1614) We [are] awash in unconstrained subjectivity - point of view grounded in nothing more substantial than personal wish and tribal myth. Postmodernism teaches us that no one can really know the truth. Multiculturalism instructs us not to challenge the beliefs of others. If the press has lost the will to tell us what it all means, it's merely a reflection of our society, which can't center on an interpretive framework capable of providing shared meaning.
What's missing from public forums isn't subjectivity but a respect for well-considered arguments backed up by facts. With reasoned analysis out of fashion, it's hardly surprising the day-to-day public dialogs have become no more than tribal shouting matches.
1615) Internet newsgroups [...] and other virtual communities are being promoted as nascent public spheres that will renew democracy in the 21st century. But these claims are fundamentally misguided: they overlook the profound differences between Internet "cafes" and the agoras of the past.
Disembodied exchange of video text is not a substitute for face-to-face meeting - it has its own logic, its own ways of forming opinions. These attributes will powerfully affect the politics that emerge in our digital era. [...] [On the Net]rational argument rarely prevails, and achieving consensus is widely seen as impossible. [...] Dissent on the Net does not lead to consensus: it creates the profusion of different views. [...] The conditions that encourage compromise , the hallmark of the democratic political process, are lacking online.
1617) If there are going to be filters on the Net, they have to come from you and your family, not the government. Even if one believes that they should come from the government, that would be impossible. No one can look at a bit stream and tell if it's pornographic.
Nicholas Negroponte interviewed by Thomas A. Bass in "Being Nicholas" in Wired (11/1995)
1618) Last January, a Muslim cleric asked the United States government to extradite Michael Jackson and Madonna to stand trial in Tehran for obscenity. You laugh. But at roughly the same time, a court in Memphis, Tennessee, was convicting Robert and Carleen Thomas, who operate a commercial bulletin board system in Milpitas, California, for violating the community standards in Memphis.
Nicholas Negroponte interviewed by Thomas A. Bass in "Being Nicholas" in Wired (11/1995)
1619) How do you respond to being flamed?: I always send a nice reply thanking them for their remarks, however harsh. Then, what invariably happens is that the person turns into a mellow tiger and starts falling all over him- or herself with apologies. E-mail is funny. If people flame at you and you reply gently, it catches them off guard.
Nicholas Negroponte interviewed by Thomas A. Bass in "Being Nicholas" in Wired (11/1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 457 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1608) The art of letters will come to an end before AD 2000 and there will be a sort of artistic dark ages till about AD 2700.
Ezra Pound letter to his mother, Isabel Pound (1/1/1910) quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section in Wired (10/1995)
1609) Simply stated, the techniques of artificial intelligence are to the mind what bureaucracy is to human social interaction.
Terry Winograd "Thinking Machines: Can There Be? Are We?" in The Boundaries of Humanity (1991) James J. Sheehan, Morton Sosna, eds. quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section in Wired (10/1995)
1610) "Psychic Litter" is a term I coined to mean acts of immorality so small as to be below the level of consciousness. One example is wasting small amounts of the time of many people. Bruce Tognazzini, the user interface guru, once opined that by creating a product that wastes a half hour of time for each of 4 million users, you waste 900 work-years of human productivity. That works out to about 12 complete lives.
1611) Programming is dreadfully impermanent; it's more like performance art than literature.
Bruce Sterling quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section in Wired (10/1995)
1612) Consider the human form. It clearly isn't designed to be a scientist. Your mental capacity is extremely limited. You have to undergo all kinds of unnatural training to get your brain even half suited for this kind of work - and for that reason, it's hard work. You live just long enough to start figuring things out before your brain starts deteriorating. And then, you die.
Hans Moravec quoted by Charles Platt in "Super Humanism" in Wired (10/1995)
1613) He was quiet, mostly kept to himself.
cliched reaction of neighbors to a serial killer, used as part of an ad for Comedy Central's Exit 57 TV show in Wired (10/1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 458 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1605) The Internet [...] evolves through the Internet Engineering Task Force, the IETF. [...] In the IETF, there's a kind of direct populist democracy that most of us have never experienced: Not in democratically elected government, where too many layers of pols and polls and images and handling intervene. Not in radical politics, where too often, the same old alpha-male/top-dog politics prevail despite the countercultural objectives pursued. And not in the feminist collective world, where so much time is spent establishing total consensus and dealing with the concerns of process queens that little gets done. The IETF provides a counter-example of true grassroots political process that few of us have ever had the privilege to participate in. [...] IETF group process succeeds because of a profound connection with, and understanding of, the real world of networking.
[...] MIT professor Dave Clark, one of the grand old men of the Internet, may have unintentionally written the IETF anthem in his "A Cloud Crystal Ball/Apocalypse Now" presentation at the 24th annual July 1992 IETF conference. Today, it's immortalized on T-shirts: "We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code." Which might translate to, "In the IETF, we don't allow caucusing, lobbying, and charismatic leaders to chart our path, but when something out on the Net really seems to work and makes sense to most of us, that's the path we'll adopt."
[...] The best of the IETFers are folks you'd want to have with you after the nuclear holocaust the Net was originally funded to survive: well-intentioned, clear-headed, results-oriented, communicative (these are communications geeks, after all) - and community-minded. [...]
[...] [T]he typical IETF populist assumption [is] that all citizens are equally able to make important decisions [...] and the process has worked quite well.
1606) [There is a] a mailing list of about 30 people who routinely bark at each other about the meaning of life, the events of the day, and esoterica such as the roots of the Peloponnesian War.
What's [interesting] about this mailing list/debating society is the number of Net GSGs (Genuinely Smart Guys/Gals) who subscribe to it. And even though formal education (some have PhDs, some dropped out of college), religion (some are fundamentalist Christian, some have lived in monasteries in Japan and India), geography (some live all other North America, some in other hemispheres), and politics (some consider themselves far to the right of Newt, some consider themselves tree-huggers of the first order) vary wildly, good manner prevail while arguments rage. Typical of the mailing list's fierce-but-friendly style is the ongoing debate between its creationists and its Darwinians, a bit like a match of the World Wrestling Federation - much shouting and posturing, much goodwill. And no one gets hurt.
1607) - We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code. - What are we good at? Responding to short-term reality, building stuff that works, calling bad stuff bad. - What are we bad at? Growing our processes to match our size, setting long term direction. - Our best success was not computing, but hooking people together.
Dave Clark "A Cloudy Crystal Ball/Apocalypse Now" (1992) quoted by Pauline Borsook in "How Anarchy Worked" Wired (10/1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 458 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1599) Our communal and civic open spaces - courts, workplaces, Congress, Academe, the media - are no longer places where issues are settled, but battlegrounds on which the most pressing conflicts will never be resolved. America is no longer one nation indivisible, if it ever was, but a land peoples by many bitterly divided tribes.
While we still come together under the aegis of public institutions to thrash out our shared values, laws, and understandings, the notion of an America united by common views of attainable equality, justice and individual freedom is a myth.
1600) The role of modern journalism as a mechanism for meaningful cultural debate is a great hoax, exposed by Orenthal James Simpson and the spectacle he's provoked in LA.
1601) [A] jury no longer does what it was meant to do (function as the true conscience of the community) but represents those parts of the community, those tribes, to which individual jurors belong.
1602) Cultural isolation might have been possible when news consisted of a daily paper, a weekly magazine, or a newscast. But news channels are now on 24 hours a day, and there are nearly 1,000 radio talk shows. There is no way to isolate a juror or anyone else from the pervasive media and their chorus of messages. Nor is there any reason to. Either potential jurors are forced to pretend they live in a cocoon, or they really do live in cocoons that poorly prepare them for their roles of deciding enormously complex issues.
But the more you know about law in general or about a case in particular, say author Wendy Kaminer, the less likely you are to wind up on a jury. Litigators, she points out, don't seek objective, unbiased jurors: they want biased ones - people their believe will favor their cases. And concern over pretrial publicity, Kaminer says, favors uninformed over informed jurors.
1603) For better or worse, great stories have always transformed the media that cover them and the institutions they cover. Walter Cronkite's coverage of the Kennedy assassination and the moon landing were broadcast journalism's twin high-water marks, legitimizing TV news as the country's most pervasive news medium. Watergate brought the press into its ongoing age of antagonism and self-righteousness, as reporters entered the personal and sexual lives of public figures. The death of Elvis sparked a booming new tabloid news culture that's become a permanent part of our information structure. The Northridge, California, earthquake, reported first on Prodigy via wireless modem, made online communications a news medium in the traditional sense of the term. [...]
But if great stories transform media, they also systematically shake our belief in institutions. Watergate and Vietnam eroded the credibility of the military and the presidency. The dramas of Anita Hill and Rodney King discredited Congress and the police. The Simpson trial has done the same for criminal justice and mass media. Story by story, our civic hearts seem broken, our faith shattered. For a generation, media mythologized our most important institutions - the FBI, the government, the judicial system. Then we learned shocking, revelatory new truths about the way our civil service machinery works, and we were totally unprepared for the idea that it doesn't always work. No wonder why we puzzle over why we are so angry and disconnected. We are given so little truth most of the time, reality seems unbearable when we are finally confronted with it.
1604) If one tenet of our age is that information wants to be free, its companion is that media wants to tell the truth. Neither information nor media get what they want much of the time; this is one of the great ironies of the information revolution and the sad legacy of the O.J. Simpson trial.
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 458 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
In the late 70's and early 80's, the crowd at Yankee Stadium would, with some frequency, spontaneously burst into a chant of "Steinbrenner Sucks!", showing their disdain for the man who ran the New York Yankees like his personal fiefdom. There hasn't been much reason for chanting lately, and that's in large part because Joe Torre's presence as the manager seemed to defang The Boss somewhat. And with a young, acitivist GM in Brian Cashman, it was no longer so easy to see Steinbrenner's paw prints on the club's activities.
But the dishonorable and disgraceful handling of Joe Torre that culminated in his leaving the Yankees has all the hallmarks of the way Steinbrenner does things. He's a man who believes in threats and intimidation, and would rather coerce results than get them in more productive ways. I've had my share of criticisms of Torre's managerial decisions, especially in the way he handles the bullpen, but there can be absolutely no doubt in any baseball fan's mind, Yankee-lover or Yankee-hater, that Torre deserved far better treatment from the team he's brought to the post-season 12 times in as many years. The Yankees may have been justified in making a change, but certainly not in going about it in such a cheap way, with no class at all.
I caught this ad on TV earlier this evening, for New Jersey State Senator Ellen Karcher. I thought it was interesting because it included none of the many cliches we've come to expect from political advertising. There was neither the grainy black & white photography, morphing faces, portentous voiceovers and stark graphics of negative attack ads, nor the fluffy shots of the candidate with family, or chatting with hard hats at a job site, or walking in rolled-up shirt sleeves with ordinary citizens of most positive ads.
This is effective salesmanship. It reminds me of Eliot Spitzer's ads in last year's New York gubernatoreial race, not because they have anything in common stylistically, but because of the decision in both cases to avoid the overused tropes and styles that make most political ads an annoyance and a chore to watch, and to instead concentrate on what will most effectively sell the candidate to the voter.
Ed Fitzgerald |
10/18/2007 10:41:00 PM
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1591) In books, television, and radio, the truth is a slave to a good story, and convincing lies are remembered, while dry factual refutations are forgotten.
1592) There's a conflict between interactivity and storytelling. Most people imagine there's a spectrum between conventional written stories on one side and total interactivity ion the other. But I believe that what you really have are two safe havens separated by a put of hell that can absorb endless amounts of time, skill, and resources.
1594) [E]ven if I could set my PC to randomly download my favorite songs from the Net, I'd never hear new material. Radio exposes us to music that we might not think of listening to, but that we enjoy.
1595) The utopian/dystopian technology question is a ponderously old one; proponents and opponents of trains, telegraphs, radio, and television all advances the same old game arguments, alternately triumphing new technologies as the latest step in ineluctable Western progress or decrying the loss of some organic, largely mythological past. But technology is neither good nor bad, nor even neutral.
Technology is one part of the complex of relationships that people form with each other and the world around them; it simply cannot be understood outside of that context. With this understanding, the simpleton's bipolar argument crumbles and the world is revealed - taa daa! - as a pretty complicated place.
1596) Confusion reigns in the political arena. Old labels no longer fit, and the citizenry seems torn between competing desired for saviors and scapegoats. While society at large seems bogged down in a bewildering swamp of regulation, litigation, legislation gridlock, and intrusive social engineering, the relatively blank canvas of the Net has encouraged visionaries and gadflies to project their dreams of a new political order onto the emerging technological culture. ... Some techno-optimists, entranced with the rapid expansion of cyberspace, are convinced that the rough contours of the future can be spotted in the shadowy forms dancing across their computer screens. The pounding drums of cypherpunks, Usenet orators, civil-liberties activists, and venture capitalists, all undulating together in the flickering RGB glow, seem to whisper alluring promises of power, privacy, and pluralism in the politics to come.
1597) [O]ne gets the sense that, given half a chance, the electorate would love to ditch the old left/rights horseshoe match and take on some new paradigms altogether.
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 459 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1586) There is a temptation to look at the human geography of LA, with its rich history of Spanish domination, Yankee connivance, mob-led lynchings, black, Chicano, and white riots, and surging influxes of Asians, as a mirror of the tortured terrestrial evolution [of the region]. It is easy to see how a demo-geologist might record the rectations of LA's ethnic history:
The Uto-Aztecan or Shoshonean plate was struck and largely submerged by the Impero-Hispanic plate in 1786, which pushed up Catholic fault blocks through the pacific thrust-faults of the Uto-Aztecan plate. The migrating Yankee plate created strains in the rock whose compressional force pushed up slabs of Iowa granite, eventually resulting in Los Angeles' first Protestant church service in 1850, which in turn jolted the deep Padre Sierra Fault. Well into the twentieth century, faraway geotechtonic temblors continued to shape the varied structure of the area, notably the Indochinese Cataclysm, the long-dormant but recently active Latino fault aggravated by the northward movement of the Guatemalo-Salvadoro-Nicaragan seismic web, and the Khomeini earthquake in Southwest Asia, which spewed plumes of Iranians over the Transverse Range of the San Fernando Valley. So far the Polynesia-Filipino Fault, one of the largest but longest-dormant earthquake faults, has failed to budge, unlike the Afro-Confederate Fault, whose violent eruptions have dramatically altered the formerly agrarian flatland of South Central Los Angeles.
Peter Theroux Translating LA (1995)
1587) The downside to all the driving [necessary to get around LA] is the mode of interruption that cars add to life in LA [...] It made the city lack impulsiveness. Distances were long, you had to make sure you had gas, there were the unpredictable traffic factors, and then you had to find a parking space and probably pay for it. It was like being a nicotine addict, making sure that you always had cigarettes and matches and were not far from an ashtray. This was, I guessed, the difference at the root of all the differences between LA and other cities.
Peter Theroux Translating LA (1995)
1588) My experiences of college campuses [...] had shown me that in certain cases the multiculturalism phenomenon was the opposite of broadening. At times it resembled a dogmatic tribal nationalism that actually ruled out a multicultural understanding of humanity.
Peter Theroux Translating LA (1995)
1589) [O]ur multicultural society would be far easier to handle if we weren't so mad about name changes. The entertainment industry [...] was especially to blame. If we had grown up listening to Henry Deutschendorf instead of John Denver, Natasha Gurdin instead of Natalie Wood, Ramon Estevez instead of Martin Sheen, and Cherilyn Sarkisian instead of Cher, perhaps things would be different. There was a backlash: after an era when Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino had to become Rita Hayworth, you had teenage girls going from Cindy to Chilictlixatl.
Peter Theroux Translating LA (1995)
1590) My ancestors came from France, but I don't call myself French. I speak French, I've been to France, and I share the religion of most French people. None of that makes me French. The French wouldn't accept me as French. And I don't want to be French.
Peter Theroux Translating LA (1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 459 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1583) Just living on a Sunday morning, Got my toast and my tea and I'm warm and I just thought I'd think about.
All the things to get and keep getting, never enough not enough and never ending. I just thought I'd think about.
And it might be...
The comfort of a knowledge of a rise above the sky above could never parallel the challenge of an acquisition in the here and now.
Letters to Cleo (Michael Eisenstein, Kay Hanley, Stacey Jones, Greg McKenna, Scott Riebling) "Here & Now" (song, 1994) on Aurora Glory Alice (cd, 1994)
1584) What if God was one of us? Just a slob, like one of us? Just a stranger on the bus? Trying to make his way home.
Eric Brazilian "One of Us" (song, 1995) on Joan Osborne Relish (cd, 1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 459 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
William Mulholland spoken at the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct (11/5/1913) quoted by William L. Kahrl in Water and Power (1982)
1582) Damn a man who doesn't read books. The test of a man is his knowledge of humanity, of the politics of human life, his comprehension of the things that move men.
William Mulholland quoted by Richard Prosser in "William Mulholland: Maker of Los Angeles" in Western Construction News (4/25/1926) quoted by William L. Kahrl in Water and Power (1982)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 459 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1578) [The writings of] Carl von Clausewitz [...] on war are often distilled to the cliche that war is a continuation of politics by other means. This intersecting notion of politics and armed conflict can be linked to the idea that the modern state and its armies are the only legitimate purveyor of organized violence. Anyone else taking up arms is either an outlaw or a bandit.
Gary Stix "Fighting Future Wars" in Scientific American (12/1995)
1579) He who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers and for his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true, Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.
Max Weber quoted by William L. Kahrl as the epigram to Water and Power (1982)
1580) Every new social relation begats a new kind of wrong-doing - of sin to use an old-fashioned word - and many years always elapse before society is able to turn this sin into crime which can be effectively punished.
Theodore Roosevelt last annual message to Congress Congressional Record (12/8/1908) quoted by William L. Kahrl in Water and Power (1982)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 459 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1566) A faith is not acquired by reasoning. One does not fall in love with a woman, or enter the womb of a church, as a result of logical persuasion.
Arthur Koestler in The God That Failed (1950) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1567) The distinction between theories and values is not sufficiently recognized, but it is fundamental. On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a new way of living together among men.
Ignazio Silone in The God That Failed (1950) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1568) I consider that on account of its compromises Christianity is bankrupt. I have written, and I firmly believe, that if Christianity has really prevailed and if it had really fulfilled the teaching of Christ, there would be [...] no social problem at all.
Andre Gide with Enid Starke in The God That Failed (1950) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1569) All goals [...] are nothing in the abstract. They only have meaning in relation to the interests of living men, women , and children who are the means through which everything on earth is achieved. In one's zeal for a cause, it is possible to forget them, or to suppose that they can wait or to imagine that they don't mind. In one's absorption in an ideal, it is possible to imagine that one generation can be sacrificed for the sake of its descendants. But sacrificing people may become a habit unto the second and third generation. I thought [...] that I was serving humanity. But it is only since then that I have really discovered the human being.
Louis Fischer in The God That Failed (1950) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1570) The idea [...] of a perfect and immortal commonwealth, will always be found to be as chimerical as that of a perfect and immortal man.
David Hume The History of England (1761) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1571) Of what use is political liberty to those who have no bread? It is only of value to ambitious theorists and politicians.
Jean Paul Marat letter to Camille Desmoulins (6/22/1790) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1572) The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratic council, and oligarchical junta, or a single emperor.
John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson (11/13/1815) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1573) "One can't believe impossible things!" [said Alice] "I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age I always did it for half-four a day. Why, sometimes, I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Lewis Carroll [Charles Dodgson] Through the Looking Glass (1872) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1574) From each according to his abilities, to each according to their needs.
Karl Marx "Critique of the Gotha Programme" (1875) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1575) The weakness of all utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motorcar or balloon.
G.K. Chesterton "Heretics" (1905) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1576) Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
George Orwell 1984 (1949) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
1577) Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.
Albert Camus L'Homme revolte (1951) quoted in program notes compiled by Frank Dwyer and Christopher Breyer for a production of Slavs! (play, 1994) by Tony Kushner, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (10/15/1995 - 11/19/1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 460 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1562) In the old days, social scientists who studied deviance adopted a medical perspective. They diagnosed symptoms, declared the subject mentally ill, and prescribed cures. Recently, some have tried a different strategy. They asked the deviants how they perceived the world, and an odd thing happened. Given the assumptions the deviants made about the nature of their own realities, their "sick" behavior appeared quite reasonable, often even logical.
John H Taylor, Raymond A. Eve, and Francis B. Harrold "Why Creationists Don't Go to Psychic Fairs: Differential Sources of Pseudoscientific Beliefs" in Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec, 1995)
1563) Scientists have beliefs and expectations about their work. Scientists are humans: They have professional egos, research projects to defend, and commitments to pet theories. While scientists often experimentally refute their own hypotheses and readily toss their theoretical failures into the trash bin, they sometimes strongly believe a hypothesis and truly hope it passes the test. Scientists usually have expectations about the probable success or failure of a hypothesis even in the absence of string commitments or opposition. Most students know scientists have biases, and some students, perhaps influenced by the epistemological relativism of the New Age movement, conclude that science is nor more objective that personal experience or mythology. They (and I suspect, a good part of the general public) fail to understand that the presence of beliefs and expectations among scientists does not mean that scientific research itself is biased. Scientists are trained to work with experimental procedures that, by and large, prevent their beliefs and expectations from influencing experimental results. Bias cannot be eliminated from science, but it can be isolated.
When we speak of objectivity in science, we do not mean that scientists are completely free from bias; rather, we mean that good research utilizes experimental and data analysis procedures and standards that prevent bias from influencing the outcome of tests. Ideally, any personal beliefs the researchers have about the eventual outcome of the experiment should play no role in the outcome. Researchers with totally opposite preconceptions should arrive at the same results upon following the same procedures.
Michael Mussachia "Objectivity and Repeatability In Science" in Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec, 1995)
1564) I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
Richard Feynman "remark concerning many scientists' failure to generalize concepts across situations" Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985) [WQ] quoted (in part) by Scott O. Lilienfeld in "Will the Real Pseudoscientists Please Stand Up?" in Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec, 1995) [review of Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry: Blaming the Body by Colin A. Ross and Alvin Pam]
1565) The fact of the matter is, we scientists are simply not all that interesting. If I may generalize wildly, we are usually dull people with interesting ideas - as distinguished from artists (interesting people will dull ideas) and dancers and athletes (dull people with dull ideas and magnificent physical skills).
James S. Trefil "Science Faction" [sic] in Scientific American (11/1995) [review of The Bourbaki Gambit by Carl Djerassi and Good Benito by Alan Lightman]
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 460 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1558) Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it is consistent with the laws of nature, and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency.
Michael Faraday laboratory diary, entry #10,040 (3/19/1849) published in Faraday's Diary T. Martin, ed. (1932-1936) quoted by Philip Morrison in "Wonders: On Neutrino Astronomy" in Scientific American (11/1995)
1559) Heuristic methods are the rules of thumb or procedures used to search for solutions or answers. If we believe that these "rules for knowing" allow one to establish truth, how might we conceptualize a measurement of these rules? We propose that the members of one subculture within American society might be termed cultural traditionalists. Specifically, we suggest that until recently most U.S. citizens (and probably most other humans) believes a thing to be true because of faith, tradition, revelation or authority. Such an attitude might be summed up in bumper sticker declarations such as "God said it, I believe it, that settles it."
A second subculture, a thread in Western society since the late 1700s at least, derives from some of the epistemological principles of Enlightenment. Specifically, truth is to be sought by the putting forth of hypotheses that are evaluated and accepted or rejected by empirical testing. Those who use an approach or have a worldview that stresses empiricism and scientific inquiry we term cultural modernists.
We suggest a third, and emerging, subculture (or better, collection of subcultures) within U.S. society opposes a return to traditionalism as defined in the first subculture, and views the modernism in the second subculture as having led to rampant militarism, consumerism, pollution, and global warming. We will term the members of the third subculture post modernists. As yet very loosely organized and multi-nucleated, this subculture spans orientations as diverse as New Age followers, holistic health practitioners, and even the far left of academe (including certain subsets of rhetoreticians, philosophers, and feminists.) These are strange bedfellows indeed. They can only be lumped together as an entity in the postmodernists subculture because of their common rejection of the validity of cultural traditionalism and cultural modernism.
John H Taylor, Raymond A. Eve, and Francis B. Harrold "Why Creationists Don't Go to Psychic Fairs: Differential Sources of Pseudoscientific Beliefs" in Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec 1995)
1560) [C]ontrary to the intuition of many (including many scientists), pseudoscientific beliefs are not restricted to the domain of the ignorant, stupid, or disordered.
John H Taylor, Raymond A. Eve, and Francis B. Harrold "Why Creationists Don't Go to Psychic Fairs: Differential Sources of Pseudoscientific Beliefs" in Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec 1995)
1561) At least two major categories of pseudoscientific belief exist, each being almost casually separate phenomena. The first of these [... is] identified with a religious belief in creationism [... T]he second [... is] a set of beliefs we have termed fantastic science [... which is] highly correlated with the rejection of traditional religion and science as valid methods for establishing the truth.
John H Taylor, Raymond A. Eve, and Francis B. Harrold "Why Creationists Don't Go to Psychic Fairs: Differential Sources of Pseudoscientific Beliefs" in Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec 1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 460 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1556) Privacy, as George Orwell pointed out, rests on some level on a bargain between people and their machines. Long before 1984, communications technology had the potential to become surveillance technology. Now it is. Not, as Orwell might have predicted, because Big Brother wants to keep his subjects in thrall but simply because most people want it to be. By giving up some protective anonymity, people get safety and service. A majority seems to think the bargain a very good one - which is why everybody should look very carefully at the fine print.
[...] Academics point out that surveillance seems to have no impact whatsoever on the overall level of crime, which is rising, but people just don't seem to care where their muggers go when they leave their neighborhood - particularly when their neighborhood wasn't too good to begin with.
John Browning "Rights of Privacy" in Scientific American (11/1995)
1557) [A]s [electronic tracking of identity] become more important, the sheer effort required to live anonymously will render choice moot. Anonymity will simply become too much work.
John Browning "Rights of Privacy" in Scientific American (11/1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 460 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 460 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1554) Swiss researchers recently published a report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London that tested the role male body odor has in female mate choice [...] [M]ale volunteers slept in T-shirts for two nights. Female volunteers than sniffed the repositories of chemical emissions, after which they rated the odiferous shirts for pleasantness and sexiness. [...] [T]he researchers [...] tissue-type[d] their subjects to determine their major histocompatability complexes, or MHCs, a crucial part of the immune system.
Studies with mice have revealed a preference for mice that have differing MHCs - presumably because offspring will have a wider array of immune options to draw on if their parents' MHCs are not alike. The T-shirt study showed the same: females rated as more alluring the smells from those T-shirts that had been worn by men whose MHCs differed most from their own. Such smells reminded females of their own mates or ex-mates twice as often as did smells of men whose MHCs were similar to their own.
The Swiss study also indicated a potentially disturbing side effect of the contraceptive pill. Females on the pill preferred males of similar MHCs. (This phenomenon may be a result of the pill's physiological mimicry of pregnancy: pregnant mice prefer to nest with MHC-similar individuals, most likely supportive relatives, not the unrelated scoundrels who got them into the situation.) A woman who chooses her husband while on the pill, stays on the pill through the first few years of marriage, then goes off the pill may suddenly wonder who the stinker in bed with her is.
Steve Mirsky "The Noses Have It" in Scientific American (11/1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 461 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1544) CROW'S-FOOT: If You're not part of the show, you're Part of them that takes it all in, And that's a fool. Think it over.
Mac Wellman "Harm's Way" (play, 1978) in The Bad Infinity (1994)
1545) CHEF: What idiocy! They want an artist, but they pay for an un- skilled hammerer of wood boards. Impossible. In America only lawyers make the money. Artists is shit here.
Mac Wellman "The Bad Infinity" (play, 1983) in The Bad Infinity (1994)
1546) MAN: What is "fuck"?
GIRL: All-purpose noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pointer, name, fate, accusation, punishment, black box, verbal dump, dark delight, toxic word waste, a hole in the head.
MAN: Oh, I see. ...
GIRL: Tell me why the world's so fucked up.
MAN: That word again. I do not able to parse that word. [sic]
Mac Wellman "Whirligig" (play, 1988) in The Bad Infinity (1994)
1547) This play is dedicated [...] to those supreme clowns of our sad time, Jesse Helms and Donald Wildmon; and also to Representative Dana Rohrabacher and the Reverend Pat Robertson, because they have shown such an abiding interest in my work. These gents (God help them!) comprise the Four Harebrained Horsemen of our Contemporary Cornball Apocalypse.
Mac Wellman dedication to "7 Blowjobs" (play, 1991) in The Bad Infinity (1994)
1548) HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric. They used to teach it in ancient times [...] It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their talk show.
Tom Stoppard Arcadia (1993)
1549) HANNAH: Sex and literature. Literature and sex. Your conversation, left to itself, doesn't have many places to go. Like two marbles rolling around a pudding basin. One of them is always sex.
BERNARD: Ah well, yes. Men all over.
HANNAH: No doubt. Einstein - relativity and sex. Chippendale - sex and furniture. Galileo - 'Did the earth move?' What the hell is it with you people?
Tom Stoppard Arcadia (1993)
1550) GUS: You know what you need in your present mood? You need my new invention. Listen to this, you'll love it. Two-D glasses. You put them on and everything looks like a movie. Is that brilliant? Those days when the shit is hitting the fan at the speed of light, you just pop these on and, Hey, no problem! I'm in a movie! Available in black-and-white, or technicolor for that gaudy MGM look.
David Ives "Long Ago and Far Away" (one-act play, 1993) in All In The Timing (1995)
1551) RUTH: Hell isn't other people. It's other people telling the same story for the twentieth time.
David Ives "Ancient History" (play, 1989) in All In The Timing (1995)
1552) JACK: Everybody's bored by sex in marriage. Except adulterers. It's a rule of nature. [...] The moment you say "I do," your sex glands pack up and head into retirement, and the perfumes that the body gives off for mutual attraction turn to vinegar. That person you used to spend whole weekends with, linked at the groin—? You start staying up a little later, so they'll go to bed before you and you won't have to endure sex with them. Your husband's cock starts to look about as attractive as an old carrot, and your wife's nipples start to look about as kissable as ink erasers. Suddenly you notice little hairs sprouting from your partner's ears [...]
David Ives "Ancient History" (play, 1989) in All In The Timing (1995)
1553) RUTH: Oh you Catholics, boy, you are really something.
JACK: Excuse me, but I am not a Catholic.
RUTH: Okay, lapsed Catholic.
JACK: Ex-lapsed. I just happened to be born into a Catholic family.
RUTH: It's the same thing.
JACK: Everybody who isn't Catholic thinks that. Especially Jews, who can't be lapsed even if they want to be. [...]
RUTH: How come everybody I know who was brought up Catholic acts like all religions are an insult to their integrity?
JACK: An insult to my integrity! A perfect description, thank you.
RUTH: Like they got jilted by God, or something [...]
David Ives "Ancient History" (play, 1989) in All In The Timing (1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 461 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1543) An underdeveloped sense of ironic detachment.
Ed Fitzgerald (c.1995)
[Note: I'm fairly sure that this phrase occurred to me, sometime in late 1995, as one that had an interesting "feel" to it, to describe people who are so thoroughly enmeshed in life that they are unable to stand back and examine themselves, their situation and the world-at-large with bemused objectivity.
At the time, I believed that I had probably picked it up from somewhere in my reading. Not having the online resources then that are available now, I could not research it very thoroughly, and so I put it down as "unknown". Now, having done various Google searches and come up empty for the phrase (or any reasonable variations of it), I think I may be justified in staking a tentative claim to its invention -- for whatever that may be worth. -- Ed Fitzgerald]
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 461 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1541) Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished or afraid. The detective ... must be such a man. He is a hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good man for any world. [...] He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
Raymond Chandler The Simple Art of Murder (1950) quoted (and excerpted) by Joyce Carol Oates in "The Simple Art of Murder" in the New York Review of Books (12/21/1995) [review of Stories and Early Novels and Later Novels and Other Writings by Raymond Chandler, Library of America editions (1995)]
1542) I [...] went [into] the bathroom, and spent a while looking in the mirror. [...] In the dark I looked okay, my form outlined in the street light coming through the pebbled glass of the bathroom window, but I knew better than to turn on the light. I'd joined the ever-growing category of things that looked better when you left the lights off.
Jonathan Lethem Gun, With Occasional Music (1994)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 461 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1538) The process by which attitudes [about Victorians] have modulated from hostility to amused contempt to irony to affectionate humor and finally to an openly acknowledged nostalgia is part of the psychopathology of the later twentieth century, and when the historians of the future want to understand us, they will do well to examine our outlook upon the past.
Richard Jenkyns "Victoria's Secret" New York Review of Books (11/30/1995) [review of When Passion Reigned: Sex and the Victorians by Patricia Anderson and The Naked Heart by Peter Gay]
1539) Andy Warhol was absolutely wrong. Yeah, sure, in the future everyone will qualify for his or her fifteen minutes of fame. What Warhol either failed to perceive or neglected to tell us was that, once the fifteen minutes was over, the supposedly disposable celebrity would refuse to go away. Like houseguests from hell, they linger, proving as indestructible as old plastic catbox liners. [...]
Celebrities do not go quietly into that dark night. On the outer fringe, a few may fade and die [...] Nearer the central core, however, a condition of stasis has been achieved - a symbiotic clusterfuck among three fixed points: the celeb's addiction to attention and the multimedia's insatiable hunger for copy with which to feed a public prurience - as bottomless as it is shameless - conspiring to create a scary pantheon of the famous.
Logic dictates that if a new media star is born every twenty-eight and a half seconds, and only the most peripheral will go away, we will soon experience celebrity overload. [...] [T]he planet in general, and this city [Los Angeles] in particular, is entirely over-populated by celebrities. ...
[The pantheon of celebrities] is not ... a pantheon of gods, but [...] a neo-aristocracy, created not by accident of birth and inherited wealth and title, but by accident of random media exposure. The question [...] is exactly how large an aristocracy can a society - even a global society - support. When we have so many celebs and wannabe celebs that it becomes difficult to identify them all without a tipsheet, a certain saturation point must have been reached.
Of the trio of conspirators - the public, the media, and the celebrities - the public can't be blamed. The public is never blamed for anything. In a democracy, the will of the people rules, even when it is stupid, hysterical and ignorant. It's currently trendy to blame the media, but individual media representatives invariably recite the standard defense: They're only giving the people what they want. [...]
At this point, two collective sets of hostile eyes turn in the direction of the celebrities. If you have to blame someone, who better than a bunch of naked emperors and empresses? The accusatory questions come thick and fast. Who are these people, anyway? Why are they able to command so much of our time and attention? Why do they exist at all? [...]
As hundreds of aspirants grab for a handhold, the celebrity bandwagon groans audibly under the weight. Passage is no longer limited to TV and movie stars, rock musicians and model hawking a product or project. Evangelists are in, as are high-profile lawyers, property developers, popcorn manufacturers, politician's mistresses, and dangerous criminals. [...] Richard Ramirez has a fan club. People magazine profiles Jack Kevorkian. David Koresh achieves martyrdom, and the judicial system founders under the highly promoted adoration of scum like Erik and Lyle Menendez.
Mick Farren "Celebrity Overload" in Los Angeles Reader (12/8/1995) drawing on the research of Leo Brady in The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History (1986)
1540) The Simpson trial was not only about race in this country, but also about the unhealthy relationship we seem to have with our designated celebrities. For a moment, by some insanely twisted egalitarianism, Rosa Lopez had become as significant in the world of gossip as Jack Nicholson, Hillary Clinton or the Princess of Wales.
Mick Farren "Celebrity Overload" in Los Angeles Reader (12/8/1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 462 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1537) [A]nyone who watches them knows [that TV talk shows] are one of the most excruciatingly moralistic forums the culture has to offer. Disturbing and sometimes disgusting, yes, but their business is to preach the middle-class virtues of responsibility, reason and self-control. [...] All right, the subject are often lurid and even bizarre [...] [but] the moral is always loud and clear: Respect yourself, listen to others, stop beating on your wife. [...]
There is something morally reprehensible about the talks [...] Watch for a few hours, and you get the claustrophobic sense of lives that have never seen the light of external judgment, of people who have never before been listened to, and certainly never been taken seriously if they were. "What kind of people would let themselves be humiliated like this?" is often asked, sniffily, by the shows' detractors. And the answer, for the most part, is people who are so needy — of social support, of education, of material resources and self-esteem — that they mistake being the center of attention for being actually loved and respected.
What the talks are about, in large part, is poverty and the distortions it visits on the human spirit. You'll never find investment bankers bickering on Rolanda, or the host of Gabrielle recommending therapy to sobbing professors. With few exceptions, guests are drawn from trailer parks and tenements, from bleak streets and narrow, crowded rooms. Listen long enough, and you hear references to unpaid bills, to welfare, to 12-hour workdays and double shifts. And this is the real shame of the talks: that they take lives bent out of shape by poverty and hold them up as entertaining exhibits. [...]
This is class exploitation, pure and simple. [...] It's is easy enough for those who can afford spacious homes and private therapy to sneer at their financial inferiors and label their pathetic moments of stardom vulgar. But if I had a talk show, it would feature a whole different cast of characters and category of crimes than you'll ever find on the talks: "CEOs who rake in millions while their employees get downsized" would be an obvious theme, along with "Senators who voted for welfare and Medicaid cuts" - and, if he'll agree to appear, "well-fed Republicans who dithered about talk shows while trailer-park residents slipped into madness and despair."
Barbara Ehrenreich "In Defense of Talk Shows" Time (12/4/1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 462 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
Seth Lloyd "Quantum-Mechanical Computers" Scientific American (10/1995)
1536) The principal credit for the relatively widespread knowledge of the recent German past [among the current generation of German youth] must go to the schools. The curricula generally prescribe at least 14 hours (plus 7 optional hours) of instruction in "National Socialism and World War II." Many teachers introduce this material as early as the fifth or sixth grade. As a result, no German child can graduate from school ignorant of this chapter in German history.
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 462 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
Speaking of Fox, boy they and TBS, must really be annoyed at the way the baseball playoffs are going. When they began two weeks ago, there were 8 teams involved, and their home cities encompassed the top 5 TV markets in the country:
# City Households % of US ------------------------------------------ 1. New York 7,375,530 6.692 2. Los Angeles 5,536,430 5.023 3. Chicago 3,430,790 3.113 4. Philadelphia 2,925,560 2.654 5. Boston 2,375,310 2.155 14. Phoenix (Arizona) 1,660,430 1.507 16. Cleveland 1,541,780 1.399 18. Denver (Colorado) 1,415,180 1.284 ------------------------------------------ 1st Round Total 26,261,010 23.787 Average 3,282,626.25 2.9725
That was pretty good news for TBS, which carried the first round of the playoffs, the Divisional Series. They had the biggest markets in the country, and a potential audience of almost a quarter of the nation's TV households.
(Unlike football, which has more of a national audience, baseball-watching on TV is primarily a local thing, because of the long season and the almost-daily games. If national coverage of baseball games is going to draw good ratings, it helps to have teams involved that come from the biggest markets, which is why you see the Mets and the Yankees in so many games covered by Fox and ESPN. By having teams from the top five markets make the post-season, TBS did pretty well.)
But what happened in the first round wasn't so good for the TV folks: the teams from the smaller markets (Boston, Phoenix, Cleveland, Denver) all beat the teams from the bigger markets (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadephia), cutting out a significant number of households for the second round, the Championship Series. Instead of having a potential audience of about 17.5% of American households, they ended up with only 6.345%.
2nd Round 6,992,700 6.345 Average 1,748,175 1.58625
TBS and Fox split the 2nd round, each doing one league, and Fox got the slightly better deal.
TBS (National League) 3,075,610 2.791 Average 1,537,805 1.3955 ------------------------------------------ Fox (American League) 3,917,090 3.554 Average 1,958,545 1.777
And what about the next and final round, the World Series, to be carried by Fox? It's too early to tell whether Boston (#5) will beat Cleveland (#16) or not (they're tied 1-1 at the moment), but in the National League, the Arizona Diamondbacks (#14) are being beaten up, 3-0, by the team with the smallest TV market in the playoffs, the Colorado Rockies (#18).
I'll bet Fox is praying right now for Boston to win, so at least Red Sox Nation will be watching the Series.
(I've picked Cleveland to win the ALCS and Colorado to win the NLCS. So far, I'm 3 for 4, having picked all the winners of the Divisional Series correctly except the New York-Cleveland series, where I picked my team, the Yankees, to win.)
Fox Business News premieres today, and Media Matters gives their estimation of what to expect:
rampant falsehoods, statements praising the Bush administration, suggestive questioning, scantily clad women, and celebrities discussing the news of the day.
The problem is that the success of Fox News [sic] Channel isn't predicated on delivering accurate news reports, it's based on reinforcing the ideology of its viewers and massaging their prejudices. There's no downside for FNC in slanting their coverage, because it tells the viewers what they want to hear anyway. On the other hand, I would imagine that businessmen and investors alike really do want accurate and factual information to base their decisions on, and if the information is instead made to conform to ideological preferences or is otherwise unreliable, then somebody is going to lose some money, which is hardly going to endear FBC to their customers.
Being deliberately biased just doesn't seem like the kind of thing that a business news channel can get away with.
So, I'll go out on a limb and after consulting my Ouija board I'll predict that if FBC plans on being as "Fair and Balanced" and accurate as FNC, that tack is not going to last very long. I'm sure Murdoch won't shut it down, but I'd look for some realignment or revamping sometime within a year or so of operation.
1532) In Los Angeles people think of space in terms of time, time in terms of routes.
"Miles" International Times (3/14/1969) quoted by Reyner Banham in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971)
1533) The splendours and miseries of Los Angeles, the graces and grotesqueries, appear to me as unrepeatable as they are unprecedented. I share neither the optimism of those who see Los Angeles as the prototype of all future cities, nor the gloom of those who see it as the harbinger of universal urban doom. Once the history of the city is brought under review, it is immediately apparent that no city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture; nor is it likely that an even remotely similar mixture will ever occur again. The interaction of these factors needs to be kept in constant historical view - and since it is manifestly dangerous to face backwards while at the steering wheel, the common metaphor of history as the rear-view mirror of civilization seems necessary, as well as apt, in any study of Los Angeles.
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971)
1534) Psychologically [...] [urban] planning, as the discipline is normally understood in academic and professional circles, is one of those admired facets of the established Liberal approach to urban problems that has never struck root in the libertarian, but illiberal, atmosphere of Los Angeles (whatever pockets of conventional good planning may have been created by local pockets of conventional liberal thinking). Indeed, it is so much a stranger that one feels it could even do harm. While conventional planners are almost certainly right in asserting that without planning Los Angeles might destroy itself, the fact remains that conventional planning wisdom certainly would destroy the city as we know it.
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 462 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1530) We have perhaps noticed that the world with which we are familiar is collapsing. The abrogation of responsibility, by those in positions of power towards those who are dependent upon them, would seem to be a leitmotif of our recent history: political personal, professional and moral violation is endemic in contemporary culture. The new world is struggling to be born while carrying passive repercussions of the past and facing active opposition from the old. The future is in place, and waiting, but we have yet to discover it. Our present position in the bridge between. This position is hazardous because we are building the bridge while crossing it.
A reasonable person would despair, but hope is unreasonable and redemption an actual event. Artists, musicians and poets deal in the unreasonable on a a daily basis. This is the living breath of our work and the invisible glue which holds together performers, audience and our song.
Redemption and repair, for those committed to serving this creative impulse, is an aspect of applied art and utterly practical. Grace - readily available, simply experienced, beyond understanding - requires no reason to enter our lives but does need a vehicle.
Robert Fripp liner notes (8/10/1993) to The Bridge Between (cd, 1993) by The Robert Fripp String Quartet
1531) CALVIN: Doesn't it seem like everybody just shouts at each other nowadays? I think it's because conflict is drama, drama is entertaining, and entertainment is marketable. Finding consensus and common ground is dull! Nobody wants to watch a civilized discussion that acknowledges ambiguity and complexity. We want to see fireworks! We want the sense of solidarity and identity that comes from having our interests narrowed and exploited by like-minded zealots! Talk show hosts, political candidates, news programs, special interest groups... they all become successful by reducing debates to the level of shouted rage. Nothing gets solved, but we're all entertained.
HOBBES: Hmmm, you may be right.
(pause)
CALVIN: What a boring day this turned out out be!
Bill Watterson "Calvin and Hobbes" (syndicated comic strip, 11/26/1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 462 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1527) [T]he most important forces at work in determining the future are not the professional politicians, nor jurists, nor even journalists. They are, first, the lobbyists who haunt the nations capital in ever increasing numbers, going about their fractious business with virtually no interference from (and often with the aid of) the supposed watchdogs of the public good; and, second, the new grass-roots organizations - most notably Ross Perot's United We Stand America - which have defied the wisdom of pundits and become a powerful independent voice. The two forces - the one through the cynical application of money, the other through the almost inexplicable enthusiasm of its various memberships - have together revealed that we are at a crossroads in terms of more than just the structure of our government and our Constitution: We may be on the verge of that supreme rarity, a basic change in the philosophy, demographics and perhaps even the number of political parties.
We sometimes forget that the division of American politics into Democratic and Republican camps was not a divine decree. When the United States was born there was no Party of the Democracy, nor would there be for well over a quarter of a century; and the meaning of the word "Republican" has been subject to an evolution that even Darwin could not have traced. (How could one political party possibly encompass Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan?) At the same time there have been parties that have played a powerful role in our nation's history and then entirely disappeared. The Federalists, for example, after forcing the American people to accept the machinery and at least some of the psychology of a true nation, were summarily dispatched. And how many non-historians can say just who the Whigs were and what they stood for? The extinction of these parties was based on one simple fact: They ceased to speak for an appreciable portion of the people, or, to use the parlance of today, they lost touch.
What is so intriguing about this moment is that not one but both major parties stand in real danger of repeating the mistake.
Caleb Carr "The Next American Revolution" in George (Oct/Nov 1995)
1528) The Democrats had a terrible history [about civil rights] and they overcame it. We [Republicans] had a great history, and we turned aside. We should have been there with Dr. King on the streets of Atlanta and Montgomery. We should have been there with John Lewis. We should have been there on the freedom marches and bus rides. We should have been there with Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama in December of 1955.
Jack Kemp quoted by Fredric Smoler in "We Had a Great History and We Turned Aside" in American Heritage (10/1993) quoted by Michael Lind in "The Myth of Barry Goldwater" in New York Review of Books (11/30/1995)
1529) A substantial number of Americans (as much as a third of the electorate, in some polls) are [...] alienated by a two-party system that tends to present only two options - conservative Republican or liberal Democrat. But the growing number of disaffected voters do not form a cohesive bloc with a shared viewpoint that might serve as a basis for a third party. On the contrary, alienated voters tend to divide into two distinct and incompatible camps: the moderate middle and the radical center.
[...] Members of the moderate middle tend to be old-fashioned Eisenhower and Rockefeller Republicans alienated by the supply-siders and religious right activists who, since the 1970's, have taken over the G.O.P. The moderate middle also includes the neo-liberal New Democrats based in the suburbs and successful in the private sector. The ranks of the moderate middle are heavy with managers and professionals with advanced degrees. They tend to combine liberal views on social issues like abortion and gay rights with concern about excess government spending on welfare and middle-class entitlements.
[...] The "radical center" (the names was coined in the 1970's by Donald Warren, a sociologist) consists largely of alienated Democrats, who broke away from the New Deal coalition to vote for Gorge Wallace in 1968, Nixon in 1972 and them in 1980, for Ronald Reagan. These former Wallace-Reagan Democrats tend to be white, blue-collar, high-school-educated and concentrated in the industrial Middle West, the South and the West. They are liberal, even radical, in matters of economics, but conservative in morals and mores.
[...] The moderate middle, by and large, is satisfied with the American private sector, to the extent of viewing its accounting procedures and organizational structures as a model for good governance in the public sector. The radical center hates big business (and big labor) as much as big government. Not infrequently, this hostility extends to the two big parties, between which, as George Wallace famously suggested, there isn't a dime's worth of difference.
[...] The political spectrum, like American society in general, is divided by class, so that the rationalistic meliorists of the moderate middle, in socioeconomic terms, are "above" the angry populists of the radical center. The difference is reminiscent of the class and cultural divide between upper-middle-class metropolitan Progressives and rural and small-town Populists at the turn of the century, who viewed each other with suspicion even though they shared many criticisms of the existing order.
[...] The angry center, on closer inspection, turns out to consist of two groups so unlike as to doom any project of uniting them in a single third-party movement. [...] A more logical alternative, then, to today's two-party system would not be a three-party system but a four-party system, with parties representing liberalism, conservatism, the moderate middle and the radical center. More likely, however, the two centers will transform American politics by influencing one of the existing parties, or perhaps both, to adopt the most important parts of their agenda.
[...] Which of the two rival centrist movements is more likely to success - either as an independent party, or (more likely) as a wing of one of the two established parties? The answer might be sought in the historical precedent of the Populists and the Progressives. Progressive politicians enacted many of the reforms of the Populist agenda, from government relief for farmers to child labor laws. The Progressives, however, rejected radical Populist economic ideas, like the nationalization of the railroads and the re-monetarization of silver. More concerned with good government than with popular government, Progressives also rejected the radical democratic ideal of the Populists; though they sometimes supported measures like referendums as tools to combat political machines, their favored alternative to government corruption tended to be the extension of government centralization by educated elites, not the extension of grassroots Jacksonian democracy. The Populists fizzled out at the turn of the century; the Progressives, and their heirs, the New Deal liberals, proved to be the dominant force in 20th-century American politics, reshaping state and society alike.
If this parallel holds up, then the moderate middle (today's Progressives) may adopt some of the reforms of the radical center (today's Populists) while rejecting the most extreme radical-centrists approaches to economic nationalism and direct democracy. Because the moderate middle tends to be composed of disaffected members of the political, economic and intellectual establishment, it has an enormous advantage over the less-educated and less-sophisticated radical center. The moderate middle has prestige, connections and access to institutional power and wealth; the radical center tends to have none of these.
[...] The long-term odds, then are stacked in favor of the moderate middle - particularly if its spokesmen adopt, and domesticate, a few ideas from the radical center [...] [but] the radical center might not be appeased. [...] [T]he accumulating resentments of the radical center could energize a destructive anti-system populism... The stability of the American political order may depend on its ability to assure angry populists - and yet the elitist bias of that very political order may insure that the interests of the working-class members of the radical center continue to be sacrificed to the ideals of the affluent and the suburban moderate middle. If so, a new [...] politics of outsiders versus insiders or of bottom versus top may replace the traditional American left-right spectrum - and, with it, the very notion of a "center" at all.
Michael Lind "The Radical Center or the Moderate Middle?" New York Times Magazine (12/3/1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 463 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
oligarchic
opportunistic
out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
prevaricating
propagandists
rapacious
relentless
reprehensible
rigid
scandalous
schemers
selfish
secretive
shameless
sleazy
tricky
unAmerican
uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
unprincipled
unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
unscientific
unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
All the fine sites I've
guest-blogged for:
Be sure to visit them all!!
recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
E-mail
All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses.
Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
1617) If there are going to be filters on the Net, they have to come from you and your family, not the government. Even if one believes that they should come from the government, that would be impossible. No one can look at a bit stream and tell if it's pornographic.
1612) Consider the human form. It clearly isn't designed to be a scientist. Your mental capacity is extremely limited. You have to undergo all kinds of unnatural training to get your brain even half suited for this kind of work - and for that reason, it's hard work. You live just long enough to start figuring things out before your brain starts deteriorating. And then, you die.
1596) Confusion reigns in the political arena. Old labels no longer fit, and the citizenry seems torn between competing desired for saviors and scapegoats. While society at large seems bogged down in a bewildering swamp of regulation, litigation, legislation gridlock, and intrusive social engineering, the relatively blank canvas of the Net has encouraged visionaries and gadflies to project their dreams of a new political order onto the emerging technological culture. ... Some techno-optimists, entranced with the rapid expansion of cyberspace, are convinced that the rough contours of the future can be spotted in the shadowy forms dancing across their computer screens. The pounding drums of cypherpunks, Usenet orators, civil-liberties activists, and venture capitalists, all undulating together in the flickering RGB glow, seem to whisper alluring promises of power, privacy, and pluralism in the politics to come.
1586) There is a temptation to look at the human geography of LA, with its rich history of Spanish domination, Yankee connivance, mob-led lynchings, black, Chicano, and white riots, and surging influxes of Asians, as a mirror of the tortured terrestrial evolution [of the region]. It is easy to see how a demo-geologist might record the rectations of LA's ethnic history:
1587) The downside to all the driving [necessary to get around LA] is the mode of interruption that cars add to life in LA [...] It made the city lack impulsiveness. Distances were long, you had to make sure you had gas, there were the unpredictable traffic factors, and then you had to find a parking space and probably pay for it. It was like being a nicotine addict, making sure that you always had cigarettes and matches and were not far from an ashtray. This was, I guessed, the difference at the root of all the differences between LA and other cities.
1564) I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
1537) [A]nyone who watches them knows [that TV talk shows] are one of the most excruciatingly moralistic forums the culture has to offer. Disturbing and sometimes disgusting, yes, but their business is to preach the middle-class virtues of responsibility, reason and self-control. [...] All right, the subject are often lurid and even bizarre [...] [but] the moral is always loud and clear: Respect yourself, listen to others, stop beating on your wife. [...]
