The Rock

The Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not only when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction. To do less would diminish us and undermine the foundation upon which we stand.

-- Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the US District Court in Manhattan, who barred testimony from a crucial witness in the first trial of a former Guantanamo detainee, New York Times, 7 October 2010

You May Know

You may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestows it.

-- Thomas Guthrie (1803-1873), Scottish divine and philanthropist, Man and the Gospel (1865)

Corporations

The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. 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. --How is this?

-- Rutherford B Hayes (4 October 1822 - 17 January 1893), 19th President of the US (1877-1881), diary entry for 11 March 1888

Our World Is Different

We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

-- John Perry Barlow (3 October 1947-), American poet, essayist, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

Frenemies

We will have to see whether we are allies or enemies.

-- Rehman Malik, Pakistan's interior minister, on strained relations between his country and the United States following deadly American air strikes inside Pakistan, New York Times, 1 October 2010

Learn About Money

The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.

-- Katharine Whitehorn (1928-), British journalist, writer, and columnist

Not

There will no longer be any one-sided concessions. We don't agree to any extension of the freeze, not for three months, not for a year, half a year or one minute. It needs to be understood that signing a comprehensive peace agreement, which means an end to the conflict, settling of mutual claims and recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, this is an unattainable goal, not in the coming year and not in the next generation.

-- Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in comments just days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to hold regular US-brokered talks following last year's summit in Washington, 7 September 2010

Veggies

There is nothing you can say that will get people to eat more veggies.

-- Harry Balzer, of market research company the NPD Group, New York Times, 25 September 2010

Extremism

Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign -- a kind of death-rattle -- when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.

-- John Brunner (1934 - 1996), science fiction author, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Tell Us

We don't want to see more dead. We don't want to see more wounded, nor do we want to be intimidated. It is impossible for us to do our job under these conditions. Tell us, then, what you expect from us, as a newspaper? ... This is not a surrender. This is about a truce with those who have imposed the force of their law in this city, so that you will respect the lives of those who dedicate themselves to the job of informing the public.

-- From an editorial on the front page of the Mexican newspaper El Diario de Juarez, following the second murder of an el Diario reporter, 20 September 2010

FDA

FDA Barring Food Makers from Advertising Products as GMO-Free

The FDA meanwhile appears to be enforcing a policy of barring food producers from trumpeting that their products don't contain genetically modified ingredients. According to the Washington Post, the FDA has sent a "flurry of enforcement letters" to companies that have advertised GMO-free products on their labels. The warnings come on top of existing policy not to require food makers to disclose if their products do contain GMOs. Congress member Dennis Kucinich said, "This, to me, raises questions about whose interest the FDA is protecting. They are clearly protecting industry, and not the public."

Democracy Now 20 September 2010

Original Thought

One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings.

-- Diogenes of Sinope (412 BC - 323 BC), Cynic philosopher of ancient Greece

Big Belly People

You should know that our leaders are big belly people, and they care about themselves more than anyone else.

-- Osman Shenwari, a village mayor in Afghanistan, New York Times, 18 September 2010

Knowingness

There are people for whom nothing is more embarrassing than to be caught not in the know. To arm themselves against embarrassment, they choose knowingness, which is just ignorance hidden by information.

-- Leon Wieseltier, Washington Diarist: In the Know, The New Republic: Books & Arts, 16 September 2010

Machine

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

-- Will Durant (1885-1981), American historian, philosopher and writer


[1337]

Bless Them

We should not hold middle-class tax cuts hostage any longer. We are ready this week, if they want, to give tax cuts to every American making $250,000 or less. that's 98, 97 percent of Americans. Now, for any income over this amount, the tax rates would just go back to what they were under President Clinton. This isn't to punish folks who are better off -- God bless them -- it's because we can't afford the $700 billion price tag.

-- President Barack Obama on his proposed tax strategy, 8 September 2010

Premeditated

An expectation is a premeditated resentment.

-- Nina Paley, Mimi & Eunice, 14 September 2010,


http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/2010/09/14/resentment/

Tired

I'm tired of talking about everything else, tired of the politics. Today is only about loss.

-- Alyson Low, whose sister died in the Sept. 11 attacks, on the controversies in the weeks before this year's commemoration, New York Times, 12 September 2010

Used To Be

What we were finding was that the soldiers we're getting in today's Army are not in as good shape as they used to be. This is not just an Army issue. This is a national issue.

-- Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who oversees basic training for the Army, New York Times, 31 August 2010

Third Half

We want to make Google the third half of your brain.

-- Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, on a new Internet search product, New York Times, 9 September 2010