Newspeak of the Week: Bye, bye world
North Korea on their nuclear bomb: “It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it.†PS, I’ve been playing Defcon. [From BoingBoing
What’s true today will be true tomorrow
There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents… The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy. -Thomas Jefferson
His lips were moving
The time has come that the American people know exactly what their representatives are doing here in Washington. Are they feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special-interest groups? Or are they working hard to represent their constituents? The people, the American people, have a right to know. I [...]
QED
At the end of [Mr. Raskin's] testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said: “Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?” Raskin replied: “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold [...]
World ADD
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. -Herbert Alexander Simon, economist, Nobel laureate (1916-2001)
Attention Fred Phelps
You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. -Anne Lamott, writer (1954- )
Obscure Recognition
Something C. S. Lewis won’t much get noticed for this month: He had an impressive grasp of office politics. We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment. [...]
I Concur
“[Intelligent Design] should of course be taught – in religion, philosophy, and history of science classes. In science classrooms, children should still be taught that the only way to know whether things are true is to check whether they’re true.” –Kate Orman
Quote
“News is what somebody somewhere doesn’t want you to know. All the rest is advertising.” –Dan Rather
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” -Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect [...]