Find The Punch

I wasn't in a mood to find the punch.

-- World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen, explaining why he offered challenging U.S. Grandmaster Fabiano Caruana a draw in Game 12 of the World Chess Championship; the players have reached a draw in all 12 scheduled games, triggering a series of rapid games Wednesday to determine the winner, 26 November 2018

Perverse Games

The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.

-- Octavio Paz Lozano (1914 - 1998), poet, writer, diplomat, and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Mexican writer to become a Nobel Laureate, El mono gramatico (The Monkey Grammarian), ch. 4 (1974)

Happy Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving (Wednesday) I had the pleasure of hosting all 5 of my daughters, all 10 of my grandchildren, and 3 out of 4 sons-in-law, for a grand total of 20 people at my house for a traditional turkey dinner.  The farthest-travelled were my #3 daughter who rode the train from Louisiana to Champaign, and her husband who flew to Champaign from Boston, where he was working.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Reflect And Be Thankful

Thanksgiving is not an anachronism whose time is past.  It is much more than a holiday to celebrate a meal shared between the Pilgrims and Native Americans.  It is a time to reflect and be thankful for what we have -- not for what we cherish, desire or envy.

-- Theodore Anthony "Ted" Nugent (13 December 1948 -), American musician, singer, songwriter, hunter, and political activist, America Rocks (28 November 2002)

An Opinion

God is not the name of God, but an opinion about Him.

-- Pope Sixtus I (42–125), Bishop of Rome from c. 115 to his death c. 124, succeeding Pope Alexander I, The Ring (c. 120), attributed

Urban Conflagration

This is the kind of urban conflagration Americans thought they had banished in the early 20th century.  It's like watching measles or polio return.

-- Fire historian and Arizona State University School of Life Sciences Professor Stephen Pyne, writing for Slate about the California wildfires, 10 November 2018

All The Evidence They Need

Most people think the world is out to get them, because they have all the evidence they need -- they don’t get enough of what they want.  But that doesn't make it so.

-- John Barnes (1957-), American science fiction author, Mother of Storms (1994) p. 104

Not My Fill

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

-- Michel de Montaigne (Michel Eyquem, lord of the manor of Montaigne, Dordogne) (1533 - 1592), influential French Renaissance writer, generally considered to be the inventor of the personal essay, Essais (1595) Book III, Ch. 2

No Reason

It's too bad I won't get to see all the illogical and pathetic reasons people will put in my mouth as to why I did it.  Fact is I had no reason to do it, and I just thought....(expletive), life is boring so why not?

I hope people call me insane (two smiley face emojis) would that just be a big ball of irony?  Yeah...  I'm insane, but the only thing you people do after these shootings is "hopes and prayers"... or "keep you in my thoughts".

Every time...and wonder why these keep happening... -- (two smiley face emojis).

-- Gunman David Long, in a series of Instagram posts made during his attack on the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, 7 November 2018, as reported by ABC News

RIP Stan Lee

Another definition of a hero is someone who is concerned about other people's well-being, and will go out of his or her way to help them -- even if there is no chance of a reward.  That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero.

-- Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber,  28 December 1922 - 12 November 2018), American comic book writer, editor, producer, and publisher; editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, cyberspacers.com

Twice As Far

For some reason troops can throw a live grenade twice as far as a practice one.

-- Leonard James, 1st Regiment Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, in an on-line discussion of military training, 9 November 2018

Reason Alone

Reason alone does not suffice.

-- Carl Gustav Jung (1875 - 1961), Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, The Undiscovered Self (1958) p. 98

I Am Submitting

Dear Mr. President,

At your request, I am submitting my resignation.

-- Jefferson B. Sessions III, Attorney General of the United States, in his resignation letter, 7 November 2018

Instrument And Symbol

Vote, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

-- Ambrose Bierce (1842 - ~1914), American short story writer, journalist, and poet, The Devil's Dictionary (1948), p. 359. Originally published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book

Rock The Vote

Rock the vote, people!

It Will Haunt You

If you do anything useful it will haunt you forever after, and if you have a major success you get decades of hard manual labor -- meaning you have to work on the manual.

-- Bjarne Stroustrup (30 December 1950 -), computer scientist and creator of the C++ programming language, Google+ C++ QA Community Event with Bjarne Stroustrup, 20 August 2014

How To Solve The World's Problems

The semiliterate on the next bar stool will tell you with absolute, arrogant assurance just how to solve the world's problems; while the scholar who has spent a lifetime studying their causes is not at all sure how to do this.

-- Edwin Thompson Jaynes (1922 - 1998), physicist and statistician, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (2003)

Genuine Courage

I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.  Wouldn't life be more interesting that way?  And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they?  Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year?  Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day.  People would be so much easier to talk to -- like talking to dogs.

-- Douglas Coupland (1961-), Canadian fiction writer and cultural commentator, in The Gum Thief: A Novel, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, (2011) p. 23

Born Or Naturalized

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

-- Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, proposed by Congress in 1863 and ratified in 1868

Screw Your Optics

HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.

I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.

Screw your optics, I'm going in.

-- Final post of Robert Bowers, @onedingo on Gab, who is accused of murdering 11 at the Tree Of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday, in which he refers to a right-wing conspiracy theory regarding the so-called "immigrant caravan" now crossing Mexico and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, posted 2 hours before the shooting on 27 October 2018

Yi Dan

Tonight I was awarded my second-degree black belt (Yi Dan) in Tae Kwon Do after testing earlier this  month.

I was originally scheduled to take this test in February 2017, but I tore the ACL in my right knee two weeks before the test.  As a result, it was about 19 months before I was finally able to take the test.

Whew!  Glad to get that behind me.

Excess Value

The capitalist does not produce a commodity for its own sake, nor for the sake of its use value, or his personal consumption.  The product in which the capitalist is really interested is not the palpable product itself, but the excess value of the product over the value of the capital consumed by it.

-- Karl Marx (5 May 1818 - 14 March 1883), German political philosopher and economist, in Das Kapital (Capital: Critique of Political Economy), Volume III, edited by Friedrich Engels (1894), Chapter II, The Rate of Profit, p. 41

Act Or Threats

[A]cts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.

-- President Donald Trump, in a statement after explosive devices were mailed to a number of Democrats including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, 24 October 2018

Plutocracy

The central issue is we're developing into a plutocracy.  We've got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they're rich because they're smart and constructive.  And they don't like government, and they don't like to pay taxes.

-- Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, in an interview with Andrew Sorkin, New York Times, 23 October 2018

What We Make

Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.

-- Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878 - 1969), American Baptist and Presbyterian minister, On Being a Real Person (1943)

Big Bird And Oscar The Grouch

I always thought, How fortunate for me that I got to play the two best Muppets?  Playing Big Bird is one of the most joyous things of my life. ...  I don't get to play him -- I get to live his life.

-- Caroll Spinney, who leaves "Sesame Street" this week after nearly 50 years of playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, New York Times, 17 October 2018

First Legal Gram

I came out tonight to be the first person in Canada to purchase the first legal gram of recreational cannabis, to help see the end of prohibition in Canada finally.

-- Canadian Ian Power, who with Nikki Rose completed the first legal marijuana sale in Canada, shortly after midnight in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada's easternmost province, Reuters.com, 17 October 2018

Tribal Affiliation

Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation.

-- The Cherokee Nation’s secretary of state, Chuck Hoskin Jr., in a statement Monday in response to a DNA test showing Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American, Washington Post, 16 October 2018

Are You Surprised?

When I speak of the fear, intimidation, arrests and public shaming of intellectuals and religious leaders who dare to speak their minds, and then I tell you that I’m from Saudi Arabia, are you surprised?

-- Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi (13 October 1958 - ?), missing Saudi journalist and author.  He is currently missing amid allegations that he was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on 2 October 2018.  "Saudi Arabia wasn’t always this repressive.  Now it’s unbearable." in The Washington Post (18 September 2017)

Disasters

This is what disasters look like.

-- Former FEMA Chief W. Craig Fugate, on the damage in Florida from Hurricane Michael, New York Times, 12 October 2018

Distance

If you can repair your future child's myopia with preemptive genetic tinkering, you might also want to increase her I.Q. by a few dozen points. Will it lead to a world as utopian as Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average? Of course not. It will just add genetic manipulation of embryos and child cloning to the means by which affluent, fussy people try to distance themselves from bad luck, disappointment, menial work, death, and poor people.

-- David Quammen (1948-), award-winning science, nature and travel writer, "Clone Your Troubles Away: Dreaming at the Frontiers of Animal Husbandry", Harper's Magazine (February 2005)

Thanks, Mark

I don't have a clever quote tonight, just the fading reverberations of a "China Grove" encore as the Doobie Brothers wrapped their set at State Farm Center in Champaign, IL tonight.

Cheers.

Girl With(out) Balloon

LONDON -- The British street artist Banksy pulled off one of his most spectacular pranks on Friday night, when one of his trademark paintings appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby's in London after selling for $1.4 million at auction.

The work, "Girl With Balloon," a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby's "Frieze Week" evening contemporary art sale.  After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby's.

-- New York Times, 6 October 2018



A few years ago, I secretly built a shredder into a painting in case it was ever put up for auction ....

-- British street artist Banksy, in a video explaining how he did it, posted to his Instagram, 6 October 2018

I Will

Mr. President, I will vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh.

-- Final line of remarks by Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) on the Senate floor to announce her decision to vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 5 October 2018

His Performance

At that time, I thought [Kavanaugh] had the qualifications for the Supreme Court should he be selected.  I've changed my views for reasons that have no relationship to his intellectual ability ....  I feel his performance in the hearings ultimately changed my mind.

-- Lifelong Republican and retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who was nominated by Gerald Ford and unanimously confirmed, speaking to a small group of retirees at The Institute for Learning in Retirement in Boca Raton, FL, when asked about praise of Brett Kavanaugh in his 2014 book "Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.", Palm Beach Post, 4 October 2018

Presidential alert

Presidential alert

THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.

Oct 3, 13:18

-- Text of the first test of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System, 3 October 2018 at 13:18

Weakness

The greatest weakness of all weaknesses is to fear too much to appear weak.

-- Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627 - 1704), French bishop, theologian, and court preacher. Bossuet was one of the first to advocate the theory of political absolutism; he made the argument that government was divine and that kings received their power from God, Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture (1709)

Talking

Look at me when I'm talking to you.  You're telling me that my assault doesn't matter!

-- An angry sexual assault survivor berating Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake as he steps into the elevator after a break in hearings on Supreme Court Candidate Brett Kavanaugh.  Flake subsequently forced a delay and an investigation, 28 September 2018

Intercede

I don't believe it's possible to be neutral.  The world is already moving in certain directions, and to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that, is to collaborate with whatever is going on.  And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world.  I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you, as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world.

-- Howard Zinn (1924 - 2010), American historian, political scientist, playwright and social activist, in Howard Zinn: You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004) documentary film

The Difference Between The Two

Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell.  It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do.  Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same -- to prevent trade.  The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading.  What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.   

-- Henry George (1839 - 1897), American economic and social philosopher who popularized the economic policies which have become known as Georgism, Protection or Free Trade? (1886)

That's OK

Didn't expect that reaction, but that's OK.

-- President Donald Trump, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, after attendees openly laughed in response to his assertions of record accomplishments by his administration, 25 September 2018

Fastest Human On A Bicycle

Denise Mueller-Korenek became the fastest human to ever ride a bicycle, hitting an average 183.932 miles per hour for one mile on a custom bicycle.  This shatters a record set in 1995.  They were only aiming for 175 miles per hour, tops, but ended up obliterating the 167 mile per hour record set by Fred Rompelberg.

-- Bill Chappell, NPR, via Numlock News, 20 September 2018

The Pleasure Of Hating

Scolding bad people makes us feel better about ourselves.  In his essay "On the Pleasure of Hating," William Hazlitt wrote, "There is no surfeiting on gall: Nothing keeps so well as a decoction of spleen.  We grow tired of every thing but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects."  We hate other people as a way to love ourselves.

-- Windsor Mann, quoting William Hazlitt (c. 1826), in The Week, "You'll miss Trump one day", (17 September 2018)


http://theweek.com/articles/795704/youll-miss-trump-day

What Happens

But fortunately, we had a good saying that we've held firm to to this day ... which is: What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep.  That's been a good thing for all of us, I think.

-- Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in a 2015 speech at Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law

Hereinafter Referred

This letter sets forth the full and complete plea offer to your client Paul J. Manafort, Jr. (hereinafter referred to as "your client" or "defendant") from the Special Counsel's Office (hereinafter referred to as "the Government" or "this Office").  If your client accepts the terms and conditions of this offer, please have your client execute this document in the space provided below.  Upon receipt of the executed document, this letter will become the Plea Agreement (hereinafter referred to as the "Agreement"). 

-- Opening paragraph of the plea agreement between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, filed 14 September 2018

Complexity And Uncertainty

Accepting and respecting neurodiversity is the key to surviving the transformation driven by the internet and AI, which is shattering the Newtonian predictability of the past and replacing it with a Heisenbergian world of complexity and uncertainty.

-- Joi Ito, in Wired Magazine, The Educational Tyranny Of The Neurotypicals, 6 September 2018


https://www.wired.com/story/tyranny-neurotypicals-unschooling-education/

Original Thought

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

-- Henry Louis (H. L.) Mencken (12 September 1880 - 29 January 1956), journalist, satirist, social critic, and freethinker, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

RIP Burt Reynolds

We're only here for a little while, and you've got to have some fun, right?  I don't take myself seriously, and I think the ones that do, there's some sickness with people like that.

-- Burton Leon "Burt" Reynolds (11 February 1936 - 6 September 2018), American actor, director and producer, "Burt Reynolds Has Made Mistakes. But He Regrets Nothing" in The New York Times (23 March 2018)

A Spark

We have been through much darker times than these.  And somehow each generation of Americans carried us through to the other side.  Not by sitting around and waiting for something to happen, not by leaving it to others to do something, but by leading that movement for change themselves.  And if you do that, if you get involved and you get engaged and you knock on some doors and you talk with your friends and you argue with your family members and you change some minds and you vote, something powerful happens.  Change happens.  Hope happens.  Not perfection, not every bit of cruelty and sadness and poverty and disease suddenly stricken from the Earth.  There will still be problems, but with each new candidate that surprises you with a victory that you supported, a spark of hope happens.

-- Former president Barack Obama, in a speech at Foellinger Hall on the campus of the University of Illinois in Urbana, 7 September 2018

Resistance

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It's not just that the special counsel looms large.  Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump's leadership.  Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma -- which he does not fully grasp -- is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know.  I am one of them.

-- New York Times Op-Ed by a senior official in the Trump administration, published anonymously, 5 September 2018