Transcend

Meanwhile, back in future America

Yikes... I mean, just - yikes. Hunter S. Thompson* said "America is raising a generation of dancers." To where are we dancing? Who's calling the tune?

And since the ad pictured above is part of a campaign conceived in Colorado, here's a quote from Extreme Behavior in Aspen:

"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer."

~ Hunter S. Thompson, February 2003

*It should be noted that Thompson was indeed a proponent of birth control.

Unfinished work

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
November 19, 1863

That freedom highway

This land is your land, this land is my land, 

From California to the New York island;

From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, 

This land was made for you and me. 

As I was walking that ribbon of highway, 

I saw above me that endless skyway;

I saw below me that golden valley, 

This land was made for you and me. 

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps, 

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts; 

And all around me a voice was sounding: 

This land was made for you and me. 

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling, 

And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, 

As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting: 

This land was made for you and me. 

As I went walking I saw a sign there, 

And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." 

But on the other side it didn't say nothing, 

That side was made for you and me. 

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, 

By the relief office I seen my people; 

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, 

Is this land made for you and me? 

Nobody living can ever stop me, 

As I go walking that freedom highway; 

Nobody living can ever make me turn back, 

This land was made for you and me.

"This Land Is Your Land"
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

Solar wealth

- - - - -

"It is obvious that the real wealth of life aboard our planet is a forwardly-operative, metabolic, and intellectual regenerating system. Quite clearly we have vast amounts of income wealth as Sun radiation and Moon gravity to implement our forward success.

Wherefore living only on our energy savings by burning up the fossil fuels which took billions of years to impound from the Sun or living on our capital by burning up our Earth’s atoms is lethally ignorant and also utterly irresponsible to our coming generations and their forward days.

Our children and their children are our future days. If we do not comprehend and realize our potential ability to support all life forever we are cosmically bankrupt."

~ Bucky, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Obsolete

The power

BBC News Magazine:

In 1996, a black teenager protected a white man from an angry mob who thought he supported the Ku Klux Klan. It was an act of extraordinary courage and kindness.



Keshia Thomas was 18 when the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist organisation, held a rally in her home town in Michigan. Full story here.
...
For Mark Brunner, a student photographer who witnessed the episode, it was who she saved that made Thomas' actions so remarkable. "She put herself at physical risk to protect someone who, in my opinion, would not have done the same for her," he says. "Who does that in this world?"
...
"I knew what it was like to be hurt," she says. "The many times that that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me."
...

"That some in Ann Arbor have been heard grumbling that she should have left the man to his fate, only speaks of how far they have drifted from their own humanity. And of the crying need to get it back. Keshia's choice was to affirm what they have lost. Keshia's choice was human. Keshia's choice was hope." ~ Leonard Pitts, Jr. (The Miami Herald, June 29, 1996)

...and again:

"Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness.
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are," Wendell Berry writes. "Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing."

No farms no food

Lets call a Farmers' Holiday,

a Holiday let’s hold.

We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs,

And let them eat their gold.

Spaghetti inferno

What more can you say?

"I've made my political points. They haven't changed. They still don't change. They won't change. Once you've said brown shoes don't make it, and the people that pass your laws are all perverted, and all the rest of that stuff, what [else] have you gotta say?"

~ Frank Zappa

Question everything

cre·du·li·ty noun
a tendency to be too ready to believe that something is real or true

War — as usual

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The more things change, the more things stay the same.

"There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one — on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful — as usual — will shout for the war. The pulpit will — warily and cautiously— object — at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, 'It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.'

Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers — as earlier — but do not dare say so.

And now the whole nation — pulpit and all — will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

~ Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories

...and some input on the subject by a less enlightened character, Hermann Göring, from an interview given from his jail cell during the Nuremberg trials (April 18, 1946):

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Vipers

A pair of copperheads in the park.

Two years to democracy

Some time ago, a commentator on the New York Times website drew my attention to a fascinatingly simple plan to exorcize corruption from our constitutional government called Two Years to Democracy. Check out the proposed solution at www.twoyearstodemocracy.com.

Close at hand

"I had to stop hoping so much that a ship would rescue me. I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me. In my experience, a castaway’s worst mistake is to hope too much and do too little. Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away."

~ Yann Martel, Life of Pi

"Bagheera sails" by aswim in knits, on Flickr

Strange days, indeed: Summer Stash 2013

Sound and Vision The Sea and Cake (David Bowie cover)
Everything All the Time Outfit
Portland, Oregon Loretta Lynn (with Jack White)
The Theory of Relativity Stars
Beta Love Ra Ra Riot
Higher Love James McMorrow (Steve Winwood cover)
Trouble José James
The Truth Handsome Boy Modeling School (feat. Roisin and J-Live)
Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way? Waylon Jennings
Get Lucky Daft Punk (feat. Pharrell Williams)
Elephant Tame Impala
Disparate Youth Santigold
Defriended Beck
Little Man Little Dragon
Before Your Very Eyes Atoms For Peace
Welcome to Japan The Strokes
Dear God 2.0 Monsters of Folk and The Roots
One Big Holiday My Morning Jacket

bonus tracks
Midnight Rider Gregg Allmann (Laid Back version)
Further North Johnathan Rice
Ain't No Reason Brett Dennen
Bring on tha Lucie (Freeda Peeple) John Lennon
Nobody Told Me John Lennon
Walkin' After Midnight Patsy Cline

Power, hey do you know how it works?

"Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness.
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ministerium für Staatssicherheit

Edward Snowden: saving us from
the United Stasi of America

Snowden's whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is
tantamount to an 'executive coup' against the US constitution

by Daniel Ellsberg, guardian.co.uk, Monday June 10 2013

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution.

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.

The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa – but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: "It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp."

For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense – as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time – as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads – they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know.

The fact that congressional leaders were "briefed" on this and went along with it, without any open debate, hearings, staff analysis, or any real chance for effective dissent, only shows how broken the system of checks and balances is in this country.

The NSA, FBI and CIA have, with the new digital technology,
surveillance powers over our own citizens that the Stasi –
the secret police in the former "democratic republic" of
East Germany – could scarcely have dreamed of.

Obviously, the United States is not now a police state. But given the extent of this invasion of people's privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement – like the one we had against the war in Vietnam – or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous.

There are legitimate reasons for secrecy, and specifically for secrecy about communications intelligence. That's why Bradley Mannning and I – both of whom had access to such intelligence with clearances higher than top-secret – chose not to disclose any information with that classification. And it is why Edward Snowden has committed himself to withhold publication of most of what he might have revealed.

But what is not legitimate is to use a secrecy system to hide programs that are blatantly unconstitutional in their breadth and potential abuse. Neither the president nor Congress as a whole may by themselves revoke the fourth amendment – and that's why what Snowden has revealed so far was secret from the American people.

In 1975, Senator Frank Church spoke of the National Security Agency in these terms:

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

The dangerous prospect of which he warned was that America's intelligence gathering capability – which is today beyond any comparison with what existed in his pre-digital era – "at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left."

That has now happened. That is what Snowden has exposed, with official, secret documents. The NSA, FBI and CIA have, with the new digital technology, surveillance powers over our own citizens that the Stasi – the secret police in the former "democratic republic" of East Germany – could scarcely have dreamed of. Snowden reveals that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America.

So we have fallen into Senator Church's abyss. The questions now are whether he was right or wrong that there is no return from it, and whether that means that effective democracy will become impossible. A week ago, I would have found it hard to argue with pessimistic answers to those conclusions.

But with Edward Snowden having put his life on the line to get this information out, quite possibly inspiring others with similar knowledge, conscience and patriotism to show comparable civil courage – in the public, in Congress, in the executive branch itself – I see the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss.

Pressure by an informed public on Congress to form a select committee to investigate the revelations by Snowden and, I hope, others to come might lead us to bring NSA and the rest of the intelligence community under real supervision and restraint and restore the protections of the bill of rights.

Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans' and foreign citizens' privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we're trying to protect.

$tate of $ecurity

The current of director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, who issued a stinging attack on the intelligence leaks this weekend, is a former Booz Allen executive. The firm's current vice-chairman, McConnell, was DNI under the George W Bush administration. He worked for the Virginia-based company before taking the job, and returned to the firm after leaving it. The company website says McConnell is responsible for its "rapidly expanding cyber business."

Charming.

Obedience

New economic perspectives

The following is my response to the second part of a lengthy post titled "Like a Wasting Disease, Neoliberals, Libertarians & the Right are Eating Away Society’s Connective Tissue" found on New Economic Perspectives. The initial italicized portion is a citation from the article:

Even libertarians, who decry “coercion” by government, spend an inordinate amount of their energy criticizing taxation while often ignoring or minimizing the use and abuse of military force as well as infringements of human rights and civil liberties at home and abroad. The primary liberty which concerns both them and more mainstream neoliberals is the freedom to own and exercise private property rights in as expansive a manner as possible. It can be reasonably asserted that most libertarians are “propertarians”, focused primarily on real and imagined threats to the private ownership of property. “Freedom” becomes an ideological excuse for personal acquisitiveness and greed.

Yes, this may be true in some or most (not all) cases.

Though, as you point out early in this article, pervasive corruption of political-economic schools of thought makes it tricky to correctly assign names and labels. A free, participatory society -- much like what the term "libertarianism" purports to describe -- resembles in no way the abusive, extractive, coercive rule by monopolist money-power elites (acting under the rubric of "neo-liberalism" or whatever) that is identified and righteously condemned in this article.

Libertarian Socialism
International Organization for a Participatory Society

Memory and dedication

Published on June 2, 1976 in the Boston Globe
Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?
by Howard Zinn

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon's and Kissinger's war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars he honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.

"The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground...Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies."

Those are the concluding lines of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day.

And also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War.

And Mark Twain, who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century.

And I.F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and brutality of the Korean War.

Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered against the war in Vietnam.

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day we should take note that, in the name of "defense," our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called "the biggest floating lemon," which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major defects at the time of its trial cruise.

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There's 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don't have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn't deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

Burn notice

From zen pencils:

Sophie Scholl (1921-1943) was a German activist who is famous for speaking out against the Nazi regime. Scholl was a member of a protest group called The White Rose, which was formed by her brother Hans, and some of his university friends. The group mainly consisted of students in their early twenties who were fed up with the totalitarian rule of the government. The Nazis controlled every aspect of society – the media, police, military, judiciary system, communication system, all levels of education and all cultural and religious institutions. The White Rose distributed leaflets urging their fellow Germans to oppose the regime through non-violent resistance.

On 22nd February 1943, after the release of the sixth White Rose leaflet, Sophie, Hans and fellow member Christoph Probst were arrested by the Gestapo and convicted of treason. They were executed that same day by guillotine. Sophie was 21 years old.

Americans who tell the truth

Models of Courageous Citizenship. Click image above to visit a gallery of portraits by Robert Shelley.

First principles

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

~ Thomas Paine, A Dissertation on the First Principles of Government (1795)

Metaphors and traditions

"Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies."

~ Joseph Campbell

If you enslave me, you'll never rescue yourself

"The right to enjoy liberty is inalienable. To invade it is to usurp the prerogative of Jehovah. Every man has a right to his own body - the products of his own labor - to the protection of law - and to the common advantages of society."

~ William Lloyd Garrison



"As long as I am an American citizen I shall hold myself free to speak, to write and publish whatever I please on any subject, holding myself amenable to the laws of my country for the same."

~ Elijah Lovejoy



"Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

~ Winston Churchill

We're only in it for the money

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."

~ Frank Zappa

Time for outrage

If you want to be a real human being — a real woman, a real man — you cannot tolerate things which put you to indignation, to outrage. You must stand up. I always say to people, "Look around; look at what makes you unhappy, what makes you furious, and then engage yourself in some action."

The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, "I can’t do anything about it; I’ll just get by." Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to feel outraged.

~ Stéphane Hessel

Avoiding cosmic bankruptcy

Scheme

We need economic growth.
Oceans need more trash.

Poison the aquifers,
Devastate the soil,
People need jobs!

clean air 
safe and sufficient water 
safe and adequate food 
safe and peaceful settlements 
stable global environment 

Economic growth is all we need. 

Perfection

"You know you have reached perfection of design not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away."

~ Antoine de Saint Exupéry

"You know, the very fact that you oppose this makes me think I'm onto something."

The story of stuff

Without contraries is no progression

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.

I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,
and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven's favor,
in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught
so often laughing at funerals, that was because
I knew the dead were already slipping away,
preparing a comeback, and can I help it?

And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed
my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom
had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not
be resurrected by a piece of cake. ‘Dance,’ they told me,
and I stood still, and while they stood
quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.

‘Pray,’ they said, and I laughed, covering myself
in the earth's brightnesses, and then stole off gray
into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.

When they said, ‘I know my Redeemer liveth,’
I told them, ‘He's dead.’ And when they told me
‘God is dead,’ I answered, ‘He goes fishing every day
in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.’

When they asked me would I like to contribute
I said no, and when they had collected
more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.

When they asked me to join them I wouldn't,
and then went off by myself and did more
than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said
‘go and organize the International Brotherhood
of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing
everybody who was against peace?’ So be it.

Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony
thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what
I say I don't know. It is not the only or the easiest
way to come to the truth. It is one way.


The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer
Wendell Berry 1970

Ignorance in its highest form
Is to blithely reject something
About which you know nothing.

Pale blue dot

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

~ Carl Sagan

If you ain't cheatin' you ain't tryin'

Baseball writers voted to reject Hall of Fame bid for Bonds and Clemens.

Comedian Lewis Black on performance enhancing drug use:

"I don’t care that Lance Armstrong was doping. I care that he won’t admit it. I mean look what doping did for him. This is a guy who had cancer in his lungs, his brain, his testicles - he went through chemo. He lost one of his balls! And now he’s getting double the oxygen out of every breath!!

The question shouldn’t be, ‘Was he doping?’

The question should be, ‘Why aren’t all of us doping?’"

Three letters: J-O-B-S

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.

We keep inventing j-o-b-s because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

"The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" in New York Magazine (30 March 1970)

Fundamental dishonesty

"It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it's useful and not because you think it's true."

~ Bertrand Russell