no. 1166

 “That summer of 1816, a group of out-of-work miners set out to walk from Bilston to London—a distance of 125 miles. They had a petition for the prince regent, an accounting of their hardships. They carried signs—Willing to Work, but None of Us to Beg—and carts of coal, which they planned to present to the prince. They were slow and steady. They were orderly and unthreatening. But they were stopped. They had to be stopped. The government would prefer not to admit that there were hardships, but it would never admit that the prince might be responsible for any. At the edges of London, the procession was met by the police. There was no possible way the marchers could meet with the prince, the authorities said. But they would buy the carts of coal and they would buy beer for all the marchers. There would be no better offer. The lesson was clear. Being polite got you nowhere.”

Nicholas Day, from his book A World Without Summer 

no. 1165

“The idea that some people were better than others at interpreting things—that was a new concept. It’s the idea of expertise, and the whole notion of expertise was still being worked out. William Herschel was the great astronomer of the day, a deeply learned man, and yet his views about sunspots were not taken much more seriously than the views of the man who’d heard something from somebody who’d heard something from somebody who’d heard that the sun was going out the day after tomorrow. All the evidence from the Tambora years didn’t add up to anything. It just inspired wild guesses about earthquakes and lightning rods and rice paddies. This is the fate of a world without the idea of expertise, a world without any sense of whom to trust. In that world, any story was a relief. It’s not a surprise that people migrated from explanation to explanation to explanation. Any story was better than nothing at all.”

Nicholas Day, from his book A World Without Summer 

no. 1164

 You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.”

Terry Pratchett from the novel “Guards! Guards!”

no. 1163

 “I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.” He waved his thin hand toward the city and walked over to the window. “A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back. “Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.“

Terry Pratchett, from the novel “Guards! Guards!”

no. 1162

 “All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can only be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.”

— Bertrand Russell, The Science to Save Us from Science, The New York Times (19 March 1950)

no. 1161

 There's a boy in you about three 

Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty Thousand years. Sometimes it's a girl.

This child had to make up its mind

How to save you from death. He said things like:

"Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk."

You live with this child, but you don't know it.

You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy At night. He's uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy You survived a lot. He's got six big ideas.

Five don't work. Right now he's repeating them to you.

Robert Bly, 'One Source of Bad Information’