- Did you eat? - No. Jew?

My favourite George Bush quote: "We used to think oceans could protect us!" ... No we didn't. You did.

And McCain said about his visit to Baghdad, proudly "I bought 5 rugs for 5$!"  - Great, you cheap fuck. Now we're not just invading them and killing them, we're ripping them off too. Great way to win hearts and minds in the muslim world. Jew down the people who hate the jews.

The conservatives are all about making Al Gore look ridiculous. Except it's not about Al Gore!... You know what? It's not. It's about losing the polar ice caps and then the seas rising, and losing Venice. And losing Holland. And losing Manhattan. And losing New Orleans. And losing Florida. And that's why I believe Al Gore - cause if there's one thing he knows, it's losing Florida!

Bill Maher - The Decider (2007)

easy as pi

If you're english, then it's all about filipino people inside the Philippines. But what about the other native language?

- Haha, to be clear: Pilipinas = country; Pilipino = person; Filipino = language.

- The Universe is expanding. Well, the Universe is Everything and if it's expanding one day it'll break apart and that will be the end of Everything.
- What is that your business? (turns to another) He stopped doing his homework!!
- What's the point?
- What has the Universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding!

Annie Hall, 1977

The nomo...

After seven years of reflection in vain, the solution came to me suddenly with the thought that out concepts and laws of space and time can only claim validity in so far as they stand in a clear relation to our experiences, and that experience could very well lead to the alteration of these concepts and laws. By a revision of the concept of simultaneity into a more malleable form I thus arrived at the special theory of relativity.

(Albert Einstein, 1924)

I stumbled across this last night, and it reminded me of... well now - the nomological-deductive model of scientific explanation! Choose not experience, but the absolute as a reference. Which is exactly what the over-hyped theory of relativity says.

I may not admire Mr. Einstein very much, but this got a big smile on my behalf.

The nomological-deductive model of scientific explanation

- you explain a phenomenon or an event of any kind by showing that it is an instance of a universal law known to be true.

Example - dropping a shoe on the floor. 

How would you get a scientific explanation of an event like that?

You refer to Newton's universal law of gravitation. All objects attract each other with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
 
The right answer to the question Why did the shoe fall toward the center of the Earth? is not Things like shoes always fell when I dropped them in the past - that's a generalization based on past experience. The right answer therefore is It had to.

(Ph.D. Daniel Robinson)

"If you really have a problem with yo' burger...

...you need to go see the Franchise Owner!"

The country was on the verge of revolution. They threw a black man up. Now we're like this. (sits docile).

They put a black face on the New World Order, and now we're all happy.  KRS ain't buying it. (KRS-One)

Matter of mind

- What is mind?
- No matter.
- What is matter?
- Never mind.
(The Simpsons' first appearance)

A rat catcher catching rats.

Psychologist dude: "A rat catcher catching rats." Is that the kind of thinking it takes to carry out state-sanctioned mass murder? Not just blind obedience, but also a belief that your victims are not human?
Hermann Göring: Let me ask you this. What was Hiroshima?
Was it not your medical experiment? Would America have dropped bombs as easily on Germany as it did upon Japan, killing as many civilians as possible?
I think not. To an American's sensibility a Caucasian child is considerably more human than a Japanese child.
Psychologist dude: America was at war with Japan. A country that had attacked it without provocation. You murdered millions of your own citizens.
Hermann Göring: What about the American citizens of the Japanese race put into ''protective custody'' in your own concentration camps?
Psychologist dude: That was wrong.
Hermann Göring: Why was this not done to Americans of Italian and German descent?
Psychologist dude: I said it was wrong.
Hermann Göring: What about the Negro officers in your own army? Are they allowed to command troops in combat? Can they sit on the same buses as the whites?
Segregation laws in your country and anti-Semitic laws in mine: Are they not just a difference of degree?

(fiction from a movie, Nuremberg, 2000)

edit... this might actually be true. Turns out the dude is Gustav Gilbert and he really did talk a lot to Göring, subsequently writing The Nuremberg Diary (there's an interesting excerpt about leading people into war there, which i quoted a couple of years ago)

Remember this, M.

[All] Battles are lost by non-engagement. 

And they usually aren't.

Not trying to be like so many others bitchin' about "how bad the good ol' days were" (Jello Biafra), but wouldn't it be better if babies today weren't documented better than The Great War? (for instance)...

Flaunting and pushing your kid into everyone's eyes is rather desperate and i don't mean to go into a psycological analysis of what that means; looking back at pictures from my childhood (a club of only about 15 members) i find myself enjoying them. Should there be a couple thousands of them my attitude would probably be different.

I'm now imagining that i have (and incidentally i do) a HDD of over 1 TB, digital camera and patience. Considering these what can I do to help my goal? (I find that every moment with my kid is magical (and it is), and feel somewhat urged from inside to capture the best i can of it.)

Maybe the best solutions aren't the obvious ones.

Same In The End (Nu mai sunt ce n-au fost)

Şi dintr-odată mi-am amintit de cuvintele lui Radu Gheo, care m-au făcut să pierd cinci minute din viaţă. *

"Mai tîrziu, am cunoscut cîţiva studenţi la Psihologie, din care o bună parte aveau probleme la mansardă: accese de isterie, crize de plîns, reacţii exagerate sau distorsionate... Dădeau impresia că au venit la facultate ca să înveţe cum să se vindece."

(DEX-ul şi sexul, 2005)

* Rîzînd.

If I was Bob Marley I'd say "Could you be loved?"

"esti ok ca ins"

1.7 kilominute

Reflex necondiţionat: deseori, urmărind un serial ajung oarecum îndrăgostit de genericul lui. Salivez aşteptînd lumea de "dincolo" de el. Ici-colo apare cîte-un generic însă mai mult decît reuşit, oferind mai mult decît nerăbdare şi voie bună (iar aici mă refer la comedii). Încerc a preţui aceste momente magice pline de mistic/feţe vesele/nume de producători, deoarece ele rămîn cu tine mult după conţinutul episodic dintre două generice.

Ultima fixaţie e ceva mai mult decît atît; dacă tot le-a luat 4 ani să realizeze un documentar, cei de la BBC au zis să nu-şi bată joc de generic. Chiar şi ignorînd efectele grafice uimitoare pentru 1970 - selecţia de imagini, modul diferit în care fiecare arde şi sinistrul ultimei imagini îmi par superbe. (HQ, full-screen)

August 1944, Warszawa.

Surprisingly, the germans allowed the poles to surrender honorably, and treated them not as partisans (fit for immediate execution), but as enlisted combatants due to rights of prisoners of war under the Geneva convention. Clearly, some of the german generals already had their eyes on possible war trials after the war.

The World at War (BBC, 1973) - Episode 19. Pincers

(things that make you go :)) )

Ţigănie

"The Department of State desired that the U.N. prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and i carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. in 1975 during the Indonesian invasion of East Timor to which the latter strongly opposed, on moral grounds.