The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one’s country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.
George McGovern, who died today at the age of 90
1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.
Kurt Vonnegut (via mutualaddiction)
(via ideoclast-blog)
And you know, if we’re going to get this country out of it’s current energy situation, we can’t just conserve our way out, we can’t just drill our way out, we can’t bomb our way out, we’re going to do it the old-fashion American way. We’re going to innovate our way out, working together.
Donald Sadoway, from his TED Talk on The Missing Link to Renewable Energy.
Source: ted.com
Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others … for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realise how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labours of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.
Albert Einstein (via slychedelic)
I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda.…I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
Malcolm X (via keepingitintrospective)
(via ideoclast-blog)
Source: mellowreg
Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think—of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what’ll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster—depression, hyperinflation—and then it’ll be showtime: We’ll either wake up and retake our freedom or we’ll fall apart utterly. Like Rome—conqueror of its own people.
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
This Shel Silverstein blog is like warm chicken soup.
Source: luckyeahshelsilverstein
[T]he great exceptionalism of America is that, which we don’t talk about too much, is that we’re the only democratic economy in the world where elections are actually financed by special interest.
Jeremy Rifkin, author of the Third Industrial Evolution, on the Diane Rehm Show
Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Neither corporations nor the government make tax returns public, and the information most companies disclose in their regulatory filings is insufficient to determine how much they pay in federal taxes and how that compares to the official United States corporate rate of 35 percent.
David Kocieniewski, from today’s NYT frontpage story on tax breaks for the video game industry. Having a high corporate tax rate doesn’t generate much revenue when companies don’t actually pay it.
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