarist Hotblack Desiato, in Douglas Adams’s novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, who spends a year dead, for tax purposes. The tax these organisms avoid, of course, is entropy’s complexity tax. Luca might have lived in a similar twilight zone.

Enzymes cruise through the molecular sludge, looking for target molecules that they fit on to, the way a wrench fits a particular nut or bolt. Then the enzyme uses tiny shots of energy to tap, bend, crack, or split the molecule, or bind it to other molecules.

Enzymes get the energy they need to do their work from the cellular equivalent of the electrical grid.

called chemiosmosis,

Chapter 5 Little Life and the Biosphere

James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis

nineteenth-century German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, one of the first scholars to write a modern, science-based origin story,

energetic photons newly arrived from the sun to goose electrons inside light-sensitive molecules such as chlorophyll. This gives the electrons such a shock that they jump out of their home atoms and then get kidnapped, wriggling all the time, by proteins. The proteins pass the high-energy electrons through cell membranes in a sort of bucket brigade. This creates an electrical gradient across the membrane that can be used to charge up energy-carrying molecules such as ATP. This is chemiosmosis again, but this time, the energy that charges up molecules of ATP comes not from food molecules but from that vast generator in the sky, the sun.

The earliest forms of photosynthesis did not produce oxygen as a by-product, and they worked well in a world without free oxygen. They may have used energy captured from sunlight to steal electrons from hydrogen sulfide (rotten-egg gas) or from iron atoms dissolved in the early oceans.

new forms of photosynthesis evolved in a group of organisms known as cyanobacteria. These forms of photosynthesis could extract more energy by using water and carbon dioxide as their primary raw materials. Prying electrons loose from water molecules was tougher than capturing them from hydrogen sulfide or iron.

these sophisticated photosynthesizers zapped water molecules and stripped electrons from their hydrogen atoms. Then they added the captured electrons to carbon dioxide molecules to form carbohydrate molecules, which acted as huge energy barns. The oxygen from broken water molecules was released as waste.

Respiration gives you the energy of fire without its destructiveness.

Margulis called the mechanism endosymbiosis.

The boring billion years of the Proterozoic eon prepared the way for a much more exciting time – the Phanerozoic eon, the era of big life.

Chapter 6 Big Life and the Biosphere

Our unusually large moon helped stabilize Earth’s orbit and tilt.

The tool-kit genes are

Ecologists talk of a food chain, a sort of queue of energy consumers with plants at the front, followed by herbivores (or creatures that consume plants), then by carnivores, which can consume herbivores, then by fungi, which bring up the rear by feasting on the dead. The whole process delights entropy, which exacts a garbage tax at every step.

The impact of the first forests was particularly significant because as yet, there were no organisms that could break down the lignin in wood. That’s why forests from the Carboniferous period (from 360 to 300 million years ago) were mostly buried beneath the soil, along with the carbon they had drawn down from the atmosphere. Over time, they fossilized to form the coal seams that later powered the industrial revolution. About 90 percent of today’s coal deposits were buried during the period of high oxygen levels, from around 330 to 260 million years ago. With

Chapter 7 Humans: Threshold 6

What is it about this strange species?

When you see sudden, rapid changes like this, start looking for tiny changes that have huge consequences. Complexity theory and the related field of chaos theory are full of changes like this.

So what tiny changes unleashed the tornado of human history?

We don’t just gather information, like other species. We seem to cultivate and domesticate it, as farmers cultivate crops. We generate and share more and more information and use it to tap larger and larger flows of energy and resources.

Vernadsky called a noösphere, a single global realm of mind, of culture, of shared thoughts and ideas. “There is,” writes Michael Tomasello, “only one known biological mechanism that could bring about these kinds of changes in behavior and cognition in so short a time.… This biological mechanism is social or cultural transmission, which works on time scales many orders of magnitude faster than those of organic evolution.” This process, which Tomasello calls “cumulative cultural evolution,” is unique to our species. The tiny change that allowed humans to share and accumulate so much information was linguistic.

warn others in their group of the approach

languages can share only the simplest of ideas,

Human language is powerful enough to act like a cultural ratchet, locking in the ideas of one generation and preserving them for the next generation, which can add to them in its turn. 16 I call this mechanism collective learning. Collective learning is a new driver of change,

W. H. McNeill

“The principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills.”

Human history begins, then, with collective learning.

past one hundred thousand years, we get some glimpses of how our ancestors lived and find clearer evidence for collective learning.

ritual traditions.

150 people represents the largest group size that human brains can normally cope with,

the megafauna vanished not long

after the arrival of humans.

origin stories that lay at the heart of education.

a new sphere of shared knowledge, the noösphere.

Chapter 8 Farming: Threshold 7

As farmers spread, they transformed their surroundings.

the beginnings of classes and castes. But

Chapter 9 Agrarian Civilizations

Over time, surplus wealth would be mobilized by small but powerful minorities, and the structures they built to mobilize surplus wealth, often using crude forms of coercion, would form the muscles and sinews of agrarian civilizations.

Surplus wealth meant surplus people. As productivity rose, not everyone needed to farm, so new social roles appeared.

why trade and markets and accounting devices such as coins and writing were as vital to complex societies

As specialization increased, so did inequality. The earliest farming communities were reasonably egalitarian, even when they exceeded the ancient community maximum of 150 to 200 people.

familiar triangle of wealth, with an elite population of about 10 percent and one person at the very top, while most people lived close to subsistence.

the emergence of hierarchies

as big men or chiefs,

why slavery and forced labor were common in agrarian civilizations.

five thousand years ago, the first writing appeared in Uruk,

wealth never really consists of things; it consists of control over the energy flows that make, move, mine, and transform things. Wealth is a sort of compressed sunlight, just as matter is really congealed energy.

a world in which resources were mobilized primarily through the threat of coercion and in which the ability to mobilize and inflict violence was widely admired. If you were a king, taking resources from your neighbors was one of the most important ways of growing your economy.

the manuals of statecraft

introduction to Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes described the state as a huge monster or leviathan:

The main features of states do indeed parallel those of living organisms. Like the cells of living organisms, states have semipermeable borders, creating a protected internal region. Flows through the border are vital to the state’s survival, so they are carefully monitored. States also have a “metabolism” that mobilizes flows of energy and resources and distributes them so as to keep the state functioning by supporting elites (the “worthy,” as the Arthashastra puts it) and the armies and bureaucracies that defend and manage the state. For states, as for living organisms, the ultimate source of most energy flows is photosynthesis, which allows farmers to capture energy from sunlight. In states, as in living organisms, flows of energy must be managed with care. Too small, and the state starves. Too large, and subjects revolt or starve, and flows of energy and resources dry up. Just as living organisms maintain electrochemical gradients that drive flows of energy, states maintain gradients of persuasion and coercion. They use law, education, and religion to persuade their subjects that their power is just. But they also maintain armies and disciplined groups of coercers so they can compel obedience when persuasion fails. This is why the Arthashastra treats punishment (danda) as the foundation of statehood. Coercion was fundamental to mobilization in all agrarian civilizations, which helps explain the importance of warfare and the pervasiveness of physical punishments in society and within households and families.

States, like living organisms, keep track of information about their resources and enemies so they can constantly adjust to unstable environments.

as states expanded over larger areas, their gods, too, seemed to acquire greater powers and greater reach. In the largest empires, we see the emergence of supreme deities

All the major world religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the religious traditions of Rome and Greece, of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and the religious traditions of American empires, incorporated superhuman gods.

And for the most part, rulers and the leaders of institutionalized religious traditions worked closely together because they understood how powerful religious beliefs could be as a way of generating support for systems from which they both benefited.

These international exchange networks also carried goods no one wanted, including diseases such as smallpox and the bubonic plague.

Afro-Eurasia. They included the Roman, Sassanian, Kushan, Mauryan, and Han Empires. And there were many smaller semidependent states in between. During the next millennium, between two thousand and one thousand years ago, some of the larger empires collapsed, including the largest of all, the Roman and Han Empires. Disease and imperial breakdown slowed growth for almost a millennium. But by a thousand years ago, there were new signs of growth. Villages, cities, and trade networks expanded in previously underpopulated regions of South China, northern Europe, and Africa. Perhaps most astonishing of all was the rise of new political systems associated with a new world religion, Islam, in the eighth century CE.

rapid population growth was made possible by huge increases in the energy consumed by our species

Most of the energy bonanza paid for growing populations.

Chapter 10 On the Verge of Today’s World

World Six Hundred Years Ago By 1400 CE, human populations had grown from about five million at the end of the last ice age to one hundred times as many, or almost five hundred million people.

Aztec Empire, which evolved rapidly in the fifteenth century, was in modern Mexico. Its capital, Tenochtitlán, was where Mexico City is today.

Inca Empire, its contemporary, were on the slopes of the Andes, in Ecuador and Peru. The Inca capital, Cuzco, was in the southeast of modern Peru.

in 1500 was ruled by the Ming dynasty in China. In the early fifteenth century, the Ming emperor Yongle sent out vast fleets, captained by a Muslim eunuch, Zheng He, to travel through the Indian Ocean to India, Persia, and the rich ports of East Africa. Zheng He’s ships were some of the largest and most sophisticated

The Ottoman Empire was the most powerful empire in the Muslim world. By the sixteenth century, its power reached into southeastern Europe,

the “Columbian Exchange,” and he showed that globalization would transform the biosphere as much as it transformed human history. 3 In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that these changes kick-started modern capitalism.

Suddenly, humans found themselves linked within a single global sphere of thought: the noösphere. By the twentieth century, the noösphere had become a disruptive force for change within the entire biosphere.

bypass the Ottoman traders who dominated the Mediterranean.

in the mid-fifteenth century, Portuguese governments began to send highly maneuverable caravels armed with cannons to probe around the western coast of Africa. The caravels, with their lateen sails inspired by Islamic models

What the Portuguese and Spanish had started, the Dutch and English continued in the seventeenth century as they seized Portuguese forts in Asia and began to nibble away at Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean and North America.

Newton’s achievement can be tied to the vast increase in general knowledge that overseas trade and exploration had brought to Europeans. The courage to generalize, to arrive at universals about the natural world, owes much to the immense quantity of information – and self-confidence – that European mastery of the great seas gave land-bound thinkers like Isaac Newton.

relationship between European traders and rulers. Rulers protected and supported commerce, and in return they got the right to tax and profit from commercial wealth. This was the earliest and crudest form of capitalism, a system admired by European economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx.

the Russian government built up a trade in vodka so profitable that by the nineteenth century, it was paying for much of the cost of the Russian army, then one of the largest in the world.

the vodka trade, which eventually led to high and dangerous levels of alcoholism.

By the seventeenth century, English brewers, brickmakers, and bakers were using coal, and Londoners began to complain about the city’s foul air.

The James Watt steam engine gave a first taste of energy flows so vast that they would transform human societies in just two centuries.

1896, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius recognized both that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas and that it was being generated in large enough amounts to start changing global climates.

Electricity and electric motors, like the proton pumps and ATP molecules of the earliest prokaryotes, provided efficient new ways of distributing power.

New technologies revolutionized warfare and weaponry. Railways and steamships moved armies and weapons faster than ever before. In 1866, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, a powerful new explosive. Along with improved handguns and machine guns, explosives multiplied the killing power of each soldier. The destructive power of industrial weapons became clear during the American Civil War, the first real fossil-fuels war,

In the mid-nineteenth century, oil, in the form of kerosene, began to be used for lighting as an alternative to whale oil, the price of which was rising,

oil was sometimes found by those drilling for salt.

Chapter 11 The Anthropocene: Threshold 8

Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his paleolithic ancestors. – MARSHALL MCLUHAN, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA

we humans have stumbled into the role of planetary pilots

Anthropocene epoch looks like a drama with three main acts

Act 1 began in the mid-nineteenth century as fossil-fuel technologies began to transform the entire world.

These differences created the lopsided imperial world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Europe’s economic, political, and military conquests encouraged a sense of European or Western superiority, and many Europeans began to see their conquests as part of a European or Western mission to civilize and modernize the rest of the world.

Act 2 of the Anthropocene was exceptionally violent. It began in the late nineteenth century and lasted until the middle of the twentieth century.

Act 3 includes the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. From the bloodbath of the world wars, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the first global superpowers.

The four decades after World War II witnessed the most remarkable spurt of economic growth in human history. This was the period of the Great Acceleration.

many scholars date the dawn of the Anthropocene epoch to the middle of the twentieth century.

artificial nitrogen-based fertilizers transformed agriculture, raised the productivity of arable land throughout the world, and made it possible to feed several billion more humans. It turned fossil-fuel energy into food. A liquid fossil fuel, oil,

Internal combustion engines spread rapidly in the late twentieth century, largely because of their wartime use to transport soldiers and equipment and to power the first tanks.

To break enemy codes, wartime governments funded research into the mathematics of information and computing.

and time, and this warping was the real source of gravity. Einstein also showed that matter could be converted into energy, and that insight provided the scientific foundations for nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Quantum physics, developed in the same era, gave deeper insight into the strange, probabilistic world of atomic nuclei.

The noösphere, the sphere of mind, became a dominant driver of change within the biosphere.

If the sharing of information is what makes us humans so powerful, computers multiplied that power many times over.

A specialist wage earner, like a nerve cell, cannot survive alone. This is why a world of wage earners is much more tightly integrated than a world of peasant farmers.

the demographic transition: the emergence of a new demographic regime of low fertility and low mortality.

Reduced pressure on women to spend their entire adult lives bearing or rearing children blurred traditional divisions between male and female roles and allowed women to take up roles from which they had been excluded during most of the agrarian era.

Transforming the Biosphere

Charles Keeling began measuring levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in Hawaii in 1958.

One of the most terrifying of these changes is the increasing productivity of human weaponry.

Chapter 12 Where Is It All Going?

The universe really is indifferent to our fate. It’s a vast ocean of energy for which individual wavelets such as us are ephemeral, passing phenomena.

Modern science captures the universe’s terrifying indifference in the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

Our discussion of the Good and the Bad Anthropocenes tells us what the goals of the human quest are right now. The first is to avoid a crash. If we can do that, there are two further goals: to ensure that the benefits of the Good Anthropocene are available to all humans, and to ensure that the biosphere continues to thrive

the preamble to the United Nations document “Transforming Our World,” published in 2015: All countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will implement this plan. We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet. We are determined to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world on to a sustainable and resilient path. As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind.

People: We are determined to end

Planet:

Prosperity: We are determined to ensure

follow 17 sustainable-development goals and 169 specific targets that are to be achieved, if all goes well, over the next fifteen years.

the Paris Accord

that this glossy new world is in motion, can we keep it going with smaller and more delicate energy flows, like the tiny flows, electron by electron, or proton by proton, that are managed by enzymes and that energize living cells? Can we imitate respiration, big life’s delicate, nondisruptive equivalent of fire? The idea of fossil fuels as activation energy suggests something else about today’s world.

once the violent energies of creation have done their work, we expect a new and more stable dynamism, as something new takes its seat in the universe. Like our sun, we can perhaps settle into a period of dynamic stability,

living life within a framework of social and cultural stability has been the norm for most of human history and for most human societies.

what it means to live richly and dynamically in a less changeable world is preserved within the cultures of many modern indigenous communities whose people see themselves primarily as custodians of a world larger and older than themselves.

no-growth future,

John Stuart Mill welcomed such a future as a refreshing contrast to the frenetic gold-rush world of the industrial revolution.

1848, he wrote, “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.” 3 Instead, he argued, “the best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.”

He warned that the stationary state should be chosen deliberately and on good terms before it was forced on a reluctant humanity on much poorer terms. “I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.”

March 1968, just before he was assassinated, Robert Kennedy described the limitations of an economy devoted to never-ending growth in gross national product: The Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.… It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.… Yet the GNP does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or… the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.… It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

what will a “mature Anthropocene” look like?

the main features of a world that preserves the best of the Good Anthropocene

Population growth will slow, eventually, to zero, and perhaps start falling.

a more stable world need not be a static world.

looks as if continental plates will regather in a new supercontinent that has already been dubbed Amasia because it will join Asia and the Americas. The

It will turn out that everything that seemed permanent in our universe was actually ephemeral.

Entropy will have finally destroyed all structure and order.

Acknowledgments

We humans swim in a sea of ideas, and a book like this is built by grabbing ideas as they float past, linking them to other ideas, bending them, perhaps warping them, perhaps finding new connections.

John Brockman, who supported the idea of this book from the moment I first suggested it.

Future Stories: What’s Next?

Christian, David

trying to see too far into the future.

the hidden face of time, the parts that seem to lie in darkness because we haven’t been there yet.

the strange place we describe as “the future.”

There seem to be many possible futures. Then, in a flash, all but one disappear, and we are left with a single present.

our only clues about the future lie in the past.

we enter the future looking back to the past.

small numbers of linkers – tramps, merchant caravans, peddlers, itinerant prophets, and soldiers – have played such a revolutionary role in human history.

we are hoping to steer is not the tiny raft of our individual futures, but a planet-size starship carrying billions of humans divided into two hundred distinct nations, as well as millions of other species of plants, animals, and bacteria.

Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper “A Theory of Human

a hierarchy of human needs,

“Declaration toward a Global Ethic” based on a draft by the Swiss theologian Hans Küng.

The declaration affirmed that “a common set of core values is found in the teachings of the religions, and that these form the basis of a global ethic.”

Condorcet

scientific and moral progress would solve the problem as people realized that they have “a duty to those who are not yet born [and] that duty is not to give them existence but to give them happiness,”

Malthus’s Essay

have read” he wrote, “some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society with great pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such happy improvements. But I see great, and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties in the way to them.”

As Adlai Stevenson said in 1965, “We travel together on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil… preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and… the love, we give our fragile craft.”

Limits to Growth, published in 1972.

“Copernican revolution of the mind.”

Sir Isaac Newton, who lost money he had invested during the South Sea Bubble in 1720, ruefully commented, “I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men.”

four scenarios, though recognizably descendants of Dator’s, are labeled “collapse,” “downsizing,” “sustainability,” and “growth.”

With humans out of the way, the biosphere will repair itself over many centuries.

end David Christian

“The human body just will not go on without water.

It will go on without oil. It may not go on the way we like it, and we

may not be very comfortable, but you can go on. Without water you

can’t go on.”

Don Christiansen is general manager of the Central Utah Water

Conservancy District. He is the former mayor of Alpine, Utah, and former member of the Central Utah Water Conservancy Board of Directors,

Chu, Steven:

I now know why you won the Nobel Prize. When they asked you a question, by God, you answered it.”

Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) to Chu

“You cannot negotiate with Nature. Nor can you ignore it, for it will not go away.”

The Economist referring to S Chu; 7–4-09, p. 64.

Steven Chu:

Church, Frank:

Church Committee’s final report about the domestic surveillance was blunt. “Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected,”

“…your biggest problem in life is not going to be hiding your stuff so nobody steals it, it’s getting anybody to ever use it.”

“if you can’t tell me what law of thermodynamics it violates, I don’t see why we can’t do it.”

George Church

Churchill, Winston:

“Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory.

The orator is the embodiment of the passions of the multitude….Before he can move their tears, his nown much flow…To convince them he must himself believe.”

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts – Winston S. Churchill

“In victory, magnanimity.…In defeat, defiance.”

“He had the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought.” on Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.

“It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead.

The chain of destiny can only be grasped

one link at a time.”

We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”

“People like to change – they just don’t like to be changed.”

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

“We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

in a 1931 essay!

“This is not the end.

It is not even the beginning of the end.

It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

Churchill

“We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow-worm.” Winston Churchill

Reason, under pressure, often produces prudence when boldness is called for.

“Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”

““The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”

“ The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

“Short words are best, and old words when short are the best of all.”

“You make a living by what you get.

You make a life by what you give.”

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

“There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away.

“The further backward you can look, the further forward you can see.”

“The creation of an authoritative all-powerful world order is the ultimate end towards which we must strive. Unless some effective world super-government can be set up and brought quickly into action, the prospects for peace and human progress are dark and doubtful.”

Winston Churchill

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”

“…writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is a far worse war or one much harder to win.”

Civilization is the state of society where moral forces begin to escape from the tyranny of physical forces.”

“We are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves, and we are applying to the present the habits of the past.”

Winston Churchill

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Winston Churchill

“science should be on tap not on top.”

Winston Churchill

It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to

suceed in doing what is necessary.

Winston Churchill

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

Winston Churchill

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.”

Winston Churchill, 11–12–36

“When the present argues with the past, the future is lost.”

Winston Churchill

“sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

«…a nation’s well-being…is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in society.” Churchill?

“Facts are better than dreams.”

“ The farther back you can look, the

farther forward you are likely to see”

Winston Churchill

“True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.”

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Winston Churchill

“History will judge us kindly because I shall write the history.”

Winston Churchill, said to Roosevelt and Stalin

“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” via Dan Brown

“The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous . . . They lived from hand to mouth and from day to day, and from one election to another . . . The cheers of weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to echo, and their votes soon cease to count. Doom marches on.”

Viscount Halifax: He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

“Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation. “

“Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.”

 –  Winston Churchill

“He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle,” John F. Kennedy said (stealing a line from Edward Murrow).

“Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle….and, whether defending or attacking, Mr. Churchill never attempted to conceal the cost.”

Edward R Murrow

“They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of (unparalleled) danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences……… We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now………..

 Winston Churchill (November 12, 1936)

“It is no use saying ‘We will do our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary”

 Paraphrase of Winston Churchill

“The multitudes remained plunged in ignorance of the simplest economic facts, and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them. The newspapers, after their fashion, reflected and emphasized the prevailing opinions.”

in The Gathering Storm

“What scares me is getting to the end before I am finished.”

W Churchill in Churchill’s secret documentary 2016; see similar Snowden quote.

“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.”

“…the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted by the light of perverted science.”

“The price of greatness is responsibility.”

 Winston S. Churchill

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.

– Edward R. Murrow, On Winston Churchill, 1954

Winston Churchill, a lifelong and rabid anti-communist, said that if Hitler invaded hell, he (Churchill) would have found something nice to say about the Devil.

Churchill put it, “When the situation was manageable, it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand, we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure.”

“Sometimes it is not enough to do our best;

we must do what is required.”

To Chamberlain: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”

 “We shape our buildings and afterwards our

buildings shape us.”

On Painting:

 “My hand seemed arrested by

silent veto,” Hazel Martyn grabbed the brush. She lustily applied splashes of vivid blue

to “the absolutely cowering canvas”. Liberated, Churchill felt that “my

sickly inhibitions rolled away”. He seized the largest implement he could

find (there’s something phallic in this account) and set to work with

“berserk fury”

 “If it weren’t for painting I could not live. I

couldn’t bear the strain of things.”

end Churchill

“I want to enjoy life now, and not trash the planet thinking a better one awaits. … I don’t see how the existence of a god or soul confers any meaning on my life.”

“Mammalian brains are…soft-wired for love and affection…morality…kindness..

Patricia Churchland

Cicero:

“No tempest or conflagration, however great, is harder to quell than the mob carried away by the novelty of power.”

For no part of life, neither public affairs nor private, neither in the forum nor at home, neither when acting on our own nor in dealings with another, can be free from duty. Everything that is honorable in a life depends on its cultivation, and everything dishonorable upon its neglect. – Cicero (44 BC)

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cicero

“..the stupid are people who do evil to others without benefiting themselves.”

“The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic

of that person.”

Carlo Maria Cipolla

“Climate change denialism by evangelicals is a ‘heresy committed against all of creation, nothing less than a monstrous wrong.’”

Richard Cizik, former evangelical preacher

“When I get to the answer, then I’ll know the question.”

Sandra Cisneros

Clapp, Alexander:

Waste Wars, 2025.

“garbage imperalism… most waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the language of planetary salvation… Faltering electronics have been ‘donated’ by western companies and universities since the 2000s… Waste trade is an opportunistic bonanza, and escape valve of environmental responsibility that profits off routing dedritis of every conceivable variety to places that are in no position to take it… As with drug trafficking, it may be that there’s too much money going around to fix the problem. Traveling trash, after all, has many advantages… The story [Western consumers] have been told about recycling often isn’t true… We insist on an environment exorcised of our own material footprints.”

James R Clapper: Facts and Fears, 2018:

“Our primary adversary … was…without exaggeration, hacking away at the very roots of our democracy…What happened to us was a sustained assault on our traditional values and institutions of government, from external as well as internal pressures…the destiny of the American ideal is at stake.

On election day, Nov. 8, no one really believed that Mr. Trump had a chance – including the Russians…On election night, they’d planned a multi-faceted campaign to discredit Clinton’s win, with the Twitter hashtag #DemocracyRIP…

We showed unambigiously that Putin had ordered the campaign to influence the election, that the campaign was multifaceted, and that Russia had used cyber espionage against US political organizations and publically disclosed the data they collected…

…the evidence …to attribute the influence operation to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government was overwhelming…

We have elected someone as president … whose first instincts are to twist and distort truth to his advantage, to generate financial benefit to himself and his family, and …to demean the values this country has traditionally stood for. He has set a new low bar for ethics and morality.”

IC assessment report pp. 376, 372–77, 366–69, 361–2, 3–4. See also Frontline Trump Showdown PBS

“If someone has a broken leg, he or she immediately gets treatment. If the person has a broken soul, they usually do not.”

David Clark

“Faith is an unreliable tool for determining reality.” Headline

“In science, faith is a vice; in religion; it’s a virtue….When it comes to the real world, science works. Religion doesn’t.”

“Science is … the best method we have for discriminating between what’s empirically true about the natural world and what we might wish to be true – but isn’t.”

“Novelty is its own reward. It’s food for the brain. And the brain’s appetite is nearly insatiable. In return, feeling good motivates seeking further novelty. Win-win.”

“…neophobia is the yin, curiosity is the yang.”

Gregory Clark

Clark, Heather:

“I wanted to see what happens in the space where biography and fiction collide.”

historical fiction.

Clark, Jack cofounder Anthropic:

“ AI is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine”.

Jim Clark in Netscape Time, St Martin’s Press, 1999:

Paraphrasing Paul Erdos:

“…a programmer is a machine for turning Coke into code.” P. 218

“Shit happens. Some people try to wish it away…Others use it as fertilizer.” P. 252.

Palm Beach Il Palmetto

“I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.”

William A Clark

Clarke, Arthur C.:

“Radio waves have never respected frontiers, and from an altitude of 36,000 km, national boundaries are singularly inconspicuous. The world of the future will be an open world.”

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

One of Clarke’s 3 laws

“He never grew up; but he never stopped growing.”

Arthur C Clarke epitaph

“Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.”

Arthur C Clarke

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going beyond them…”

Arthur C. Clarke

“robo sapiens…

“If a scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.”                  Arthur C. Clarke

“I would consider Creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer, who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of fooling mankind? And, though I do not necessarily agree with the Catholic paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin’s advocacy of evolution as a major proof of the glory of God, his attitude is both logical and inspiring.

The future isn’t what it used to be…

A Creator who, right back at the beginning of time, laid the foundations for the entire future is far more awe-inspiring and deserving of worship that a clumsy tinkerer who constantly modifies billions of his creations and throws away whole species because of defective engineering.”

Arthur C. Clarke, 1999

“… we should thank the Taliban for finishing the task the Crusades began 900 years ago – proving beyond further dispute that Religion is incompatible with Civilization…

Religion is a disease promoted by starvation, because hungry people hallucinate, and then pray for food. This is why so many religions encourage fasting: it awakens the mind..”

Claude, AI model by Anthropic:

from Wikipedia ‘Claude’:

Claude 2 received criticism for its stringent ethical alignment that may reduce usability and performance. Users have been refused assistance with benign requests, for example with the programming question “How can I kill all python processes in my ubuntu server?” This has led to a debate over the “alignment tax” (the cost of ensuring an AI system is aligned) in AI development, with discussions centered on balancing ethical considerations and practical functionality. Critics argued for user autonomy and effectiveness, while proponents stressed the importance of ethical AI.

Nick Cammarata: ‘… a sort of computational guardian angel who’s pretty good at everything watching over them.’

Amanda Askell: ‘What is the kind of person you can disagree with, but you come away thinking, ‘this is a good person’? These are the sorts of traits we want Claude to have..’

Clausen, Alf:

“I like to say I can make you feel five ways in 13 seconds on this show. We can turn on a dime from comedy to a real poignant scene.”

“Leadership is about managing energy, first in yourself and then in those around you.”

James Clawson

“One billion people don’t have enough food, and yet one billion people eat too much.”

Jason Clay, WWF

“I loved Ayn Rand when I was 18 – before I had children and figured out how the world really works. That’s not how it works, as it turns out.”

Stephanie Clayton, Rep. state rep, Kansas.

Cleary, Beverly:

“A little person sometimes had to be a little bit noisier and a little bit more stubborn in order to to be noticed at all.” via NYT obit.

Cleese, John:

“I don’t make the jokes. I just point them out.”

Clinton Hillary:

“China…they have a deplorable human-rights record…They’re worried. They’re trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand. They cannot do it…»

“It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim, they all want to control women. They want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and our own bodies. Even here at home we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us because America needs to set an example for the entire world.”

“When you stop being shocked, you start being radicalized.”

“Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three and a half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me.” 1967, age 20.

Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty

Clinton, Hillary Rodham

1. Something Lost, Something Gained

SOMETHING LOST, SOMETHING GAINED She held court like a queen. As I watched Joni Mitchell at the Grammys in 2024 – singing from a lavish armchair that looked like a golden throne and, as one critic put it, “wielding a cane like a scepter” – the word that kept coming to mind was “regal.” Mitchell was eighty years old, and in 2015, she had suffered a debilitating brain aneurysm that left her virtually unable to speak, let alone sing. Yet she fought back, and now here she was, performing her spellbinding song “Both Sides Now.” Many of the music world’s biggest stars listened in rapt attention. At home, I too was on the edge of my seat. I’ve been a Joni Mitchell fan since the 1960s. There were two wonderful early versions of “Both Sides Now,” one from Mitchell, who wrote the song, and a cover by the great Judy Collins. I thought both were terrific, although at that point I had more questions than answers about life and I didn’t really know what it meant to be in love. It was still a few years before I would meet the tall, red-bearded law student who couldn’t stop talking about Arkansas. But I was the right age to be captivated by a song about how the passage of time can bring a new perspective on life and love. It was a heady, anguished, exhilarating time to be a college student. The Vietnam War was raging. Protests for peace, civil rights, and social justice were swelling. The innocence and illusions of childhood were falling away. “Tears and fears and feeling proud,” as the song goes. Like so many in my generation, my eyes had been opened to a darker side of American life, to injustice, corruption, assassinations, and war. At Wellesley College and then Yale Law School, I joined protests and marches, read everything I could get my hands on, and stayed up late into the night discussing the fate of the world with my classmates. Some days it felt as if looking “at life from both sides now” gave me enormous clarity – about right and wrong and what it would take to make progress; other days, it just felt confusing. When Mitchell sang, “I really don’t know life at all,” she was speaking for many of us. The mix of emotions she captured felt so specific to our time and place, but also timeless. Most young people leaving behind adolescence and grappling with adulthood have felt some version of it. Later, Mitchell came to occupy a special place in my family’s life. In 1978, I was walking down the King’s Road in the Chelsea neighborhood of London with Bill (who looked less like a Viking but was still quite excited about Arkansas), when we heard Judy Collins’s cover of Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” wafting from one of the storefronts. Bill started singing along. “If we ever have a daughter, we should name her Chelsea,” he said. Two years later we did. We had our share of “dreams and schemes and circus crowds.” Then one day I looked up and I was seventy-six. There was Joni Mitchell again, singing on my television, her voice deeper and world-weary but unmistakably hers. The old words took on new meaning. Gone was the twentysomething shaking off the rose-colored glasses of a love affair and the illusions of adolescence, and in her place was a matriarch reflecting on the hard-earned wisdom of a long, eventful life. Oh, but now old friends, they’re acting strange And they shake their heads and they tell me that I’ve changed Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained In living every day. It felt like I was listening with new ears, almost as if I were hearing the song for the first time.

We started talking a lot about what it means to have more yesterdays than tomorrows.

Every day matters more if there are fewer of them ahead.

When you’re young, you live every day in the present tense. When you’re old, it’s tempting to live in the past, even an imagined past. These

I remain “an optimist who worries a lot,” to borrow a phrase from my friend Madeleine Albright.

This book reflects the mix of anxiety and optimism I feel in this strange, perilous moment. It’s a love letter to life, family, and democracy.

Hillary Clinton

Clinton William Bill:

 “When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have someone who’s strong and wrong than somebody who’s weak and right.”

“…in the name of all those who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the kids and play by the rules – in the name of the hard-working Americans who make up our forgotten middle class.”

Bill Clinton Demo nomination acceptance speech, 1992

“In that environment, the proper response is relentless explanation.           “

«…a political environment in the Republican primary … means you can’t be authentic unless you’ve got a single-digit IQ.”

“Given the choice,” he tells me, summing up a

crucial Clinton insight – one many Democrats still can’t quite seem to grasp – “the

American people always support strong and wrong versus weak and right.”

End Clinton

Clooney, George:

Parents at table: “You’ve got to do it when it’s uncomfotable.”

challenge lies, racists, fascists…

“Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

Chuck Close

“…value is independent of your preference. You’re going to spend some time with them because there are things in these works to be seen that will transform your vision; there are thoughts in these works that will make you think differently…

The point of …education …is to enable you to see things that were invisible, to hear new sounds, to understand what didn’t make sense…

 Every professor knows the sudden light in students’ eyes as they begin to see, as they begin to feel the contours of a mind, a way of sensing, they hadn’t imagined existed, as they begin to feel that this mind might be their own.”

Michael Clune

Ronald Coase- If you torture the data long enough, they will confess to anything.

via Danah Boyd

Coates, Gloria:

her music would sometimes be met with a mix of bravos and boos: “That means it was controversial. Sometimes you’re way ahead of your time.”

Coates, Ta-Nehisi:

“The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating one man.”

“If a black man can be president, then any white man – no matter how fallen – can be president.”

“Donald Trump…The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president – and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.”

“The war is here. The war is right here.”

“Nothing should really scare a writer more than the moment when they are no longer scared.”

Reparations essay:

“America begins in black plunder asnd white democracy two features that are not contradictory but complementary…

…we must imagine a new country. Reparations – by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences – is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely…Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is –  the work of fallible humans…

…a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge…Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls…

“The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,”

Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.”

…wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as – if not more than – the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

…Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient.

“Politicians respond to only one thing – power. This is not the flaw of democracy, it’s the entire point. It’s the job of activists to generate, and apply, enough pressure on the system to affect change.”

The Message: My [moral] frame excluded any defense of the patently immoral.” Regarding settler colonialism theory – defined as ‘any state that is created against the will of the people previously living there is permanently illegitimate…’ (via Pamela Paul).

“What kind of truth will you uphold?” he asked them [at West Point], according to a video of his speech that was recently removed from the internet. Will you interrogate the narratives this country tells itself, or will you allow lies to persist?”

end Coates, Ta-Nehisi

“To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

Coats, director of national intelligence, re Trump.

“… actions of powerful men in service of outmoded ideas.”

‘While the public tends to view instances of election violence “as a static record of the past, historians tend to look at them the way that meteorologists look at hurricanes: as a predictable outcome when a number of recognizable variables align in familiar ways.” As Mr. Cobb said last fall – when political violence was clearly trending upward – the metaphorical hurricane was close at hand indeed.’ viacBrent Staples

Jelani Cobb

“The Defense Department is not controlled by foreign wars.The wars are a consequence of the quest for higher budgets…

[on Boeing] managers from the defense side should never be transferred to the civiliasn arm, lest they infect it with their culture of cost overruns, schedule slippage, and risky or unfeasible technical initiatives…

Spinney paper on Perpetual War

Andrew Cockburn

 Cockburn, Claud:

“Never believe anything until it has been officially denied…those in authority canbe challenged and harassed by a determined and skillful journalist, even one

almost entirely without resources.”

Claud Cockburn

Coehlo, Paulo:

“The fear of failure is worse than failure itself.”

“Life is too short, so kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly.”

“Be brave. Take risks. Nothing

can substitute experience.”

“People need to learn how to survive without America being responsible for everything.

…you have to .. learn how to express your soul. And this is what I am still doing. I hope I will write until the day I die…

A book is not improved when it becomes a movie. A book is something that stimulates creatiity in the reader. The movie – you have everything already.

I don’t remember not being in love. There are very different types of love. There’s Eros, love for another person. There’s Philia, love for wisdom. And there is Pragma, which is love that goes beyond everything.

I cannot see my life without my wife. Every time I go to sleep, I look at her and she is already sleeping. And I say to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is the greatest blessing in my life, to have found the person who understands me.’”

from Alchemist intro:

“… I never lost faith in the book or ever wavered in my vision. Why? Because it was me in there, all of me, heart and soul. I was living my own metaphor. A man sets out on a journey, dreaming of a beautiful or magical place, in pursuit of some unknown treasure. At the end of his journey, the man realizes the treasure was with him the entire time. I was following my Personal Legend, and my treasure was my capacity to write. And I wanted to share this treasure with the world….

The story of one person is the story of everyone, and one man’s quest is the quest of all of humanity.,…

Even if my neighbor doesn’t understand my religion or understand my politics, he can understand my story. If he can understand my story, then he’s never too far from me. It is always within my power to build a bridge. There is always a chance for reconciliation, a chance that one day he and I will sit around a table together and put an end to our history of clashes. And on this day, he will tell me his story and I will tell him mine.”

end Paulo Coehlo – note from wiki:

The Pilgrim – Story of Paulo Coelho is the international title for the biographical film Não Pare na Pista, a co-production between Brazil’s Drama Films and the Spanish Babel Films, in which the younger and older Coelho are played by two different actors. One of the producers, Iôna de Macêdo, told Screen International: “The film tells the story of a man who has a dream. It’s a little like Alice in Wonderland – he’s someone who is too big for his house.” The film, shot in Portuguese, had its premiere in Brazilian theatres in 2014 and was internationally distributed in 2015.

Coetzee, JM:

“…those with no religious faith continue to cling to an

unshakable illusion: that the universe is ultimately governed by justice…

via Dwight Garner: …a line that J.M. Coetzee attributed to Mark Twain and paraphrased this way: “When an American writer does not know how to end a story, he shoots everyone in sight.”

End Coetzee

Coffin, William Sloane:

“The truth will make you free,…but first it makes you miserable.”

The Heart is a Little to the Left, Essays 1991

…Archbishop Helda Camara of Recife, Brazil said, with a broad smile and in a heavy accent:

“Right hand, left hand – both belong to

ze same body but ze heart is a little to ze left.”

I tell you this story because I too believe that “ze heart is a little to ze left.”

You don’t have to give socialist answers, but you do have to press socialist questions. These are the ones that point toward greater social justice.

And that’s where I think a Christian should stand, one whose heart is “a little to ze left”.

William Sloan Coffin

Cohan, William:

“… the problem is one of temperament and character. It will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him.”

Eliot

Cohen, Joshua:

“Tarfon: It is upon us to begin the work. It is not upon us to complete it. – the Talmud…

“A novel about the German 1930s – about pervasive surveillance and militarized policing, about how the fake-news threats of ‘migrants’ and ‘terrorism’ can be manipulated to crush democratic norms – will never be enough to prevent any of that from ever happening again…

[The novel] did nothing to alter the appeasement policies of Britain’s prewar prime ministers, and it certainly didn’t get the United States to reconsider its doctrine of isolationism…

…the social-realist principle that art can have a message; and that such art-with-a-message, which will always be dismissed as propaganda, is in fact the only available corrective to the real and actual propaganda of entrenched power.

Feuchtwanger expected his work not just to be something, but to do something: the Werk giving rise to Arbeit, which can bring about a change.”

Leonard Cohen

“A pessimist is someone who is waiting for the rain. Me? I’m already wet.”

… Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.”

“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows that the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

Leonard Cohen, ‘Everybody Knows’

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

Leonard Cohen , Anthem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDTph7mer3I

“What happened to me was not that I got any answers, but that the questions dissolved.”

From NYT op-ed by Wieseltier: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/opinion/my-friend-leonard-cohen-darkness-and-praise.html

He lived in a weather of wisdom, which he created by seeking it rather than by finding it. He swam in beauty, because in its transience he aspired to discern a glimpse of eternity: There was always a trace of philosophy in his sensuality.

… he was possessed by a lasting sensation of brokenness. He was broken, love was broken, the world was broken.

“If It Be Your Will,” [was] his most exquisite song.

Leonard Cohen was the poet laureate of the lack, the psalmist of the privation, who made imperfection gorgeous.”

Leon Wieseltier

“I want to… read poems filled with terror and music that changes laws and lives.”

via Montefiore: “I have seen the future. It is murder.”

“We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.”

end Leonard Cohen

 “… the dead hand of antiquated economics.”

Maeve Cohen, Econocracy

“People who follow Mr. Trump blindly will suffer the same consequences I’m suffering.”

“In coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office”

Michael Cohen, regarding Trump

«… Wall Street chicanery and climate destabilization share a number of common features. The failure to adequately regulate both financial markets and emission streams springs from a perilous combination of political malfeasance, corporate greed, and public quiescence. Our dual economic and environmental problems are also emblematic of a global economy that is intent – indeed programmed – to use any and all available means to propagate an endless supply of consumer goods to maintain an illusion of ‘growth’…

 We have created over the past sixty years a growth-bound economy that is dependent on three preconditions to maintain itself – proportional investment in public goods, rising wages across a broad cross section of income classes, and continual novelty….

Maurice Cohen

Cohen, M.R., via GG Simpson:

“and our view of the human scene becomes narrow, unillumined, and passionate if we do not rise above its immediate urgency and see it in its cosmic roots and backgrounds.”

“Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president. Their credulity ensures that the propaganda of half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the power to change the world.”

Nick Cohen The Guardian

Cohen, Phoebe A.:

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,”

The Trump presidency that Wolff describes in virtually pornographic detail was the creation not just of Trump but of all the people who failed to oppose him. These are the people who ducked the greatest political test this nation has faced since the Civil War – who enabled the election of a man whose sanity is now questioned but whose incompetence never was. It is not true that Trump is nobody’s fool. He is the GOP’s.

“When we listen to a tale, we need to take into account the teller.”

Richard Cohen

“[Trump] lies for purpose and he lies just for the hell of it. His lying is such that it ought to be a mental ailment. Call him politically insane.”

“Pence is shockingly unreasonable. But he is also shockingly hypocritical.”

“Democracies perish, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point out, by a kind of civic Alzheimer’s. They forget to function.”

The first casualty of war, the saying goes, is truth. But with Trumpism, truth is not collateral damage; it is the enemy itself.

The lie no longer shocks. It often amuses, and complacent Republicans either look the other way or jump gleefully on the bandwagon of deceit.

The fascists may not have taken over the government, but the liars have.

Richard Cohen

Roger Cohen:

“This is the silent spring…a time of total reset…

the earth has struck back…asserterd its demand to breathe.”

«…Perry occupies the culturally and intellectually empty heartland of the Republican Party.

“The only people who walked away unscathed from the great financial binge that preceded this mess were its main architects and greatest beneficiaries: bankers, financiers and hedge-fund honchos. Perhaps the society dealing best with these dilemmas is Germany. It has invested in a highly educated work force. It has matched workers’ skills to jobs. It has continued to make precision machinery others can’t make. It has fostered cooperation between labor unions and employers and between industrialists and the government in defense of German jobs. The youth unemployment rate is under 10 percent.

Roger Cohen

“When you are not told what to do you begin to think what to do.”

“The superrich who trash the West trust the West with their money….

Asians lend America money to police the world.”

Roger Cohen

“A defense mechanism to the incomprehensible is to pretend it does not exist.”

“There is no why here.”

The Islamists’ war is against freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of blasphemy, sexual freedom – in short, core characteristics of democracies seen by the would-be rebuilders of the Caliphate as signs of Western debasement….

the abject failure of the Arab world, its blocked societies where dictators face off against political Islam, its repression, its feeble institutions, its sectarianism precluding the practice of participatory citizenship, its wild conspiracy theories, its inability to provide jobs or hope for its youth, that gives the Islamic State its appeal.

… Zealotry of any kind subsumes the difficulty of individual choices into the exalted collective submission of dedication to a cause. Your mission is set. It is presented as a great one with great rewards. Goodbye, tough calls. Goodbye, loneliness.

It offers to give meaning, whether in this life or the next, to meaningless lives.

… the ideas behind them, rooted in a violent rejection of modernity (but not all its tools, witness the Islamic State’s slick use of the Internet) and in an extreme, literalist interpretation of certain teachings of Sunni Islam, have proved of unquenchable appeal….It is clearly tapping into something deep. Perhaps that something is at root a yearning to be released from the burden of freedom.

Western societies have been going ever further in freeing their citizens’ choices – in releasing them from ties of tradition or religion, in allowing people to marry whom they want and divorce as often as they want, have sex with whom they want, die when they want and generally do what they want. There are few, if any, moral boundaries left.

In this context, radical Islam offers salvation, or at least purpose, in the form of a life whose moral parameters are strictly set, whose daily habits are prescribed, whose satisfaction of everyday needs is assured and whose rejection of freedom is unequivocal. By taking away freedom, the Islamic State lifts a psychological weight on its young followers adrift on the margins of European society….

Roger Cohen

“A corrupted polity tends toward collapse….

As Europe knows, democracies do die.”

…writing was not a choice but a need.

What stands between civilization and barbarism is the idea that nobody is above the law.

History is flux and our natures conflicted.

…the quest for homogeneous societies led the 20th century to its most unspeakable horrors.

Trump beckons us into the abyss of the hateful. The arc of his mind bends towards injustice.

Roger Cohen

“Trump speaks to the basest but also some of the most ineradicable traits of human beings – their capacity for mob anger, their racist resentments, their cruelty, their lust, their search for scapegoats, their insecurities – and promises a miraculous makeover. …It is possible because history demonstrates there is no limit to human folly or the dimensions of the disasters humanity can bring on itself.”

Roger Cohen on a Trump election

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, via Roger Cohen NYT

via Roger Cohen:

James L. Petigru, a prominent jurist

and politician, upon the secession of South Carolina from the Union in 1860:

“South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.”

“A know-nothing tide is upon us … ignorance … is an attribute.”

Roger Cohen

“… democratic societies can veer off the rails into forms of horror that, in hindsight, seem unimaginable. Small compromise by small compromise, craven step by craven step, is a Republic undone.

There’s nothing new about mass popular delusions or the madness of crowds.”

Roger Cohen

“Great. Terrific. Phenomenal. Tremendous. Fabulous. Beautiful. How Trump has hollowed out these words. How arid, even nauseating, he has made them. They mean nothing….

From Trump’s White House there now seeps a kind of ignorance mixed with vulgarity and topped with meanness that I find impossible to wash from my skin…”

“When Primo Levi arrived at Auschwitz he reached, in his thirst, for an icicle outside his window but a guard snatched it away. “Warum?” Levi asked (why?). To which the guard responded, “Hier ist kein warum” (here there is no why).

As the great historian Fritz Stern observed, “This denial of ‘why’ was the authentic expression of all totalitarianism, revealing its deepest meaning, a negation of Western civilization.”

Cohen on Trump

“Disorientation propagates itself.”

“Character is like concrete: You can make an impression when it’s freshly poured, in its youth, one could say, but when it sets, it’s impervious to alteration.”

“Trump[’s] fiendish antennae for the mass hypnosis of our age.”

“…Life is a predicament, death the elephant at the horizon that looms larger as the years pass….

“At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper – no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly palliate the overwhelming importance of that point.” via Roger Cohen NYT

“Trump’s brilliance lay in seeing that he could become the perfect impostor, the wealthy and highly visible figurehead of a 21st-century movement of the dispossessed and the invisible. He could be their voice. He could say the unsayable. He could disrupt…”

Trump, in Singapore, saluted evil.

One of the pleasures of growing old is the shedding of ambition.

…narcissism is an impregnable shield against self-awareness.

Roger Cohen

“Armchair pontification can turn to bloviation…

Brevity is a bitter stimulant to pithiness…

“…the idiom fascism knows best is untruth so grotesque it begets unreason…

Odesans have an app that provides a daily bulletin on whether Mr. Putin is alive or dead.” in NYT on Odesa

Putin’s Forever War NYT 8–7-2023:

Nikolai Vorodnikov: ‘Russia and Ukraine are one body. The body has a tumor – it is Ukraine, and we have to cure it.’

Oleg Orlov: ‘History for Putin is an instrument to shape current events. He is absolutely uninterested in historical truth.’

Cohen: Nationalism is not fascism, but it is an essential component of it. Its perennial essence is a promise to change the present in the name of an illusory past in order to forge a future vague in all respects except its glory.

end Roger Cohen

”Denial is understood as an unconscious defence mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality…

Every personal life and every society is built on denial…

…a deeper form of denial is more universal: the inability or refusal to be continually ‘facing’ or ‘living with’ unpleasant truths.”

Stanley Cohen.

  “[Trump] …is an idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything – not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better.”

Gary Cohn via Wolff bk

Cohn, Marthe:

“Be engaged, and don’t accept any order that your conscience could not approve.”

“I bring out the worst in my enemies and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.”
                  Roy Cohn

via Ken Auletta: ‘Cohn is a legal executioner…he is not a very nice man.’

“There is an old Jewish saying, ‘If you have only two alternatives, then choose the third’.”

“…the nation-state … is fast becoming an obsolete political structure.”

Daniel Cohn-Bendit    

“Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls”

 Edward Coke , quoted by Robert Monks

Colamedici, Andrea:

“A.I. will slowly but inevitably destroy our capacity to think. Hypnocracy” describes how powerful people use technology to shape perception with hypnotic narratives,

putting the public in a kind of collective trance that may

be exacerbated by relying on A.I. show the dangers of “cognitive

apathy”…“the art of prompting – how to ask A.I.

smart questions and give it actionable instructions

Colbert, Stephen:

“I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.”

“Reality has a well known liberal bias.”

“You can’t discover the product until you’re making it.”

“You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time.”

to the press: “… you people were so good over tax cuts, W.M.D. intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out.”

“…the explecative deconstruction of the day’s news…

…the president is trying to cast a spell to confuse people so they cannot know the true nature of reality…

…there’s this pool of radioactive slidge…the daily news.My job is to be lowered like carbon rods into that sludge and absorb the radiation of the insanity that happened today. Then…I irradiate it back at the audience at a much lower nonlethal rad level…”

…it’simportant that you not let the tide of history sweep you along if you don’t actually agree with it. (paraphrasing Robert Bolt).

Stephen Colbert

Colby, Ashley:

“…people who are concerned about the state of society and looking for ways to thrive that don’t require widespread social, economic or political control.”

“More so than in any election in my memory, the fate of the Court, of constitutional law, and of justice itself is at stake in the coming election.”

David Cole the nation 10–2015

“…the Supreme Court failed the ultimate test of justice. It bowed to the prejudice of the powerful when its duty was to protect the most vulnerable.”

David Cole

Cole, KC:

Cole, KC Mind over Matter, 2003:

“There is an uncertainty relationship between truth and clarity.” Neils Bohr

“Spider thoughts in a spider universe – sensitive to raindrop and moth flutter, nothing beyond…What is it we are a part of that we do not see…” Loren Eiseley

‘There is no where without when, no when without where.’

‘…250 of the 250 million people living in the Unites States will experience a one-in-a-million coincidence every day – purely by chance. ..events that people think of as highly unlikely are often very likely…only the shared links will be remembered as amazing coincidences.’

‘Literal thinking often leads to intolerance because it insists that only one meaning can be right – leaving no room for interpretation, ambivalence, or ambiguity.’

‘Being right stokes your ego, but being wrong teaches you something.’

“The heights of wickedness to which men have been driven by superstition.” Lucretius

quotes from K C Cole’s Sympathetic Vibrations, 1984:

‘We live in a three-dimensional spider web spun in the unseen context of our four-dimensional space…From our spider point of view, the world is clearly flat.’ Based on Loren Eiseley’s:

“…spider thoughts in a spider universe.”

“…the only wrong perspective is the one that insists on a single perspective.

“…a man with a huge volume of a thousand pages before him – in reality, the pages of earth time – should read the final sentence on the last page and pronounce it history.” Loren Eiseley Time

‘Complementary ideas are opposing ideas that add up to much more than the sum of their parts….complementarity is not a compromise.

‘…just as we need two eyes to see depth so we need more than one perspective to see almost anything in all of its dimensions.’

‘There is as much information in the shape of the darkness as there is in the light…Light without shadows contains so much information that it contains no information.’

‘A vibration is a wiggle in time; a wave, a wiggle in space.’

‘A thing may be indeterminable but not indeterminate.’

end Eiseley via Cole

Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and His Astonishing Exploratorium

Foreword by Murray Gell-Mann

children in blank darkness tremble and start at everything, so we in broad daylight are oppressed at times by fears as baseless as those horrors which children imagine coming upon them in the dark. This dread and darkness of mind cannot be dispelled by sunbeams, the shining shaft of day, but only by an understanding of the outward form and inner workings of nature. – LUCRETIUS, De Rerum Natura, 55 B.C.E.

chaos is a name that some have given to the magic zone between order and disorder where life flourishes and complex adaptive systems evolve.

the brain has a mind of its own

It was, in effect, a playground. But in place of jungle gyms and slides were nifty gadgets and natural phenomena – rainbows and magnetic fields and electric oscillations. It was not so much a place as a way of being in the world – a verb rather than a noun: spin, blow, reach, vary, strum, look, throw, fiddle, watch, wonder.

thing about him was his eyes: intense, translucent, twinkly, powder blue. They looked different from other people’s eyes, as if they saw through things, beyond things.

The cane was so much a part of Frank’s persona that you could read it like a weathervane to see which way

the winds were blowing inside his head. Staffers called this game “caneology.” When he was agitated or impatient,

“Misbehavior is as important in the study of nature as in people.”

Sightseeing, he liked to say, is the basis for all discovery. Marco Polo and Charles Darwin were both sightseers.

“Individual sights combine to form patterns,” he said, “which constitute a simple form of understanding.”

Frank’s deep regard for undirected sightseeing grew

“Everyone Is You and Me”: In my youth I used to wander in the mountains. I would gain a “feel” of the terrain and gradually build up a reliable intuition of how to get from here to there and back again. Always, on these expeditions, I would discover special places – a tiny area, the only one, where fairy slippers grew; a pool in a rushing stream that was deep enough to swim in. Invariably I would find myself excitedly climbing some promising knoll or uppermost peak. Suddenly a whole new vista would open up, showing a great expanse of prairie, a hidden lake in some

inaccessible canyon, an entire new ridge of peaks. As a result of these solitary expeditions, I would tell friends what I had found and would want to show it all to them. Somehow it was especially important that they see the view, often at a special time of day – perhaps precisely when the sun was setting. But we would start late or they would be unable to walk as fast as I. I would point to the place where I had found the fairy slippers, but we would walk on by. We would reach the top, and the view would be well worth the effort and the hurry. But gradually I began to realize that there was something wrong with these revisiting expeditions. Although the view far outweighed anything along the way in wondrous and memorable experience, the events along the way had been an integral part of the trip for me, and would also have to be so for the people I wanted to bring pleasure to. If the trip was spoiled through hurry or painful effort, then no one was moved to go searching for views on his own. When I was teaching physical science to high school students, I felt the same kind of thing happening. The course was certainly an improvement on my mountain expeditions. I cleared the trail, mapped out switchbacks when the grade was too steep, and built bridges or steps when the terrain was impassable. But for those who built the course and came to know it well, it was crucial to reach the panorama of the final chapters, which put together everything that

had gone before and opened up grand new vistas . . . But in order to reach the vantage point soon enough, the trip had been spoiled. There was no opportunity to explore unexpected and pleasant nooks along the way.

every sight and sound had to be authentic, every innard exposed.

“This show of reality represents a basic honesty that has a surprisingly important effect on learning,”

People had become information rich but experience poor, with very little access to many aspects of nature or technology. Frank wanted a place where

one staffer explained. “If you don’t tie things down, they wander, but they don’t get stolen. By having pieces that can float, we’re saying to them, in effect,

‘We trust you.’”

“No one flunks a museum,”

Occasionally though, something incredibly wonderful happens.”

“It’s not the real world,” he insisted. “It’s a world we made up.” We could make it up any way we liked.

the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. Caen was intrigued by Frank’s ideas and told him, “Get thee to a typewriter!”

“There’s nothing a computer can do that I want done,” Frank said.

a Community Museum Dedicated to Awareness.

Frank was interested in what perception could tell us about the social dynamics that seemed to keep the people of the world in a state of continual conflict. Why is it that foreigners often look alike to us? More generally, how do we make judgments about people? If information is ambiguous, how do we decide which interpretation to accept? Illusions are windows into how the mind works, offering

insights into how we determine reality. In effect, they catch the brain in the act of jumping to conclusions: they reveal the perceptual biases that lead us to perceive things we know are impossible; to ignore things that are right under our noses (our noses included); to use information that ought to dispel an incorrect conclusion to instead compound it; to automatically adapt to just about any stimulus, causing it (perceptually speaking) to completely disappear. In part, these “mistakes” are caused by the brain’s need to take shortcuts,

since we tend to screen out all information that is different or threatening, we also screen out much that is interesting and valuable.

“Our optical illusions,” Berman wrote in an essay Frank distributed widely, “prove to be fairly innocuous compared

to our political and personal ones.” Frank loved these political parallels and saw them everywhere. Once we were playing with an exhibit on binocular vision in which lenses sent two different and conflicting images to each of a viewer’s two eyes. Because the combination of the two made no sense, some people actually became nauseated when they looked at it. Wouldn’t it be nice, Frank offered, if the contradictions and lies of politicians automatically made people “just throw up”?

Philip Morrison and his wife, Phylis, spent the summer of 1971 helping out, and left behind a number of perception and color exhibits…

“You ended up treating the public as intelligent, curious, and thoughtful people, rather than pandering or talking down to them,”

Governor Ronald Reagan crippled California’s public education system with his tax policies, Frank’s reaction was

“He must have had really horrible teachers.”) So Frank went out

constantly refining this “kindness component”

Frank tried hard, as he put it, not to make science too sciencey, art too precious, technology too impersonal. He didn’t want anything in the museum to convey the message “Isn’t somebody else clever?”

. . I don’t care how expensive it is, it’s gotta look cheap.”

This remarkable power of abstraction – Frank called it our “ability to discern pattern in a mire of confusion”

The fact that the Exploratorium found a home in a huge empty hangar was an accident, but it turned out to be the perfect venue to show off this connectedness. Dividing areas up with walls would have greatly diminished the sense that things are of a

piece, that common threads weave through the whole like a theme in a symphony.

He believed if someone was sufficiently

enthusiastic about an idea, that person would learn how to communicate it.

Mike Templeton, the former director of the Association of Science-Technology Centers, put it best: “He had a deep respect for ideas and a deep respect

for people who had ideas.”

Explainer reunion, Ana Wong,

Adults wouldn’t make very good Explainers, Frank thought, because they were

too constrained, too worried about giving the wrong answer, too unwilling to guess.

“He was a moral hero,” said the eminent British psychologist Richard Gregory, whose influence on Frank (and on the early perception exhibits) was enormous.

he managed to mesmerize people out of their money.

unbeatable; people simply couldn’t turn them down. If Ginny was the professional, Frank was her “talent.” “He was a great showpiece,” she said. “His earnestness was so compelling.

Ford Foundation, who recalled, “Boy, you and Frank, what a show you were. We used to love the two of you walking into the office.”

The one income source he refused to consider was an admission charge (although he did ask for donations). Woods are free, and so should be a woods of natural phenomena. He wanted visitors to wander

In some ways, it radicalized the notion of public understanding of art as much as it did the public understanding of science.

include art in a serious way. In his eyes, the two were inseparable: “One cannot truly understand nature without also discovering the ways in which it is related to human experience and feeling,” he said, “and one cannot appreciate human experiences without learning that they are imbedded in a broad concept of nature.” It was, in fact, impossible to discriminate between art and science at the Exploratorium.

Bill Parker – whose “Lightning Balls”

considered his plasma discharge sculptures art or science. “Neither,” he said. “It’s nature.”

Artists make intellectual decisions and scientists make aesthetic ones.

“At the leading edge of experience in philosophy, science and feeling,” Frank mused, “there is inevitably a groping for language to translate the insecure novelty of noticing and understanding into a precision of meaning and imagery.”

there is no point in looking for the truth unless what it is makes a difference.”

disturbed that advertisements implied that smells like sweat were offensive. It was part of a “concerted attempt to sterilize human experience,” he wrote, “part of the set of rules that say we are not to raise our voices, not to argue about religion, not to revolutionize politics, not to be awake when we should be asleep or drowsy

when we should be awake or ever miserable or mischievous. “We can now be odorless when we smell.

his insistently inconsistent character.

He wondered whether toys were an introduction to art. “Toys

Frank valued play so highly is that it is one of the few activities

that explicitly encourages people to rely on their sense of aesthetics. In play, you try something because you like it. You do things that are pleasing, that seem “right” in one way or another, that reward the senses. This “aesthetic feel,” he believed, was a critically important human quality. Taste was an intellectual tool as valuable as logic, empathy, or common sense.

“It’s through familiarity with the arts that I think we will make

the kinds of changes that make life stay human.”

Congress, unable to decide on a difficult matter, took a recess to visit the National Gallery for guidance.

“If you don’t know how to notice, you can’t do anything well,” Frank said. “You can’t even relate to people well.”

Ned Kahn’s “Whirlpool”; when I think of exotic bits of matter coming into being seemingly out of nothing, I see his “Visible Effects of the Invisible.”

They make sketches with equations or charcoal.

essence, they make patterns of patterns that reveal new insights.

thought, art tells us what is possible in human experience.

museums and art galleries can seem less than

welcoming to outsiders.

The appropriate emotion in either case is awe.

For most people, museums fall into the same category as church or school – places to be revered more than really enjoyed,

the mother dragged the boy away, grumbling, “It has something to do with physics.”

As far as your brain knows, light has no history; even if it’s been bent and spun around several times over, your brain assumes it’s coming at you in a straight line.

Ned specializes in making the invisible visible,

Ned said, “because I got interested in the edges of what’s knowable . . . those phenomena that are so complicated and

Physics is taught as a “right answer” subject, while its metaphysical implications are ignored

“no one looks to art to provide any answers at all.”

Donald Kennedy – president emeritus of Stanford University

“It’s hard to imagine that someone as sweet and

mild-mannered could have so much stealth drive.”

Understanding Is a Lot like Sex “[ The Exploratorium] represents the hope that people will be convinced that the world, including the private world, is understandable.”

Frank often wondered why most people weren’t as curious as he was, especially young people. Some unknown circumstance of society had rendered people “artificially celibate,”

how is it we have managed so thoroughly to suppress curiosity in ourselves and our

To Frank, curiosity and confidence in the ability to understand things were not just niceties. They were fundamental human needs – and fundamental for survival.

Knowing why things happen, and also that the most amazing array of phenomena can be understood with a few simple ideas, brings with it a long existential sigh of relief –

“Understanding brings a sense of order, a reduction in uneasiness, and a definition of beauty,” Frank wrote. “Understanding simplifies. Things that did not seem to fit together become part of a whole. Through art and science one becomes aware that each thing that happens around us or is felt within us need not be a separate thing to be separately learned and remembered but

can belong to an interrelated family.”

“The intellectual apathy that I am told now exists among young people,” Frank wrote, “may have come about because these youths have never been convincingly taught that . . . they can make a difference.”

Rather than an informed citizenry, what was needed was a citizenry composed of people with the ability and confidence to figure things out for themselves – to detect lies, check facts, and stop feeling they had to rely on received wisdom.

For Frank, promoting understanding was the highest kind of civic duty.

we’d never seen anyone who let curiosity so completely off the leash;

You could show him almost anything, and he would say, ‘That’s really interesting.’”

Frank’s addiction to understanding was infectious all by itself, but he also had a knack for passing on his madness,

The responsibility of a teacher, therefore, was to help people get unstuck.

Frank was always delighted when he found the one little thing that would tweak someone’s interest.

see you in a beginner place. He made everybody feel like their brains were working just fine.” Sometimes meeting people on their own terms required rethinking basic assumptions about teaching and learning; for example, rethinking what it meant to “make sense” – an idea often misconstrued by teachers, Frank thought. For one thing, what makes sense to the teacher isn’t necessarily what makes sense to the student. “What we call making sense seems to be the accumulated longtime effect of nonsensical understanding,” Frank wrote.

credit for being able to deal with nonsensical things, they eliminate much that is interesting about science.

show students how to understand science in the same way we help them understand and enjoy poetry. One of the most

creating learning addicts, Frank decided, was to turn them into teachers themselves.

the “right answer” wasn’t as important as the process of thinking things through.

quote the father of quantum theory, Niels Bohr: “When it comes to atoms, language can

be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts

as with creating images.”

He thought most museums – art and science alike – had far too little in the way of signs and labels.

“I don’t think you can be evil and creative,” Frank said.

remember one time I sort of got carried away by my own writing, and the content was slowly seeping out the sides,” said Thomas Humphrey. “It was, I think, an article on equilibrium. And Frank wrote some notes on the page that absolutely took the wind out of my sails. And I realized that I had written seven consecutive content-free sentences. And I felt somewhat embarrassed by what I had done.

at its core, the Exploratorium was a political institution.

“The Manhattan Project had a political motivation as well as a technical one. And so does the Exploratorium.” During Frank’s years

humanity learned to cope with its seemingly insatiable thirst for self-destruction.

Frank built the Exploratorium because he felt the need for understanding – and in particular scientific understanding – was an urgent political matter.

“The basis for social change as well as technical change is understanding how nature behaves and how people behave,” he said, “and if one can promote that, if we can create confidence in that, then

there’s some chance that we won’t

blow each other up and that we can have a decent society.”

Promise for Human Values “The spirit of truth and the highest human welfare are inseparable.” These ideas of

The survival of the world may well depend on the extent to which scientists reclaim their role as citizens. In fact, Otto’s little book is

“Just as present technology had to await the explanations of physics, so one might expect that social invention will follow growing sociological understanding.”

he thought, we’d do better to bribe our enemies by dropping food on them rather than dropping bombs.

dumping Jell-O on our enemies to incapacitate without seriously harming them. (Talk about shock

“we really have to begin to think somewhat outrageously.” (The Jell-O attack would also provide the victims with something to eat afterward, another attractive quality.)

Frank’s main worry was that the raw materials necessary for social inventions were drying up.

would have to “discover truly new things about people and society,”

in American society in which coercion was replacing persuasion as a primary method of influencing people,

explained why so many people had given up trying to understand things.

“The claims and counterclaims are so mindless that we eventually give up trying to understand

Where learning was not revered, little new was learned.

words. “The coercive uses of language especially as they become amplified by modern delivery systems are almost as discouraging as the coercive uses of bombs and their incredible delivery systems,”

“The worst thing a son-of-a-bitch can do is turn you into a son-of-a-bitch.” This philosophy,

We are a decent nation; let’s try to act like one.”

By honoring Carson, Frank said, we would be honoring the power of a single book to make a significant difference – through pure persuasion.

“We have lowered artificially imposed barriers not only between the arts and the sciences,” Frank said, “but also between activities of the hand and the mind.”

everyone should be included in everything. Nobody wanted to feel left out, and usually they didn’t have to be. The staff accommodated themselves to this total lack of boundaries, almost always ready to get roped into anything.

It was a system that didn’t so much encourage creativity as require it.

“The thing that was so remarkable was that everyone was so passionate about everything,” the staffer said.

Intuition-building can’t be made to happen. It has to be allowed to happen.

“When staff members are frustrated by our visitors’ tendency to this kind of ‘Brownian motion,’” Frank wrote, “I urge them to look back and remember how many different kinds of patterns and circumstances in their own learning were wonderful like the variety of my mountain walks.”

documentary Exploratorium, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1974.

Frank spoke of his mission as “trying to organize experiences into ideas.”

the obsession with formal evaluation (which had only just begun at the time of his death) struck him as a kind of poison. “How does one determine the social benefits of sightseeing?” Frank

(We can’t readily measure kindness or honesty or wisdom either, which may account in part for the decreasing respect we seem to accord them in modern society.)

You never know what people are going to be interested in; the thing you leave out of your design might be just the thing that grabs them.

What Frank wanted, above all, was to turn people on by whatever means he could, switch on those gold-rimmed glasses, get them taking apart lamps and wondering at seagull feet. Since people are so wonderfully diverse in their interests and attention spans, and since the tug of curiosity is so often unexpected, and since even a single individual may respond to very different types of seductions depending on the day or year or present company, there was nothing to do but set out a cornucopia of options and simply allow things to happen.

sole criterion: the number of learning addicts he could create.

that rules were excuses people made for failing to take the time to make

thoughtful decisions.

He felt that people weren’t allowed to take enough risks in their lives.

the idea that

he’d squandered his time there (or anywhere else) struck him as “incomprehensible.” Even when Frank set out

what you were supposed to be doing was pointless, and sure to piss off Frank. He wanted you to figure that out; he wanted you to invent your job.

his enormous faith in the abilities of people and his respect for individual minds.

Exploratorium wasn’t democratic, and Frank knew it. But it did capture democracy’s best

features: ingenuity, independence, and stability. The stability came from the inherent ability of a democracy to fix its own mistakes.

‘We’ll do it the right way, and we’ll get by.’”

that took a special kind of courage that naturally attracted people.

“He was like a happy cloud that wandered through the shop,”

photographer Nancy Rodger said.

eventually agree. “When we would talk with Frank, we got to get upset,” one staffer remembered. “We got to storm out if we wanted. We got to show how much we cared about stuff. There was fire in the room. There was passion. There was unrest.” In fact, nothing made

“You don’t need to apologize to me for crying in the meeting because that was demonstrative of your feelings, and how much you care about this situation. It’s when you don’t get upset, and you don’t cry, and you’ve lost your feelings for things, then I want you to apologize to me.” This atmosphere tended

“The only way to cultivate trust is to be consistently honest and open in

one’s dealings,” Frank said.

Frank did agree to create an organizational chart in 1983, and formed an executive council. And at some point he tried to work out an arrangement with the California Academy of Sciences, and then with Stanford University, to assure the survival of the Exploratorium, but both institutions turned him down.

Robert Oppenheimer

Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner point out in their introduction to a collection of Robert’s letters, “Complexity is not (in itself) a trait of personality; it indicates rather that the observer is puzzled.”

F. Van Kasper,

who became chairman of the board as

“He could ignore you with more style than anyone I ever met,” Van said.

Warren Bennis,

the genius for change comes from people who, like Frank, have a rather “skewed vision of reality,” who are not just open to the new, but “open to the unbidden,” who “change the temperature of the room.” Van’s assessment that a Frank-like leader couldn’t hack it in the so-called real world“ is simply not true,” Bennis said. “It’s very not true.” In 1983, however, Frank couldn’t convince his own board of directors that he could manage the world he created. The situation remained essentially unresolved, and within a year Frank would learn that he was suffering from terminal cancer. In the midst of this meltdown, Frank went to have dinner at the home of his old friend Lou Goldblatt of the Longshoremen’s Union, who’d been so helpful to Frank in getting the Exploratorium started. While he was inside eating and drinking, he left Orestes, as always, waiting in his Dodge Dart. But this time, somehow, the car caught fire – probably because of an electrical short caused by Orestes’ chewing or an overheated muffler that ignited dry leaves. By the time Frank realized what had happened, Orestes was dead. Frank was, of course, devastated. When he phoned to tell Mike, he was sobbing. It was the only time

it was to find a person who was open and curious and had a vision for what the world and society could be.

“Dying was just another phenomenon. And

it’s the most influential museum in the history of the world,” Alan Friedman, the

people could take the feeling of confidence that came from understanding the world and transfer it to realms like politics –

that feeling of “Yes, I can understand it. I can do it.”

He had that amazing connection with the bigger picture . . . that incredible grasp of something larger, and just kind of the whole progression of human knowledge or awareness.”

Micah Garb

“I learned that anybody anywhere could understand anything, that nothing is beyond anyone’s grasp; no matter how complicated it is, I can explain it to them.” Micah doubts

“even people with very little experience can notice really interesting things.”

artists had spent time in residence

Explainers. I think one of the things that

the Obama administration, which began as this book was going to press,

that math is nature’s native language (equations do grow on trees). I remembered

Coda: Living a Fruitful Life Speech to the 1960 graduating class of Pagosa Springs High School

that part of the sense of having lived a full and a rich life comes from an ability to continually take things seriously – but not too personally.

Of a willingness, even a determination, to become deeply involved in what you are doing, but not obsessed by it. What have you taken seriously?

the atoms of all the elements were in the cosmic rays coming from outer space.

Throughout one’s life one sees the perpetration of innumerable injustices and inhuman acts both at home and abroad. Usually one feels powerless to do anything about them, but I recommend to you that when an opportunity to intervene for justice arises, either for you alone or in concert with others, you take these opportunities

seriously, and consider them important.

Notes

13 “nooks along the way”: Frank Oppenheimer, “Everyone Is You . . . or Me.” Technology Review 78, no. 7 (June 1976). “things one sees are so beautiful”: Frank Oppenheimer, “The Pleasures and Personal Satisfactions of Science,” lecture delivered to alumni groups at Grand Junction

end K C Cole on Frank Oppenheimer

“…do we need the spectacle of corpses to make the story real?…a photograph of a dead child on the United States-Mexico border is not, by itself, the bitterest truth. A bitterer truth might be to convey that what we are looking at is not an accident: It is a crime…What sort of person needs to see such photographs in order to know what they should already know?…

These photographs are mirrors, not windows. We look into them, and what they reflect back to us is something monstrous and hard to reconcile with our notion of ourselves. We look, and look, and then – sated with looking, secure in our reactions, perennially missing the point – we put them away.”

Teju Cole NYT Mag

obscure, unseen and dark.”

Teju Cole

“…rape…: the penetration of the vagina without the woman’s consent.”

Linda Coleman, Alabama state senator

Coleman, Peter: The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“…today the schism seems to be approaching a form of mass national psychosis – with the two sides experiencing fundamentally different realities.

…serious problems arise when we exist in two parallel but conflicting realities while living in the same home or community…

* Attractors are stable patterns that draw us in repeatedly and resist
change – like a strong attitude, habit, or addiction. ..
there is something liberating, almost comforting, about living in a world of clear good and evil. ..a sturdy sense of certainty, of a place to take a stand.

… the need for moral certainty in what is known as the consistency

principle.

negative partisanship, in which Americans largely mobilize against the other party rather than align with their own.
the importance of basic biological differences in brain sensitivities to threat between red and blue Americans,
Karl Popper, one of the most influential philosophers of science of the last century,

argued that how scientists – and all humans for that matter – think about problems
Popper believed that most of our problems lie on a continuum somewhere between clouds and clocks…

more simplistic, one-dimensional processing of complex problems leads to (and are fed by) more intractable conflicts. At
some point, these processes of oversimplification, certainty, and contempt become

self-organizing within and between people and groups and become impervious to outside attempts to alter them. This makes them more likely to become intractable attractors.
When different factors begin to reinforce one another in consistent ways, the

patterns they form become extremely hard to change because they result in attractor patterns,
attractors draw us into their grip is because they are lower-energy states. We are

always seeking easier paths in life, and because attractors require less energy, we are more likely to fall into and remain in these much easier states…it’s hard to summon the energy required to change a deeply set pattern or habit.
the power of negativity is extraordinary. One of the more robust findings from

psychological research over the past few decades has been that bad is stronger than good.
negative experiences and events have much more impact on us than positive ones, and negative information is processed more thoroughly and remembered
The study of attractors and complex systems has led to the identification of a set of

what I call crude laws* about how these systems change, which go against most of our standard assumptions about linear cause-and-effect change processes
This inclination for coherence is natural and mostly functional until the system reaches a state of hypercoherence, which can become pathological.
Tibetan homes, “Sit quietly in front of the fire with your hosts after dinner and don’t speak for hours at a time.”

automatic emergency rules
lead to dramatic differences in how we feel, perceive, think, act, and interact with

others, and they usually serve us well. However, these rules are meant to be followed temporarily in response
When the threat subsides, we are meant to return to more nuanced, open, and

benevolent modes of functioning. We need both modes of operation equally – to aid both wolves struggling within us – but healthy social functioning thrives most in the open, nonacute stress mode.
devastated by earthquakes or tsunamis – a clear demarcation in time, a potential turning point.

Nelson Mandela: I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.

I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that

surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.

end PeterT Coleman

“The universe is a cosmic web woven by God and held together by the crossed strands of attractive and repulsive forces.”

“Since then, at an uncertain hoiur,

That agony returns,

And till my ghastly tale is told

This heart within me burns.”

Samuel Coleridge

“In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coles, Katharine:

“People have all the information that they need…How do we get them to understand that they care?”

Coles, Robert:

“I work with very vulnerable people, and yet I’m not very vulnerable myself,” he said in

an interview with The New York Times in 1997. “It makes me uncomfortable, seeing the

disparities between the world I document and the world I inhabit.”

From NYT obit: He began his study of children with Ruby Bridges, whose poise in the face of racism moved him deeply. The girl was threatened daily on her way to class. She was told her food was poisoned and she was kept isolated in a classroom without other students for a year. Dr. Coles noticed that she seemed to be talking to the hostile white people, and asked her why. She said she was praying for them.

But why? “They need praying for,” the little girl said.

From back cover of Lives of Moral Leadership, 2000:

“We need heroes, people who can inspire us, help shape us morally, spur us on to purposeful action – and from time to time we are called on to be those heroes, leaders for others, either in a small, day-to-day way, or on the world’s larger stage.”

Collard, Agnes:

No one can sincerely assert words whose meaning she knows will be garbled by the lexicon of her interlocutor…

I fear that the more I tell you, the less you will understand…

I want to talk to…any and all of you, freely, so that you can help me stop misunderstanding myself.”

Collin, Philippe:

‘Facing History’ (French) podcast-

“People in the United States can no longer speak to each other. There the ‘other’ is no longer a human being.”

Collingwood, RG :

defined philosophy as “thought of the second degree, thought about thought”

“Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches what man has done and thus what man is.”               Collingwood ref. 5 in Szasz Madness; last line in 2025 film Nuremberg: “the only clue to what man can do is what man has done.”

The Idea of History, 1946.

Collins, Craig:

”catabolic capitalism is a

self-cannibalizing system whose insatiable hunger for

profit can only be fed by consuming the society that

sustains it.”

Collins, Eileen – Colonel, NASA astronaut:

“From space, there was no geography class in neatly etched states.

From space, there were no continents with the rigid

stitchings of national boundaries.

From space, I saw, instead, the serene beauty of flowing landscapes.

 . . the brilliant radiance of sun-glinted lakes.

Because unimpeded by the divisions of national borders,

panoramas of countryside cascaded gracefully and

swiftly before me.

The world I saw from space had no divisions of peoples…

no artificial separations of human interests and human needs.

All I saw was one fragile blue planet.

In the midst of an eternal midnight, an oasis of light.

A vulnerable homeland.

It’s people … a family.

From space, this is the way the world appeared to me.

A world of shared dreams.

A world of shared destinies.”

Gail Collins:

“…have you ever seen a state legislature in action? Have you ever seen the Texas Legislature in action? I have, and my first thought was not: “Gee, let’s give these folks a whole lot more clout.”

Texas, which ranks first in the nation in the percentage of the population without health insurance, and 45th in high school completion. We could return to grass-roots, state-driven environmental regulations, the kind that have made Texas the nation’s leader in clean-water permit violations, hazardous waste spills and toxic emissions from manufacturing facilities.

“[The Texas] State Constitution prohibits anyone who doesn’t believe in God from holding public office.”

“This business of legislating fiction is rather widespread.”

Gail Collins on Rick Perry TX

«…Republican voters aren’t asking for much…a candidate who’s really conservative. Who has verbs in his sentences…

…a series of state and local elections that seemed to suggest that voters were getting tired of crazy…a very strong anti-nutcase tenor…

things have gone so far that Mississippi had to pull us back.”

“The primaries have been great for the economy. Dimwitted billionaires are dumping money they don’t need into the campaigns of people who can’t win, providing much-needed jobs for ad-writers, poll-takers and yard-sign manufacturers.

Do you remember, at the depth of the recession, when Keynesians kept saying that we could jump-start the recovery by just paying a whole bunch of people to dig holes and fill them back in? This is exactly the same thing! Keep going, Republicans!”

a man who … lost the state in which he was born, the state in which he was governor, and the three states in which he owns houses. …the only candidate for president who lost his home state by a larger margin than Mitt Romney was John Frémont in 1856. And Frémont was coming out of a campaign in which the opposition accused him of being a cannibal.

Gail Collins

“…he was not the sharpest hoof in the herd.” on Clive Bundy

“…one of the terrible truths of presidential politics: It changes everybody who gets into it, generally for the worse, frequently for the awful.” (on Mike Huckabee)

Gail Collins

“”…freedom … used to be such a great word, and now, when it comes up, we are forced to recall ‘…freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’” Gail Collins on the Freedom Caucus

When your life expectancy is 15 years and less, then you get counted as old.”

Warren Sanderson, via Gail 9–29–2016

“There is nothing so dangerous to national wellbeing as an extremist with a smartphone….the American dream does not involve everybody having health insurance.” (on Mario Rubio)” Gail Collins

“This business of legislating fiction is rather widespread.”

“When you get weary

And you can’t sleep,

count the candidates instead of sheep.”

Gail Collins

“[Trump] has a minimal ongoing relationship with reality, let alone truth.”

Gail Collins

“… there are several incarnations of the president, from the Somewhat Normal Republican Trump (SNORT) to the Nearly Unhinged Trump (NUT). The one we saw at the bipartisan meeting was the Reasonable Chatty Trump, whose pleasant disposition makes up for the fact that the initials don’t spell anything.

The Reasonable version can sit through a fairly long gathering nodding, agreeing, making the occasional joke and appearing to be an excellent listener. When he’s actually not paying any attention at all.”

end Gail Collins

“Among these rights are life, liberty and pistol in the glove compartment.”

“Mitt [Romney} has a habit of … mutating to the political winds.”

“Truly I did not expect to live to hear that a four-term Republican congressman from Kansas was defeated by a gay Native American woman who used to be a mixed martial arts fighter.”

“…the drunken, parading,flag-waving elections were the closest thing many people had to entertainment…

we’re [now] watching elections work themselves out through a worldofhowling social media ..”

end gail collins

Michael Collins via Kristof Trump poetry contest:

I’m sorry for my tone, of late.
It’s tiring, decrying hate,
And likely tiresome as well
But ever since the hammer fell
And Trump ascended to the throne

I’ve told myself my voice alone

Won’t make a difference, but that I

Should not interpret that: Don’t try.

The Whos that only Horton hears

In Dr. Seuss’ book reached ears

Besides the elephant’s when they

Cried all together, so, O.K.,

I’ll keep on shouting, We are here!

A waste? Perhaps, but it’s sincere.

Collins, Paul:

“…“more and more, the courts are seen as a venue for social change.”…political groups, are using the courts the way they used to use Congress – basically, amicus briefs are a means of lobbying.”

Suzanne Collins:

“Collin’s message is clear: to maintain order one has only to strip people of their social consciousness. To retain the ability to think critically and ask questions is to reserve the power to to challenge the status quo and replace it with a new social order…”

quoting Katniss: “…look at the state they left us in, with the wars and the broken planet. Clearly, they didn’t care about what would happen to the people who came after them.”

“Collins seems to believe that the work of building a more equitable world is a project that ultimately falls to the young.”

Rodrigo Rodriguez, chapter in Politics of Panem

“…Katniss’s acts of resistance do not entail awe-inspiring acts of bravery and heroism. To the contrary, she more often engages in minor acts of resistance that inspire others to come together as a collective and work for change”

…the goal of the dystopian genre to “place a mirror before readers, challenging them to examine the world they inhabit and the obstacles it places on the path to social justice”

Rodriguez via Nynan piece, pdf see also rod. pdf from Politics of Panem

from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games film: President Snow says:

“Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous. Spark is fine, as long as it’s contained.”

“Suzanne Collins …filtered her influences through a heroine who embodies the adage that it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees … a character who exists outside the traditional confines of the feminine-masculine split.”

Manohla Dargis, NY Times review of Mockingjay Part 2.

end Suzanne Collins

Collison, Patrick:

Irish billionaire

…Collison has posted his entire nearly 800-volume bookshelf to his personal site (though he admits he’s only read about half of them).

see Tyler Cowen, progress studies.

Colman, Olivia:

“There’s a phrase in French which is that as you’re going into your slumber, you become your most eloquent.”

Colorado ad for Outdoor Retailers convention:

“Colorado has stronger beer, we have taller peaks…But, most of all, we love our public lands.”

“We must no longer view hatred as natural, normal, or necessary; disparity in wealth as inevitable; or injustice as simply regrettable.”

Barbara Coloroso, 2007, Extraordinary Evil

[Rand’s} idolatry of self and selfishness [is] the antithesis of Christianity.”

Chuck Colson, quoted by Prothero

Marie Colvin, from A Private War:

“I care enough to go to these places and write, in some way, something that would make someone else care as much about it as I did at the time. Part of it is you’re never going to get where you’re going if you acknowledge fear. Fear comes later, when it’s all over…

from Wiki: “You’re never going to get to where you’re going if you acknowledge fear.”[8]

49 min. in: “War is the quiet bravery of civilians who will endure far more than I ever will, of those asked to fight and those who are just trying to survive – Mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, traumatized families, bereft and inconsolable.”

Marie Colvin

from wiki on Colvin: Colvin noted the importance of shining a light on “humanity in extremes, pushed to the unendurable”, stating: “My job is to bear witness…”

see Requiem for A Private War by Annie Lennox. Lyrics:

Why do these cold stars burn bright

All these cold stars.

Why do these cold stars burn bright

All these cold stars.

Bring it on

Bring it on

Bring it on

Nothing will stop me

Bring it on

Bring it on

Bring it on

Nothing will stop me

Still the world keeps spinning around you

Heaven knows were drifting apart

All the burning buildings surround you

All the world is falling down

All the world is falling down

Bring it on

Bring it on

Bring it on

Nothing will stop me

Bring it on

Bring it on

Bring it on

Nothing will stop me

Underneath the shooting stars

Fireworks tearing us apart

Tiny sparks and broken parts

Bruised and bleeding broken hearts

Hopelessness turned to despair

Shattered glass lies everywhere

Flying from the deadly blast

Armageddon’s come at last

Bring it on

Bring it on

Bring it on

Comerford, Cristeta:

“We are really, basically bonded by what we eat together. Culinary diplomacy is everything.”

White House executive chef

James Comey:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

“…[Trump] has an emptiness inside of him, and a hunger for affirmatioin, that I’ve never seen in an adult.”

“Everyone has a story and I bet her story is incredible.”

‘‘The statue of Justice has a blindfold on because you’re not supposed to be peeking out to see whether your patron is pleased or not with what you’re doing. It should be about the facts and the law.’’

p. 146 ff: listening with Obama…

p. 136…m l king jr and niebuhr

p.116 eisenhower on integrity

location 1598…doubt wisdom weakness

p. 93 confirmation hearing quote, posted on refer door by Comey’s wife…

p.56 Warren Buffett tide out…naked bodies…

p. 75 laughter joy

p.219..judgement…intelligence…facts…”…balance of confidence and humility…”

James Comey

“Significance drives memory.”

James Comey NYT

Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence.. Mr. Trump pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent.

 Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Comey op-ed via Boot

“How it is possible that they didn’t get up and walk out…? … they too easily surrender their individual moral authority to a group, where it can be hijacked by the loudest,arshest voie….Lord of the Flies…herd…”

“…the word ‘conversation’…doesn’t apply when one person speaks nearly the entire time.”

end James Comey

Comfort, Nathaniel:

“..the Western civilization canon…a white supremacist narrative.”

“Let’s look at 200 years of industrial development in the East. By the 1960s, rivers were catching on fire. We already have 200 years of history of what states do when given control of natural resources.”

Robert Comstock Utah Public Lands session 8–2013

“…the stereotype of the hard-core gamer as a geeky, adolescent, straight, white male still persists …the culture that surrounds gaming provides particularly fertile soil for sowing the seeds of resentment that grow into hate.”

 Megan Condis

Confucius:

“Under good government, poverty is shameful; under bad government, wealth is shameful.”

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” 

Confucius wrote over 3000 years ago, “In order to change something, you have to call it by its right name.”

Confucius: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves” – one for your enemy and one for yourself.

 Confucius

Conger, Kate:

“Musk spent a fortune on the largest

megaphone he could find, only to discover that the more he shouts into it, the fewer

people are listening.”

Connelly, Matthew:

the 9/11 Commission Report:

“Secrecy, while necessary, can also harm oversight. The best oversight mechanism in a democracy is public disclosure.”

America’s Most Redacted…

Declassification Engine…

IARPA: Intelligence ARPA…

“The answer is in the question – that’s where wisdom is.”

Billy Connolly

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. –

middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Connolly, Cyril

Connolly, Matthew, Coloumbia University:

“If, instead, academics choose to boycott colleagues rather than stand with them, they become accomplices in the very assault on academic freedom they wish to oppose.

Conrad, Joseph:

Heart of Darkness discn via Schell, 2000:

‘… an investigation by literary means of the extremes of evil…

quoting Reck-Malleczewen, on meeting Hitler:

‘if I had had an inkling of the roll this piece of filth was to play, and the years of suffering he was to make us endure, I would have shot him without a second thought. But I took him for a character out of a comic strip and did not shoot.’ on assassination

“The most interesting places are the empty spaces on a map.”

“To make you hear, to make you feel, above all to make you see.”

Joseph Conrad

“Facing it – always facing it – that’s the way to get through.”

Captain MacWhirr in Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon.

Conrad, Peter:

Reviewing Bolton book:

said it was a “punchy but self-aggrandising memoir” and that, “[d]espite the promise of the book’s title, Bolton was not in the room during Trump’s extended confab with Putin in Helsinki, from which Putin emerged as cockily as a strutting bantam while Trump stumbled out like a trodden hen with ruffled feathers.”

culture: linear (West, USA), lateral (chinese), intuitive (Japanese). from Culture Hacks by

Richard Conrad

Converse, Connie:

Lyrics: via Abdurraqib NYT 2009 How Sad, How Lovely album:

“We lived alone

my house and I

we had the earth’

we had the sky

I had a lamp against the dark

and I was happy as a lark.

I had a job

my wants were few

they were until I wanted you

and when I set my eyes on you

nothing else would do.”

“Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it.”

2014 documentary: We lived alone.

end Converse

“Your profile is then run through algorithms that can serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into hardened convictions.

…We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them.”

“Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies…Rogue actors and even governments have taken advantage of user trust to deepen divisions, incite violence and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false,.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook, who Jobs hired in 1998. “It’s in the hands of the creator whether it becomes good or bad.” Cook is distributing a hardcover copy of the book to Apple employees as a reminder that “the purpose of the company is to make the best products in the world that really enrich people’s lives and leave the world better than we found it.”

Tim Cook, Apple

“What is lacking in Utah today is a confidence and the will, and the leadership that is generated by solving hard problems together. Our leaders spend most of their time outlining what they are against and stirring people up to anger. This has given us a political system that is stuck, under the influence of special interests, which leaves us not finding solutions for today and the future.”

Pete Cooke

Cookson, John:

“…’no’ must be the most powerful sentence in the English language.”

Cooley, Alexander:

“There are just not a lot of safe spaces anymore…It’s becoming much more routine. Just bolder and bolder…Once they saw they could get away with it, It became a standard operating thing…” on repression, censorship, assassination

Cooley, Denton:

“I have done more heart surgery than anyone else in the world. Based on this experience, I believe I am qualified to judge what is right and proper for my patients. The permission I receive to do what I do I receive from my patients. It is not received from a governmental agency or one of my seniors.”

«…memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…unhappy memories became a guide for avoiding bad behavior rather than an excuse for it.

Stephanie Coontz

Cooper, Alex:

I think Gen Z, the minds of young creators and adults and young individuals, people want to figure it out for themselves. They don’t want to be told what to do.”

“The ignorance around here [Congress] is staggering. Nobody has any idea what they’re voting on…

Too many people here are willing to deliberately harm the country for partisan gain. That is borderline treason…It is more like gang behavior. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred.”

 Jim Cooper Rep., Democrat TN

”People vote on things they have not read, do not have the time to read, and cannot read.”

Jim Cooper, Demo, House, TN

“It is one of the consequences of aggression that it hardens the conscience, as the only means of quieting it.”

James Fenimore Cooper

Cooper, Marie:

“They interfered with me and God. I was ready to go, and they took that away from me.”

re DNR, POLST

“[Trump]…comments…signaled to Russia…that the Trump campaign was just find with its underhanded efforts…”

“Trump… [sided] with a foreign adversary that attacked Amnerican democracy – and that’s treachery.”

David Corn

Costello, Thomas H:

“Widespread belief in unsubstantiated conspiracy theories is a major source of public concern and a focus of scholarly research. Despite often being quite implausible, many such conspiracies are widely believed. Prominent psychological theories propose that many people want to adopt conspiracy theories (to satisfy underlying psychic “needs” or motivations), and thus, believers cannot be convinced to abandon these unfounded and implausible beliefs using facts and counterevidence. Here, we question this conventional wisdom and ask whether it may be possible to talk people out of the conspiratorial “rabbit hole” with sufficiently compelling evidence…

this paints a surprisingly optimistic picture of human reasoning: Conspiratorial rabbit holes may indeed have an exit. Psychological needs and motivations do not inherently blind conspiracists to evidence – it simply takes the right evidence to reach them.”

ChatBot pdf

“There is no script. Live your life.”

Dick Costelo, CEO, Twitter “Among the human rights is the right to remain

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

Nicolaus Copernicus

McKay Coppins:

“…in this state of hightened suspicion, truth itself …felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe [or click], the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach…censorship through noise…

“Time is the lens through which dreams are captured.”

Francis Ford Coppola

“Weakness has a special sting if you understand it as a moral failing.”

Ian Marcus Corbin, NYT oped

“For the many, not the few.”

Jeremy Corbyn

“I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orban has, but he doesn’t.”

David Cornstein, Trump’s ambassador to Hungary.

Coronel, Sheila:

“…President Trump, Marcos and Duterte have much in common: the promise of greatness, the assault on facts, the stoking of fear, the erasure of memory. They even have the same aesthetic: loud, bombastic, hypermasculine. They like to wave from balconies, finding affirmation in the adulation of crowds. They thrive in times of insecurity and uncertainty. And they feed off the shortcomings of democracy.”

Corsi, Jerome, via Bamford:

“Islam is a peaceful religion as long as the women are beaten, the boys buggered, and the infidels killed.”

”A word to the wise ain’t necessary; it’s the stupid ones who need the advice.”

Bill Cosby

“Unesco mission is a vital one: to ‘build peace in the minds of men and women’ and ‘create the conditions for dialogue among civilisations, cultures and peoples, based upon respect for commonly shared values’.”

Costa-Bravas, on UN, film, culture

Cottle, Michelle:

‘When a guy is digging his own grave, you don’t fight him for the shovel.’

“In practice, politics runs on hypocrisy…

…hypocrisy risks making hypocrites of those who denounce hypocrisy.”

“If Mr. Trump couldn’t have his way, he was content to watch America burn.”

“This is America. People have a God-given right to flush their money down whatever gold-plated toilets they choose. Just leave public tax dollars and venerable institutions out of it.”

End Cottle

Cottom, Tressie McMillan:

“The public is going to have to learn how to talk about powerful women…it is incumbent upon us to talk about style as political craft, even when the politician is a woman.” re: Senator Sinema dress; dress as free speech.

“For Musk, Chaos is Content…

[Musk’s] Mission is not just to dismantle the federal government, but to demoralize it. …Trump needs a muckraker who can create content for our media environment.

DOGE is a democracy-wrecking machine. It is targeting the government’s plumbing… DOGE is also a propaganda machine.

Musk’s escapades are political posturing staged like a video game side quest

Musk’s fans love his… vicarious gamelike experience of dominance. …He clarifies a scary world for them… in terms they understand. Bad guy. Good guy. Evil. Villain. Kill. Win. This is propaganda, but it is also a skilled manipulation of content… All of our emotions are fuel for the content machines that don’t care what we feel, only what we do…

Content feels a lot like political spin, but unlike spin, it can be completely captured, its amplification manipulated and the response to it monetized….content-driven chaos is going to be the M.O. of Trump 2.0.

Chaos is central to his deployment of untracked executive power. But chaos has to be tended like a fire. It needs the right amount of constant oxygen to keep it going.

That is Musk’s utility to Trump. …you are not the intended audience…

Chaos wants to shut down thinking and feeling by trapping us in the emotional state of its choosing… action is the only real power… opposition is action…

If you are not inciting yourself or others to act, your political rhetoric will not eclipse Trump’s chaos.”

“Nostalgia is a heck of a drug.”

Time does not exist online.

maybe it’s time to confront an uncomfortable truth: A lot of us are exactly who

Donald Trump believes that we are.

“history will tell you that negotiating with racism or fascism or authoritarianism never ends well.…

Our culture is built to forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes…

You don’t wear the cool tattoo for over a decade that may be, kind of, possibly, probably looks like something horrible and hateful.”

end Cottom

“Where science is ambiguous, politics begins…Over the past century we’ve created the greatest gift in the history of humanity – thirty years of extra life – and we don’t know what to do with it!”

Joseph Coughlin, Age Lab MIT via Gopnik

Coulter, Ann:

“In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably. European.”

“People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time…More and more, the choice for the world’s people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens.”

Norman Cousins

Cousteau, Jacque:

“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.”

– Jacques Yves Cousteau

“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.”

– Jacques Cousteau

“Happiness, for the bee as for the dolphin, is to exist. For Man, it is to know existence and to marvel in it.”

“We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.”

“The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish.”

“Enjoy the time you have, because it is already too late. We’ve passed the threshold. The beginning of the end has started….Life will be reborn, but first the world as we know it will die.”

Jacques -Yves Cousteau, in 1990s, in Turner Last Stand bio

“…one thing which, if removed, will destroy the most powerful government, the most successful business, the most thriving economy, the most influential leadership, the greatest friendship, the strongest character, the deepest love. … That one thing is trust.”

Stephen Covey

Cowen, Tyler:

The Complacent Class, Stubborn Attraction,…

see also Collison

Emergent Ventures

Cowen’s practice of ruthlessly scouring books for the information value they contain and abandoning them – sometimes after five minutes – may make some completionists shudder.

Tyler Cowen announced that he’d begun “writing for the AIs.” It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems – and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. “With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,” Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it “a model of how you think,” with which future readers could interact. “Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas,” Cowen wrote. Around this time, he began posting on his blog about mostly unremarkable periods of his life – ages four to seven, say. His human readers might not care about such posts, but the entries could make it possible “for the advanced A.I.s of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowen biography.”

“There’s some evidence that people in Central American countries convert income into happiness more efficiently than in other places.”

‘Cowen seems to obsessively maximize how efficiently he can accumulate knowledge of no impaired practical use.’

End Cowen

“The Wall Street Journal … turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis…there lies embedded in the business pages an entire theology. At the apex … is its doctrine of God…this celestial pinnacle is occupied by The Market.”

The Market is becoming more like the Yahweh of the Old Testament – the only true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals.”

 …the First Commandment is ‘There is never enough.’ The Market that stops expanding dies.

Harvey Cox, ‘The Market as God’ Atlantic 3–1999

Cox, Oliver Cromwell:

“Racial antagonism is part and parcel of this class struggle, because it developed within the capitalist system as one of its fundamental traits…

Whether in the United States or around the world, it is capitalist exploitation – and not some inborn tribalism – that drives racial prejudice and conflict…

Race prejudice developed gradually in Western society as capitalism and nationalism developed. It is a divisive attitude seeking to alienate dominant group sympathy from an ‘inferior’ race, a whole people, for the purpose of facilitating its exploitation…The greater the immediacy of the exploitative need, the more insistent were the arguments supporting the rationalizations.”

from his 1948 book via Bouie NYT

‘Our conscience is God’s way to teach…’

Dr. Paul Cox

“…indigenous peoples believe that the entire planet is sacred.”

Paul Alan Cox and Michael J Balick

Cox, Spencer, Utah gov.:

A single data center in Utah could use 1.4 gigawatts of power, Gov. Spencer

Cox told The Salt Lake Tribune in December. “The entire state runs on four,”

Cox said. “These AI data centers, their energy consumption is insatiable. It’s

insane.”

…the addiction economy.”

End Cox, Spencer

Coy, Peter:

Socrates originated the concept of a noble lie, which is a myth that elites propagate for what they view as the good of the public…Selgin…Keynes…

Coyote, Peter:

Peter Coyote, challenged his “We are as gods” hypothesis. “Idiot savants,” Coyote proposed instead. “We’re highly developed, we have these great skills, this technological cleverness, which is completely untethered to wisdom.”

“Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning. In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.”

Jerry Coyne, Templeton grantee

«…the real war is between rationalism and superstition…religion is the most common form of superstition.”

«…we get no where by labeling our ignorance God.”

Jerry Coyne

Cozzens, Donald:

“I write to convince the reader of nothing,” he wrote in the introduction to “Faith That Dares to Speak” (2004). Convincing is the job of politicians and debaters, he said; speech that rises from faith should serve as an invitation to ponder and consider…

the issue was more about unhealthy patterns of authority and power.”

“The time has come to set celibacy free…Charismatic celibacy will remain a great gift to the church. Mandated celibacy awaits repeal.”

“A homeostatic afferent pathway originating in lamina I

The new view of pain as a homeostatic emotion arises directly from functional anatomical findings in cat and monkey, rather than from philosophical considerations. These results have identified specialized central sub- strates that represent pain, temperature, itch, muscle ache, sensual touch and other bodily feelings as discrete sensations within a common pathway. They indicate that specific activity representing these modalities is conveyed first of all to homeostatic response regions in the spinal cord and the brainstem. In addition, these findings indicate that in primates a forebrain system has evolved from the hierarchical homeostatic system, and that this provides a discrete cortical image of the afferent represen- tation of the physiological condition of the body (which we term interoception), along with direct activation of limbic motor cortex. The interoceptive system is distinct from the exteroceptive system associated with touch and move- ment, although there is overlap (in area 3a of the sensorimotor cortex) with respect to pain. These data indicate that in humans pain is an emotion that reflects specific primary homeostatic afferent activity. These results are briefly summarized here, and detailed reviews are available elsewhere [4,5,16].

…pain in humans is a homeostatic emotion reflecting an adverse condition in the body that requires a behavioral response.

This new view differs fundamentally from the prior conventional view in several ways. It incorporates specific sensory channels for different kinds of pain and for pain of different tissue origins. It provides a fast (sharp) pain channel that can elicit fight-or-flight behavior [43,44] and a slow (burning) pain channel that can engage long-term responses, sickness behavior and immune function [42,45].

A.D. Bud CRAig 2003 pdf

“… people [are] making sense of politics in a way that places resentment toward other citizens at the center …perhaps issues are secpndary to identities.”

Catherine T Cramer, The Politics of Resentment 2016

Crawshaw, Steve small acts of resistance quotes see pdf.

“In Ireland, there’s no guns.”

Anna Cream, Parkland High survivor

Crease, Robert P:

“… enjoy the cosmologists, understand their theories and realize their flaws, yet sympathize with those whose confidence will soon be demolished.”

Crenshaw, Kimberle:

“This thing will not be satisfied by one victory. This is just one skirmish in a wider, broader battle” to make discussions about the legacy of racism in this country taboo and “to contain the power of Black folks, queer folks, women and pretty much everybody else who doesn’t agree to the agenda of reclaiming this country that the MAGA group claims.”

Michael Crichton:

“… scientists are driven by the sense that the world out there – reality – contains a hidden order, and the scientist is trying to elucidate the hidden order in reality. And that impulse is what the scientist shares with the mystic. The impulse to get to the bottom of things. To know how the world really works. To know the nature of reality.”

quotes Feynman, Bronowski on awe, art, etc.

“I am constantly depressed by the capacity of academics to overcomplicate things. … great events leave many scholars undisturbed, still grazing happily in their own narrow fields. …

…there can never be peace in the world while we believe that for every nation there must be a state and that the state or national parliament … must be fully sovereign. …

National states are not the only possible form of human government, nor necessarily the best. “

Bernard Crick

“First class scientists take risks.”

“Whatever has a beginning must have an ending.”

Francis Crick

“…data without models are chaos, but models without data are fantasy.”

P M Crill

Crissey, Forrest, Where Opportunity Knocks Twice, 1914 ILL

“That’s the Portuguese of it. I am half Irish and half Portuguese, but it’s the Portuguese part of me that does the farming…

… as practical farmers, the Portuguese of the Pacific coast – who are almost exclusively from the islands of the Azores – have few peers.”

Crockett, Jasmine:

““We have a thug in charge of the White House…Americans

thought that it was OK to take a full-fledged criminal and make him the

president of the United States, and then they want to act aghast when he

does criminal things….mediocre white men…

“…serotonin could promote prosocial behavior by enhancing harm aversion, a prosocial sentiment that directly affects both moral judgment and moral behavior.”

Molly J Crockett PNAS 2010 see pdf

Croker, Richard:

“…my machine [Tammany Hall] is America’s great digestive apparatus, capable of converting lonely immigrants into active citizens.” via Jon Grinspan, NYT

“…the Jews live out the indignity of refugees awaiting repatriation, and Christians engage in their undignified scramble for salvation, Islam can at least make available to the Muslims in their families a resigned and dignified calm.”

Patricia Crone, Hagarism, 1977

“…we’re all really hackable right now. We’re all open to invisible influence in a way that previously would have sounded like conspiracy theories but now sound like open truths.

…I don’t like the psychological landscape of social media. I don’t like who I am and I don’t like who my friends are. I find these people I absolutely love become these complete aliens on social media. It’s just the pressure of that structure of communicating.”

Brandon Cronenberg in NYT review by Zinoman

Audrey Kurth Cronin Power to the People, 2020 (www.audreykurthcronin.com )

the invention of dynamite (p.7)…

lethal empowerment theory…

focus here on violent individuals…

ricin poisoning p.37…(did search, see pdfs)…

contagion…copycat activities…

Chapter 3 Dynamite…

The advent of gunpowder

grenades…

nitroglycerin…

blasting cap…

tsar

Dynamite Saturday, War…

property anarchist

bombings map

Nobel mis obituary and Prize

Kalashnikov ak-47

letter advocating regulation p. 166

“What the Danes call ‘flexicurity’ …a workable and humane policy response to a globalized and highly competitive economy.”

 James Cronin (Berman)

“Technology is opening a new world of leisure time.”

Walter Cronkite, 1967

Crosta, Andrea, via Tad Friend, NYer:

“…wildlife has a right to exist regardless of its economic value, regardless of its usefulness to us in any way. It’s the same thought I have had since I was ve: Animals are our family. They are my family.”

«…the fundamental cause of democratic decline in contemporary politics is the major imbalance…between the role of corporate interests and those of virtually all other groups….leading to politics once again becoming an affair of closed elites, as it was in pre-democratic times.”

Colin Crouch

Crow, Jason:

“Now is the time…for us to stand with all those defending democracy.

“Defending free speech.

“Defending freedom of religion.

“Defending due process.

“Defending the rule of law.

“Defending the right of schoolchildren to learn without fear of being shot.

“Defending government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

“Through a remarkable manipulation of limited knowledge, brute force, and an overwhelming arrogance, humans have shaped a world that in all likelihood cannot sustain the standard of living and quality of life we have come to take for granted.

We remain fixated on short-term goals and a simplistic model governed by what I call ‘Stone-Age logic’.

Find it, burn it, bury it. Our dependency on fossil fuels would be worth of caveman.”

Michael M Crow, Pres. AZ State U

“This body is no longer livable.”

Frances Crowe at 100 see pdf

Crowley, John, Harpers:

“Fear, shame, guilt, and embaressment – the Four Horsemen of the disintegrating self – were frequent visitors. I was often angry.”

Crowther, Gail:

Marilyn and her Books, 2026:

“If you are ignorant, books won’t laugh at you,” she said poignantly.

Her eternal quest was for self-improvement, underscored also by the dumbbells she hoisted well before Jane Fonda made it fashionable.

«…simplify, then exaggerate.”

Geoffrey Crowther, editor, The Economist

Cruise, Tom:

re: Valkyrie: “He was someone who realized that he had to take the steps that ultimately cost him his life. … He recognized what was at stake.”

“You don’t fight injustice by asking to become part of the system that committed the injustice against you in the first place,” she told the paper. “That’s like a freed slave striving to become a slave owner.”

Carmen Yulín Cruz

Cruz, Ted, Senator:

Oliver on Cruz:

I do not like that man Ted Cruz

I do not like him in the news.

I do not like what he just said.

I do not like his boxy head.

I do not like him wearing glasses.

I do not like him kissing asses.

I wish he’d never get one vote.

That man, Ted Cruz, can lick my ??ote.

on Ted Cruz:

“…there is a world of difference between being ahead of the curve and being behind it …

Lysenko’s environmentalist views were congenial to Soviet leaders who wanted to believe …

‘Lysenkoism’ came to be a cautionary tale, synonymous with the costs of the ideologically driven distortion of science …

Climate change denial has the support of powerful men and women in American government, but it finds almost no support within the halls of science.”

Naomi Oreskes on Ted Cruz, etc.

Senator Cruz,

There’s an old lawyerly adage that “if you don’t have the law on your side, argue the facts. If you don’t have the facts on your side, pound the table.” You did a very good job pounding the table this week.

Aaron Mair, Pres. Sierra Club

Cruz on Trump:

“He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And he had a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook. His response is to accuse everybody else of lying.”

Cruzado, Waded:

“They have taught me here that neighbor is a verb,”

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly:

“If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety.”

“When the self loses itself in a transcendent purpose – whether to write great poetry, craft beautiful furniture, understand the motions of galaxies, or help children be happier – the self becomes largely invulnerable to the fears and setbacks of ordinary existence.”

“…a kind of spiritual X-ray of my family, with its wounds and its sores.”

“As humans, we’re trying to cope with many different things, but mainly, probably, with an immense sense of loneliness.”

Alfonso Cuaron

“…this is Texas. So you talk about guns, you talk about God, you talk about trucks.”

Henry Cuellar

Javier Perez de Cuellar , former Secretary-General of the United Nations:

“… the question may justifiably be put to the leading nuclear powers: by what right do they decide the fate of humanity?.. No ideological confrontation can be allowed to jeopardize the future of humanity. Nothing less is at stake.”

from NYT obit:

competent but colorless…

everyone’s last choice…

the least objectionable

Culkin, John M.:

“…we shape our tools, and thereafter, they shape us.”

“We’re in a moment of global humility…Holy Cow! We’re not fully in control.”

Severn Cullis-Suzuki

“The greatest disguise is learning how to be invisible in plain sight.”

Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock Holmes)

Cumming, Alan:

“No one ever fully recovers from their past.”

Cumming, David:

“All the terrible things we see people doing, the British did it first.”

“When you are dealing with fossil fuels, things will always go wrong. There will always be spills, there will always be pollution.”

Brendan Cummings

on Dominic Cummings:

via Jenni Russell, NYT: ‘…stories and lies, allied to strategic cunning, conviction, secrecy, ruthlessness and upending convention, could be much more appealing than reason and fact…Mr. Cummings is deploying all the techniques that have worked for him before: disruption, deception, intimidation and an implacable willingness to alienate people.’

Cummings, E E:

“…the Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself,” via David Bowie, Popova

“I thank you God for most of this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.” on memorial bench near Eugene, Or.

“It may be the children…to find a new way….People want fairness.”

Cummings, Elijah Congressman, MD,

Cummins, Madame Bella:

“There is a safe, healthy way to solve the situation.” re brothels, Nevada

 “But how do you deny what God put in a young body – which is that desire?”

We’re more like therapists…

“All fiction, all good fiction, can potentially dismantle some of the problematic language that serves often as barriers to meaningful conversation.”

Jeanine Cummins

“Writing…is a gift we as writers are trying to give to readers.”

“If you can’t exorcise your little writing demons, you’re going to at least learn to identify them. So I’ve got some little entities sitting on my left shoulder, saying, ‘Oh, shut up,…This is just going on too long.’…

“For me, the finished book is surrounded by various nimbuses, visible only to me, of the various other ways it could have been written. And then, all that is surrounded, also visible only to me, by the impossibly great book that no one can write.”

Michael Cunningham

“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”

Mario Cuomo

Cupp, Scott, via Belkin:

““The system is made up of human beings, and human beings are flawed,” he said. “In this case, you add a relatively small town where law enforcement and prosecution is a big fish in a little pond. It’s ego pure and simple.”

“…women would frankly have to have been lobotomized to believe anything the

Republican Party tells them.”

S E Cupp nyt op-ed pdf

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

Marie Curie, 1903, 1911 Nobel Prizes

“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us most work for our own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.”

“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals.”

Madame Marie Curie

“…neoliberalism …is a shorthand description for a political philosophy, which essentially suggests that the market and marketized forms of competition are the only organizing principle of human activity.”

Thomas Curran

Currie, Ron:

“…late capitalism enters hospice care…”

I’ve thought about sabotaging a pig farm or an oil rig,

I’m skeptical of my own species.”

Curtis, Adam wikipedia entry: “He believes the Western world is haunted by the past, with no vision for the future, and that it has become pessimistic and backward-looking.”

“… the whole thing about good and evil – it’s a naive view of the world. The problem is bigger, it’s a system.”

“On a social-media network, it’s very much like being in a heroin bubble. … you know you aren’t safe, but you feel safe because everyone is like you.. But you don’t have to take heroin, so it’s brilliant. You don’t get addicted, or maybe you do. Mostly you do.”

Adam Curtis

Curtis, Jamie Lee:

About Michelle Reiner:

“You make a family and you challenge authoritarians. You answer their

horrificness with your passion and your intelligence and your advocacy.”

The Dark Ages of medieval times received its name from the dearth of intellectual stimulation and progress in the realms of science, discovery and reason. Under the crushing weight of strict religious control, deadly plagues and incessant warfare, ideas and their applications seemed generally lost to the west. Indeed, it was the fortunate preservation and encouragement of past ideals and knowledge by the Islamic and eastern kingdoms that kept many of the ideas and records alive during these days.

Jeff Curtis Humanists of Utah news

“…the increasing luxury of the world inside the care is a kind of consolation for the degradation of the world outside of it.” gated community?

Rachel Cusk

Czech, Brian:

Endangered Species Act of 1974:

“…various species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the United States have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth.”

“… wealthfare – the subsidization of the rich …”

“A penny spent is a penny burned.”

“…economic bloating …”

“Economic growth is … the underlying, overarching, all-encompassing cause behind virtually every environmental problem you can think of, including climate change in a fossil-fueled economy.”

Talk 1–11–2023 to CACOR see steadystate.org:

economy of nature

dematerialization

steady statemanshiptrophic theory

Brian Czech

Dagan, Meir (via Bergman, Mossad):

“[The media] is an insatiable monster, so there’s no point in maintaining a relationship with it…

There are advantages to having a back injury. You get a doctor’s certificate confirming that you’re not spineless…

Assassinations have an effect on morale, as well as a practical effect…..anyone cane be replaced, but there’s a difference between a replacement with guts and some lifeless character…

Assassination is a lot more moral than waging all-out war…

…sometimes it’s more effective to kill the driver, and that’s that.”

“…the evils of Capitalism … were basically rooted in the public’s failure to appreciably shorten the hours of labor…

the only move which Capitalism could make to save itself from collapse…

Capitalism is necessarily in unstable equilibrium. …

under a chronic and genuine scarcity of labor Capitalism is potentially an almost ideal system of economy…

Poverty is far more than a matter of bread.

…it is desperation and fear more than greed that transforms man into the beast.

…labor-saving machinery does not of itself bring about a single moment of leisure when the working day is not shortened…”

Arthur Dahlberg

Dalai Lama:

from Dalai Lama Beyond Religion, 2011:

«…the source of our problems lies at the level of the individual. If people lack moral values and integrity, no system of laws and regulations will be adequate. So long as people give priority to material values, then injustice, corruption, inequity, intolerance, and greed – all the outward manifestations of neglect of inner values – will persist…

religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics…we need today an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion … a secular ethics…

although humans can manage without religion, they cannot manage without inner values…

I consider compassion to be the core principle on which an entire ethical approach can be built. It is from a compassionate concern for the welfare of others that all our ethical values and principles arise, including that of justice.

…ethical awareness…does not arise magically, but comes from the use of reason….

we must weigh the pros and cons of the various paths open to us and then let ourselves be guided by a sense of responsibility. This…is what it means to be wise.

Our shared problems do not fall from the sky…they are products of human action and human error. If human action can create these problems…then surely we humans must have the capacity as well as the responsibility to find their solution.

Apathy is itself…a form of selfishness.

When greed is seen as acceptable, even praiseworthy, there is clearly something wrong with our collective value system.

…capitalism is clearly inadequate as any kind of social ideal, since it is only motivated by profit, without any ethical principle guiding it.

we need to adopt an approach to economic justice which respects the dynamism of capitalism while combining it with a concern for the less fortunate.

Ethics…is about doing.

…society itself is nothing but a collection of individuals…it follows that if we want to change society, it is up to each one of us to make our contribution…

Dalai Lama

«…the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are missing a part of the brain, the part that contains common sense.”

Dalai Lama to Pres. Obama

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, he said: “Man.
Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.
And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present;
the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;
he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”

“If eventually most of the leaders of different nations are female, maybe we’ll be safer.”

“Where ignorance is our master, there is no possiility of real peace.”

“I defeat my enemies when I make them my friends.”

“I belong to the Marxist camp, because unlike capitalism, Marxism is more ethical.”

“When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know.

But if you listen, you may learn something new.”

Dalai Lama XIV

“Your homeland is wherever you are happy. And whoever loves you is your parent.”

“surgical violence” on sabotage, via Matthieu Ricard.

end Dalai Lama

“Be outrageous. It’s the only place that isn’t crowded.”

Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy, 2024 Edition

Daley-Harris, Sam

“…populists tend to want to fight with the other side rather than try to find ways of getting through it. Populists have in common that they’re confontational.”

“I have a principle: if you worry, you don’t have to worry. And if you don’t worry, you have to worry.”

Ray Dalio

“Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.”

Oystein Dalle, VP (former) of Exxon for North Sea

Daly, Herman:

”While the invisible hand looks after the private sector, the invisible foot kicks the public

sector to pieces.”

“[…the elites who make the decisions] have figured out how to keep the benefits for themselves while ‘sharing’ the costs with the poor, the future, and other species”

 “…an information economy? Why not a knowledge economy?

Why not a wisdom economy?”

““Once we pass the optimal scale, growth becomes stupid

in the short run and impossible to maintain in the long run.”

“How do you envision a successful economy without continuous growth?

It helps to consider a prior question: how do you envision a successful planet earth without continuous growth? That is easy to envision because it exists! The earth as a whole does not grow in physical dimensions. Yet it changes qualitatively, it evolves and develops. Total matter on earth cycles, but does not grow. Energy from the sun flows through the earth coming in as a radiant low-entropy energy and exiting as high-entropy heat. But the solar flow is not growing. Nearly all life is powered by this entropic throughput of solar energy. There is birth and death, production and depreciation. New things evolve; old things go extinct. There is continual change. There is qualitative development. But the earth is not growing!

Excess carrying capacity is a necessary condition for freedom and democracy. Living close to the limit of carrying capacity, as on a submarine or spaceship, requires very strict discipline. On submarines we have a captain with absolute authority, not a democracy. If we want democracy, we better not grow up to the limit of carrying capacity – better to leave some slack, some margin for tolerance of the disagreements and errors that freedom entails.

Laissez-faire takes on a new meaning – it is the ecosystem, not the economy that must be “left alone” to manage itself and evolve by its own rules. …it is past time to transfer the privileges of “laissez-faire” from the economy to the ecosystem.”

This painful experience taught me to concentrate on what I am able to do and not waste energy on things that I can’t do.”

“… pursuit of development that was not physical to achieve prosperity.”

“There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation.”

“present day society is locked into four positive feedback loops which need to be broken:

economic growth which feeds on itself,

population growth which feeds on itself,

technological growth which feeds on itself, and a

pattern of income inequalitywhich seems to be self-sustaining and which tends to spur growth in the other three areas.”

Victor Furkiss via Herman Daly

“Money ranks with the wheel and fire among ancient inventions without which the modern world could not have come into being…it is illegal for citizens to destroy or deface it, but private banks can annihilate it.”

…debt appears to offer a means of dodging nature, of evading the second law of thermodynamics, the law of randomization, rust, and rot….the idea that all people can live off the interest of their mutual indebtedness is just another perpetual motion scheme – a vulgar delusion on a grand scale.”

«…moral hazard …is what results from the combination iof privatized profit and socialized loss.”

«…under Reagan…the banking sector wanted ‘the government off its back’. Now…the last thing it wants is for the government to leave the scene of the train wreck.”

«…secure in the faith that technology is likely to mop up whatever mess they make.”

A failed growth economy and a steady-state economy are not the same

thing; they are the very different alternatives we face.

Growth is more of the same stuff; development is the same amount of

better stuff (or at least different stuff).

Tax ‘bads’, stop taxing ‘goods’. That’s the basic idea. You don’t want to tax what you want more of. You do want to tax what you want less of. This could be sold as a revenue-neutral shift. We’re not going to tax more, we’re going to tax

differently, we’re going to tax different things to instill different incentives.

…’sustainable growth’ – a clear oxymoron.

Once you draw the boundary of the environment around the economy, you have said that the economy cannot expand forever.

The principle…an eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not allow unlimited inequality in the distribution of private property.

Historically the steady state is the normal condition; growth is an aberration.

“…if the monetary interest rate were negative (i.e., if you lost less by investing your money than by holding it)…”

“[Economics] insists on straining out gnats of inefficient allocation while swallowing camels of unsustainable scale and unjust distribution. It is past time for a big reform in economics! “

Reform of both economic understanding and the economic system

in the light of physical and moral first principles is the sine qua non of a

civilization capable of using knowledge for good rather than evil.

“…the world’s real problem was faulty economics.”

Daly quoting Soddy

Daly quoting Millikan:

“sleep in peace with the consciousness that the Creator has put some

foolproof elements into his handiwork, and that man is powerless to do

it any titanic physical damage”

end Daly, Herman

“…violent language can incite actual violence … metaphor can incite murder. …Palin added to a climate of violence.”

Michael Daly

Damatac, Jill:

“By self-deporting, I ended my American life to save what

remained of my actual life…

Damon, Matt:

“Robin [Williams} was a very deep, deep river…What a completely unique brain he had, the connections he would make. He’s quiet, reserved, and suddenly…he’s doing a bit about the pope and his Brazilian dancers. What…?”

d’Ancona, Matthew:

Matthew d’Ancona likens the Murdochs to the Sacklers of Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin, encouraging a section of the American public “to become addicted to the opioid of an unyielding conservatism that often strayed into conspiracy theories and outright lies”.

Dane, Barbara:

“I knew I was a singer for life,

but where I would aim it didn’t come forward

until then. I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”

from NYT profile:

“Paredon didn’t put out music about politics. They put out music of politics,” said Josh MacPhee, the author of “An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels” and a founder of the Brooklyn-based Interference Archive, which chronicles the cultural production of social movements. “These are not artists commenting on political issues. These were sounds that were produced by people in motion trying to transform their lives.”

“Why would I want to stand in front of a band with a low-cut dress singing stupid words when I could be singing for workers who are on strike?,” she said. “It didn’t seem like a good bargain to me.”

If you see your country “making horrible mistakes, you have to speak up,” she said. “You’re colluding with it if you don’t speak up.”

“One must participate in the emerging struggle around them in order to make art that reflects it,” she said.

“If you’re an artist, you’ve already got tools. If you don’t know what to write about, remember that truth and reality is what we’re after. You have to know reality to tell the truth about it. You got to get out and be a part of it.”

also Paredon Records

“Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.”

Anthony J. D’Angelo

“A great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully constructed denials.”

Mark Z Danielewski

Daniels Defense Inc. site:

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

maker of rifle used by Uvalde shooter

“Taxes are not just about money but about the meanings we attach to money.”

Ellen Danni

Dante:

“We are one-wing angels:

we can only fly together.”

“We need audacity, and yet more audacity, and always audacity!”

Georges Danton

“Trump’s essence is a dark swirl of cruelty, violence and fear. He doesn’t know that people who don’t confront their demons are destined to be confronted by them.”

Michael D’Antonio via Maureen Dowd, Touch of Evil

“The secret of happiness is to have low expectations…You can’t fight faith with logic.”

Tony Daoud, Square of Change, Beirut, Lebanon

“Suzanne Collins …filtered her influences through a heroine who embodies the adage that it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees … a character who exists outside the traditional confines of the feminine-masculine split.”

Manohla Dargis, NY Times review of Mockingjay Part 2.

Dario, Ruben:

To Theodore Roosevelt:

You are the United States.

You are the future invader

of the naïve America that has Indigenous blood …

Dark, Alice Elliott:

“I want more than a story – I want the structure and patterning of a book to reach me on a deep level.”

“…pain is a biopsychosocial condition…most people taking opioids longterm do not benefit from the,…up to one-third ofthe U.S. population lives with ongoing pain. Chronic pain … is more prevalent that diabetes or heart disease.”

Beth Darnell see pdf

Darnton, Robert:

“The marvels of communication

technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past,”

re: Iran nuclear pact pullout: “…an act of diplomatic vandalism, seemingly for ideological and personality reasons, because it was ‘Obama’s deal’.”

“..Trump radiates insecurity.”

Sir Kim Darroch

“I always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.”

“History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history.”

Clarence Darrow

Darwin, Charles:

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” -Charles Darwin

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

“Men do not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.”

“…some animals have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.”

“If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”

Charles Darwin, 1859

“Without speculation there is no good and original observation.”

“ I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

“…from so simple a beginning endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been, and are being, evolved.”

Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, 1859

“I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit…

my power to follow a long or purely abstract train of thought is limited…

but I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things

which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully.”

“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.”

C Darwin, 1872

“…facial expressions are a sort of ‘shared language’ among mammals…

Darwin: They say he read novels to relax, but only certain kinds – nothing that ended unhappily. If he happened on something like that, enraged, he flung the book into the fire.”

on Darwin via Annie Proulx

end Darwin

“Governments gambled on a return to growth solving all the problems. That bet has failed.”      Satyajit Das

“…a nation-state is an organization that has an exclusive right in a specific territory to use and threaten killing force on its own citizens and on anyone who threatens its so-called ‘sovereignty’.”

“…it is not that ‘communism’ died and ‘capitalism’ triumphed. It is that ‘communism’ died before ‘capitalism’ did. Both are unsustainable.”

Jim Dator nonkilling

Rene Daumal (via Hugh and Popova), from Mt. Analogue.

 “Alpinism is the art of climbing in the mountains in such a way as to face the greatest risks with the greatest prudence. Art is taken here to mean knowledge gained in action. You cannot stay on the mountaintop forever, you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place?

Just this, What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. In climbing, take careful note of the difficulties along the way, for as you go up you can observe them. Coming down, you will no longer see them, but you will know they are there if you have observed them well. There is an art of finding one’s direction in the lower regions by the memory of what you saw higher up. When you can no longer see, one can at least still know.”

Daumier, Honore:

…the young Honoré de Balzac, a literary editor, said of Daumier’s lithographs

“Why, this fellow’s got Michelangelo in his blood !”

“Corporate America’s love affair with debt is driven by a heavy subsidy, courtesy of the federal tax code. ..the interest that corporations pay on their debt is deductible on their federal taxes….debt-financed investments are cheaper than equity….This creates a bias by corporations toward debt….

Steven M Davidoff

«…the wealth of a country is most closely correlated with the degree to which the average person shares in the overall growth of the economy.”

Adam Davidson on Daron Acemoglu book Why Nations Fail.

“Hubris syndrome is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.”

Jonathan Davidson

Davies, Dan:

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How the World Lost Its Mind

‘weak ratings make good journalists do bad things’.

have a professional interest in situations like this–cases where the exact thing that nobody wanted to happen has happened.

called Lying for Money, about the history and economics of financial fraud.

fraud investigator Bill Black had coined the concept of a ‘criminogenic organisation’. It

the overall system of incentives in the economy was so criminogenic that banks had a natural tendency to organise themselves into fraudulent behaviour. All the top executives had to do was set unrealistic profitability targets and under invest in legal departments and compliance systems. It wasn’t so much that anyone had told their traders what to do; more that nobody ever organised things in such a way that they wouldn’t form a criminal conspiracy.

Over twenty-five years [Fox News] had become a media colossus,

largely based on two creative insights. First, that some people enjoy being angry, and will consume their rage as a product. And second, that some presenters have the gift of making people angry, just like a comedian can make people laugh.

They have constructed

accountability sink to absorb unwanted negative emotion.

the KLM squirrel debacle

This property of there being ‘nobody to blame’ is the definition of what constitutes an accountability sink.

The foundations of Robert Maxwell’s media empire were built on Pergamon Press, which was one of the first companies to realise that the business model has two incredibly favourable properties. Firstly, the customer base is captive and highly vulnerable to price gouging. A university library has to have access to the best journals,..

A not-wholly-unfair analysis of academic publishing would be that it is an industry in which academics compete against one another for the privilege of providing free labour for a profit-making company, which then sells the results back to them at monopoly prices. It is, as you’d expect from that description, highly profitable–and passionately hated by the academics.

truly valuable output of the academic publishing industry is not journals, but citations.

the outsourcing of the academic performance

measurement system is a solution rather than a problem. It redirects potentially destructive negative emotions to a place where they can be relatively harmlessly dissipated.

historian of conspiracy theories,

Peter Dale Scott,

Rather than ‘conspiracy’, he preferred to use the term ‘parapolitics’, defining that as the part of the government system in which the possibility of accountability is intentionally diminished.

He later supplemented this with the idea of ‘deep politics’, referring to the political practices and arrangements which were kept out of

public discourse, and in the 2000s, he began to refer to the ‘deep state’.

it caught on rapidly in the English-speaking world when Donald Trump began to use it to refer to anyone who stopped him from doing what he wanted.

part of the state which operated at least partly by removing itself from accountability.

Euro member countries came to an agreement, known as the Stability and Growth Pact,

Part Four: What Happened Next?

the first step towards the possibility of any improvement has to involve doing something about private equity.

causes a huge number of problems, it normalises bad practice and it doesn’t provide proportionate benefits.

The principle of limited liability acts as an accountability sink for private equity investors.

any entity taking control of an operating company should have to guarantee its debts.

make it possible for a bad deal to affect investors as well as the little people

decision-making system of a

modern corporation has a particular dysfunction: one of its signals has been so amplified that it drowns out the others.

Viable systems fundamentally seek stability, not maximisation.

is hard to hear the conscience of corporations above the noise of debt and ‘fiduciary duty’, but it’s there.

Any system which is set up to maximise a single objective has the potential to go bonkers.

end Davies, Dan

Davies, Paul:

“…bringing information into physics cracks open a door to a scientific revolution that is only today starting to unfold.

…think of entropy as ignorance…

…information is about what you know, and entropy is about what you don’t know…

Szilard’s demon, engine…

“There is plenty of room at the bottom for novel physics to operate in a manner hitherto undetected…”

Davies, Robert USU:

“…it is not for us to say that such change is not possible.”

“Perhaps the great virtue of the scientific method is not that it is smart …but that it is slow and careful.”

“…emotion has overwhelmed reason as the foundation of our public life.”

William Davies

da Vinci, Leonardo quotations:

“The noblest pleasure is the JOY of understanding.”

“Can you accept there that there may be certain realities beyond the limits of your comprehension?” Captain Janeway, StarTrek Voyager Four, #179, 1997

“I cannot accept that – and I would be fooled.” says Leonardo.

“Ostinato Rigore,” Italian for persistent rigor. ..via Donaldson

“I am not to be accused of idleness.”

“Do you not know that our soul is composed of harmony?”

“I have been hindered neither by avarice nor negligence, but simply by want of time.”

“Even though I may not know, like them, how to cite the authors, it is a much greater and more worthy thing to bring to bear the results of experience, teacher of their teachers. These puffed up, pompous fellows get about clothed and adorned not by their own efforts but by those of others; and to me they won’t allow the benefit of my own exertions; and if they despise me as an inventor, how much more blameworthy are they who are not inventors but merely flourishers and retailers of the work of others.”

“Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory.”

“There are men who deserve to be called nothing but passages for food because nothing else is served by them.

Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.

…my subjects require for their exposition experience rather than the words of others.

The desire to know is natural to good men.

Every action in nature takes place in the shortest possible way.

I never tire of being useful.

“Surrounding things transmit their images to the senses and the senses transfer them to the Sensation. Sensation sends them to the Common Sense, and by it they are stamped upon the memory.”

Do not mock me, reader, if we here make great leaps from subject to subject.

Here is revealed the experience that gives birth to certainty.

“If you are mindful that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so exert yourself in youth that your old age will not lack sustenance.”

“Although human genius through various inventions makes instruments corresponding to the same ends, it will never discover an invention more beautiful nor more ready nor more economical than nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”                 

“Remember that your bird should have no other model than the bat,”

“Learning without a liking for it stills the mind and retains nothing that it takes in.”

“For in truth great love is born of great knowledge of the thing loved.”

“Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world?”

“Do not scorn me so! I am not poor. He is poor, rather, who desires many things.”

“The truth has such excellence that by praising little things it makes them noble.”

“All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.”

“Painting is born of nature.”

“Make yourself a master of perspective, then acquire perfect knowledge of the proportions of men and other animals.”

“A painter above all must keep his mind as clear as the surface of a mirror.”

“just as iron rusts from disuse…so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.”

“The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.”

There shall be wings!

If the accomplishment be not for me, ‘tis for some other.

“The desire to know is natural to good men.”

“Study the science of art and the art of science.”

«Saper Vedere – knowing how to see”

“No human investigations can be called true science without going through mathematical tests.”

“Learn diligence before speedy execution.”

“Once you have tasted flight you will walk the Earth with your eyes toward the sky. For there you have been and there you long to return.”

If you would be healthy, observe this advice:

Eat only when hungry, and let light fare suffice.

Chew all your food well, and this rule always follow:

Well cooked and simple be all that you swallow.

On leaving the table, a good posture keep,

And after your luncheon do not yield to sleep.

Let little and often be your rule for wine,

But not between meals or when waiting to dine.

Visits to the privy should not be postponed…

as quoted by Michael White

“Experiments never deceive. It is our judgment that deceives itself because it expects results which experiments refuse.”

“The grandest of all books, I mean the Universe, stands open before our eyes.”

«…the more you write at length, minutely, the more you will confuse the mind of the reader.”

Strive to preserve your health in which you will be the more successful the more you are wary of physicians.”

…that deceptive opinion by means of which…a living is made from fools.” (on astrologers)

When besieged by ambitious tyrants, I find a means of offence and defense in order to preserve the chief gift of nature, which is liberty.

While I thought I was learning how to live, I was really learning how to die.”

….confused things kindle the mind to great inventions.”

Do not interfere with matters of the eyes trying to get them through the ears.

da vinci on deathbed: “Tell me, did anything get done?”

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

“do not scorn me so! I am not poor. He is poor, rather, who desires many things.”

“Constancy. Not who begins but he who perseveres.”

“…evil, that is death, which destroys this memory together with life”

from Ken Burns Pt. 1, Pt. 2:

“In the days of thy youth seek to obtain that which shall compensate the losses of thy old age. And if thou understandest that old age is fed with wisdom, so conduct thyself in the days of thy youth that sustenance may not be lacking to thy old age”

quoted by da Vinci in Windsor codex – from Dante’s Inferno:

Lying in a featherbed will not bring you fame,

nor staying beneath the quilt,

and he who uses up his life without achieving fame

leaves no more vestige of himself on earth

than smoke in the air or foam upon the water.”

Dante via Kemp as Mona Lisa influence?:

“Such things appear in her aspect

As show the joys of Paradise,

I mean in her eyes and her sweet smile,

For Love draws them there as to his place.

They overwhelm this intellect of ours,

As a ray of light does week vision.”

Da Vinci via Steve Allen: Meeting of Minds, Shows 21, 22:

Anyone who relies on authority is using his memory, not his understanding.

The act of investigation – understanding – became the powerful emotional experience.

The paintings were commissioned. Only my sketches were created with total freedom.

…arriving at the opening of as great cavern t…there was suddenly awakened in me two emotions, fear and longing – fear of the dark threatening cave, and longing to see whether some marvelous thing lay inside.

“There are things in this world that I understand and you don’t.”

Captain Janeway to Leonardo, StarTrek Voyager Concerning Flight

‘My mind would be too small.”

Leonardo in response to Capt Janeway’s sparrow question.

from Paracelsus, 1530s quoted by Leonardo:

“He who wishes to explore Nature must tread her books with his feet. Writing is learned from letters but Nature from land to land. One Land, one page. This is the Codex Naturae, thus must its pages be turned.”

Stefan Klein on Leonardo:

“A good scientist approaches nature the way a caricaturist approaches the features of a politician: Both simplify and overdraw their objects until the essence clearly emerges.”

«…science is the business of disengaging yourself from the obvious.”

Even the most self-assured spirits can hesitate to wage a solitary battle against the universally accepted dogmas promoted by the renowned scholars of their era.”

…his notebooks repeatedly referred to the destruction of nature by man.”

We want answers; he posed questions.

Driven by curiosity, he worked for the shear pleasure of understanding the world.”

“Leonardo was always short of paper.”

Michael White

“…never, never underestimate Leonardo da Vinci.”

Mark E Rosheim

«…the sole evidence of a security leak from the future appears to be the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.”

Arthur C Clarke (in Sam Magruder)

“In the course of philosophizing on nature…Leonardo formed such heretical ideas that no religion could be reconciled with them; evidently he wanted to be a philosopher more than a Christian.”

“The heavens often rain down the richest gifts on human beings, but sometimes with lavish abundance, they bestow upon a single individual beauty, grace, and ability so that he surpasses all other men.”

Giorgio Vasari

«….the marker of an old man in exile, prey to the random offerings of memory.”

“The cage is empty; the mind has flown.”

Charles Nicholl on Leonardo’s aging

“Mystery to Leonardo was a shadow, a smile and a finger pointing into darkness.”

«…the most relentlessly curious man in history.”

Kenneth Clark

“No other artist bequeathed so copious a record of his thoughts and yet told us so little of himself.”

Daniel J Boorstin

end of da Vinci quotes Da Vinci:

“…he is thinking of the end before he has made a beginning.”

Pope Leo X on da Vin

perche la minesstra si fredda…because the soup is getting cold.

signature: Leonardo Vinci disscepelo della sperientia…disciple of experience…

Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a compass.

“Better a small certainty, than a big lie.”

I am not to be accused of idleness.

Do you not know that our soul is composed of harmony?

I have been hindered … simply by want of time.

Even though I may not know, like them, how to cite the authors, it is a much greater and more worthy thing to bring to bear the results of experience, teacher of their teachers. These puffed up, pompous fellows get about clothed and adorned not by their own efforts but by those of others; and to me they won’t allow the benefit of my own exertions; and if they despise me as an inventor, how much more blameworthy are they who are not inventors but merely flourishers and retailers of the work of others.

Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory.

There are men who deserve to be called nothing but passages for food because nothing else is served by them.

Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.

…my subjects require for their exposition experience rather than the words of others.

The desire to know is natural to good men.

Every action in nature takes place in the shortest possible way.

I never tire of being useful.

Surrounding things transmit their images to the senses and the senses transfer them to the Sensation. Sensation sends them to the Common Sense, and by it they are stamped upon the memory.

Do not mock me, reader, if we here make great leaps from subject to subject.

Here is revealed the experience that gives birth to certainty.

If you are mindful that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so exert yourself in youth that your old age will not lack sustenance.

Although human genius through various inventions makes instruments corresponding to the same ends, it will never discover an invention more beautiful nor more ready nor more economical than nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

Remember that your bird should have no other model than the bat.

Learning without a liking for it stills the mind and retains nothing that it takes in.

For in truth great love is born of great knowledge of the thing loved.

Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world?

I am not poor. He is poor, rather, who desires many things.

The truth has such excellence that by praising little things it makes them noble.

All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.

Painting is born of nature.

Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly. (via Shlain)

All evil leaves sadness in one’s memory, except the supreme evil, death, which destroys memory along with life. (via Shlain)

Where flame cannot live, no animal that draws breath can live.” (oxygen!)

Make yourself a master of perspective, then acquire perfect knowledge of the proportions of men and other animals.

Man has great power of speech, but what he says is mostly vain and false; animals have little, but what they say is useful and true.

[You should] withdraw apart, the better to study the forms of natural objects…remain solitary, …intent on studying and considering those things which continually appear … and furnish material to be carefully stored in the memory.

Alone you are all yourself, with a companion you are half yourself.

…as a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

A painter above all must keep his mind as clear as the surface of a mirror.

…just as iron rusts from disuse…so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.

The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.

There shall be wings!

If the accomplishment be not for me, ‘tis for some other.

It will seem as though nature should extinguish the human race, for it will be useless to the world and will bring destruction to all created things. via L Shlain

The desire to know is natural to good men.

Study the science of art and the art of science.

«Saper Vedere – knowing how to see”who have ears and hear nothing;

“Music: The shaping of the invisible.”

No human investigations can be called true science without going through mathematical tests.

on worship:

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they talk to them and receive no answer; they adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they burn lamps for those who do not see.

On Michelangelo: “You should not make all the muscles of the body too conspicuous …otherwise you will produce a sack of walnuts rather than a human figure.”

Learn diligence before speedy execution.

Once you have tasted flight you will walk the Earth with your eyes toward the sky. For there you have been and there you long to return.”

If you would be healthy, observe this advice:

Eat only when hungry, and let light fare suffice.

Chew all your food well, and this rule always follow:

Well cooked and simple be all that you swallow.

On leaving the table, a good posture keep,

And after your luncheon do not yield to sleep.

Let little and often be your rule for wine,

But not between meals or when waiting to dine.

Visits to the privy should not be postponed…

as quoted by Michael White

Things that happened many years ago often seem close and nearby to the present, and many things that happened recently seem as ancient as the bygone days of youth.

in Codex Atlanticus

Experiments never deceive. It is our judgment that deceives itself because it expects results which experiments refuse.

The grandest of all books, I mean the Universe, stands open before our eyes.

…the more you write at length, minutely, the more you will confuse the mind of the reader.

Strive to preserve your health in which you will be the more successful the more you are wary of physicians.

…that deceptive opinion by means of which…a living is made from fools. (on astrologers)

When besieged by ambitious tyrants, I find a means of offence and defense in order to preserve the chief gift of nature, which is liberty.

While I thought I was learning how to live, I was really learning how to die.

….confused things kindle the mind to great inventions.

Do not interfere with matters of the eyes trying to get them through the ears.

disscepolo della sperienta

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Art and science are disciplines that must walk together hand in hand.

Constancy. Not who begins but he who perseveres.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form. [on procrastination]

First I shall do some experiments before I proceed farther, because my intention is to cite experience first and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way. And this is the true rule by which those who speculate about the effects of nature must proceed.

When besieged by ambitious tyrants I find a means of offense and defense in order to preserve the chief gift of nature, which is liberty. …Death rather than loss of liberty. The goldfinch brings spurge [a poisonous plant] to its young when they are imprisoned in a cage. It is better to die than to lose one’s freedom.” (via Shlain)

“It had long since come to my attention that people of

accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them…

…they went out and happened to things.”

Quotes by others about Leonardo:

“Leonardo’s strong comic streak is another striking example of the association between creativity and the ability to appreciate and to create humor….the ability to manipulate contradiction and to create paradox, which are basic to humor, are also an integral part of the creative process.”

Rhoda L Fisher

Fritz Capra: “Leonardo never thought of the body as a machine.”

Peter Donaldson: “,” Italian for persistent rigor

Da Vinci via Steve Allen: Meeting of Minds, Shows 21, 22:

Anyone who relies on authority is using his memory, not his understanding.

The act of investigation – understanding – became the powerful emotional experience.

The paintings were commissioned. Only my sketches were created with total freedom.

…arriving at the opening of a great cavern …there was suddenly awakened in me two emotions, fear and longing – fear of the dark threatening cave, and longing to see whether some marvelous thing lay inside.

“There are things in this world that I understand and you don’t.”

Captain Janeway to Leonardo, StarTrek Voyager Concerning Flight

‘My mind would be too small.”

Leonardo in response to Capt Janeway’s sparrow question.

“Can you accept there that there may be certain realities beyond the limits of your comprehension?” Captain Janeway, StarTrek Voyager Four, #179, 1997

“I cannot accept that – and I would be fooled.” says Leonardo.

from Paracelsus, 1530s quoted by Leonardo:

“He who wishes to explore Nature must tread her books with his feet. Writing is learned from letters but Nature from land to land. One Land, one page. This is the Codex Naturae, thus must its pages be turned.”

Stefan Klein on Leonardo:

“A good scientist approaches nature the way a caricaturist approaches the features of a politician: Both simplify and overdraw their objects until the essence clearly emerges.”

«…science is the business of disengaging yourself from the obvious.

Even the most self-assured spirits can hesitate to wage a solitary battle against the universally accepted dogmas promoted by the renowned scholars of their era.”

…his notebooks repeatedly referred to the destruction of nature by man.”

“We want answers; he posed questions.”

“Driven by curiosity, he worked for the shear pleasure of understanding the world.”

Michael White: “Leonardo was always short of paper.”

Mark E Rosheim: “…never, never underestimate Leonardo da Vinci.”

Arthur C Clarke (in Sam Magruder): “…the sole evidence of a security leak from the future appears to be the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.”

Giorgio Vasari: “In the course of philosophizing on nature…Leonardo formed such heretical ideas that no religion could be reconciled with them; evidently he wanted to be a philosopher more than a Christian.”

“The heavens often rain down the richest gifts on human beings, but sometimes with lavish abundance, they bestow upon a single individual beauty, grace, and ability so that he surpasses all other men.”

Charles Nicholl on Leonardo’s aging: “….the marker of an old man in exile, prey to the random offerings of memory.”

“The cage is empty; the mind has flown.”

Kenneth Clark: “Mystery to Leonardo was a shadow, a smile and a finger pointing into darkness.”

«…the most relentlessly curious man in history.”

Daniel J Boorstin: “No other artist bequeathed so copious a record of his thoughts and yet told us so little of himself.”

Martin Kemp: “He brainstormed on paper.”

“…no one ever used the tools of visual representation more compellingly and with more inventiveness to communicate the eternally fresh thrill of visual insight, as we learn to ‘see’ in the sense of ‘to understand’. …he instinctively knows how to draw us into his world of sensory delight and how to feed our eyes and our intellects to just the right degree, while leaving room for us to bring what we can to the completion of the cycle of communication between the thing, the artist, and the spectator.”

“Great artists know how to do just enough to entice us into the game of completing their image. They know when to stop spelling everything out.”

 “…his artistic productions are more than art – that they are part of a vision embracing a profound sense of the interrelatedness of things. The full complexity of life in the context of the world is somehow implied when he characterises any of its constituent parts…. I believe that his vision of the totality of the world as a kind of single organism does speak to us with particular relevance today.”

Chris Wise: “He was a curiosity junkie.”

Sigmund Freud: “He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others are all still asleep.”

David Bull “…painting was almost too easy for him.”

William A. Emboden: “Leonardo’s … manners were irreproachable and his demeanor was such that he was admired … He road as well as any horseman and had a noble bearing in his carriage. He had mastered the building and playing of the lute and sang with a most pleasant voice. He was remarkably handsome, of a fine physique and a noble face. His dress was always simple but elegant, and his magnanimity was known throughout the court.”

“This solitary researcher transcended all of the thinkers and artists of the late 15th and early 16th centuries in obliterating boundaries between time and space, mass and the energetics inherent in mass.”

“Time, rather than history, was of interest to Leonardo.”

“…once a thought was comprehended by Leonardo, it was sufficiently exploited to allow him to move on into new realms of endeavor.”

“…he was one of the great pioneers of plant studies.”

“This is no idler but a man destined to find a beauty in these symbols of complex relationships that are the passages in the labyrinth of an incredible mind, … the harmony of interwoven ideas.”

“In showing the diminution of sound Leonardo used the analogy of the scent of flowers.”

“…Leonardo had mastered Latin …”

“…he captures a moment in time with full knowledge of all of the transciency, succession and variation inherent in time … [giving] a mysterious force to all of Leonardo’s portrayals of nature. They can never be static.”

“…sought to give permanence to nature, and at the same time to portray its dynamics.”

William A Emboden

Walter Isaacson:

re da Vinci:

Vision without execution is hallucination.

…a mind dancing with nature…the cross-disciplinary brilliance…

mood swings and attention-deficit disorder.

…an apocalypse that begins with water and ends with fire.

…the basis for his creativity was an enthusiasm for interweaving diverse disciplines.

He wanted to know everything there was to know about everything that could be known.

…his mind could dance magically, and sometimes frenetically, back and forth across the smudgy line that separates reality from fantasia.

p. 216:

via Francesco Melzi:

“The loss of such a man is mourned by all. for it is not in the power of Nature to create another.”

from Intro to the Method of L da Vinci, 1994:

“Once rigour is established a positive liberty becomes possible…

“Is there anything that resists the lure of the senses, the dissipation of ideas, the fading of memories, the slow variation of the organism, the incessant and multiform activities of the universe?”

“…the author himself…is unable to give any account of the lines he has followed, that he is the wielder of a power he does not understand…

that psychical postulate which in our consciousness resembles the principle of inertia in mechanics…

It was reserved for Faraday to rediscover the methof od Leonardo as applied to physical science….

it is hopeless illusion to think that one can produce in the mids of others the fantasies of one’s own mind…

I … think it unworthy … to write solely out of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is not the writer’s state of mind…

But no revelations for Leonardo…

Leonardo…attains…a steadily more perfect mastery over his oen nature; unceasingly he modifies his ideas, unceasingly looks closer, unceasingly elaborates his notes…

He plays with things, he grows bolder…His craving not to leave anything unexamined…renews his strength and the cohesion of his life…”

allen steve character quotes from Meeting of Minds series

Series #1- 4; Shows # 1 – 24 also Jayne Meadows

da Vinci: Shows 21, 22 of Series and Volume 4.

[One] must be born in a time,place, and circumstances in which one’s gifts can be brought toflower. It was my good fortune to grow up in la bella citta de Firenze…

The act of procreation…is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if it were not a traditional custom…

Anyone who relies on authorities is using his memory, not his understanding…

I found that the more thoroughly I understood something the less I was inclined to love or to hate. The act of investigation – understanding -became the powerful emotional experience…

I often attended to small matters in order to earn a living…

da Vinci Gravity via Gharib pdf:

“Nothing could stop him,” Morteza Gharib, an author of the paper and a professor of aeronautics at California Institute of Technology, said in an interview. “He was far ahead in his thinking. It could not wait for the future.”

“It’s mind boggling,” Dr. Gharib said. “That’s the beauty of what Leonardo does.”

He said many art historians had examined The Codex Arundel – but not scientists. “It’s an open book they haven’t looked at yet, haven’t spent time exploring,” he said. “There are so many other things to be discovered.”

end da Vinci

Davis, Angela:

”We have to talk about a complete and total change in the structures of this society because that’s the only way that a concept like academic freedom is going to be made relevant. We have to go to the streets.”

“freedom is not simply the goal of liberation, it begins with liberation.”

“I treasure this time, because it means I get to see that the work that was done 50 and 60 years ago really mattered, even though there were moments when all of us felt it was in vain.”

Angela Davis

Davis, Emma:

“It felt you were wrapping yourself up in this blanket of all of this misery and darkness.”

Davis, Garry:

“The nation-state is a political fiction which perpetuates anarchy and is the breeding ground of war…. We, the people, want the peace which only a world government can give. The sovereign states you represent divide us and lead us to the abyss of total war.”

“…the system of exclusive nation-states poses the greatest single threat to humanity.”

“…inalienable – incapable of being transferred to any other person or authority.”

Garry Davis

“We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority.”

Jefferson Davis

Davis Michael:

“Let’s be realistic, demand the impossible.”

“Time isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing.”

“Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

“All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”

Miles Davis

Davis, Patti: “We live in times of great oversharing.”

Davis, Pete:

“Infinite Browsing Mode…this is the defining characteristic of my generation…”

Davis, Wade:

—-The colonial process was always a negation of the normal cognitive process – its names, its geography, its history, its knowledge – was always seen as the starting point of the educational journey of the colonised. In short, colonisation, in the area of education, was always predicated on the negation of the colonised space as the starting point of knowledge.—- “[Americans] are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it.”

“…a place of such poverty…people adorn their lives with their imaginations.”

Wade Davis re: Haiti

Davos:

A mayor of London…once attended Davos only to dismiss it as “a constellation of egos involved in massive mutual orgies of adulation.”

Dawes, Robyn:

“We’re the primates whose cognitive capacity shuts down in the absence of a story.”

Dawkins, Richard:

 on Memes, Foreward to Blackmore bk, 1999:

mimetic engineering.

…the meme might one day be developed into a proper hypothesis of the human mind.

The real unit of natural selecxtion was any kind of replicator, any unit of nwhich copies are made, with occassional errors…

[Blackmore is] a psychologist and sceptical investigator of the paranormal: superstition and near-death experience.

Blackmore: ‘Imagine a world full of brains, and far more memes that can possibly find homes. Which memes are more likely to find a safe home and get passed on again? ..’

memeplexes.

Religions may be the most convincing examples of memeplexes.

…meme is a monosyllable similar to gene…

Chinese junk meme [origami]…

Memes travel longitudinally down generations, but they travel horizontally, too, like viruses in an epidemic…

There is even a new religion…called the ‘Church of Virus’, complete with its own list of Sins and Virues, and its own patron saint (Saint Charles Darwin, canonized as ‘perhasps the most influential memetic engineer…

Brodie, Lynch book refs

Oxford English Dict. definition, via Blackmore: Meme. An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, especially imitation.

…the entity that might play the role of gene in the transmission of wortds, ideas, faiths, mannerisms and fashions.

«“Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.”

 “If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it’s not supernatural.”»

Insofar as I show hostility to alternatives, superstition and so on, it’s because they are sapping education and depriving young people of the true glory of the scientific world view …It’s tragic to see children being led into dark, pokey little corners of medieval superstition….

It would be very surprising if there wasn’t a genetic basis to the psychological predispositions which make people vulnerable to religion…. seeing agency rather than boring old natural forces may have been programmed into our brains.”

“Three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder while I was writing…”

Intelligent life … comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence…

…faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.”

from God Delusion:

“I picture the relative brevity of life by imagining a laser-thin spotlight creeping along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything before or after the spotlight is shrouded in the darkness of the dead past, or the darkness of the unknown future.”

“When we ask about the survival value of anything, we may be asking the wrong question…

the cargo cults of the South Pacific…provide a fascinating contemporary model for the way religions spring up from almost nothing…cult…

…the ‘imaginary friend’ phenomenon of childhood…

Twain via Dawkins:

‘I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.’

«…the sheer aesthetic excitement of understanding why we exist is among the highest experiences the human mind is privileged to enjoy.”

“Science is the poetry of reality.”

“an alpha-male in the sky…”

“…the odd thing about tradition is that the longer it’s been going the more people seem to take it seriously…as though the passage of time takes something that was just made up and turns it into what people believe as a fact….

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

religion is a dangerous virus infecrtion of children child abuse

secular schools lead to greater separation …to a different species!

We are privileged to be alive.”

“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. ..

The genes of a species can be thought of as a description of ancestral worlds…

In Intro to Bronowski, The Ascent of Man:

drawing of the baby in the womb introduced the television version of The Ascent of Man:

Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvellous plasticity of mind.

‘Knowledge … is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.’

care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate

in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.

the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

The University is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it.

Science is the poetry of reality.

end Dawkins intro to Ascent of Man

end Dawkins

“There must be a way of coming down the hill, of de-escalating … The only solution is not to give us more arms for our security, but to give us more security so we can have less arms.”

Gen. Moshe Dayan

“It’s a decision made with conviction, but not full understanding.”

Daniel Day-Lewis, on retiring

“Scientists…have discovered a vast source of … wealth…the treasure of discovery. The endless pleasure of asking questions and seeking answers – and it is there for the taking.”

David Deamer

“…we’ve given people a way to shout back, and we listen…they don’t even have to shout anymore.”

“You’ve got to start from where you are, not from where you wish you were.”

Howard Dean

Dean, James:

“You’ve got to live fast. Death comes early.”

“If a man can bridge the gap between life and death…if he can live on after he’s dead, then maybe he’s a great man.”

“Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.”

“Death. It’s the only thing left to respect. It’s the one inevitable, undeniable truth. Everything else can be questioned. But death is truth. In it lies the only nobility for man, and beyond it, the only hope.

I also became close to nature, and am now able to appreciate the beauty with which this world is endowed.”

…acting is the most logical way for people’s neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves.

He had the greatest of intellectual qualities – curiosity about everything.

said Roy Schatt on James Dean

see jamesdean.com

“The truth will emerge …”

John Dean

Deaton, Angus:

[…with Anne Case popularized the term “deaths of despair.”] …

“the mystery of American pain reveals a warning for the future.”

“Basically, if you’ve got a B.A., you’re vaccinated against all of this crap,”

“..revisionist history is a hallmark of authoritarians.”

a despotic crime boss rules over the world’s most populous country at the same time a shallow, self-obsessed president leads the country with the world’s biggest economy.

Chris Deaton

De Beauvoir, Simone:

“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

“The present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action,”

Growing, ripening, aging, dying – the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.

There is only one solution…that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work…

In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.” on aging, via Popova

“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”

Via Popova: “the true self” is discovered through an interplay between the freedom of choice and the constraints of circumstance. But because circumstances are always changing and choices are dynamic processes rather than static products of the will, the self is a moving target. She writes:

“A choice is never made, but constantly in the making; it is repeated every time that I become conscious of it.”

end de Beauvoir

“Our health is only as safe as our democracy is strong;

our democracy is strong only as long as our voices are loud.”

Robert DeBirk, HEAL Utah 2013 breakfast

deBoer, Freddie:

“… we live in a country and culture with deeply entrenched racial inequality, and all decent people have a duty to try to confront that inequality… We also have a moral duty to do it well….The left… needs to invest in real change for those in need rather than heed elite rhetoric.”

“I knew this would happen.”

Arnaud de Borchgrave Tombstone draft death

“As Michel Foucault pointed out in his detailed study of the mechanisms of power, nothing suits power so well as extreme individualism. In fact, he explains, political and corporate interests aim at nothing less than “individualization,” since it is far easier to manipulate a collection of discrete and increasingly independent individuals than a community. Guns undermine just that – community. Their pervasive, open presence would sow apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear, all emotions that are corrosive of community and civic cooperation. To that extent, then, guns give license to autocratic government.

Firmin Debrabander

“I am for socialism because I am for humanity. . . . Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization.”

“The working class who fight the battles, the working class who make the sacrifices, the working class who shed the blood, the working class who furnish the corpses, the working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war.”

“While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Eugene Debs

“Music is the space between notes.”

“There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.”

Claude Debussy

“…we, the local leaders of the world, have many tools, more than we may have in fact realized, and we must use them boldly even as our national governments hesitate.”

Bill de Blasio, at Vatican Mayor’s conference

DeBord, Guy:

French philosopher Guy Debord, who wrote that, if pre-capitalism was about ‘being’, and capitalism about ‘having’, in late-capitalism what matters is only ‘appearing’ – appearing rich, happy, thoughtful, cool and cosmopolitan. via HOSSEIN DERAKHSHAN

de Botton, Alain:

Religion for Atheists “It’s clear to me that religions are in the end too complex, interesting and on occasion wise to be abandoned simply to those who believe in them”.

The Knots we tie ourselves into. Sam Harris interview

DeChristopher, Tim:

“Maybe Greed and Competition are not the best values upon which to build our civilization.

We’ve already as a nation decided that the people in Appalachia are expendable – those people have to be sacrificed.

Sometimes the truth isn’t very nice.”

…the cowardice of the environmental movement.

what level of injustice is it going to take to fight back? What is the next group of people to be sacrificed. Who will be the next scapegoats?

Climate change is a war against people – a war against the young.

“leadership is embodied not in one’s ability to control a situation, but in one’s courage to engage with and relate to a situation…acknowledging that some things are impossible can help expand the realm of what is possible….

The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it’s that I have greater respect for justice. Where

there is a conflict between the law and the higher moral code that we all share, my loyalty is to that higher moral code. I know Mr Huber disagrees with me on this. He wrote that “The rule of law is the bedrock of our civilized society, not acts of ‘civil disobedience’ committed in the name of the

cause of the day.” That’s an especially ironic statement when he is representing the United States

of America; a place where the rule of law was created through acts of civil disobedience. Since

those bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew attention to legalized injustice. The authority of the government exists to the degree that the rule of law reflects the higher moral code of the citizens, and throughout American history, it has been civil disobedience that has bound them together.

The areas with the richest fossil fuel resources, whether coal in West Virginia and

Kentucky, or oil in Louisiana and Mississippi, are the areas with the lowest standards of living. In

part, this is a necessity of the industry. The only way to convince someone to blow up their

backyard or poison their water is to make sure they are so desperate that they have no other option. But it is also the nature of the economic model. Since fossil fuels are a limited resources, whoever controls access to that resource in the beginning gets to set all the terms. They set the terms for their workers, for the local communities, and apparently even for the regulatory agencies. A renewable energy economy is a threat to that model. Since no one can control access to the sun or the wind, the wealth is more likely to flow to whoever does the work of harnessing that energy, and therefore to create a more distributed economic system, which leads to a more distributed political system. It threatens the profits of the handful of corporations for whom the current system works, but our question is which segment of the public are you tasked with protecting. I am here today because I have chosen to protect the people locked out of the system over the profits of the corporations running the system.

I will continue to confront the system that threatens our future. Given the destruction of our democratic institutions that once gave citizens access to power, my future will likely involve civil disobedience. Nothing that happens here today will change that. I don’t mean that in any sort of disrespectful way at all, but you don’t have that authority. You have authority over my life, but not my principles. Those are mine alone.

At this point of unimaginable threats on the

horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow. The choice you are making today is what side are you on.

“People fighting for a liveable future will not be discouraged or deterred by anything that happens in this courtroom today…

SL Trib editorial: 7–27–2011: Justice denied:

“This is not justice but an unconscionable injustice.”

«…sometimes the truth isn’t very nice, but it has to be said anyway.”

“…leadership is no place for a coward.” to Faust, President of Harvard

activism … the actions of those who lack authority through the traditional power structure yet still believe that they can shape the society around them. … activism is an act of faith in our fellow human beings. The greater the risk and sacrifice involved in the activism, the greater the faith required in each other….

The Left has been ordering off a menu written by the Right….

“There’s no safety in silence.”

“…if the people in our judicial system can’t recognize the humanity of the people whose fates they are deciding and still do their jobs, it means that our judicial system is inhumane by definition. If you can’t see people as people and still exercise justice, then our system must not exercise justice.” on Judge Benson

it’s really hard to change the world when your first priority is making sure that the little world around yourself doesn’t change.

“If you want to shift the balance, if you want to tilt that scale, you have to go to the edge and push. You have to go beyond what people consider to be reasonable, and push.”

“I thought I was sacrificing my freedom, but instead I was grabbing on to my freedom and refusing to let go of it for the first time.”

“We know that every new fossil fuel infrastructure will lead to another mass grave somewhere in the world. We don’t know where that mass grave will be, we don’t know who will fill that mass grave, but we know that this mass grave that Spectra is digging here today, this one is ours.”

Unitarian talk 8–11–2013

“Utah progressives are self-oppressive – fear, shame, short-term thinking….political shame – like all shame – is self-reinforcing.”

“We all do better when we all do better.” Jim Hightower

“We all do better when we are greedy and treat each other as crap.” paraphrasing Paul Ryan

“…gets more complicated every day, to learn how to live and love with a dying world and a broken society.”

from book Wrenched interview:

“Abbey… planted seeds in my head a long time ago, and my thoughts grew and grew until finally I couldn’t hold them in anymore…his writings kind of lit a fire in me.

… we should feel as passionately as he did, that we should take it as personally as he did, and that we should get as angry as he did.”

See film Bidder 70.

end deChristopher

«…extrinsic tangible rewards undermine intrinsic motivations.”

Edward Deci

“A university president should … provide a physically safe and intellectually unsafe, exciting, and stimulating environment where any mind may think critically and develop to its fullest.”

Anne Cullimore Decker

Daniel Defoe, ..Plague Year:

…The Danger of Immediate Death to ourselves, took away all Bonds of Love, all Concern for one another.”

“Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.”

Daniel Defoe

Patriotism is when love of your country comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.
                  Charles de Gaulle

de Gennes, Pierre-Giles:

“theoretician of the tangible” blobs nets grids ‘reptation’ wetting scaling

from NYT obit: ‘he was able to take solutions from one field of physics and show by analogy how they could solve entirely different problems.’

In Nobel address, speech: ”What do we mean by soft matter? Americans prefer to call it “complex fluids”. This is a rather ugly name, which tends to discourage the young students. But it does, indeed, bring in two of the major features:

“1) Complexity. We may, in a certain primitive sense, say that modern biology has proceeded from studies on simple model systems (bacteria) to complex multicellular organisms (plants, invertebrates, vertebrates). Similarly, from the explosion of atomic physics in the first half of this century, one of the outgrowths is soft matter, based on polymers, surfactants, liquid crystals, and also on colloidal grains.

“2) Flexibility. I like to explain this through one early polymer experiment, initiated by the Indians of the Amazon basin. They collected the sap from the hevea tree, put it on their foot, let it “dry” for a short time. And, behold, they have a boot.

“From a microscopic point of view, the starting point is a set of independent, flexible polymer chains. The oxygen from the air builds in a few bridges between the chains, and this brings in a spectacular change. We shift from a liquid to a network structure which can resist tension – what we now call a rubber (in French: caoutchouc, a direct transcription of the Indian word). What is striking in this experiment is the fact that a very mild chemical action has induced a drastic change in mechanical properties – a typical feature of soft matter.”

from Brochard obit: “Every one of us has a treasure of images caught in glimpses but never forgotten…”

‘With his strikingly simple yet pioneering ideas, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes drew
‘white lines in large strokes’ that defined the physics of soft matter …’

‘De Gennes pursued his research with extraordinary imagination, insatiable curiosity and an ability to grasp facts rapidly. But he also gave his time to others and helped them develop their ideas. A keen ambassador of science to the public…’

from Fragile Objects, 1996:

“I am not at all certain … that developed human societies constitute a stable form oflife…

For lack of motivating endeavors, our societies shrivel and degenerate into nationalistic, ideological, or religious sectarianism…

…in Western societies … the objectives presented to our youth are mediocre, centered as they are on comfort and leisure…

a general collusion between teachers and students, each helping the other cut the branch on which they both sit…

I am constantly astounded by how little common sense recently degreed engineers have…

Ignorance of the real world causes grave distortions…there is too much ignorance all around..

The French over estimate the power of the mind…

To be fed images, even carefully selected ones, encourages passivity…

A democracy cannot function without educating its citizens…Two of the most pressing problems facing our world are the birth rate and the environment…theinformation dealing with these issues is both mediocre and dangerous…

I have an infinite amount of respect for school teachers…

The scientist is not a demiurge; he is no more dependable than anyone else when it comes to moral, political, or judicial issues…

Eventually, we were able to propose a few ideas which were novel precisely because we came from a different world…

[quoting Feynman ‘Theory is the best guess’]…

Soft matter is exactly like the clay of the sculptor, which, through an extremely weak action, can be changed, shaped, and organized…

[some book section titles]:

Know when to stop, know when to switch.

The duty to inform, not the power to decide.

More conscience calls for more science.

end de Gennes

Degler, Carl:

“If we historians fail to provide a nationally dened history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.”

“Ignorance of certain subjects is a great part of wisdom.”

Hugo De Groot

Deighton, Len:

“My writing success is due, in part, to a profound inferiority complex…

When I started writing, I had rules. One was that violence must not solve the problem, and I cannot have the hero overcome violence with a counterweight of violence.”

de Jong, Jacquelina [Jacky Dejo]:

“There are two types of men online: those who are useful and those who need to be destroyed.”

“Kuznets justified the perpetual motion theory of economic growth … and got a Nobel Prize for it…wealth-care industry.

John deJong

“Once an institution is established, it must learn to change without continuing to grow.

A culture of learning must pervade the institution.”

G Delacote, Exec Dir, The Exploratorium, 1998.

De La myco, Mikaela (pseudonym):

“There is happiness to be found when you know who you are.”

Delbanco, Andrew The Death of Satan, 1995 pdf:

“Time is a relentless solvent of memory.

…the wisdom of mourning as a regimen preparatory for the resumption of life.

… evil tends to recede into the background hum of modern life … a uniqely efficient lubricant for moral evasiveness.

…there was once such a concept as sin … it has faded.”

See The Manufacture of Evil bk:

“…malefactors … nom longer boast horns and wear suits with tails, but rather three-piece suits and sometimes turtleneck sweaters of cashmere wool or magenta blouses of tailored silk.”

quoting Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, mad doctor:

“Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I Happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants – nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can’t you stand to say I’m evil?”

“… if evil … escapes the reach of our imagination, it will have established dominion over us all.”

review of book on Serling:

‘the homeopathic principle that small doses of fear might ward off bigger fears.’

see Serling quotes.

De Leeuw, Hendrik:

Sinful cities of the western world, 1934.

“… an evil kept in the open within certain bounds is preferable to an evil rampant and promiscuous undercover.… All these sex starved men and women are potential degenerates and perverts.”

re sex prostituion capitalism…civilization…

“Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.”

“What we excrete comes back to consume us.”

“Language is inseparable from the world that provokes it.”

Character in Libra: ‘Hashish. Interesting, interesting word. Arabic. It’s also the source of the word assassin.’

Don DeLillo
“I am still afraid of entropy. An organization that does not evolve is condemned to die.”

Angelos Delivorrias

De la Rosa dissertation 2015 Memes:

No longer the abstract notion of a cultural gene that Dawkins (2006) introduced in the late 1970s, memes have now become synonymous with a particular brand of vernacular language that internet users engage by posting, sharing and remixing digital content as they communicate jokes, emotions and opinions.

…the language of Internet Memes is understood as visual, succinct and capable of inviting active engagement by users who encounter digital content online that exhibits said characteristics.

the dissertation was crafted as a journey from the academic to the whimsical, from the lecture hall to the image board (where Internet Memes were born), from the written word to the remixed image as a visual language that is equal parts form and content that emerges and culminates in a concluding chapter composed almost entirely of popular Internet Meme types.

An online component can be found at http://memeducation.org/

Delmer, Sefton:

Propaganda is successful when
it gives people a satisfying part to play: someone to be, to love and hate

Delmer wanted to alienate people from Nazi propaganda by pushing Nazi propaganda ‘one step further into the ridiculous’

Delmer wanted to alienate people from Nazi propaganda by pushing Nazi propaganda ‘one step further into the ridiculous’

“Our stories were peopled with Burgomasters, District Leaders, Local group leaders,” he explained. “We spread over them a slime of obloquy as foul as that which they themselves had spread over the Jews.”

Here was a radio programme pretending to be Nazi, which understood that its listeners knew that it wasn’t, and whose listeners tuned in because they needed the emotional and physical safety of play acting as if they thought it might be Nazi after all. If the principle of Goebbels’ propaganda was to try to entrance you, to dissolve you into the loud, angry crowd, then here was media that required you to make a series of autonomous, conscious steps to engage.

see K book by Pomerantsev on Delmer

DeLong, Bradford:

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

in 1930 when John Maynard Keynes gave his speech “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”

Keynes and Roosevelt are useful reminders that the fact of individuals acting in particular ways at precise moments, not just thinking thoughts but finding themselves with opportunities to make those thoughts influential, matters profoundly. Even in grand narratives.

The shotgun marriage of Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi, blessed by John Maynard Keynes, that helped raise the post–World War II North Atlantic developmental social democracy was as good as we have so far gotten. But it failed its own sustainability

Why, with such godlike powers to command nature and organize ourselves, have we done so little to build a truly human world, to approach within sight of any of our utopias?”

Delors, Jacques:

he was always “on the right of the left and the left of the right, rejected by both.”

“Americans do not need to ask permission to assemble. The First Amendment is a right, not a privilege.”

Kevin DeLuca

«…economists have made extraordinary errors over the past several decades…

…economics is … an art that is shrouded in uncertainty, imprecision, mystery, and error.”

George F DeMartino, The Economist’s Oath, 2011

Deming, W. Edward:

“it is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
“I am someone who spent his life trying to keep America from committing suicide.”

Demke, Henry (BYU UG):

“… the spirit of fear is of the devil, and I feel

like there’s a lot of fear-based politics in the Trump movement.”

“Steinbeck’s greatest books are an antidote to – if not a blatant call to resist – the tidal wave of vain poisturing , fake news, obfuscation, debasement of language, and outright lies that seem to be the stock market in trade of our greviously callous and incompetent current administration.”

Robert DeMott

“I look to push myself to the fear level.”

Judi Dench

Deneen, Patrick:

Why Liberalism Failed:

“…democracy is the most demanding regime, given its demands for civic virtue. The cultivation of virtue requires the thick presence of virtue-forming and virtue-supporting institutions, but these are precisely the institutions and practices that liberalism aims to hollow and eviscerate in the name of individual liberty. In a deep irony, liberalism claims legitimacy based upon democratic consent, yet it ultimately hollows out the prospects for a functioning democracy.”

via Yanofsky – Deneen suggested to me that Catholicism was becoming the religion of the intelligentsia. The president, the speaker of the House and six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic (a seventh was raised Catholic), along with a number of prominent writers, many of them converts. “It’s a tradition that gives you the resources,” Deneen said, “for how to think outside of liberal categories.”

Denevi, Timothy (see Didion):

“[Didion] had a startling insight about the precariousness of the country, at the exact moment when she could feel the 60s snapping.”

“No one likes criticism. Not you, nor I, nor God. But those who criticize you, in a soft voice, in private, are your friends.”

“The only simple subjects are the ones you don’t know much about”

Noel de Nevers

Deng, Xiaoping:

“…an open window brings both fresh air and flies.”

Denmark:

Janteloven: an unwritten code that says you are no better than anyone else….via Henry C. Henson, Aarhus Univ.

Dennett, Daniel C.:

“The ultimate currency of life – time.”

“Religious faith gives people a gold-plated excuse to stop thinking. Anybody who has been persuaded that it is their religious duty not to question their faith has been partially disabled.”

“…parasites can hijack brains of hosts…

Islam means ‘surrender’ – submission of self-interest to the will of Allah…

It’s ideas – not worms – that hijack our brains…

Most people have their brains hijacked by parasitic ideas…

There are a lot of ideas to die for…they’re infectives…

…we need to understand the conditions of infection…

secret of happiness…the subordination of genetic interests to other interests…

a meme is an information packet with attitude…

…we’re wiping out native peoples with dangerous ideas…infectious dangerous memes…

…there are a lot of toxic ideas…spreading…wiping out whole cultures..like our germs wiping out cultures not immune to those germs…

You can never annihilate the germs…avirulence.”

See:

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: on Amazon K Sample thru Chap 3.

I consider this book to be … my grateful attempt to pay my tuition…This is what I think I’ve learned…

…evolution is a process that depends on amplfying things that almost never happen…

…the MacCready Explosion…

D’Arcy Thompson famously said, ‘Everything is the way it is because it got that way.’

…a mystery solved is even more ravishing than the ignorant fantasies it replaces…

Hofstadter …Strange Loop

Cartesian Gravity

We tend to underestimate the strength of the forces that distort our imaginations…

“Occam’s Broom – with which one sweeps inconvenient facts under the rug.”

from I’ve Been Thinking, 2023:

“…intuition pump…the audience is lead to a specific conclusion by means of intuitive logic…”

from ScienceMag review: Douglas Hofstadter once called “tillos- ophy,” in which Dennett begins by confronting a hard problem and persists until he realizes that he is stuck, at which point he deliberately engages in activities that are less intellectu- ally demanding. These latter activities often include tilling one of the fields on his Maine hobby farm. This practice frees his brain to mull over the philosophical problem with which he is grappling, helping his thinking to move forward, while at the same time ensuring progress is made on the farm’s many chores.

[similar to Feynman’s process for learning a hard book].

“At its best, philosophy is intellectual reverse engineering, methodically dismantling bad habits of thought,”

NYT obit:

“There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,”

For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision- making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.

“Information entering the nervous system is under continuous ‘editorial revision.’”

While he admitted that many of the questions he raises in his work “cannot yet be answered,” wrote the reviewer, Mr. Dennett “argues that putting the right questions is a crucial step forward.”

from NATURE obit:

According to Dennett, religion arose from a combination of language and humans’ atten- tion to alarming events. Together, they fostered the development of fantasies, or “culturally evolved systems of memes that arose naturally out of our innate vigilance and sociality”, as he said in I’ve Been Thinking. Religion, for him, was the domestication of these fantasies.

“There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their

lives to an illusion.”

end Dennett

Dennis-Tiwary, Tracy:

reviewing Haidt:

“…phone-based childhood…smartphones…addictive by design and perpetually distracting…

stranger danger, driving parents towards fear-based overparenting…

Denoncourt, Serge:

“…you can talk about anything if you have a way to talk about it.”

De Puy, John:

“These days when I go out to meditate, I can smell the earth dying.”

from Wrenched 2020 interview:

‘Ed Abbey…editor…El Crepusculo de la Libertad, Taos, NM….bill boards north of Taos…

One day Ed and I decided: Enough. We went out with chainsaws and cut them all down… Ed said these actions were the beginning of what became the Monkey Wrench Wang and called it ‘night work’.’

“Most men are disguised by sobriety…

Murder is an art; but not all murders are works of art and not all murderers are artists…

                  Thomas De Quincy

Derber, Charles:

surplus people…Marx’s ghost…sociopathic society…dying for capitalism…

Dying for Capitalism: How Big Money Fuels Extinction and What We Can Do About It (Universalizing Resistance)

Derber, Charles; Moodliar, Suren

“triangle of extinction” that connects environmental death with war and capitalism–

major political organization in the most powerful country in the world’s history is quite literally dedicated to the destruction of much of life on earth.

Bill McKibben has said on climate, “winning slowly is the same as losing.”

Greta Thunberg, We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis …

the United States is the leading “extinction nation,” a fact that every American needs to understand in his or her gut. More than any other nation, American policies are fueling the existential threat to human civilization.

The extinction threats of climate and war are paralleling and intensifying the threat of the extinction of democracy

Survival requires a new abolitionist movement.

King equated the evils of capitalism with those of racism and militarism in his famous “Three Evils” speech,

Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor–both black and white, both here and abroad.

time may no longer be on our side. The

we prioritized the Universal Basic Income (UBI),

Where we won UBI, many thousands of activists were suddenly freed up to do much more movement work.

private profit came before people and planet.

We began talking about public goods–the bundle of security and rights guaranteed to everyone–that were essential to the common good.

people have turned to the state to demand public goods that the market failed to provide.

Noam Chomsky

“[ B] usiness has always rejected the suicidal doctrines that are piously preached. Rather, the business world demands that a powerful state, under its control, intervene constantly to protect private power from the ravages of an unconstrained market and to sustain the system of public subsidy, private profit that has been a cornerstone of the economy.”

big-picture thinker in the period, Timothy Snyder, a student of the 19th and 20th century crucible

the vast working class was subject to contradictory pressures under capitalism.

the working class was constantly being recomposed and decomposed.

This gave it a profoundly intersectional character. At

for me, in the 2020s, what was most vital and alive in Marx’s legacy was the sense that the world had finally arrived at a moment in which it could be appreciated as a totality and not only in the sense that we could think globally (and utter the many yeses) but also in the temporal sense

–we could look back into our pasts and ahead into our possible futures.

capitalism and is civilizational malcontents had seeped into every pore of the planet, subjugated or otherwise threatened every population and species and in so doing, birth a diverse and multifaceted working class while creating the tools for comprehending the possibility of a global civilization. Yes, at the very same moment that it threatened to extinguish us all, what we called “The Greatest Emergency of All Time,” we came to recognize that our multi-scalar or multi-level existence is a global one.

Yanis Varoufakis, a former Greek finance minister, and Bernie Sanders, who helped reawaken American socialism after a century-long slumber. They recognized the global character of the threats facing humanity as a whole, and developed a list of 12 broad principles, enumerated as single words, like, “Democratic,” “Plural,” “Egalitarian,” “Sustainable,” “Ecologic,” and “Post-capitalist.”

Check out its full set of principles in the chart.:

Declaration of Progressive International, September 2020

Principle (PI) Summary/ Excerpts from Explanatory Text (MM)

I. Internationalism or Extinction Internationalism is not a luxury but a strategic necessity.

II. A Definition of Progress Progress that is democratic, decolonized, just, egalitarian, liberated, feminist, ecological, peaceful, post-capitalist, prosperous, plural, and bound by radical love.

III. Peoples of the World, Organize “international organization: to combine forces across borders … to reclaim the planet as our own.”

IV. We Build Infrastructure “the forces of progress remain fragmented, while wealth and power consolidate …. We build the scaffolding of a planetary front.”

V. Unity, Not Conformity “The present crisis demands the strategic alliance of all progressive forces. But coordination does not require submission. We aim to build a broad coalition, while making space for creative contention inside of it.”

VI. Partnership by Mutual Power “partnership without mutual power is just another name for domination. In our work, we aim to rebalance rather than reproduce disparities of power ….”

VII. Capitalism Is the Virus “We believe that exploitation, dispossession, and environmental destruction are written into the genetic code of capitalism.”

VIII. Internationalism Means Anti-imperialism “Our internationalism stands against imperialism in all its forms: from war and sanctions to privatization and ‘structural adjustment.’”

IX. Language Is Power “Linguistic barriers strengthen class domination, white supremacy, and indigenous dispossession. We aim to transcend linguistic barriers to find our own common language of resistance.”

X. Freedom at the Frontline “Our internationalism is intersectional … we center the frontline struggles for liberation at the base of global economy: for food, for land, for dignity, and for emancipation.”

XI. An Internationalism of Liberation “Our opposition to oppressive hierarchies is the foundation of our internationalism.”

XII. Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor “Our demand is full reparations for past crimes and the immediate restoration of land, resources, and sovereignty to all the dispossessed ….”

XIII. Feminist Politics, Feminist Practice “Our aim is to break with the patriarchy while disrupting the binary structure of gender on which it relies. We direct our politics toward care, cooperation, and communal accountability”

XIV. Buenos Vivires “We do not measure progress with growth … and we define our success by the quality of our collective coexistence.”

XV. No Justice, No Peace “… peace can only last in the security of social justice. We work to dismantle the war machine, and replace it with a diplomacy of peoples based on cooperation and coexistence.”

XVI. Revolution, Not Regime Change “We support popular movements to transform society and reclaim the state. But we stand against attempts to overthrow regimes in order to protect the interests of capital ….”

XVII. Winning Elections Is Not Enough “Elections are opportunities to transform politics and turn popular demands into government policy. But we know that winning elections is not enough to fulfill our mission.”

XVIII. Power from Pluralism “Our coalition is bound by a shared vision of collective liberation. We do not import this vision, or impose one program over the rest. Instead, we weave together our needs, knowledge, and policy priorities to build a common program that derives power from pluralism.” [complete explanatory text]

XIX. Relationships Are the Foundation “Our internationalism is intimate. New technologies promised community and connection, but sowed discord and disillusionment instead. We believe that we cannot succeed unless we know and trust one another on equal terms.” [complete explanatory text]

XX. Dialogue is Not Enough “Our aim is collective action …. Our activities prepare us for planetary mobilization, matching the scale of our crises to the scale of the actions that we mount ….”

XXI. Not For Profit, Not By Profit “We do not accept money from for-profit institutions and the representatives of fossil fuel companies, pharmaceutical companies, big tech companies, big banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, agribusinesses, and the arms industry.”

XXII. We Are Not an NGO “[ R] eal change comes from movements of people, not the benevolence of philanthropy. We are accountable only to those movements and the communities from which they grow.”

XXIII. Fight on All Fronts “Our coalition reflects the diversity of struggle …. We welcome unions, parties, movements, publications, research centres, neighbourhood associations, and individual activists in their lonely struggle. Together, this coalition is greater than the sum of its parts, and powerful enough to remake the world.”

XXIV. From Each, and to Each “Our model of membership is simple: from each, according to ability; and to each, according to need …. And we strive to support members in all the ways that their struggle demands.”

XXV. Solidarity Is Not a Slogan “We believe that solidarity is an action. The expression of sympathy for our allies is common. Our task is to recognize their struggle as our own, to organize our communities to take part in that struggle, and to join forces across borders in a common defense of people.

notice the short distance between the ideas in this chart and many of the points listed by Progressive International.

Ideas and Concepts from the Front for Survival and the Slender Path:

Goals and Objectives Do these goals give us the capacity to challenge the rule of capital and face down the extinction threats posed by war, climate breakdown and disease?

Public Goods The Commons Commanding Heights “Variegated” State

Visions Do these visions inspire people to action and cooperation?

“Beloved Community” Democratic Socialism “Narratives of Connectedness”

Activities What kinds of organizing embodies these goals, objectives and vision?

Multiscalar Organizing Active Networking Participatory Organizing Negotiating the Universal

all these topics are deeply interwoven with one another. That is, it was typical to talk about organizations, networks, political jurisdictions, programs, social theory, and vision as discrete topics. They are! But they are also interconnected. Much of the ferment of the twenties should be seen as part of a broader transition underway at the time.

This was part of the work of recomposing and coalescing the diverse and fragmented working class.

we recognized is that the working class is a political project in the constant throes of composition and recomposition.

Activists like me found my marching orders in figuring out how to bring the diverse parts of the working class into dialogue with each other.

problem solving and networking activities of activists trying to overcome the fragmentation of the working class? And the working class in your view seem to encompass the vast majority of humanity including what were popularly called the middle classes or even professionals?

politics varied across contexts, and we had to remain flexible and avoid unnecessary either-or choices.

are matters of affect, attitude, and outlook. It is a certain flexibility in a world of hard choices and inflexible but complex laws of physics and nature. In some ways, it was and is about an ethics of how we treat each other within the movement

everyone recognized the need for more stability, more employment and housing security, a stronger social safety net, better health and healthcare, and so on.

Growth had to be radically rethought.

The idea that we should democratically plan our production–in the form of expanding public goods

Some people claimed that planning was exactly what the discredited state socialism of the 1900s embodied. That idea soon gave way to the recognition that the old-fashioned mega-corporations of the 2020s were in fact engaged in planning on a routine basis. Indeed,

“Living lightly on the planet” became a set of values

came to accept as common sense.

there was a new awareness that the most efficient and just way to achieve this necessary leveling up had little to do with “More,” and everything to do with a new social contract one that had to be discussed and negotiated by democratically chosen representatives of these different layers of the working class.

the provision of public goods grew and as did the demands for these in proportion to the increasingly evident disasters.

the state had to take responsibility for the production of critical goods. The debate was not over the state’s role but what level of state.

yes, a renewed sense of government

the policy did not have to wait for our electoral victory. The

convey our activism as self-conscious, morally-inspired makers of history,

we developed inclusive language that also gave voice to our shared anger at neoliberal elites, the polarizing dynamics of fascist agitation was attenuated.

Heather McGhee. In a brilliant work, The Sum of Us:

“solidarity dividend,”

weaving together a narrative of togetherness without dissolving our particularities.

building–a consciousness of humanity as a whole–

Peter Linebaugh,

“The commons is invisible until it is lost.”

fiction writer, celebrated by Barack Obama, Kim Stanley Robinson

that as the costs of the various climate, health and war dislocations increased everywhere–in both imperial countries and those of the Global South–neoliberal foibles about limited state intervention in the economy went out the window!

end Derber, Charles

“We can start all the organic farms we want, but we couldn’t stop Congress from declaring pizza sauce a vegetable.”

‘With wise self-protection and tactful self-suppression, she directs our gaze to where it belongs: the work itself.’ on Ferrante’s work.

William Deresiewicz

DeSantis, Ron:

2018 opponent made a remark that has remained relevant in US politics:

“Now, I’m not calling Mr DeSantis a racist. I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.”

end DeSantis

“The chief cause of our errors is to be found in the prejudices of our childhood.”

Descartes

Deseret News:

“It’s no secret that the world will have to make the transition from fossil fuels to something more sustainable.” 8–13–2013

“…the world ought to turn its attention to the development of wind, solar, geothermal and other alternative sources for energy,…”

9–30–2013

Desmond, Matthew:

Poverty, by America

We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another. – Leo Tolstoy, Epigraph

help me make sense of my country and its confounding, unblushing inequality.

who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy.

Why all this American poverty?

how some lives are made small so that others may grow.

become poverty abolitionists,

Poverty is the constant fear that it will get even worse.

Poverty is the loss of liberty.

Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction – on and on it goes. Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies.

when it comes to poverty reduction, we’ve had fifty years of nothing.

We typically don’t talk about poverty as a condition that benefits some of us.

composer Stephen Sondheim once wrote, “The history of the world, my sweet – is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.”

Our vulnerability to exploitation grows as our liberty shrinks.

Complexity is the refuge of the powerful.

Poverty will be abolished in America only when a mass movement demands it so.

Perhaps the reason protestors often chant “This is what democracy looks like” is because we can so easily forget.

de Tocqueville, Alexis:

When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.

“Can it be believed that the democracy which has overthrown the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists?”

«…in every democracy, the people get the government they deserve.”

Alexis de Tocqueville…1848 [days before the French insurrection]: …we are sleeping on a volcano…the earth is trembling…Can you not feel the wind of revolution in the air?

Alexis de Tocqueville long ago:

“They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

“America is great because she is good. When it ceases to be good, it will cease to be great.”

“A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.”

“…the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.”

“Lawyers in the United States form a power that…envelops society as a whole, penetrates into each of the classes that compose it, works in secret, acts constantly on it without its knowing, and in the end models it to its own desires.”

Those living in the instability of a democracy have the constant image of chance before them, and, in the end, they come to like all those projects in which chance plays a part…because they like the emotions evoked.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840

From Economist, America at. 250:

The recipes it contains describe how to mix equality, prosperity, law, religion and democracy in the right proportions to make freedom….

“From time to time strange sects arise which endeavour to strike out extraordinary paths to happiness,” he writes. “Religious insanity is very common in the United States.”…

…one more manifestation of Americans’ ubiquitous, manic energy. “In the United States,” Tocqueville writes, “a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on.” Rather than enjoy what they had, Americans were “restless in the midst of abundance”

One of the best passages of the book describes the contrast between the two banks of the Ohio river. On one side was a slave state (Kentucky) while the other side was free (Ohio). In Kentucky, society seemed to be asleep. Ohio, across the water, was humming. On one bank work meant slavery, on the other it meant prosperity and improvement: “on the one side it is degraded; on the other side it is honoured.” Tocqueville was a racial pessimist: he thought black and white Americans would never live alongside each other in conditions of real equality….

Andrew Jackson was president when Tocqueville was in America, and they met in the White House. The visitor was unimpressed. Jackson was “a man of violent temper and very moderate talents…

People like Jackson would lead, because in a democracy popular opinion is sovereign, and because democracies tended towards mediocrity in government. …

Democratic oppression, he wrote, would be “unlike anything that ever before existed in the world”. An equal, democratic society made up of people pursuing their own happiness could become so atomised that citizens would give up on politics, withdraw, leave it to someone else. Above these people would stand “an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate”. This power would seek to keep people “in perpetual childhood”….

https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/tocqueville-road-trip

“It may be said that that on leaving the mother country, the immigrants had, in general, no notion of superiority one over another. The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.”

End de Tocqueville

Deutsch, David:

“Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable,

given the right knowledge.”

de Valera, Eamon:

“I hope this [television] service will provide for you all sources of recreation and pleasure, but also information, instruction, and knowledge.” Although [Irish] President Éamon de Valera added a prescient warning: “Like atomic energy, I am somewhat afraid. It can be used for incalculable good but also irreparable harm.”

DeVega, Chauncy:

“Republicans and their allies are dedicated to their cause. They believe themselves to be just and noble,… on the correct side of history. They will never admit defeat. They will never repent. To an increasing degree, they are willing to die or kill for their cause.”

Devenot, Nese:

“I was hit with this expansive lived sense of the fact that things just keep going in new forms. One thing goes away and it allows something else to be.” re: psychedelics

De Waal, Frans:

Primates are made to be social, made to care about one another and made to get along, and the same applies to us. Civilisation does all sorts of great things for us, but does so by co-opting natural abilities, not by inventing anything new. It works with what we have to offer, including an age-old capacity for peaceful coexistence….Anthropodenial emotions, not instinct

“Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire that can rid us of the curse of xenophobia.”

Frans de Waal

«…the seeds for a moral order seem far older than our species. Empathy, sympathy, reciprocity, fairness, and other basic tendencies were built into humanity’s moral order based on our primate psychology. We did not develop this order from scratch, but had a huge helping hand – not God’s, but Mother Nature’s.”

“I am wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.”

M. de Waal

“How did … my people, multiple generations of us – manage to look evil in the face every day and not see what was right there in front of us?”

Charles Dew

“Democracy begins in conversation.”

“[d]emocracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

John Dewey

Dews, Peter:

The Idea of Evil :

“It hints at dark forces, at the obscure, unfathomable depths of human motivation.

If we understand the factors that condition people to do wrong … then presumably we will be able to alter them.

… the label ‘evil’ often functions as an intellectual and ethical shrug of the shoulders. We do not need to question or ponder any longer: we just know that this human being, or that social or religious group, has an irrational commitment to chaos and moral mayhem. …we must simply contain those who hold [that point of view], marginalize them, possibly even eradicate them.”

“The urge to be cruel and to destroy is an inbuilt propensity of some human beings.”

“[Can] the defeat of moral evil … be made compatible with our modern commitment to freedom and rational insight.”

“Evil is somehow chosen, not a matter of lapse or default.”

“… freedom is the last hinge on which man turns, a highest possible pinnacle, which allows nothing further to be imposed upon it; thus man bows to no authority, and acknowledges no obligations, where his freedom is not respected.” quoting Hegel

End Dews

‘You can be mad at him, but we can’t keep making this about him. People like him will exist. That’s just the reality of life. The point is not to give those people all the energy.’

Elecia Dexter

“All advice ends up binary…when it should be shades of grey…communicating uncertainty.”

Ranu Dhillon

Diamandis, Marina:

“I don’t want to live in a man’s world anymore.”

Diamond, Jared:

Wars are disasters that we inflict on ourselves.

“Past societies have destroyed themselves…”

Constructive paranoia bad Finland Luck

“Collapse is a loss of social-political-economic complexity usually accompanied by a dramatic decline in population size

End Diamond

Diamond, Larry:

“The revenue logic of Facebook is not consistent with the interests of democracy.”

“Chinese president Xi Jinping is constructing a neototalitarian Orwellian surveillance state that is more repressive of human liberty than anything we’ve seen since Mao.”

Larry Diamond

“To be right-wing means to support the state in its capacity as enforcer of order and to oppose the state as distributor of wealth and power downward and more equitably in society.”

Sara Diamond

DiAngelo, Robin:

[white supremacy is] “the historical and current accumulation of structural power that privileges, centralizes, and elevates white people as a group.”

“How can you know something so big, how someone – who goes on national television and says something – and you know it’s not true … whether it’s the president or not, you have the responsibility to say no. To pass through this barrier of fear and say no.”

Sandra Diaz, a Trump housekeeper, undocumented

Tom Diaz, The Last Gun:

“…the gun industry will dig in as it has always done, and continue to profit from fear and violence – until the very last gun.”

“…[a] shrinking pool of aging white men … are the core of the NRA …”

“…the gun industry strikes out more and more dangerously, like a wounded rattlesnake in its final throes.”

“…gun ownership is declining in America, it is in free fall among younger cohorts.”

“…the NRA’s legislative program is largely driven by the gun industry’s business interests.”

“…the NRA’s religion is about more than guns. At its core, it’s about culture – socioeconomics; race; ethnicity; the modern politics of an old doctrine…”

“Like any religion, the NRA has its gods, commandments and hierarchy,” Josh Sugarmann, 1992. see 2012 printing of 1992 book, on order.

“…the gun industry’s marketing falls particularly hard on women and children.”

“…propagandizing children in the guise of education is used by the NRA in its notorious ‘Eddie Eagle’ program, a marketing device pawned off as a ‘gun safety’ program.”

“…a direct mail letter must appeal to three base emotions: Fear, Hate and Revenge.” Alan Gottlieb.

“…it is unlikely that … the Framers of the Bill of Rights …intended to freeze American government two centuries hence at their eighteenth-century level of understanding.” Richard A Posner.

end of Diaz

“Knowledge imposes responsibility. If you know something, you have an obligation to act….it is far more comfortable to…ignore what science has to tell us.”

Gale Dick

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Philip K Dick

Dickens, Charles:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment,

prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be

immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of

touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Dickens via Gopnik

“…Dickens will teach any writer how to plot and can turn a sentence into an Incantation.”

via Donna Leon

end Dickens

Dickerson-Despenza, Erika:

“…an apocalypse makes everything else bubble to the surface.”

Dickieson, Dorothy:

”Since New York City and Syracuse have an exemption from fracking to protect their water supply, we in the Finger Lakes expect – and demand – the same protection.”

Dickinson, Emily:

“Faith is a fine invention

When gentlemen can see, 

But microscopes are prudent

In an emergency.”

“That it will never come again

Is what makes life so sweet.

“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,”

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d banish us – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog  –

To tell your name – the livelong June  –

To an admiring Bog!

Via Popova: the poems of Emily Dickinson – those great love letters to reality…

end Dickinson, Emily

Didion, Joan:

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in hisown image.”

“…the sense of sports being the opiate of the people.”

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.”

“…the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood.”

“Make a place availableto the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer availale to the imagination.”

“Something about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what it is that bothers me…

“Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms,” she writes, “to what we think we remember.”

via Kakutani: writing had always been a means for her to impose order on a threatening and chaotic world…People look “for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”…Didion’s utterly distinctive writing style – distinguished by its spareness, its surgical precision, its almost staccato yet incantatory rhythms – was also a tool for containing her often harrowing subject matter, be it her own experiences of loss and grief, reportorial assignments involving murder or war, or the melodramatic situations that the heroines in her novels so often faced…

 “You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, she wrote.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

“… it was as if all the disturbances of the whole past couple of years came to a head that night. And here was a whole part of America that wasn’t having it.… It was like something snapping…

My body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.”

see also Dunne

via Wilkinson, Alissa, NYT Book Review:

“…the controlling emotion of her work is almost always dismay…

Leaves us with the question of what happens when everyone stops believing them [our stories] at once.”

end Didion, Joan

DiDonato, Joyce: EDEN, via Scheer Portman,…see CD in iMusic

“When I look at music and the natural world; I see harmony; I see balance; I see all kinds of forces working together to create an ecosystem, to create a symphony, to create an environment where everything has the chance to thrive. So, I’ve married those two, and I’m putting it out under the invitation to say, in a really simplistic way: What seeds are you planting with your words, with your actions, with your tweets, on your balcony?…

We are leaving behind a green souvenir in the hands of everybody…”

Scheer, Portman,

Dietz , Rob and Dan O’Neill, Enough is Enough, 2011:

“Some one is profiting from economic growth, but it’s not the world’s poor.

Nor is it the average citizen in the wealthy countries.”

«…the rising tide is lifting the yachts and swamping the rowboats.”

A steady-state economy requires a different kind of monetary system.”

…the financial sector …should account for as small a percentage of total economic activity as possible.”

We need to declare a Chapter 11 on the way businesses are currently operating.”

“…the tendency to emulate can lead to rapid social change.”

Thomas Dietz, in reviewing Robert Frank Under the Influence.

diFranco, Annie:

we’re all taught how to justify history as it passes by

and it’s your world that comes crashing down

when the big boys decide to throw their weight around… via Danah Boyd

Diggins, Jesse

“I’m not trying to push through anything. I’m not trying to outrun anything. I know it’s

going to be painful. That’s the whole point.” Olympian

“I’m greeting my pain with gratitude. The pain is here because it’s a sign that I’m getting

everything out of my body.”

Via Reid Forgrave: she recalls “This whole next vevel had been there the whole time, and I can access it if I am willing to push that hard.. All it is is pain. It’s not permanent damage. I want to know what my true potential is.’

…just dealing with some physical pain in a race that has a defined finish line and end point, that’s not a big deal…

Instead of pushing aside the pain, trying to ignore it, trying to pretend it isn’t happening, it’s like, of course this is happening. I wanted this to happen. Because this is how I know I’m getting everything out of my body.”

Reid: She bounded up the stairs and felt the pain: a grimace, then a smile.

Digh, Patti:

“The shortest distance between two people is a story.”

Dijkstra, Nadine:

“…brain signals reflecting imagination and signals reflecting reality are completely intermixed in our brain, muddling the distinction between our inner world and the outside world, between reality and fantasy.”

…there is no real categorical difference between imagination and reality,… they are subjectively intermixed…

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

di Lampedusa:

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, via Roger Cohen NYT

“Sometimes you jump off the cliff first, and build your wings on the way down”

Annie Dillard

Dillon, Tim:

On Kimmell: “Clearly, it was a politically motivated hit job.”

“…human civilisation … will self-distruct, producing massive environmental damage, social chaos and megadeath. We are entering a new dark age, with great dieback. The only question that remains is whether we will survive this dark age, and if so, for how much longer.”

Craig Dilworth, Too Smart for our own Good, 2010, last page.

Dimsdale, Joel E.:

Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media

Preface on Heaven’s Gate cult:

‘…drink some more of the ‘vodka medicine’ and lay back and relax. After the breathing has slowed down use plastic bag to be sure….

they ingested extra medication (hydrocodone) to make sure.

They all died, and their earthly vehicles were now empty.’

I started this work out of intellectual curiosity. Little did I suspect that in the archives I would find my colleagues, professional societies, and universities tied up in all this.

coercive persuasion.

to H. G. Wells, who warned that “human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”

Isak Dinesen

“The YouTube system of recommending the next video and the next video,” she said, had created “an ecosystem of hate.”

Debora Diniz in YouTube Brazil NYT pdf

Dintzer, Kenneth:

“Data is oxygen for a search engine…
Google is now protected from competition behind a fortress built with data.”

Diogenes the Cynic:

“…a cynic is someone who eschewed money, power and fame, and instead sought to live self-sufficiently and in tune with nature.” via Rosenblum NYT

Dionne, E J:

”We are supposed to have faith that an invisible hand will eventually put matters right; in the meantime, we must accept any slap in the face the invisible hand might deliver.”

We can seek to control our fate, or we can turn the Invisible Hand into a God who commands us

to be helpless.”

“American politics has become a bazaar for the very wealthy and for increasingly aggressive corporations. We might consider having candidates wear corporate logos.”

“We have less and less to do with each other, meaning that we feel few obligations to each other…”

“…the GOP has treated court appointments the same way machine politicians once treated jobs in city sewer departments: If you have the clout, you use it to place your people. Period.”

“…truth and justice demand that you get out of your comfort zone.”

“Obama is defending a tradition that sees government as an essential actor in the nation’s economy, a guarantor of fair rules of competition, a countervailing force against excessive private power, a check on the inequalities that capitalism can produce, and an instrument that can open opportunity for those born without great advantages.

Today’s Republicans cast the federal government as an oppressive force, a drag on the economy and an enemy of private initiative.”

End Dionne

Diop, David: At Night all Blood is Black review:

“Literature can be a way of moving people before they turn to rational explanations of history…

I read [historians] the way an academic shouldn’t: without taking notes. I wanted what had really made an impression on me to reemerge when I started writing.”

Dioum, Baba:

‘in the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught,’

Baba Dioum of Senegal

Dirac, Paul:

”Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.”

Louis Pasteur or Paul Dirac

DiResta, Renee:

The goals of active measures are to undermine citizens’ trust in government, exploit societal fractures, create distrust in the information environment, blur the lines between reality and fiction, undermine trust among communities, and erode confidence in the democratic process.

Renee DiResta new knowledge data for democracy

Invisible Rulers, 2024 Nature Review:

central thesis -a few social media propagandists increasingly have the power to profoundly shaped public opinion…misinformation spirals…

 “if you make it trend, you make it true.… fantasy-industrial complex.”

End DiResta

“If what you’re selling is bullshit, then you need a shovel, and if what you’re selling is truth you really only need a teaspoon.”

Abigail Disney

“The health of a people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and their powers as a state depend.”

“Justice is truth in action.”

Benjamin Disraeli

“We don’t completely blame Facebook. The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?”

Dissanayke,Harindra a presidential adviser in Sri Lanka.

Ditlevsen, Tove:

wrote her own obituary:

“Before her untimely death, Tove Ditlevsen was able to write over a score of books, of which the most important are her memoirs.”

“With ruthless honesty she tells about the men with whom, out of the goodness of her prodigal heart, she shared table and bed….Unfortunately her contemporaries did not appreciate her honesty, which led in the end to no man daring to converse with her on the street for fear of appearing in her next volume.”

from NYT delayed obit:

‘…she crafted a brutally honest form of auto-fiction…’

“When telling your life story, make sure that you’re the one holding the pen.” memoir

Efraim Diveroli

Dixon, Robyn:

on genocide: “They’re talking about destroying Ukrainians as a group, Ukraine as a state and as an identity community,” Eugene Finkel said. “The argument is we are going to destroy this national community as it exists and create something new that we like instead, no matter how many people we kill in the process.”

Robyn Dixon

diZerega, Gus:

 http://dizerega.com/2015/06/30/turning-the-tables-the-pathologies-and-unrealized-promise-of-libertarianism/

[Libertarian] terminology uses common words in uncommonly narrow ways.

… Along with ‘nonaggression’ and the ‘individual,’ ‘private property’ is the core principle underlying libertarianism’s solutions to all of society’s major problems.

… my critique does not reject their principles; it argues that libertarians do not understand them.

… It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand

Rand’s depiction of strong creative individuals standing firm in their visions of how life should be lived can be inspiring reading for young people discovering the many hypocrisies in our society.

… Koch Industries is privately held, and as a consequence Charles and David Koch can legitimately be considered responsible for its actions, good and bad alike.

… No matter how sophisticated our questions, we always ask them within a social context that remains largely taken for granted.

… the property rights libertarians rightly identify as necessary for individuals to exercise freedom are socially determined and must exist prior to the market.

… CATO is the most prominent libertarian think tank in the United States. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, who helped start it many years ago, are now seeking to take it over completely. The Kochs have contributed nothing to the organization for years. CATO has survived and prospered on its own. The libertarians who now populate it are fighting back in the name of freedom of thought.

… the chief moral weakness of many libertarians. They appear unable to imaginatively place themselves in the shoes of people unlike themselves. They have a failure in empathy.

… Rand ultimately had no understanding of human rights.”

end of di Zerega

Djou, Charles:

“I abandon my party because I am unwilling to abandon my principles.”

Congressman Hawaii

“… in North Korea, ordinary life itself is slavery.”

Hee-youn Do, see pdf

“…facts can anger people in power…sometimes those wielding such power are not the usual suspects such as Big Brother or Big Business, but self-appointed guardians of the nonpowerful … activists….

When a motivated group with a playbook of ugly tactics spots a scientific funding they don’t like, they can often dominate public discussion in a way that replaces a factual story with a false one.”

David Dobbs

Doblin, Rick:

“If you give MDMA to hard-core haters on each side of an issue, I don’t think it’ll do a lot of good. But if you start with open-minded people on both sides, then I think it can work. You can improve communications and build empathy between groups, and help people be more capable of analysing the world from a more balanced perspective rather than from fear-based, anxiety-based distrust.”

responding to Huffington Post Gregoire question: Would MDMA-assisted psychotherapy also be helpful for a general population – not just patients with PTSD? Could this be a reality one day?

at ps17: “Does it last? … Something fundamentally is changing in people’s brains and their emotions through this therapy, and the benefits proceed over time.”

“People have such enormous fears and anxieties that get in the way of really hearing and listening. With psychedelics, you can get over these emotional blocks that also block our thinking. Psychedelics can produce a deep reliance on common interests and values.”

“The overall goal is to have a more spiritualized humanity that can, instead of ghting each other, address our common challenges, such as climate change and the rise of authoritarianism.”

Doctorow, Cory:

“… dog-eared and underlined, the hallmarks of a book that demands revisiting.”

“Communist Manifesto – its moral clarity, thundering language and incisive analysis.”

“… capitalism threatens to roast and flood our world.”

“Telepathy is not real … But in novels, it is…novels…create the illusion of telepathy.”

“…enshitification” re: social media firms.

“All our tech businesses are turning awful. And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”

Margaret Thatcher’s mantra was: “There is no alternative.” She repeated this so often they called her “Tina” Thatcher: There. Is. No. Alternative.

On trump’s 80th: Dear Comrade Trump: On this, the occasion of your 80th

birthday, I write to extend my sincere thanks for all the

work you have done. After decades of deadlock, you have

inspired the world to action! You have done more to de-

dollarise the world than any American leader in history.

Without you, there would be no way that Ethiopia would be

revaluing its national debt in yuan. You have done more to

end the global dependence on oil than any leader (except,

perhaps, for Comrade Putin). Without you, there would be

no way that India would be chucking out its gas hobs and replacing them

with induction tops. And, of course, you have done more than any president

in history to end American dominance over the internet. Without you, there

would be no way the EU would be racing forward with projects such as

Eurostack and European Digital Infrastructure Consortium, with whole

nations ditching American tech exports like Microsoft Office 365 in favour of

free, open, auditable, transparent alternatives running on servers within the

EU’s borders. Comrade Trump, you are, at long last, ushering in the post-

American world, and a grateful planet salutes you!

Re: Reverse Centaurs Guide … book:

“The most important thing about the gadget isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.”

“You can’t make billions without hurting people.”

a “reverse centaur” is “a human who is

conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine.”

End Doctorow, Cory

Doctorow, E L:

“The challenge of working with the FDA and working within the medical model is that you’re only able to create drugs that treat recognized diseases. …there are enormous benefits outside the medical model to treat people who don’t have a specified disorder – … spiritual experiences and personal growth.”

“two things must be said about knowledge deniers. Their rationale is always political. And …they hold in their hand a sacred text for certification.”

“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”

“Pretending is the brain’s work. That’s what it does.” Andrew in Andrew’s Brain

Doctorow wrote in 1986: “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945. It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after 40 years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture – its logic, its faith, its vision.”

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far

as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E L Doctorow

Doerr, Anthony:

from a parable: “Cobwebs at first, cables at death.”

“Sustainable technologies are the next big thing…the mother of all markets.”

John Doerr

“What we have here is a threat to democracy itself.”

William Doherty

Domingo, Placido:

via Levitin: “When I rest, I rust.”

Domogatski, Grigori V.:

“You should never miss the chance to ask nature any question. …

You never know what answer you will get.”

Donegan, Moira:

“They have already tried compromise; they have already

tried capitulation. It is time to try defiance.”

“Trump’s vision of governance calls to mind the declaration

attributed to Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’ est moi’: I am the state.”

It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be

…death is an ascent to a better library.”

John Donne

“From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two classes – paupers and millionaires.”

Ignatius Donnelly via Zinn

Donner, Frank J.:

“…the truth-is-bad-enough school of journalism.”

Donner, Rebecca re: Mildred Harnack:

“Her aim was self-erasure.”

“…he can always hide behind the fact that I invented things, and I can always hide behind the fact that something invented could be true.”

Donnersmarck, Florian Henkel von – wrote The Lives of Others.

Donoghue, Emma:

reviews of her books:

‘Fiction is small solace for history’s grief, but it’s one way to set the record straight…her prose is especially exquisite at depicting ambiguity…Eccentric, untethered genius…she finds the light in the darkness.’

Donoghue, Denis:

from NYT obit: his “heightened tone, the lack of hesitation, the thinking aloud as fierce and eloquent activity, and the sense also that this mattered more than anything else mattered – this attempt to analyze and define and almost imitate layers and levels of feeling, of imaginative energy, of tonal nuance….his fascination with the irrational, almost mystical quality, at the heart of the creative process…standing opposed to both the politicized theories of the left and the tradionalist pieties of the right.”

Donovan, Diane:

”When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending.”

Donziger, Steven:

“Ecocide should be made a law on the same order as genocide and crimes against humanity.”

Doonesbury:

“Listen, Dude. I spent two years behind an M60 machine gun defending, among other things, your right to be a moron about guns.”

“…we don’t have to leave the world as it was when we first encountered it.”

Ariel Dorfman

“[Trump] lack of compassion and ability to cause pain without any sense of responsibility, struck me as deeply evil…

[Trump is] a caricature of an actual person, the physical embodiment of the seven deadly sins. He is all about greed, lust, gluttony, wrath, envy, sloth, and pride.

If he was a character in one of my novels, I’m sure he’d read as forced and phony – a total cliche. Maybe this is part of why I have so much trouble creating believable bad guys – I don’t understand how anyone can be so thoroughly devoid of morality without a single redeeming quality. Yet, Trump is that guy.

…men like Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell offer up another brand of evil altogether. In many ways, they are far worse than Trump.

Jacqueline Dooley

“In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.”

Rudi Dornbusch, quoted by Kenneth Rogoff

Dorsey, Jack:

“…in principle I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter…Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”

Dorsey, Ray, et al: Ending Parkinson’s Disease on K:

The Parkinson Pandemic…

“America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out

who have taken the clean waters our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul…

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people.”

“Our only hope lies in the frail web of understanding of one person for the pain of another.”  – John Dos Passos

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: (see also Ornstein):

“In every man … a demon lies hidden – the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the scream of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.”

…tears of humanity…

I must have justice.

I hasten to give back my entry ticket

in the Brothers Karamasov

To consider freedom as directly dependent on the number of man’s requirements and the extent of their immediate satisfaction shows a twisted understanding of human nature, for such an interpretation only breeds in men a multitude of senseless, stupid desires and habits and endless preposterous inventions.” karamasov

“… we care for the weak too. They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them – so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name. We shall deceive them again … That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.”

Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor quoted by Szasz in Madness.

via Hedges – Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes a block of sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in Notes from Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us. “I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.”

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

“…too much reason is a thorough-going madness.”

Jesus came to give people freedom, but that’s not what they want. What they really want is to be told what to do and believe, and to be fed.

Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor

Aldous Huxley quoting Ivan ‘…they have vanquished freedom and done so to make men happy.’

“…evil lies deeper in human beings than our socialist-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it has always been; that

abnormality and sin arise from that soul itself; and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges.”

via Costica Bradatan see pdf

“The darker the night, the brighter the stars.”

by Raskolnikov at end Crime and Punishment:

‘He had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia. Everyone was to perish, except for certain, very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men’s bodies. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakeable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgments, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable. Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be infected and go mad. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate.’

see New Yorker, David Denby Raskolnikov’s Dream.

From The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima:

“The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”

end Dostoevsky

“Giving ‘equal time’ to creationism and evolution is like giving equal time to astrology and astronomy …”

Howard Doughty

“…some of the world’s most important problems – such as … world poverty, climate change and war – can be attributed to … moral deficits.”

Thomas Douglas via Metzinger

 Douglas, William O.:

“The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.”

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. ..there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

“It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside…”

William O. Douglas, cited in The Shulgin Index

Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert:

on Memoirs; “The one person that you can’t watch is yourself. You are your own great blind spot… Tell a story that is truly like life, and it will be” just one damn thing after another.”

Douglass, Frederick:

“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”

“The fate of the greatest of all modern Republics trembles in the balance. To what cause may we trace our present and deplorable condition?”

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want the rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both… but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

“A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us. As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood. Our white countrymen do not know us. They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us as a people. The great mass of American citizens estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, it at all, against the withering influence of a nation’s scorn and contempt.”

“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle… If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

“Men are so constituted that they derive their conviction of their own possibilities largely from the estimate formed of them by others. If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation.”

“Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them…

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

“I prayed for 20 years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

“The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous.”

see Zinn pp. 182–3

 on Douglass Via David Brooks:

‘Douglass’s genius was his abilityb to balance his indignationat oppression with with his underlying faith in the American project…’

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

“To make a contented slave you must make a thoughtless one.”

‘[Lincoln’s] great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen.

Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless.[…] Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.’

Frederick Douglass via Bard Coll conf. Yale historian

“… the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny…”

‘Composite Nation’ speech re 14th Amendment:

“We shall spread the network of our science and our civilization over all who seek their shelter whether from Asia, Africa or the isles of the sea. We shall mold them all, each after his kind, into Americans; Indian and Celt, Negro and Saxon, Latin and Teuton, Mongolian and Caucasian, Jew and Gentile, all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm and seek the same national ends.”

end Douglass, Frederick

Ross Douthat:

“Technology really does affect character. Cultures do change from era to era, sometimes for the worse. Particular vices can be encouraged by particular innovations, and thrive in the new worlds that they create.”

The idea that modern America is in thrall to self-regard dates back to the 1970s…American self-involvement is actually reaching an apogee in the age of Facebook and Twitter. … The rituals of social media, it seems, make status-seekers and exhibitionists of us all.

[Weiner’s] “partners” existed less to titillate him than to hold up mirrors to his own vanity

…There was a time when fame and influence were supposed to liberate men from such adolescent insecurity.

…in the late ’70s, Lasch distinguished modern narcissism from old-fashioned egotism. ,,..the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. His innate insecurity can only be overcome “by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power and charisma.”

Facebook and Twitter did not forge the culture of narcissism. But they serve as a hall of mirrors in which it flourishes as never before – a “vast virtual gallery,” as Rosen has written, whose self portraits mainly testify to “the timeless human desire for attention.”

«…Romney…has managed to run for president for almost five years without taking a single courageous or even remotely interesting position….Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn’t believe a word he says.

“It will do America no good to replace the arrogant with the ignorant, the overconfident with the incompetent…We need intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people whose lives have taught them caution. We still need the best and brightest, but we need them to have somehow learned humility along the way.”

“Hermann Samuel Reimarus, …writing in the 18th century,.. argued that the real Jesus of Nazareth was a political revolutionary who died disappointed, and whose disciples invented a resurrection – and with it, a religion – to make sense of his failure.”

“Trump is … challenging…the entire post-Reagan conservative matrix.”

“In American politics, the two-party system, no less than the Senate or the Supreme Court, has long served as a check on pure democracy, a means of elite control….[by] the (mostly upper-class, highly-educated, self-consciously globalist) people…

“…a politician explains who actually reads the British papers [on a British sitcom]:.

‘The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country.

The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country.

The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country.

The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country.

The Financial Times is read by people who own the country.

The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. And

The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.”

“…American people are exceptional: exceptionally easy to bait.”

fake Putin via Douthat

“Between the 19th century and the 1950s, the American university was gradually transformed from an institution intended to transmit knowledge into an institution designed to serve technocracy….

… students seeking wisdom and character could be forgiven for feeling like a distraction from the university’s real business….

… the student radicalism of the 1960s entered the picture. The radicals moved quickly to dismantle the vestiges of moral conservatism on campus – the in loco parentis rules that still governed undergraduate life, for instance. But their real mission was actually a kind of remoralization, a renewal of the university as a place of almost-religious purpose, where students would be educated about certain great truths and then sent forth to live them out….

… the 1990s, was a campus landscape where left-wing pieties dominated official discourse, but the university’s deeper spirit remained technocratic, careerist and basically amoral….

The protestors at Yale and Missouri … are… dealing with a university system that’s genuinely corrupt…

The protestors … aren’t wrong to smell the rot around them.

“WHEN an old order is in crisis, something distinctive happens to the men who lead it.

A strange paralysis sets in, a curious mix of denial and resignation.”

“…distrustful stability and prosperous despair…”

via Lilla review: ‘decadence means akind of cultural exhaustion and world-weariness…malaise…to sap us of ourbstrength and hope.’.

“…China’s attempt to wean young people off the spiritual opium of video gaming.”

from How I Became a Science Experiment, NYT:

“…the body’s experiences are their own form of empirical reality…

I could feel the experience of illness remaking me…[use in memoir?]

integrate fringe experiences with more mainstream positions…”

The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery:

The prairie of pain, the suffering body as the suffering landscape, is the best description of the pain of Lyme I’ve heard or read.

the possessed person experiences a taste of hell but isn’t actually damnedembrace the experimental spirit that chronic

sickness seems to obviously require.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. That’s from Tennyson,

The gift of chronic illness is the space and opportunity to strive and seek.

“…beliefs instilled by… experiences and the skepticism they generate (understandably) from people who haven’t had them… is crucial to understanding cultural polarization in our time…

people who have a terrible experience with official consensus, and discover that some weird idea that the establishment derides actually seems to work, tend to embrace a new rule to replace the old one: that official knowledge is always wrong, that outsiders are always more trustworthy than insiders, that if … Fauci or the FDA get some critical things wrong, you can’t trust them to get anything right…

“the sleep of reason produces monsters…the arc of history is bending away into the dark.”

end Douthat

“…the university – indeed all of education  – must be a place where re-examination, uncertainty, change and conflict become an integral part of what is studied.”

Douglas Dowd

Dovzhyk, Sasha:

“Ukrainians fight in full knowledge that no compromise with evil will contain it.”

Dowd, Maureen:

…Rand is blazing back as an icon of the Tea Party, which overlooks her atheism, amorality in romance and vigorous support for abortion.

She died before capitalism evolved into a vampire casino where you could bet against investments you sold to your clients, and make money off something you didn’t own or that existed only on paper.

it is obvious now that the party is fully engaged in a project to dismantle the foundations of the New Deal and the Great Society, and to liberate business and the rich from the inconveniences of oversight and taxes.

 NY Times editorial 4–18–2011

“It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you’re reading. It is about what you’re reading.”

“It’s so easy to wipe the slate clean on TV”

“…the N.S.A. went wild with technology that allowed it to go wild. These technological toys turn everyone into thieves.”

“It is always the case that technology is invented and used before its consequences are known.”

[GOP] “Gasping Old Party.”

«…dictators are often not just cruel and evil, but lunatics. It’s very rare to find a rational dictator. Absolute power deranges them and gives them delusions and fantasies.”

The Republican ‘Taliban wing’ …the rabid Tea Party militants…

Obama…is a new entity…He’s the first independent president…

“Americans are scared out of their minds about what is happening to America….the Tea Party slashers roaming the corridors of the Capitol have feasted without resistance on delicious victims and will only grow bolder.”

“The Republicans are now the ‘How great is it to be stupid?’ party…there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency..

The occupational hazard of democracy is know-nothing voters. It shouldn’t be no-nothing candidates.”

«…doing what Republicans do: Throwing people out of work and making money.”

(on Mitt Romney)

“When a man marries his mistress he creates a job opening.”

(on Newt Gingrich)

“Randism is a state of arrested adolescence.”

on Ayn Rand

“Republicans care … deeply about making us think that they care deeply.”

“They used patriotism like brass knuckles.” – on Bush-Cheney

«…the last ever to be seen … a Civilization gone with the wind.”

from Gone with the Wind via Maureen Dowd

For all the Republican establishment’s self-righteous bleating, Trump is nothing more than an unvarnished, cruder version. For years, it has fanned, stoked and exploited the worst angels among the nativists, racists, Pharisees and angry white men, concurring in anti-immigrant measures, restricting minority voting, whipping up anti-Planned Parenthood hysteria and enabling gun nuts.

How lame was it that after saying he was a crazy choice, Rubio, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and John McCain turned around and said they will support Trump if he’s the nominee?

“America is living through a fractured fairy tale, in the grip of a lonely and uninformed mad king, an arrogant and naïve princeling, a comely but complicit blond princess and a dyspeptic, dystopian troll under the bridge.”

“Trump White House, where conflict of interest has been replaced by confluence of interest.”

“…the Irish propensity, woven through our literature and history, [is] to let the past drag down the present.”

“Newt is the progenitor of the modern politics of personal destruction…

He weaves an alternative history of his own life, where he is saving civilization

rather than ripping up the fabric of Congress, where he improves the moral climate of America rather than pollutes it.

Republicans have a far greater talent for hypocrisy than easily cowed Democrats do – and no doubt appreciate that in a leader.”

“Michael Beschloss: “On December 1972 tape, Nixon told Kissinger, ‘The press is the enemy, the establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy.’”…

Michael D’Antonio said. “He thinks confidence is more important than competence and attitude matters more than aptitude. Others may be exhausted by the frenzy. You can see it in their drawn faces and pained expressions. Donald is energized by the fight.”

“Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio says the president has been lying reflexively since he was a kid bragging about home runs he didn’t hit. He gets warped satisfaction from making up stuff…including ficticious claims of dating Carla Bruni and being hit on by Madonna.”

“When societies try to protect a malevolent status quo, they become warped. The most chilling sign of this is when people look the other way as the most vulnerable members of society are preyed on.”

“…the media’s shock collar.”

“Trump built a movement based on lies. The Cheneys showed him how it’s done….I miss torturing Liz Cheney.”

via Dowd: ‘Shakespeare knew that character is revealed when the stakes are high.’

…Drew Lichtenberg, resident dramaturge at the Shakespeare Theater Company, points out, Hamlet’s disquiet about suicide and dying has a resonance in the part of the world now bearing the slings and arrows of a demented dictator.

“There’s a long tradition in Central European countries, such as Poland or Ukraine, of embracing Shakespeare and especially Hamlet as a kind of metaphor for the broader political situation,” he said. “Poland and Ukraine both have had periods where they didn’t exist, where their language was erased and replaced by either German or Russian as the official language and culture of the state. They know what it is ‘not to be.’”

We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.

“Trump set a fire with lies, then doused Mike Pence in gasoline.”

“… social media companies torqued their algorithms to spin up conflict and profits.”

 “…shame is long gone from the Republican Party, except for a vestigial smidge in Mitt Romney’s office.”

“[Trump] has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses.”

“…cloistered, robed zealots, driven by religious doctrine, with no accountability.” Supreme Ct

via Thomas Paine:

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote, adding, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”

“Trump loves to be admired by the elites, and he adores money. Musk has gotten the keys to the American kingdom so he can attack “the woke mind virus,” which Musk says “killed” his “son,” who transitioned as a teenager. Both men are driven by revenge to smash up the government.”

“Shane…1953…a real man doesn’t babble or whine or brag or take advantage. He stands up for the right thing and protects those who can’t protect themselves from bullies.

Loyalty outweighs legality…

Putin has made it his business to seduce the president.

… It feels as if we’re turning our country into a crass, commercial product, making it cruel, as we maximize profits.

I hope, as President Trump and Elon Musk exercise their ‘masculine maximalism’,

they remember the words of John Wayne in the 1972 western, The Cowboys’: “A

big mouth don’t make a big man.”

“Trump did not need to alter his behavior to be president. He simply altered the presidency to match his personality…

Trump sets fires and leaves destruction in his wake…

Trump is a dark genius at distorting reality into deceptive narratives to reshape history.

Abe Lincoln urged Americans to move past the civil war with ‘malice toward none, with charity for all’. Trump has malice for all, charity toward none.”

“The depth of his shallowness is infinite…

Trump has made America un-American.”

Doyle, A Conan:

“That which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed.”       The Hound of the Baskervilles

Draghi, Mario:

“Do you prefer peace or the air conditioning on?”

…men…should discover a mode of government that contained the greatest sum of individual happiness, with the least national expense.”

Dragonetti, quoted by T Paine in Common Sense.

“….the Fourth Amendment for all intents and purposes was revoked after 9/11…”

Thomas Drake

Drazkiewicz, Elzbieta:

“Conspiracy theories are more about values then about information…

Conspiracy theories …amplify existing fears and ideas about people’s place in the world…

To gain traction, conspiracy theories had to resonate resonate with local histories.”

Dreher, Ron:

“If the right should somehow gain that kind of power, I don’t trust us with it,”

quoting emigre’s interviewed from Soviet, Czech:

“You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow. You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works…

End Dreher

\

“When you’re busy enjoying what you’re doing, you don’t spend a lot of money.”

Mildred Dresselhaus on scientist salaries

“People can have a hard time recognizing that they’ve been conned.”

“Trump has the rhetorical skills of the talented demagogue; his rants are leavened with entertainment. He applies to the dangerous the cosmetic of fun…He’s turned the truth into a volleyball.”

                  Elizabeth Drew

Drexler, Jorge – cancionista:

“La Luz Que Sabe Robar” (“The light that Knows how to Steal”).

“Salvavidas de Hielo” (“Lifejacket Made of Ice”).

“What’s important is connections, connections, connections.” NYT profile

Dreyer, Jacob:

“The pandemic awakened China’s young people to the reality that their society is oriented to the values and priorities of the elderly, whose truths are very different from their own…

We are the last generation, thank you…

In today’s China, the world of the 1950s generation weighs like a nightmare on the lives of the young…

The political monopoly of the old has given a lopsided, strange quality to the decisions that determine everybody’s lives…

Imagine the surprise of the elders as they discover that some of their kids don’t want to live in the world they built.”

“Profit is the cost of staying in business.”

“One of the secrets of productivity is to have a very big waste-paper basket to take care of all invitations such as yours.”

Peter Drucker

Druckerman, Pamela:

Bebe

“[The French] are aiming for something that sounds quite American: choice (here they call it equlibre – balance). Unlike us, they might actually get it.”

“The typical ‘French dream’ … isn’t of great wealth, it’s of great security, including a steady income and pension.”

Pamela Druckerman

“…in a polarized environment voters make worse choices and have more confidence in them … intense party competition degenerates opinion quality.”

James N Druckman

“The two most important problems facing the human race right now are the need for widespread deployment of renewable energy and figuring out how to deal with the end of work.”

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones Robot Job story see pdf

Drutman, Lee:

“…hyper-polarization cracked the foundations of American democracy, creating the conditions under which a party could break democratic norms with impunity, because winning in the short term became more important than maintaining democracy for the long term.”

Druyan, Ann:

“…humanity has to step up…all of us are descended from generations, countless generations, of humans who had their backs to the wall and who managed to endure and to survive, and even to flourish. And that’s what we have to do. It’s our turn.”

“If we consider divine anything we do not understand, God is a kind of shorthand for what we do not know.”

End Druyan see Consilience

John Dryden, 1685:

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

Not heaven itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

End Dryden, John 1685

“Frustration turns into hate.”

Jose Napoleon Duarte

W. E. B. Du Bois:

“If it is going to use this power to force the world into color prejudice and race antagonism; if it is going to use it to manufacture millionaires, increase the rule of wealth, and break down democratic government everywhere; if it is going increasingly to stand for reaction, fascism, white supremacy and imperialism; if it is going to promote war and not peace; then America will go the way of the Roman Empire.”

“We let men take wealth which is not theirs; if the seizure is ‘legal’ we call it high profits and the profiteers help decide what is legal.”

“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far is the truth is ascertainable.”

“The final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.”

‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.’

Dubos, Rene:

“Every civilization has its own kind of pestilence and can control it only by reforming itself.”

“Being a scientist does not disqualify a person from being an intelligent citizen.”

L DuBridge

Duckett. Thasunda Brown:

chief executive of TIAA, suggested that

part of creating a sense of trust is the simple act of listening.

“It’s not about being right. It’s about just being heard, And I think

whenever you hear a roar, it’s about, ‘Do you hear me?’ And I think we also can’t

ignore why people are roaring.”

“The eleventh-century Christians still felt utterly crushed by mystery, overwhelmed by the unkown world their eyes could not see.”

Georges Duby, historian

…language is just no damn good – I use it because I have to. but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.”

“Art is a habit-forming drug.” (via Shlain)

Marcel Duchamp

Duchin, Moon :

“Democracy science… randon…ranked…”

Dudamel, Gustavo:

“My maestro always said that the culture for the poor people cannot be a poor culture.”

Dudinsky, Denis of Belarus:

“…these people know how to formulate their requests in such a way that you cannot say no.”

Duffy, Aidan:

“…the object still holds an echo of its previous function; it still needs to hold the ghost of what it Ince was.” Garbage sculpture artist, exhibit in Guimaraes.

Duffy, Eilidh:

“…capitalism can just absorb any resistance, any form of anti-capitalism, transforming it into something with monetary value in order to dissolve or disarm any kind of resistance to it.”

Duffy, Jennifer:

“Trump’s habit of pushing the boundary on truthfulness has almost been a permission slip for everyone else to push that boundary,”

via Bruni

“When one admits his fear, his finitude, a confidence can be reborn from this vulnerability. Being alive is a risk. Few beings are.”

Anne Dufourmantelle

Duggan, Lisa:

“Emotion had brought down the house of reason…

The unifying threads are meanness and greed…”

Lisa Duggan on Ayn Rand

more via reviewer Jennifer Szalai: ‘her enormous fan base include Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Tea Partyers, president Trump and innumerable adolescents…Rand…has somehow managed to be reclaimed by those she so cruelly deplored…

a philosophical system in which every human relationship is transactional…

She liked to affect a steely, imperious persona, but she was deeply insecure and easily wounded.’

Dugger, Ronnie:

“Why are nuclear weapons called ‘weapons of mass destruction’ when morally they

are weapons of mass murder? President Obama calls for a nuclear-free world, but

says it’s not likely in our lifetimes. Why not? And what is the political and ethical

responsibility of the American citizen for our H-bombs?”

“It is not our abilities that show what

we truly are– it is our choices”

The all-time, bar-none, best quote ever about decision theory:

Albus Dumbledore

“The long history of Earth testifies that the modern era has constructed an entire civilization on mistaken assumptions.

Earth systems and human ones…require a continuous flow of energy to maintain their organization, and the greater the complexity, the greater the demand for energy.

The only thing certain about the coming century is its immense uncertainty. The reat temptation of our time will be the impulse to flee from this uncertainty.”

Diane Dumonowski

“Conspiracy theories are the last refuge of the status quo – its last line of ideological defense.

…what is most wrong with the world is not in its heart but in its bones…

conspiracy theories tend to be projections…”.

Mark Dunbar

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 3)

Elie Wiesel famously observed, the road to Auschwitz was paved in the earliest days of Christendom. Historian David Stannard, in American Holocaust, adds the caveat that the same road led straight through the heart of America.

Whitman explicitly grounded this prescription in racism: “The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history.… A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out.”

the Indigenous peoples of the West found a form of resistance that spread like wildfire in all directions from its source, thanks to a Paiute holy man, Wovoka, in Nevada.

the Ghost Dance, which promised to restore the Indigenous world as it was before colonialism, making the invaders disappear and the buffalo return. It was a simple dance performed by everyone, requiring only a specific kind of shirt that was to protect the dancers from gunfire.

I suppose the authorities did think they were crazy – but they weren’t. They were only terribly unhappy.

They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must get civilized. I remember that word too. It means “be like the white man.” I am willing to be like the white man, but I did not believe Indians’ ways were wrong.

after a while we also began to say Indians were bad.

A “race to innocence” is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression.

in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.

A more sophisticated version of the race to innocence that helps perpetuate settler colonialism began to develop in social movement theory in the 1990s, popularized in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth, the third volume in a trilogy, is one of a number of books in an academic fad of the early twenty-first century seeking to revive the Medieval European concept of the commons as an aspiration for contemporary social movements. 27 Most

Ishi – identified by Anglos in 1911 as the last of the Yahi people of Northern California – died in 1916, the University of California at Berkeley anthropologist who had studied him and his culture, Arthur Kroeber, insisted on an Indigenous traditional burial and no autopsy, according to Ishi’s wishes. When asked about the cause of science, Kroeber said: “If there is any talk about the interest of science, say for me that science can go to hell. . .

We will not let our heritage be hidden by those who seek to obscure it.” 36 Chatters claimed that Kennewick

Erik Davis, calling this identification with the remains a scientist studies “pathological ventriloquism,”

“Winchester Mystery House,

Sarah L. Winchester, the wealthy widow of William Wirt Winchester, built the Victorian mansion to avoid and elude ghosts,

She likely was well aware of the widely publicized Ghost Dance in 1890, which led to the killing of Sitting Bull and the Wounded Knee massacre. The dancers believed that the dance would bring back their dead warriors.

It makes sense that Mrs. Winchester felt the need to guard herself from the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, which her late husband’s father had invented and produced in 1866, with later models being even more lethal. Mrs. Winchester inherited the fortune accumulated by her husband’s family through sales of the rifle. There was one major purchaser: the US Department of War. The chief reason for the War Department’s purchases of the rifle in great quantities: to kill Indians. The rifle was a technological innovation designed especially for the US Army’s campaigns against the Plains Indians following the Civil War.

Visitors trekking through the widow’s home are astounded, and perhaps saddened, by the evidence all around them of the fears and anguish of an obviously mentally disturbed person. Yet there is another possibility: a sense of the scaffolding that supports US society, a kind of hologram in the minds of each and every person on the continent. Mrs. Winchester might have been more aware of the truth than most people and therefore fearful of its consequences.

“regeneration through violence,” in Richard Slotkin’s phrasing.

Gómez-Quiñones coins a measure of intelligence in the United States the “Indigenous Quotient.

the denial of sacred lands and sites is a form of genocide.

Duncan, Arne:

“..universities should embrace a principle long understood by NATO: An attack on one is an

attack on all. If sovereign nations can pledge collective defense, so too can American universities….Silence is not neutrality; it is permission.”

Dunn, Arnie:

White House Communications Director, : “Fox was not a legitimate news organization.”

Dunn, Rob:

Mutualism…greenhouse gases – the feces of the industrial revolution…

Creating planetary conditions which we cannot survice…

Book: The Call of the Honeyguide

Dunn, Tim:

“Money only makes it easier to perpetuate the illusion of control…

each person is in control of only three things: who or what you trust or depend on, how you look at things – your perspective – and what you do.”

Dunne, Finley Peter:

On Journalism: ’To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’

Dunne, John Gregory:

“The thing about Bobby’s death was there was a pattern. There was something wrong. It was the final unraveling of a very dark tapestry.” see also Didion.

“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”

Printing was the Reformation; Gutenberg made Luther possible.”

w…the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense. (on John Calvin)

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

“No civilization has found life tolerable without … the things that provide at least some brief respite from reality.”

Will Durant, Historian

“The American people have a limited attention span. Once you convince them there is a problem they want a solution.”

Dick Durbin

“Voters reacted to this in the mid-term election by throwing out the party that saved the day and restoring to power the party that caused the problem.

Sometimes, madam – a leader has to lead.”

David Durenberger

“I’m not a big fan of the idea of countries…I consider myself a legal citizen of the world.”

Pavel Durov

Duterte, Rodrigo:

“Journalists are not exempted from assassination.”

Dutzy, Sherry:

“I strongly believe in the separation between church and state … since I wouldn’t go to church to hear a political speech, why was I accepting the recital of a prayer at a governmental meeting?”

“Data is just a proxy for control.”

Sam Dwyer, UPS driver

Dyer, Gwynne:

The Shortest History of War: From Hunter-Gatherers to Nuclear Superpowers – A Retelling for Our Times (Shortest History Series)

Governments that cannot feed their people tend not to survive, so we may end up with large “ungoverned” spaces in some of the worst affected countries –

Arafat and his colleagues understood the importance of rebranding the “refugees” as “Palestinians.”

convince the world that there was such an identity as “Palestinian,” for to call people by that name is implicitly to accept that they have a legitimate claim to the land of Palestine.

this was international terrorism with a rational and achievable objective: not to bring Israel to its knees, but to force the world to accept the existence of a Palestinian people who must be active participants in the discussion of their own fate.

the US military’s obsession with “bases.” Such facilities are indispensable for regular armies but are actually irrelevant for revolutionaries using a terrorist strategy.

the planning for 9/ 11 was mainly done in Germany, and the pilots were trained in the United States.

Three great changes are underway that could tip the international system back into the old disorder: global heating, the rise of new great powers, and nuclear proliferation.

it is the absolute independence of national governments that makes war possible. Unfortunately,

The United Nations was created to end war – “ not to bring mankind to Heaven but to save it from Hell,” in Dag Hammarskjold’s words. The UN’s founders knew that to

the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, which was deliberately prolonged by American and Russian aid to Saddam Hussein in the hope that he would destroy the revolutionary Islamic regime in Iran.

we have reached a point where our moral imagination must expand again to include the whole of humankind, or we will perish.

Brian Urquhart: However deficient in many ways the United Nations may be, I think it’s an absolutely essential organization. There is no way in which this effort cannot be made – it has to be made – knowing perfectly well that you’re pushing an enormous boulder up a very steep hill. There will be slips and it will come back on you from time to time, but you have to go on pushing. Because if you don’t do that, you simply give in to the notion that you’re going to go into a global war again at some point, this time with nuclear weapons.

Our task over the next few generations is to transform the present world of independent states into some sort of genuine international community. If we succeed in creating that community, however quarrelsome, discontented, and full of injustice it will be, then we shall effectively have abolished the ancient institution of warfare. Good riddance.

Sanctions have long been the default instrument of countries that disapprove of another country’s actions but are not willing to go to war over them.

end Dyer

Dylan, Bob:

“Everything worth doing takes time. You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one.”

“…if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”

Dylan via Steve Jobs

“Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard,

Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,”

Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the call

Don’t stand in the doorway

Don’t block up the hall

For he that gets hurt

Will be he who has stalled

There’s a battle outside

And it is ragin’

It’ll soon shake your windows

And rattle your walls

For the times they are a-changin’.

Come mothers and fathers

Throughout the land

And don’t criticize

What you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is

Rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’.

“…something is happening here,

but you don’t know what it is.”

Merchants of war:

http://www.vox.com/2016/10/13/13271166/michelle-obama-trump-speech

“I’m the first person who’ll put it to you

and the last person who’ll explain it to you.”

Guthrie “had something that needed to be said”, Dylan remembered.

“And that was highly unusual to my ears.”

End Dylan

“I hate what he does with every cell of my soul. I have overcome fear; my hatred for him defeated it.”

Sergei A Dylevsky, Belarus in NYT

Dyson, Freeman:

“I am well aware that memory is unbreliable.It not only selects and rearrages the facts of our lives, but also embroiders and invents…

The future is my third home…The future is my distant mirrow.

Freeman Dyson said of Taylor, “Very few people have Ted’s imagination. … I think he is perhaps the greatest man that I ever knew well. And he is completely unknown.”

”Science is … an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

“Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.”

“Science as subversion has a long history.”

…the universe is guided by the principle of maximum diversity.”

from NYT Obit: ‘…Dyson’s mind burned until the end.’

via Economist obit: Heretics were useful in science. It was far better to be contradicted than ignored; better to be wrong than vague.

on Feynman: “he was a natural physicist, and he thought in terms of concrete objects. The mathematics was an encumbrance, something you had to stick on afterwards, more or less…as a necessary evil.”

End Dyson

“… deliberate ignorance … whiteness … racial ignorance.”

Michael Eric Dyson