no. 46

"Descartes popularized the idea that reality is limited to what we can measure. Economists have taken this error farther by thinking that value is the same as money, so they don't notice that many of the foundations of value and wealth in our society are declining.

...the dominant culture uses money not just to measure material value, but to measure human value and moral value: the more money that passes through your hands, the more successful and virtuous you are. By this logic, Jesus Christ was a parasite and Bernard Madoff was God."

via Ran Prieur, dated Oct 3, 2009, referring to an article at The Archdruid Report.

no. 45

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one. 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."

Voltaire

no. 44

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals, now we know that it is bad economics."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jan. 20, 1937

no. 43

"The current recession is a nightmare for people who have lost their jobs, homes, and savings; and it’s part of a continuing nightmare for the poor. That’s why we have to do all we can to get the economy back on track. But most other Americans are now discovering they can exist surprisingly well buying fewer of the things they never really needed to begin with."

Robert Reich

no. 42

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."

Elie Wiesel

no. 41

"Last week, I listened to audiobooks while cleaning. My earbuds kept falling out while I was cleaning the bathroom, and I was reminded of something I read or heard someone say about listening to dharma tapes while driving. I wish I could remember the source and share it, but it escapes me in the moment. But in a nutshell, it was suggested that when we drive, we could just drive. Maybe it is not the time to listen to anything... maybe it is a gift of time with ourselves where we can be quiet and focus on the wheel beneath our hands and the pedals beneath our feet and the road ahead. As my earbuds kept falling out I thought about this... how I was trying to make cleaning 'not cleaning'"

from Zen Under the Skin via Zen Filter

no. 40

"People will now go to films with subtitles, you know. They're not afraid of them. It's one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail. Maybe the only good thing to come of it."

Kristen Scott Thomas

no. 39

"Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue."

Sallust

no. 38

“The sad exhaustion of an event named to repeat itself forever.”

@ibogost summing up 9-11 in a single evocative phrase.

via Gerry Canavan

no. 37

"The poor have occasionally objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all."

G.K. Chesterton

no. 36

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people as you do."

Anne Lamott

no. 35

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

William Pitt

no. 34

"People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them."

Dave Barry

no. 33

“When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried they wont like the truth"

Granny Weatherwax, from Terry Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum

no. 32

"The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous."

Garrison Keillor

(via)

no. 31

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

(via)

no. 30

"He's nice now but he WAS an asshole. Just 'cause a piece of shit dries up and stops smelling, doesn't mean it's not still a piece of shit."

from Shit My Dad Says

no. 29

"The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?"

Slavoj Žižek

(via)

no. 28

"Reihan Salam says that cranky old white conservative nostalgics aren’t racists they’re just white people who are nostalgic for a whiter, more racist America."

Matthew Yglesias

no. 27

"What always gets me with these climate-change denialists is the rationale they use to decry the work of the IPCC and other scientific bodes and scientists: It’s not that merely that they’re wrong, it’s that they’re running a scam so that they can get rich. That’s right—a guy representing oil interests first and foremost is accusing climate scientists of trying to get rich from global-warming research. That’s like Madonna complaining that some homeless street musician with an open guitar case for people to toss change into is trying to fleece the public."

Kevin Beck

(via)