Quote of the Day

"The word intellectual strikes me as odd. Personally, I've never met any intellectuals. I've met people who write novels, others who treat the sick. People who work in economics and others who write electronic music. I've met people who teach, people who paint, and people of whom I have never really understood what they do... But intellectuals? Never.

On the otherhand, I've met a lot of people who talk about "the intellectual". And listening to them, I've got some idea of what such an animal could be. It's not difficult -- he's quite personified. He's guilty about pretty well everything: about speaking out and about keeping silent, about doing nothing and about getting involved in everything... In short, the intellectual is raw material for a verdict, a sentence, a condemnation, an exlusion...

I don't find that intellectuals talk too much, since for me they don't exist. But I do find that more and more is being said about intellectuals, and I don't find it very reassuring.

I have an unfortunate habit. When people speak about this or that, I try to imagine what the result would be if translated into reality. When they "criticize" someone, when they "denounce" his ideas, when they "condemn" what he writes, I imagine them in the ideal situation in which they would have complete power over him. I take the words they use -- demolish, destroy, reduce to silence, bury -- and see what the effect would be if they were taken literally. And I catch a glimpse of the radiant city in which the intellectual would be in prison, or if he were also a theoretician, hanged, of course."

Source: Michel Foucault:The Masked Philosopher. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and other writings 1977-1984. (page 324)

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.

-George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

-George Orwell

1. The delusion that individual advancement is made by crushing others
2. The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected
3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it
4. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences
5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind and not acquiring the habit of reading and studying
6. Attempting to compel other persons to believe and live as we do.

"Thus we have a system that encourages lowest common denominator stories that appeal to the Jerry Springer in all of us, stories about missing teens in Aruba that we can all get concerned about. This is also why we don't see stories about Darfur, Genocide, children being raped in Iraq, or all the other unpleasant things that are happening in your world tonight. What isn't profitable for the corporation isn't something the corporation wants to show, and those things disturb people, make them feel bad and guilty for not doing something. It makes them question their wisdom in electing their current leaders. Worst of all, in the corporate eyes, it makes them change the channel. And when that happens, people in the news room lose their jobs."

The methods and bias of the media

We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled. ...the Court's conclusions in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion and that government has no compelling interest in protecting prenatal human life throughout pregnancy find no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.

Supreme Court Nominee, John Roberts

Globalism is yesterday's tomorrow. The future is about living locally on a much smaller scale. Pepsi Cola and Exxon-Mobil are exactly the kind of gigantic enterprises that are going to wither and die over the next decade. China is not tomorrow's geopolitical colossus, it's a geopolitical super train wreck waiting to collide with the reality of its environmental devastation, population overshoot, and energy starvation. Americans will be lucky if they can do each other's laundry ten years from now, let alone sell massive amounts of soda pop to people twelve thousand miles away.

-Jim Cunstler

Modern psychology has often drawn, I suspect, a caricature rather than a portrait of man. As a result it has introduced a grave gap between itself and the knowledge of men that observation gives us and from which investigation must start. Those who are not psychologists ... speak of such strange things as fair play, justice and unjustice, even of dignity and the need for freedom. ... Yet not only are these ideas excluded from scientific discussion; the conceptual schemes with which psychology works today hardly leave room for them.

Solomon E.

"It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones--a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative systems, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy ...is enough to drive one to despair.

I've been around journalists my entire life, since I was a little kid, and I haven't met more than five in three-plus decades who wouldn't literally shit from shame before daring to say that their job had anything to do with truth or informing the public. Everyone in the commercial media, and that includes Hitchens, knows what his real job is: feeding the monkey. We are professional space-fillers, frivolously tossing content-pebbles in an ever-widening canyon of demand, cranking out one silly pack-mule after another for toothpaste and sneaker ads to ride on straight into the brains of the stupefied public.

Matt Taibbi, Shoveling Coal for Satan.