Super Quotes for Super Heroes

[Darren Dirt]

"If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. And it's -- our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why we have to be humble. And yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom."

-The Flip-Flopper (a.k.a. Dubya), 11Oct2000, channelling the doublespeak spirit of The Well-Rewarded Foreign Policy Advisors Collectively Known As The Vulcans

[Darren Dirt]

He was deeply interested in the problem of what held complex modern societies together. Religion, he argued, was an expression of social cohesion. ...He thought that the function of religion was to make people willing to put the interests of society ahead of their own desires.

-Wikipedia article on Emile Durkheim (as linked from "collective effervescence")

[creolefood]

"Judge: a law student who marks his own papers," H.L. Mencken

[Darren Dirt]

"I no longer have any contracted obligations to the producers of Celebrity Poker Showdown, so I am ready to move on… After 42 episodes of Celebrity Poker, I just want to see people play in turn, bet more than $200 into a $5K pot, and know when they have the nuts."

- brilliant and amiable poker pro Phil Gordon, upon leaving his co-hosting duties with "Celebrity Poker Showdown" ;D

[eye2i2hear]

"As a scientist, I don't believe the [psychic's dowsing] story," [physicist Freedman Dyson] wrote, "but as a human being I want to believe it."

...

If there is anything stronger than belief itself, it is the desire to believe.

--Jerry Adler, in a magazine article titled Unlocking Minds

[Darren Dirt]

The arresting officer has been trained to conduct himself in a manner as to take total control through a posture which allows absolutely no resistance. By interrupting the accused expectation of civil treatment, initiates the interruption of the expectation of treatment.

The jailers to whose custody the officer renders the accused continues the pattern of punishment and abuse. This pattern is followed by the magistrate and prosecuting attorney in their turn. Even the Judges follow along without interruption or intervention of the mistreatment they have to know is improper.

The first mandate [of Texas House Bill 72, the Education Reform Bill passed in 1984] was that the school shall instill in the child a deep and abiding faith in and respect for the American form of government. To their credit, the schools in America, and especially in Texas do just exactly that.

This brings us to the audacity of the corrupt, conniving, conspiracy presently practiced by Prosecutors and those acting under their direct advice to police and inferior courts. Our Legislature, in its wisdom, found it expedient to take advantage of learned counsel already in its employ and directed prosecutors to render legal advise to the police and lower courts.

In ordinary circumstances it would be unconscionable to allow an attorney to render advice to officials in matters in which the attorney would have a professional interest. What would you expect of a harried prosecutor rendering advice to those involved in the handling of cases s/he must prosecute? This notion of allowing prosecutors to advise the police on matters of practice and procedure toward cases ultimately handled by the prosecutor was a prescription for just the sort of disaster we now experience.

Instead of rendering legal advice, prosecutors have entered into a criminal conspiracy with police, jailers, magistrates, and Judges toward easing the prosecutorial burden, maintaining a high conviction rate, and securing funds for the State.

- Randall D. Kelton, in a very unique, and extremely educational Writ of Habeas Corpus (.pdf)

[eye2i2hear]

There are only two perils against which the State cannot protect us: itself and ourselves. And the former is never more harmful than when it tries to spare us the latter.

--Christian Michel, www.liberalia.com (as quoted here)

[Darren Dirt]

To do business is to sell a product or a service at a higher price than it costs and to keep the profits away from the tax collectors. This definition tells us two things. First of all that to do business is to conduct relations with others. Robinson Crusoe, on his island, has an economic life, very active even, but he does not do business. He has no one with whom to exchange goods and services.

Second, this definition reminds us of an obvious fact, namely that our relationships with others can be of two kinds : voluntary or imposed. One can talk of business dealings only between consenting people who need each other.

- Christian Michel, "Can You Do Business Without Dirtying Your Hands?" (Business As A Relationship With Others)

[Darren Dirt]

[Administration] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.

The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom restrained from acting, such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd.

- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America (as quoted by John Taylor Gatto)



Horace Mann had sold forced schooling to industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century as the best "police" to create moral children, but ironically, as it turned out in the twentieth century, big business and big government were best served by making schoolrooms antechambers to Hell.

As the twentieth century progressed, and particularly after WWII, schools evolved into behavioral training centers, laboratories of experimentation in the interests of corporations and the government. The original model for this development had been Prussian Germany, but few remembered. The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit.

Since bored people are the best consumers, school had to be a boring place, and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. In the new system, schools were gradually re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to have standardized customers and employees, standardized because such people are predictable in certain crucial ways by mathematical formulae.

- from JTG's History Tour

[eye2i2hear]

[W]hat should be celebrated on the Ides of March is not the tyrannicide as a strategy, but rather tyrannicide as a moral fact. Putting a diadem on your head and wrapping yourself in the blood-dyed robes of the State confers neither the virtue, the knowledge, nor the right to rule over anyone, anywhere, for even one second, any more than you had naked and alone. Tyranny is nothing more and nothing less than organized crime executed with a pompous sense of entitlement and a specious justification; the right to self-defense applies every bit as much against the person of some self-proclaimed sovereign as it does against any other two-bit punk who might attack you on the street. Every victory for human liberation in history — whether against the crowned heads of Europe, the cannibal-empires of modern Fascism and Bolshevism, or the age-old self-perpetuating oligarchies of race and sex — has had this insight at its core: the moral right to deal with the princes and potentates of the world as nothing more and nothing less than fellow human beings, to address them as such, to challenge them as such, and — if necessary — to resist them as such.

The Rad Geek People's Daily, Tyrannicide Day 2007
(The State Inc./Ink = Tyranny, be it Republic or Democracy in-forced-- with every individual Voter* & Citizen a tyrant?! )

*noting that there are at least 3 primary forms of voting in most State Governments!! the essential $one being: the tax paid]

[freeborn]

The entirety of our predicament is due to failure to live in harmony and accord with moral
and natural law. The current system is the cause/effect result of our own folly. All
governments are expressions of, and exist by virtue of, the people's irresponsibility,
ignorance, laziness, larceny, and surrender of personal power, freedom, and autonomy in
exchange for "being taken care of."


Anonymous

[Darren Dirt]

eye2i2hear said:

Marc, are there any websites you might recommend that explain your position regarding "the internal evolution" interpretation of The Bible? And to heed Voltaire's admonition, what makes up ...

Upon searching for the source of Voltaire's uber-famous quote (which btw might be not Voltaire but actually a paraphrase of a far lengthier offering by John Locke!),

I stumbled upon this novel interpretation:

Is the "terms" here conditions for conversing, or definitions of words that were be used in the conversation?



...see also this.

[NonEntity]

"You can't be striving to please. You have to strive to get at the heart of the matter." - Vanessa Redgrave, on CBS Sunday Morning 3/25/07, discussing her role in "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion

[NonEntity]

It's almost romantic the way some people think there's no river of blood too wide, no mountain of skulls too high and no price too dear to pay to achieve what they see as perfection.

- Lummox

[marc stevens]

"It's been a while since you had a certifiable moonbat on! Thanks for Marc Stevens and the "cops who point a gun at my head when they stop me for running a yellow light." Mr. H., listener to the Bill Meyer Show KMED 1440 AM Medford, Oregon, March 26, 2007.