Original RI quotes only

[Maddy]

Right - the "anti-idiot" special interest group. I understand they have a severely under-funded lobby.

[Maddy]

Moral of story for me: don't expect the system to just work, expect to have to work on or around the system.

[Perelandra]

It may be a trivial point of categorization, but the wars of imperialism, or of the originally European great powers against the rest of the world and amongst themselves, have been global and continuous throughout the last five centuries (and the five thousand years that preceded them weren't peaceful either). The Pax Britannica is a misnomer, the only thing remarkable about it was the relative infrequency of major interstate land wars in Europe itself, but as we know the formula for what constitutes History is supposed to be that Europe + Anglosphere = The World. The 19th C. was a time when they were busy assaulting everywhere else and fearful of revolutions at home. The Cold War is also a misnomer, as it was hot in every year, with tens of millions dead, just again not between states in Europe proper. I'd even call that a nuclear war, with hundreds of thousands of casualties, but waged by the superpowers in controlled fashion on their own territories (and those of their dependencies) in an effort to terrify each other and out of terror of what would happen if they acutally launched into the enemy's territory. But yeah I'd count post-9/11 as the fourth world war; US-UK leading a crusade against the outliers from global corporatocracy, and mounting a desperate, presumably final effort to maintain the Anglo-American empire and keep territorial control of the resource base.

[nathan28]

The new $100 bill design is scheduled for unveiling on April 21, 2010... Oh shit! That's the day after April 20, two after April 19!!! It's going to have the UN flag on it!

[streeb]

Nathan 28 wrote:

SuperJesusBlackTurboReagan2k10

[JackRiddler]

streeb! You had to add this:

Obama thinks Left/Right is false dichotomy

Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates between right and left, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure all and those who would claim it has no place. Because this issue is just too important to allow our progress to languish while we fight the same old battles over and over again.

Draft version, before the rewrite:

Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates between movers 'n' shakers and wage-slaves, between the fine people who prop me up and the insignificant tree-huggers, between those who would claim drilling is extremely profitable for drilllers and those who would claim it is extremely profitable for drilllers. Because this issue is just too important to allow my stellar career to languish while I pretend there is a "we" all over again.

Hope, by the way. Change. Martin Luther King and stuff. Winning smile, etc.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=27700

[Allegro]

So as a mental exercise in default-assumption-challenging, it at least probably can't hurt to try getting a jump on that by picking up our most effective tools and summoning our greatest strengths and resources in advance of asking ourselves what the largest problem is.

And it might even help.

Although it's just a suggestion, not a cure-all or a profound comment on human affairs. But the thought suddenly occurred to me. So I'm passing it along.

[Allegro]

We constantly and collectively mislead ourselves and deny reality by calling the present dilemma of the human species an environmental or ecological crisis. It’s not. The environment is indifferent to us. An environment will continue to exist no matter what happens.

The crisis is only that of our collective (by the decisions and actions of some more than others) destruction of the biospheric basis for sustaining our civilization in its present form and our species at the present numbers - and also of Gaia’s ability to support most other higher life forms (the latter probably only for the short term of mere millions of years). Nevertheless Earth and Gaia will survive, and you may think that (as I also do in some of my more philosophical moods) it’s no big deal, in the big picture, that billions of us will prematurely die as our population crashes, and also no big deal that most species in the vertebrate and arboreal classes will be wiped out, if our civilization continues consuming everything in the way we do, until it collapses. This still won’t mean our extinction… so okayfine? [See Entire Comment].

[Peregrine]

if you go all righteous vegetarian on me, expect to get some hot lard thrown in your face.

heh.

[Peregrine]

I recommend you get a good cookbook, and get the fuck away from that fucking souse. Jesus. That's just gross. You eat that kind of shit and do crank and there's no deodorant in the world that can cut the stink of your body odor. None.

[Peregrine]

My god....that picture is like...well, if you were on acid and someone slid it under your nose you would probably run outside and stand in the middle of the tracks to wait for the train.

[Allegro]

(But every one, creature, life form, etc, is in itself a unique universe, unlike any other. As meaningless as it all may be, ultimately, it's still all pretty amazing. So better to appreciate the beauty, while we're still here.)

[Peregrine]

Gee, he really proved to me that voicing opposition to state policies of ethnic dislocation makes me an anti-Semitic terrorist sympathizer who throws bags of kittens into the ocean.

[JackRiddler]

So all you need to say is I believe in the American dream, that anyone who works hard enough can make it come true, that freedom and liberty are the greatest gifts given to us by an almighty God; that any foe who dreams they can topple us will feel the wrath of our might (even before they think it since we know they one day wil); that we are the undying ally of Israel and, oh, by the way, I have 600 million dollars to spend on advertising and I am going to pick out a person in the audience to tell a little tale about that answers the question why I want to be the Commander in Chief. Her name is Sally. Sally's on wellfare. She got drunk and fell down the stairs on Christmas Eve. Her blood alcohol content was so high that when she rolled into the blinking Chritmas tree she burst into a ball of fire....oh....wait....that's for a different adience. Where's Randy...there he is....Randy was a carpenter who fell off a ladder while working overtime on a second job trying to make ends meet for a family that includes four kids with spineobifida and his blind wife Maria. When I heard this story I decided someone had to help him and that someone was me!

[Simulist]

My overall impression from it is that the Tea Partiers, generally, are like watchdogs barking at the mailman while the burglar is sneaking off with the loot.