“Once you know that there is really no such thing as a free market, you won’t be deceived by people who denounce a regulation on the grounds that it makes the market ‘unfree’”
—Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
June 2012
24 posts
“Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are — a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.”
—Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”
—Lord Henry Wotton from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
“There are three kinds of men. The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”
—Will Rogers
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
—Max Planck
“But over the course of the Obama presidency I have become convinced that no single force exerts a greater pull on his presidency than white racism. Not white resentment. Not white populism. White racism. I don’t know how else to explain a health care denounced as reparations, the rather continuous disrespect, the sense that he is a Kenyan illegitimate or all of the attendant theories. I do not know how else to explain a state like West Virginia, arguably the most racist in the country, where delegates are now refusing to endorse the president.”
—
Ta-Nehisi Coates
“People, I just want to say, can we all get along? Can we get along?”
—Rodney King
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
—Albert Einstein
there are no happy endings, because nothing ends
- Sam Gamgee: Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?
- Frodo Baggins: No, they never end as tales. But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later - or sooner.
“‘Jerry [Sandusky] loves kids so much that he does things most of us wouldn’t think of doing,’ [Sandusky’s defense attorney] Amendola said.”
—http://www.dependablerenegade.com/dependable_renegade/2012/06/quote-of-the-day.html
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We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers….
A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death….
” —Chris Hedges
“I don’t give them Hell. I just tell the truth about them and they think it’s Hell.”
—Harry S Truman
“We have the best government that money can buy.”
—Mark Twain
“And that led me, already, to the understanding of what became Popper’s main systematic point: that the test of empirical science was that it could be refuted, and that any system which claimed that it was irrefutable was by definition not scientific.”
—Friedrich Hayek
“There is, however, no such thing as natural law and a perennial standard of what is just and what is unjust. Nature is alien to the idea of right and wrong. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is certainly not part of natural law. The characteristic feature of natural conditions is that one animal is intent upon killing other animals and that many species cannot preserve their own life except by killing others. The notion of right and wrong is a human device, a utilitarian precept designed to make social cooperation under the division of labor possible. All moral rules and human laws are means for the realization of definite ends. There is no method available for the appreciation of their goodness or badness other than to scrutinize their usefulness for the attainment of the ends chosen and aimed at”
—Ludwig von Mises
“If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”
—Malcolm X
“…economic recovery was never the point; the drive for austerity was about using the crisis, not solving it. And it still is.”
—
Paul Krugman
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/opinion/krugman-the-austerity-agenda.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&smid=fb-share&adxnnlx=1338653185-QJ2ANHT0kKopzjHMbmrVLw
“You can’t be both strong and pure…. Once you have power, you’re gonna have sin.”
—Rich Cohen
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/02/154153252/americas-gone-bananas-heres-how-it-happened
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/02/154153252/americas-gone-bananas-heres-how-it-happened
“If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toes, after that anything would seem easy.”
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt
