"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