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"I want to apologize to Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. I am sorry, Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, for ever calling you "Lake Chargagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg." I will never mess up the name Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg ever again. Because really, there is no excuse. Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg? Lake Chargagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg? They sound nothing alike."
- Dime Store Adventures
Now you're making my head and my throat hurt. :-)
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"[T]he new mission of journalism [...] doesn’t seem to be uncovering the truth anymore, but managing the information cycle. They act almost like banks that get money directly from the Federal Reserve. I call it ‘fiat information.’ The government prints information and certain favored institutions are first in line to get it, and then they loan it to others for a profit."
- Walter Kirn
"I wasn't even quite sure what show Lenny [Nimoy] was doing at the time, I just knew that he wasn't coming to Schwab's anymore in the mornings. So he met me at Paramount and I got hysterical with the way he looked, with those ears! And he took me to meet a guy who I later found out was Gene Roddenberry, and Gene looked at me and said to Lenny, 'Arne Darvin,' and I said, 'Oh, and a happy Arne Darvin to you.' I thought it was a Jewish holiday. Then Lenny and I walked to the soundstage and he said, 'You got a job.' And I said, 'Oh, that's nice.' I called Lenny up when I got the new job on Deep Space Nine and I told him about it, and he said, 'Boy, you must have made a great impression; they have you back every twenty-nine years."
- Charlie Brill
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"I saw him dancing and swaying through the cornfields in the pale moonlight. A husk in tattered rags, his dead limbs creaked like an old barn door. I could feel it as he looked at me from the places where eyes used to be. I've tried to get away from him, but still he follows me. One moment he’s there, the next he vanishes. He wants me to join in the dance with him and the others. Forever. I hear the stomp, stomp of his boots as he draws closer. Where do you come from? Where did you go? Where do you come from Cotton Eye Joe?"
- anonymous
"Theory without a reality check can make the world unlivable. This is because theorists can build beautiful models that hide grave errors, intentionally or not, and there is no means by which their mistakes are revealed until you test them against the real world. You never want them in charge of the whole project."
- Jeffrey A. Tucker
"In my lifetime, all the labour- and time-saving technologies which have been pushed at us, from the microwave oven to the Internet, have given us things we didn’t previously have, and taken plenty more away, but one thing none of them has done is to save either time or labour. [...] This is the devil’s bargain of the technium, and we have been falling for it forever: embrace the new, lose the old, and find yourself more deeply entwined in a technological web from which you cannot extricate yourself even if you want to."
- Paul Kingsnorth
"With enough current, any wire can be welding wire."
- anonymous
"[T]his is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for the second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering."
- Thomas Jefferson
Interesting. When/where did Jefferson say that?
Interesting. When/where did Jefferson say that?
Proposals to Revise the Virginia Constitution, letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816
"The days is not far off, I think, when some of us who work in open-plan offices may hold entire conversations which consist of reading AI scripts created on our phones. The trick will be making these recitations sound natural by pausing sometimes and varying our pacing, clearing our throats, maybe sneezing on occasion."
- Walter Kirn
Interesting. When/where did Jefferson say that?Proposals to Revise the Virginia Constitution, letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816
Cool. Thanks for the reference. :-)
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"At that time there were 11 aircraft based at this airport: 91% single-engine and 9% helicopter."
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"The days is not far off, I think, when some of us who work in open-plan offices may hold entire conversations which consist of reading AI scripts created on our phones. The trick will be making these recitations sound natural by pausing sometimes and varying our pacing, clearing our throats, maybe sneezing on occasion."
- Walter Kirn
Any halfway-decent AI will be able to do all those things when reciting the script in your voice.
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“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”
- José Ortega y Gasset
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"It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls."
- C.S. Lewis
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"To anyone who recommended The Mandalorian to me, I finally checked it out. I only have one question... why do you hate me?"
- Daniele Bolelli
"I like music. It goes in my ear."
- random YouTube commenter
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“Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are, in principle, under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist, that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level. [...] Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I am opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy.”
― Noam Chomsky
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"The UK and the USA: two countries divided by a common language."
- anonymous commenter
"If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." - Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850
"Few things worse than the idea that you are some unique soul. There have been thousands of humans psychologically identical to you over time, you are a modern avatar of an old archetype, and you need to find what that archetype is. Your best life equals embodying that archetype fully. After basic survival, humans burn the highest amount of energy telling stories. We are a storytelling species because we are an archetype finding species. An old hero who speaks to you is your soul tracing its own mould for the first time."
- Jash Dholani
"To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human is the key to modern life."
- David Foster Wallace
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"A population beset by despair, a sense of dethronement and powerlessness, is intoxicated by an orgy of annihilation, which soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed them. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical one. It retreats into self-adulation fed by self-delusion and historical amnesia."
- Chris Hedges
Fish heads
Fish heads
Happy happy fish heads
Fish heads
Fish heads
Eat them up
Yum
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Movements are systems and systems kill
- Crass, "Punk Is Dead"
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Fish heads
Fish heads
Happy happy fish heads
Fish heads
Fish heads
Eat them up
Yum
[pedantic]
The lyric is "Roly-poly fish heads".[/pedantic]
"Roly-poly fish heads are never seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women. Yeah!"
(same song: "Fish Heads" by Barnes & Barnes)
Fish heads
Fish heads
Happy happy fish heads
Fish heads
Fish heads
Eat them up
Yum[pedantic]
The lyric is "Roly-poly fish heads".
[/pedantic]"Roly-poly fish heads are never seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women. Yeah!"
(same song: "Fish Heads" by Barnes & Barnes)
Not fun at parties since they aren't good dancers.
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"There is now an ambient political conditioning that is so pervasive, it is hard to bring into focus as an object of scrutiny. It’s just the water we swim in. It often feels like the point of it is to “trouble” us, like modern art."
- Matt Crawford
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"Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking, it's a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along. It's a thing that Jefferson laid great stress on. It wasn't enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in a Constitution or a Bill of Rights. The people had to be educated and they had to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise, we don't run the government--the government runs us."
- Carl Sagan
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“Part of the playful pleasure of postmodern theory was pretending that a flaw in a poem was evidence of a crack in society, and that verbal constructs held true for three-dimensional life like a pin stuck in a voodoo doll that made a real person scream. What would happen if such fanciful borrowings from the realm of magic and mental illness began seeping into law, public policy, or political culture? Turning everything into a text that meant only what the interpreter believed it meant.”
- Jonathan Rosen
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and the next step in Rosen's description?
--> clarifying that last sentence, or recasting it for accuracy:
"Turning everything into text that means exactly what anyone claims it means, under any set of circumstances."
"Provided that it is not accompanied by humiliation, discomfort can be endured for long periods without complaint. For proof of this, we have only took look to the example of the many soldiers and explorers who have, over the centuries, willingly tolerated privations far exceeding those suffered by the poorest members of their societies, so long as they were sustained throughout their hardships by an awareness of esteem in which they were held by others."
- Alain de Botton
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"(B)y means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms--elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest--will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial--but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)
“When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered in mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.”
- Niccolò Machiavelli
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
- Frank Zappa
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"Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgement or will of their own. They become very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of what I have called “herd-poisoning.”
Reading is a private, not a collective activity. The writer speaks only to individuals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety. The orator speaks to masses of individuals, already well primed with herd poison. They are at his mercy and, if he knows his business, he can do what he likes with them."
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)
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“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
- Aldous Huxley