no. 433

"There are three sides to every story -- yours, mine, and the truth."

An American Proverb

no. 432

no. 431

"In general, good decisions are made when the person making the decision shares in both the benefits and the consequences of that decision. Shield a person from either and you shift the decision making process."

Condensed from the book "Why Flip A Coin? The Art And Science Of Good Decisions" by H.W. Lewis, and presented in the comic Free Fall by Mark Stanley.

no. 430

"Literary theory is a type of performance art!"

from Zach Weiner's comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

no. 429

If you were to shuffle a deck of cards and draw out ten cards, the chances of the sequence you drew coming up are in the trillions, no matter what the cards are. If you drew out an ordered suit, it would be astonishing, but the chances are the same as any other set of ten cards. The meaning is a human construct.

David McRaney, discussing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in his book, You Are Not So Smart (p42)


Hey, you want to see the truth of this first hand? Play poker, but make the worst hands the winners.

no. 428

Punditry is an industry built on confirmation bias. Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter - These people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing worldviews. If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn't, you hate them. You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.

David McRaney, discussing confirmation bias in his book, You Are Not So Smart (p28)

no. 427

Remember, there's always someone out there willing to sell eyeballs to to advertisers by offering a guaranteed supply of people looking for validation. Ask yourself if you are that audience. In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.

David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart, p. 31

no. 426

"Well coffee can't be trusted, you know that right?"

Shep, in the comic Road Apples Almanac

no. 425

"If you think that selfishness and cruelty are fantastic personal traits, you might be a libertarian. In the movement no one will ever call you an asshole, but rather, say you believe in radical individualism."

Edwin Lyngar, Why I fled libertarianism — and became a liberal

no. 424

"A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."

W.T. Shedd

no. 423

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Frederick Douglas

no. 422

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement…. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves.

Senator James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina plantation owner, in a senate floor speech from 1858 (a statement made pre-civil war, obviously).

Tell me, just how different is this idea from the idea currently being used to justify our current level of income inequality; that the rich somehow "deserve" their wealth while the poor "deserve" their poverty.

no. 421

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956


Or as my friend Mark Davis put it, "Silence is to injustice what oxygen is to fire."

no. 420

"Not seeing things as the are" is the field where the other causes of suffering germinate.

The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, ca. 200 BC

no. 419

Vickram beamed at me. "Oh yes, madame. I am always happy. It is like this: What happens to us in life is for God to decide. But whether to be happy or not - that is our choice."

Anne Cushman, from Enlightenment For Idiots, p. 67

no. 418

"Euphemism is the opposite of swearing. Swearwords work because they carry an emotional charge derived from their direct reference to taboo objects, orifices, and actions. Euphemisms exist to cover up those same taboos, to disguise or erase the things that prompt such strong feelings."

Melissa Mohr, Holy Shit, p.197

no. 417

via


If I had been paying attention, I would have made this quote number 420. That folks, is poor planning.

no. 416

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

James Baldwin

no. 415

no. 414

"I find it interesting that while destroying the NEA seems to be one foundations of education “reform”, no one has suggesting destroying the AMA for healthcare reform."

Jake the snake commenting at Balloon Juice.