Saturday, May 31, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 31, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 31, 2014



"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

- Upton Sinclair, in I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 27, 2014

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Friday, May 30, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 30, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 30, 2014



"Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris's right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, 'Stop this madness; we don't have to live like this?' Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more."

- Richard Martinez, speaking after the death of his son Christopher at the hands of a gunman near the University of California Santa Barbara campus.

[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/05/christopher-michael-martinezs-father-gets-it-right.html]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
May 29, 2014

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Thursday, May 29, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 29, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 29, 2014



"Once you can be defined, give it up."

- Sigmar Polke, artist.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
May 27, 2014

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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 28, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 28, 2014



"And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo--that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices."

- Joyce Carol Oates, from "Reflections on the Grotesque".

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 27, 2014

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Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 27, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 27, 2014



"And so it occurred to me (after my fifth pint of IPA) to spin my speculative political satire around the fact that there is only one man on the global political scene today who has what it takes to be a plausible Republican candidate for President Of The United States at the next presidential election.

"This man: Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin.

"Let me enumerate the ways in which this man makes sense as a candidate. He's only 62 years old--not as youthful as Barack Obama, but still well within the age range for POTUS. He has proven experience of leading an aggressive, declining, former military superpower bristling with nuclear weapons and suffering from eating disorders and a tendency to binge on breakaway republics when nobody is looking. As a former KGB Colonel he understands the needs of the security state like no US president before him, except possibly George H. W. Bush (a former Director ofthe CIA); he's exactly the right man to be in charge of the NSA, post-Snowden. As a Russian he clearly likes his tea, so he'll go down well with that wing of the party. Nobody can accuse him of being soft on terrorism, or communism, or gay rights. Nobody can question his virile, macho manhood either, not with his state-run press agency circulating photographs of him bareback-riding a bear. He's an instinctive authoritarian, a daddy figure, totally in love with god, guts, and guns--and if anyone says otherwise he'll put powdered Polonium in their soup."

- Charlie Stross, writer.

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/04/books-i-will-not-write-yet-ano.html]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
May 27, 2014

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Saturday, May 24, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 24, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 24, 2014



"An absence isn't a weakness if you make it someone else's problem."

- David Merrill, writing about Anthony Robles, 2011 NCAA Division 1 wrestling champion, who has only one leg.

[http://deadspin.com/the-one-legged-wrestler-who-conquered-his-sport-then-l-452888181]

Submitted by: Prem Pahlajrai
May 20, 2014

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Friday, May 23, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 23, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 23, 2014



".... We do all kinds of things to ensure that we can have a realm in which we can engage in conduct without other people's judgmental eyes being cast upon us.

"And if you look at how tyrannies have used surveillance in the past, they don't use surveillance in support of their tyranny in the sense that every single person is being watched at all times, because that just logistically hasn't been able to be done.... But what's important about a surveillance state is that it creates the recognition that your behavior is susceptible to being watched at any time. What that does is radically alter your behavior, because if we can act without other people watching us, we can test all kinds of boundaries, we can explore all kinds of creativity, we can transgress pretty much every limit that we want because nobody's going to know that we're doing it. That's why privacy is so vital to human freedom.

"But if we know we're being watched all the time, then we're going to engage in behavior that is acceptable to other people, meaning we're going to conform to orthodoxies and norms. And that's the real menace of a ubiquitous surveillance state: It breeds conformity; it breeds a kind of obedient citizenry, on both a societal and an individual level. That's why tyrannies love surveillance, but it's also why surveillance literally erodes a huge part of what it means to be a free individual."

- Glenn Greenwald, journalist

[http://www.cnet.com/news/saving-the-net-from-the-surveillance-state-glenn-greenwald-speaks-up-q-a/]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
May 21, 2014

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Thursday, May 22, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 22, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 22, 2014



"In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant."

- Hannah Arendt, in On Violence.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
May 21, 2014

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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 21, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 21, 2014



"I would rather be ashes than dust."

- Jack London

[http://london.sonoma.edu/credo.html]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 21, 2014

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Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 20, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 20, 2014



"The goal of the project is to raise that question of how do we know what's best, or what is humane treatment and also to look at how we treat ourselves. We're living in these little boxes, just like chickens."

- Austin Stewart, an assistant professor in Iowa State University's College of Design, on his speculative Second Livestock program. Second Livestock envisions virtual-reality headsets that could be put on chicken to provide an illusion of a free-range life.

[http://www.secondlivestock.com/]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
May 19, 2014

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Monday, May 19, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 19, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 19, 2014



"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more qtired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

- Rosa Parks, from her autobiography, recalling what led her tqo refuse to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, on Dec. 1, 1955. Her spontaneous action led to a boycott of Montgomery buses in protest and was a seminal event in the U.S. civil rights movement.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
May 19, 2014

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Friday, May 16, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 16, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 16, 2014



In America, there are two things
they got lots of: guns and sandwiches.
It is every person's right to know
how to pack a rod and a light lunch.
But in my country, if you haven't got a gun
you ain't gettin' no sandwich.

- Nash the Slash, musician, aka Jeff Plewman, from his song Guns and Sandwiches. Nash died recently at the age of 66.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 14, 2014

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Thursday, May 15, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 15, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 15, 2014



"All of the modern formats weren't really made to last a long period of time. They were really more developed for mass production."

- Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress, discussing how compact discs age and become unplayable.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/the-library-of-congress-wants-to-destroy-your-old-cds-for-science/370804/]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
May 14, 2014

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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 14, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 14, 2014



Can I tag along tonight?
We'll kill some time, it looks like you might
Need a little company
I'm so cheap I might as well be free

- Joel Plaskett, from his song Nowhere With You.

[http://joelplaskett.com]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 13, 2014

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Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 13, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 13, 2014



"While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets."

- David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.

[http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 12, 2014

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Monday, May 12, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 12, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 12, 2014



"We kill people based on metadata."

- General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA.

[http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/may/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 12, 2014

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Sunday, May 11, 2014

Quotation of the day for May 11, 2014

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Quotation of the Day for May 11, 2014



"Blues means what milk does to a baby. Blues is what the spirit is to the minister. We sing the blues because our hearts have been hurt, our souls have been disturbed."

- Alberta Hunter

Submitted by: Terry Labach
May 11, 2014

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