"The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." --Jesus
"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious" --George Orwell
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." --F. Scott Fitzgerald
Smarter Than You Think - Aiming to Learn as We Do, A Machine Teaches Itself - NYTimes.com: "When Dr. Mitchell scanned the “baked goods” category recently, he noticed a clear pattern. NELL was at first quite accurate, easily identifying all kinds of pies, breads, cakes and cookies as baked goods. But things went awry after NELL’s noun-phrase classifier decided “Internet cookies” was a baked good. (Its database related to baked goods or the Internet apparently lacked the knowledge to correct the mistake.)
NELL had read the sentence “I deleted my Internet cookies.” So when it read “I deleted my files,” it decided “files” was probably a baked good, too. “It started this whole avalanche of mistakes,” Dr. Mitchell said. He corrected the Internet cookies error and restarted NELL’s bakery education.
His ideal, Dr. Mitchell said, was a computer system that could learn continuously with no need for human assistance. “We’re not there yet,” he said. “But you and I don’t learn in isolation either.”"
[Nobody] has ever successfully explained to me how people who are too stupid and helpless to take care of themselves are smart enough to elect individuals that will take care of them. Once you understand that contradiction, you understand how tyrannies come to [pass] around the world.
Book Shelf
The Constitution Will Not Be Televised
"I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute." -- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Who Said It?
"First he incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack." --Do you know who said this?
Anyone paying attention to politics circa 2006 would reasonably guess that it's a quote from some famous Democrat about George Bush. But it isn't -- the answer is here about three fourth's of the way down the page.
The Past Blasts
Resolved, That the aim and object of the Democratic party is to preserve the Federal Union and the rights of the States unimpaired, and they hereby declare that they consider that the administrative usurpation of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution — the subversion of the civil by military law in States not in insurrection; the arbitrary military arrest, imprisonment, trial, and sentence of American citizens in States where civil law exists in full force; the suppression of freedom of speech and of the press; ... Resolved, That the shameful disregard of the Administration to its duty in respect to our fellow citizens who now are and long have been prisoners of war and in a suffering condition, deserves the severest reprobation. ... === Sound familiar? The Democrats are saying 1) The war is lost; 2) Let's negotiate; 3) The Constitution is trashed; 4) They steal elections; 5) We support the troops.
You've got to hand it to these Dems. They're certainly consistent.
That was the 1864 Democratic Party platform. Yes, 1864.
Cycles of History Again: We're Somewhere In The Bold Print...
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage."
They Will Have It
"They chose dishonour. They will have war." -- Winston Churchill
The Current Jaw Dropper
In a series of e-mails I patiently explained that Bush couldn't be Hitler since Hitler was dead. He also couldn't be a "new Hitler" since the two men have policies almost diametrically opposed. Most significantly, Bush is attempting to replace genocidal dictatorships with secular democracies. Hitler did everything he could do to destroy democracies and replace them with genocidal dictators. I thought my sister might understand the difference. I also pointed out that Hitler was a starving artist who joined the National Socialist Party, supported gun control, abortion, government control of corporations, was an athiest with an affinity for paganism, hated Jews and allied himself with radical Muslims. I then noted that the Democratic Party, not the Republicans, had a platform which came closest to Hitler's. In other words, using objective reality, not delusional rantings, Hitler is closer politically to the Democrats than to Bush." --See this.
TEA PARTY UPDATE: Looks to me like the fullness of time has put a nasty dent in the idea of Bush eschewing government control of corporations and the Muslim alliance issue remains at best complicated. So the Dems still clearly remain worse now that we see Ogabe in action but both parties basically suck big time.
The Last Jaw Dropper
When my grandfather left Europe in 1937, the graffiti on the walls read, 'Jews go to Palestine'. Today the graffiti reads, 'Jews out of Palestine'. How soon Europe forgets." -- See this.
The Previous Jaw Dropper
I was stunned to learn the story of Haj Mohammad Amin al-Hussein, which I tell at great length in Preachers of Hate. Not only did he meet with Hitler in Berlin in 1941: he became the Arabic voice of Nazi Germany in all their broadcasts to the Arab world, exhorting Muslims to murder Jews and enact Hitler's final solution. Not by coincidence, one of his greatest students is Yasser Arafat, who in moments of weakness claims (wrongly, I believe) that he is Haj Mohammad Amin's nephew." -- see it here
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