Quote of the moment

I remembered this recently, it's from Findlay Dunne, not Mencken

A man that would expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer and remains at large.

From this quotations page.

Laughing out loud

From Overcoming Bias

"As for the little green men... they don't want us to know about them, so they refrain from making contact... then they do silly aerobatics displays within radar range of military bases... with their exterior lights on... if that's extraterrestrial intelligence, I'm not sure I want to know what extraterrestrial stupidity looks like."
-- Russell Wallace

My new favorite Mencken

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

From here

My new favorite title for any long story

"A funny thing happened on the way to the grave..."
Tommy Womack

The quotable General Sherman

I'm surprised that no one on the left has picked up this little Nugget from General Sherman, specifically

You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.

Other favorites

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and defeat.

Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other always.

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.

Vox populi, vox humbug!

War is, at its best, barbarism.

More Hoffer

I figure I'll make up for my light blogging by posting some of my favorite Hoffer quotes, still the most insightful thinker of the 20th century, along with Mencken. I was trying to remember the first quote below (from his classic, The True Believer) when I was thinking about the current immigration kerfluffle, I figured I would repost them all for posterity.

It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise. The Japanese had an advantage over us in that they admired us more than we admired them. They could hate us more fervently than we could hate them. The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American's hatred for a fellow American (for Hoover or Roosevelt) is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.

The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.

We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.

It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.

Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion, a truth, a leader, a nation, a race, a part or a holy cause, we are also proclaiming our own uniqueness.

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.... It is thus with most of us: we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

The Savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.

I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.


The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time — not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me.

How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.

Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.

Take man's most fantastic invention — God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.

The ability to get along without an exceptional leader is the mark of social vigor.

Quote of the moment

"Values aren't taught, they're caused."

Rick Arndt

Quote of the morning

Via Megan

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald,

Quote of the morning

Via Megan

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald,

Quote of the morning

From Despair.com

When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true. Unless it's really a meteorite hurtling to the Earth which will destroy all life. Then you're pretty much hosed no matter what you wish for. Unless it's death by meteor.

Quotes of the evening

From Napoleon

In war, moral is to the physical as three is to one.

And this old chestnut from the Duke of Wellington

For a great nation there are no small wars.

Quote of the moment

From Bloggingheads:

"Marxism went to the universities to die in comfort."

The quotable Dwight Eisenhower

While perusing WikiQuote while waiting for some files to upload I came across these nuggets of wisdom

if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

In his case, there seems to be no final answer to the question, "How stupid can you get?"

The runner up

The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened — by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.

Any my favorite

Oh, goddammit, we forgot the silent prayer.

Quote of the moment

From this BloggingHeads episode:

The world is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.

Quote of the moment

From this page,

"That's the problem with religion: you beat your way past the clerics, fight your way through the demons, stand before the holy of holies, and when you rip away the veil, there's nothing there but a mirror."

-- Owen Rowley

Line of the moment

I came across this podcast of Steven Landsburg, author of More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics and found it quite entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed his earlier works, especially The Armchair Economist (much better than Freakonomics). In the excerpt it has this bit:

...If your common sense tells you otherwise, remember that common sense also tells you the earth is flat.

Quote of the moment

Via CodePoet, and from this page

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. (Nathaniel S Borenstein)

and

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)

and

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle)

Wars in the Middle East are officially a vested interest

I read this article on CNN.com

White House taps general for 'war czar' post
President Bush has chosen Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the Pentagon's director of operations, to oversee the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan as a "war czar" after a long search for new leadership, administration officials said Tuesday.

In the newly created position, Lute would serve as an assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser, and would also maintain his military status and rank as a three-star general, according to a Pentagon official.

and was reminded of this Albert Jay Nock quote:

Experience has made it clear beyond doubt or peradventure that prohibition in the United States is not a moral issue; it is not essentially, even, a political issue; it is a vested interest.

and this H.L. Mencken quote:

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

We have this horrible tendency in our culture to see the means (a big new bureaucracy) as an end in itself, nay, an achievement. What endeavor has failed because there are too few managers? The right managers, sure, lots of failures due to a lack of them. But too few?

Plus an additional bureaucracy just creates it's own principal-agent and knowledge problems.

Functionally Lute will probably serve as a dedicated adviser, but why the title Czar? All of the Russian Czars were an odd combination of stagnant, incompetent and murderous. Why is that some role model.

Sigh.

The Sniper

I finally finished watching The Sniper, a good film noir from 1952. It's a good tense drama about a compulsive sex killer (who uses an M1 carbine, heh). One funny moment comes after the protagonist burns himself on a stove and goes to the emergency room. In addition to the memorable scenes of doctors smoking in hospitals, it has the line

E.R doc: A man's got no business messing around with stoves, it's strictly a woman's business.

Quote of the evening

From the movie Knock on Any Door

Female Lead: If I were as cynical as you I'd hang myself.
Bogart: I don't trust the rope.

Apocolyptic quote of the moment

From Michael Lind

Modernity shot itself in the head in 1914. How much longer ought we expect the body to live?

More wisdom from my old econ professors

The same professor mentioned in the previous post said that it is the natural order of things for

"Those who study the very big see the study of the very small as true, but not relevant. Those who study the very small see the study of the very big as relevant, but not true".

Two good reads

• From Col. Lang (on partial withdrawal)

  Iraq, (Mesopotamia) has always been held together (in various eras) by force and coercion. The enmity among the "Iraqis" is not a matter of misunderstanding, or a failure to communicate among themselves.
  

• From Michael Scheur (on George Tenet's book)

  But Tenet's resignation would have destroyed the neocons' Iraq house of cards by discrediting the only glue holding it together: the intelligence that "proved" Saddam Hussein guilty of pursuing nuclear weapons and working with al-Qaeda.

Quote of the moment

Is Timothy Virkkala saying

The world marches on to the beat of a million monkeys typing the Collected Works of William Shakespeare.

Quick Tuesday rapid fire

• Prominent 30s fascist sympathizer was actually black! Favorite quote: "One could perform whiteness to some degree, and that is precisely what Dennis did"
• The best author's site ever
• Real Estate Photography - As I'm doing some light house hunting at the moment, I can definitely say that most online real estate listings are horrible.
• Chet Richards interview
  

Quote of the moment

I'm watching Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd". Andy Griffith plays a Southern lowlife who stumbles into a major media role, sort of a cross between Elvis and Oprah, with the personality and accent of John Edwards on PCP.

The quote is "Well, he's got the courage of his ignorance, I'll give him that."

The best marriage proposal ever

belongs to uber-mathematician John von Neumann

"You and I might be able to have some fun together, seeing as how we both like to drink."

I miss Ronald Reagan

Somehow I stumbled upon this quote of his about hippies, to wit a hippie is someone who "dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah."

Is there anyone on the political scene right now that has come up with a better one liner? Clinton did have a few good ones in the early nineties, but the only pithy statements lately are Rice's "Franco-American relations work much better in reality than in theory" and Rumsfeld's response when asked him if he thought the Taliban would fight to the death: "We won't know that until they're all dead!".

Rumsfeld and Rice were appointees though. Have there been any good one-liners by anyone running for the 2008 election?

The funniest anti-Mac screed yet

via Megan McCardle, here is the best anti-Mac rant so far. Favorite line

Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality.

In keeping with the theme, one of Megan's commenters said this

I knew a guy once who would always tell me that I should buy a BMW like he did, because doing so made "a statement about yourself".

I came to the conclusion that people who bought products to make statements about themselves were mostly saying they were A-holes.

The best I've come up with is "The MacIntosh. It's too good to be useful!"

Quick Thursday round up

• Interesting solar thermal plant in Nevada.
• George Eastman - founder of Kodak, and the originator of two of my favorite quotes. He named his company Kodak because he thought the letter K was "a strong, incisive sort of letter". His suicide note was "My work is done. Why wait?".
• Tech Recipes - Vista Tips
• A good bio of Albert Jay Nock.
  

Quick tab clearing round up

• Meanest quote: they "breed like flies but die in the same way.”
• Joaquin Murietta
• The funniest thing I read on Sunday "A small group of the SOF participated in mass nudity and arson as means of protesting against materialism". Mass nudity and arson! Probably not at the same time though.
• Why the camera adds 10 pounds.
• Bikes must ride single file on Columns Drive
  

Quick tab clearing roundup

• The Sunni-Shia Quiz - I got a 100!
• Private solutions to Global Warming
• Ron Paul is running for president! Finally a good republican.
• Engineering Quotes
• Woman Fired For Writing About Avoiding Work
  

Quote of the moment

Paraphrased from Brink Lindsay:

Conservatives and liberals both want to return to the 50s. Liberals want to work there and conservatives want to live there.

Quote of the moment

Stephen Chapman

the GOP has morphed from a party that reveres limited government to a party that is girlishly infatuated with executive authority.

via Althouse

Monday rapid fire

• An interesting John Robb post - check out the map
• Solar powered home fueling station
• "I'm proud to pay taxes in America, but I could be just as proud for about half the money." by Arthur Godfrey
  

Sunday quotes

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."

and

"One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances."

Thomas Sowell

Best characterisation of Iraq

From Winston Churchill "An ungrateful volcano"

via Andrew Sullivan on BloggingHeads

Quote of the moment

From this post at Jane Galt's

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens --Abraham Lincoln

The commentor was dubbed "Occam's Beard" which is a name I like.

One of the better lines of all time

From the recently seen (by me) Double Indemnity

Keyes: Walter, can I be blunt with you?
Neff: Of course.
Keyes: I'm a great man.

One liners and things that caught my eye

• Good one liner -

  If there is a motto for the Bush Administration’s war policy, it is, “Doing the Right Thing Wrongly.”

  The argument on the neo-right these days resembles the 30s debates between Stalinist and Trotskyist on the nature of communism, i.e. can one separate the theory and practice.
• The nature of motion sickness
• From an article about the Skyhook (sort of a reverse parachute) -

  The first live test was conducted with a pig as the target. Due to some stability issues, the pig spun in the 125 mph wind, and arrived on the plane dizzy and discombobulated. It recovered, however, and promptly attacked the crew.

Tuesday rapid fire

• Art of Innovation
• A very good analysis of the ISG report, specifically

  The risk of surging any troops is summed up in the Sixth and Seventh Books of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. I refer to the story of the Sicilian Expedition, in which the Athenians invade Sicily in support of allies there. But as problems mount with the operation, more and more reinforcements are sent, so that the consequences of failure rise from the merely serious to the monumental.

  Which is something to bear in mind.
  
• Ouch
• RentGlass.com - Lenses in this case
  

It's been a little while

Sorry for the light blogging.

Periodically my mind wonders back to the Mathew Paris essay "Nature Does Not Exist", where he states that there are few meaningful differences in application or effect between religion and science. Then my thoughts turned to Alan Paulk's line "Religion is first century technology" and how that tracks with Robert Kaplan's assertion that Islam is an excellent religion for hard times (paraphrase).

Then I think the original (to me) thought that technology does not replace spirituality, or compete with it either, but merely pushes it back to another level of abstraction. This leads me to think that the modern conception of a distinction between the religious and the secular is probably new and not meaningful.

And that's what has been in the back of my head for the past few days.

Lines of the moment

From Freakwater's song "One Big Union"

Don't the truth look bad up next to a pretty lie?

and

False hope is the seed in the field of greed that we must plow.

Nietzsche at the end of a long, poorly focused day

Today's quote is

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
Friedrich Nietzsche

via the Nietzsche Family Circus
Just have to love the Germans.

Somehow I've let all of the tedious work that has to be done during the month have to happen today. Diagramming, estimating, writing, organizing. Humbug. Everything has taken forever today.

On another note, the photos I took on Saturday turned out well, and surprisingly Gothic and noirish. All of my more recent shots have gone in a Sin City direction. I'll post them soon.

New quote of the moment - movie edition

If I always knew what I was talking about I'd be a genius.

Phillip Marlowe in Murder My Sweet

The Nietzsche Family Circus

Die at the right time!

The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.

They're all winners, this is actually going on the BlogRoll.

Quotes of the moment - Saturday morning Edition

I came across these while perusing the internets...

I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.
- Bill Hoest

Feel like you've lived a wee bit too long? Looking for a spectacular way out -- one that'll keep your family crying in disgust for years on end?
- Defense Tech - from a post about a personal helicopter

"I do not think people who have bad things in their minds would wear a burqa," he said.
- CNN Article about a possible Dutch Mask Law

Quotes of the moment

Marine Corps Gun Rules

• Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
• Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.
• Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

From the quiet insightful Green Lantern theory comments

"Conan, what is best in life?"

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!"

Why the long pause....

For anyone reading, I'm still swamped with work. And I'm grinding my teeth again. While I'm awake.

Random Commentary, regarding the song “Fluorescent Light Blues”

Sitting at a computer all day and you’d think I’d get the odd writing done, but those white tubes in the ceiling kill the muse with vibration shooting 20 rounds of white light every second right at your brain. May it’s creator burn one tier above Hitler, right next to the sonofabitch who gave us the child-proof cigarette lighter, while the inventor of the smoke detector gives them the finger from his cloud next to Lincoln.

Line of the moment

The message you get when one is about to delete something in BlinkSale

This action is wholly irrevocable and utterly non-undoable.

Quote of the moment

I think my life will run out before my work does.
Townes van Zandt

The funniest thing I read today - Monday edition

From the Navy Seal recruitment page

The SEAL program consists of more than 12 months — followed by an additional 18 months — of intensive training designed to push you to your physical and mental limits — again and again

More than 12 months, followed by 18 months?

At long last...

I finally get the wireless router to work with my laptop. I think it was changing the channel that did the trick. I'm typing this from my living room.

The quote of the moment is "Sometimes you have to murder your sweetheart" from a History Channel engineering program. It refers to stopping work on a favored project when it proves unworkable.

Quote of the moment

From the comments of this post at Coming Anarchy

"generalizations are a willful display of ignorance"

Quick Sunday rapid fire

• An hourly motel in the sky, more info here.
• The funniest quote I read yesterday is from this blog, to wit

  Every adult must at some point have paused during some slapstick piece of debauchery and thought, "Christ, this is ridiculous". Having testicles is like being chained to the village idiot. Sad, but there it is.

• The famous "What year is it?" essay. What year you compare our modern times to determines your current outlook, pretty interesting. Personally I think it's 1905, and Radical Islam is best compared to the Bolshevism of that period, but all comparisons are, by definition, imperfect.
• The Seventh Seal was an incredible movie
• This is an incredibly cool time lapse movie, regrettably, in QuickTime, but still good.
  

Quote of the yesterday

"You sure do have a lot of interesting scars"

Said by Stephanie yesterday. I realized just now that they're all on my right side too. She was referring to the faint one of my head, the fading one on my right hand, and the large one on my right leg, which, while healing, still bears an uncanny resemblance to a hamburger.

Funny police report

A tale of a daring milk robbery in Ohio.

Choice quote from the police report

"he realized this was no joke when the rotund robbers began pelting him with a flurry of chubby fists"

Quote of the moment

"You know the story. Most of my life in jail; the rest of it dead!"
Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest