Words

"There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains. the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch."
--Bette Davis, The Lonely Life, 1962

Ideals

"You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements."
--Norman Douglas, South Wind, 1917

Banking IV

"Bleed him, purge him, and if he dies, bury him." --Portuguese, Spanish Proverb

Problems

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."
--Douglas Adams

Force III

"Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace."
--Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) 34th U.S. President (1953-61)

Heart

"Heart attacks... God's revenge for eating his little animal friends."
--Author Unknown

Success V

"I'd rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate."
--George Burns (1896-1996, American Comedy Actor)

Advertising III

"I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form."
--Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

Input

"I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version." --Oliver North

Danger

"I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger."
--Daniel Webster (1782-1852) American Statesman

Rights

"Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck."
--Susan Jacoby

Needles/Pills

"A man who cannot work without his hypodermic needle is a poor doctor. The amount of narcotic you use is inversely proportional to your skill."
--Martin H. Fischer

Walter Cronkite, R.I.P.

It has been interesting watching the vapid television coverage of Uncle Walter's passing. That the CBS Evening News under his anchoring was substantive (albeit imperfect) rather than the current cotton-candy-made-with-aspartame pseudo-news is completely, and deliberately, not being addressed. Most glaring is all the video, but hardly any audio, of Uncle Walter that is being played in the coverage of his passing..

TLC


A few quotes grabbed from the usual sites:

America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.

There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.

We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.

It is a seldom proffered argument as to the advantages of a free press that it has a major function in keeping the government itself informed as to what the government is doing.


"If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country."--President Lyndon B. Johnson

Plan

Gladiator in arena consilium capit - The gladiator is formulating his plan in the arena. (Too late)
-Seneca The Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)

Led

"I am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than an army of 100 lions led by a sheep."
--Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, French statesman

Opinion

"The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane."
--Mark Twain, in Christian Science

The Difference

Murder over a million people for oil and empire, and you're immune from prosecution, above the law, flyin' free.

Be one of the many people that have leaked parts of the Guns N' Roses "Chinese Democracy" album over the years, and you had better hire yourself an attorney because you're going to be prosecuted by the Bu$hama Just-Us-War-Criminals Department.

TLC

The Faux Outrage Of A Self-Neutered CONgress

The claims of members of CONgress that they had no knowledge of Dickless Cheney's assassination squads do not pass the straight-face standard.

Seymour Hersh, with no subpoena power, without a large staff of dedicated career investigators, was able to find out about Cheney's program, yet CONgress was supposedly blind to the obvious, completely at the mercy of what they were told by Bu$hCo/deaf to sources within the Executive Branch, and unable to uphold the Constitution Of The United States Of America (which they were sworn to protect) by speaking out and putting a stop to the trashing of that Constitution.

See, hear, and speak no evil? How stoopid do the co-conspirator War Criminals Of CONgress, and the corporate media, think we are?

TLC

Port

"If a man does not know what port he is steering for, no wind is favorable to him."
-Seneca The Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)

Bring Back & Enhance The Electric Car

A friend of mine posted a comment elsewhere questioning the efficacy of the electric car.

My response:

Check out the DVD, "Who Killed The Electric Car". In the early part of the 20th century, we had excellent electric cars, with excellent batteries. Now, a century later, we have solar to provide the electricity, not to mention wind technology. Wouldn't that be less expensive than the $3 trillion it's cost for the war for oil/empire on Iraq (Saddam kept disobeying OPEC's orders, thus he had to go) and Afghanistan (gotta have that pipeline)? And that's not counting the 1.3 million Iraqis dead thus far, nor the millions yet to die due to the widespread use of depleted uranium (a/k/a chemical warfare). How much are each of those lives worth? $2000, which seems to be the current going US rate? And with the US dollar heading toward the trashheap of history (can you say, "Amero"?), what value do we attach to the millions of homeless and unemployed Americans?

TLC

(Op)press

"Hitler’s dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man." --Albert SpeerHitler’s Minister for ArmamentsSource: at his trial after World War II


"The modern press itself is a new phenomenon. Its typical unit is the great agency of mass communication. These agencies can facilitate thought and discussion. They can stifle it…. They can play up or down the news and its significance, foster and feed emotions, create complacent fictions and blind spots, misuse the great words and uphold empty slogans."
--Commission On Freedom Of The PressSource: A Free and Responsible Press, 1947

Cured II

"Doctors think a lot of patients are cured who have simply quit in disgust." --Don Herold

Ethics

"It horrifies me that ethics is only an optional extra at Harvard Business School."
--Sir John Harvey

Winners

"Winners are losers who got up and gave it one more try."
--Dennis DeYoung
Rock Musician and Songwriter

Either II

"Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts."
--Max Lerner

Panetta's Faux Mea Culpa

The Wall Street Urinal has a fable claiming, "Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon E. Panetta has told lawmakers that the agency "concealed significant actions" from Congress, according to a letter released Wednesday from seven Democratic lawmakers."

Bu$hit!

That's like Charles Manson, with a knife in his hand and covered with blood, claiming that he had nothing to do with the demise of Sharon Tate, and the police officers accepting the denial and walking away from the scene of the crime without asking any questions or doing any meaningful investigation.

CONgress knew damned well what was going on. As Rod Stewart and company said many years ago, "A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse". And the supposed "blindness" of CONgress was criminal indeed. Bring on the scaffolds. Good enough for Nazi Germany, good enough for the fa$cists in the US government.

Special thanks to Lori of Citizens For Legitimate Government for bringing the WSJ propaganda to my attention.

TLC

Change VI

"When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts."
--Ethiopian Proverb

Truth

"The Truth requires action."
--Mason Weaver

Matters

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
--Henry David Thoreau

All III

"All national institutions of churches,
whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish,
appear to me no other than human inventions
set up to terrify and enslave mankind,
and monopolize power and profit."
-- Thomas Paine
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author

4th

A holiday in which millions of dollars of Chinese fireworks are purchased by an economically bankrupt America so that American body parts can be blown apart and American homes are burned down.
--TLC

Successful

"The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny."
--Michael Parenti (1933- )

Capitalism

"Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven't had capitalism."

--Ron Paul

When III

"But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations,
pursuing invariably the same object,
evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,
it is their right, it is their duty,
to throw off such government, and
to provide new guards for their future security."
--Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776