Current location:	at my desk
Current mood:	annoyed
Current music:	"Trouble," Pink

Quotes, Inertia Edition
[W]hy don't we look more like cats? Do you see LOL humans sweeping the Internets? No, you don't. And, sure, you have LOLCelebs, but only a few people can be celebs while ALL my cats, my mom's cats, my family's cats, and even the crazy cat-ladies of the world, can have their precious feline masters be LOLCats.
-- Moses, Pharyngula, comments

Men voluntarily starved to death during Great Depession I because they didn’t want to accept help. They’d send their women and kids to the Red Cross, but they themselves would just walk away and die. That people would do this rather than murder the people who did this to them shows you all you need to know about the utter futility of trying to get modern Americans to fight the system that is ruining them.
-- The Moar You Know, Balloon Juice, comments

This is a problem with which Keynes was familiar: giving money away, he pointed out, tends to be met with fewer objections than plans for public investment "which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict 'business' principles." What gets lost in such discussions is the key argument for economic stimulus - namely, that under current conditions, a surge in public spending would employ Americans who would otherwise be unemployed and money that would otherwise be sitting idle, and put both to work producing something useful.
-- Paul Krugman, quoted at Hullabaloo

Having a creationist teach science is like having an atheist lead a mass.
-- helvetica, Pharyngula, comments

So many Americans believe that they’ll be rich too someday and don’t want to punish the class they aspire to join. A country full of Gatsbys out there chasing something they can’t quite catch.
-- cyntax, Balloon Juice, comments

I fully support the creation of a religion using Dr Seuss as scripture. It has just the right mix of rhyme, moral message, pointless mayhem, and flat out weird. Give it a thousand years to mature, and you'll have people fighting crusades over whether the green eggs were literally green or not.
-- Reed, Pharyngula, comments

One explanation (though not the only one) is that most Americans are now (at least if they are under, say, 55) the people who have been assaulted (no not rhetorical excess here) by advertising in every aspect of their existence since birth. They have been exhorted to buy and feel good since they were old enough to comprehend. here in the US, When you think about the immediate gratification nature of most of us coupled with relentless advertising and the notion that a consumerist society is heaven on earth, it’s a wonder we haven’t all spent ourselves into peonage.
-- Sparky, Balloon Juice, comments

Did you hear about the schedule for the new Congress? First, Pelosi gavels the house to order; then they swear in the members; then they vote on the rules; then the Democrats capitulate.
-- librarian, Hullabaloo, comments

If all of what you know (or even most) comes from the babble box then you don’t know much and what you do know is mostly wrong.
-- Duke of Earl, Balloon Juice, comments

When you no longer understand what the fuck people are talking about — when people make some noise and tell you it’s the sound of that so-and-so commercial everyone knows and you have no fucking idea what they are talking about—then you have been outside the bubble long enough to know what I’m talking about.
-- binzinerator, Balloon Juice, comments

There is a lesson for us in this installment from Days of Praise. The creationists are impervious to reason. If no natural explanation is known for a phenomenon, then God did it. If a natural explanation is known, then it is merely God's means for accomplishing his ends. It's a win-win technique for creationists while being lose-lose for rational thought and science.
-- Zeno Ferox, "The ends justify the meanness," Halfway There

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
-- Stephen King, quoted on Wikipedia

And don't forget to post over and over again the photo of Franken from that comedy skit in which he wore a diaper, because doing that on television disqualifies one from public office (while doing it in private with a prostitute means it's okay to be the Republican senator from Louisiana).
-- Zeno, Pharyngula, comments

Many of our [Maryland] cops would be right at home in the reddest of red states. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Texas sends us the schmucks who are too nasty for its police forces.
-- kommrade reproductive vigor, Balloon Juice, comments

In yesterday’s column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan player Kevin Cordon. I apologize. In my defense, I want to note that in the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak, Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted.
-- Dave Barry, writing a correction, quoted at Regret The Error

First they get your philosophy wrong, and then they tell you how much it sucks. Nice argumentation.
-- Zeno, Pharyngula, comments

I hate to be a broken record, but this is another example of how the conservative movement work on rhetoric and propaganda over the past 30 years will continue to pay dividends even as they are out of power. Since people have not heard anything different during that period, as Democrats embraced the idea that government was the problem not the solution and that liberal ideology was "divisive" and wrong, they pretty much left the playing field to the conservatives. Now that the right wing ideologues have destroyed the economy, people don't have any idea how a government is supposed to work and will be susceptible to tired, useless Hooveresque solutions because they simply don't know anything else.

Ideology actually matters at times like this. The idea of massive government spending to stimulate the economy is not intuitive when individuals are being told to tighten their personal belts and pay off their debts. (When people hear for decades that the government should run like a household budget or a business, that's to be expected.) If they had a simple faith that government is a solid, dependable actor, or were given a short primer in liberal economics as part of the political debate, they would know that this emergency requires serious government intervention. But they have been told for a quarter century that government is an irresponsible, spendthrift institution that stands in the way of individual prosperity and nobody has been saying otherwise, least of all Democrats who've also been fetishizing markets and praising tax cuts like a bunch of Ayn Rand groupies.
-- Digby, "Stimulate This," Hullabaloo

[A]lmost all Americans sincerely and religiously believe that the movers and shakers who have fucked us all for generations to come are supposed to be above the law, not to mention retribution. The notion of even holding them accountable (never mind exacting revenge) sends even self-described liberals to the fainting couches by the thousands.
-- The Moar You Know, Balloon Juice, comments

I'm afraid we are growing immune to just how outrageous and destructive it is, in a democracy, for the President to violate federal statutes in secret.
-- Dawn Johnsen, quoted at Glenn Greenwald's blog, Salon

I've always taken the position on Intelligent Design that I'd believe in it if I could see any.
-- Fellow Traveller, Pharyngula, comments

Here's what I've been told about Republican discourse. There are three sides to their rhetorical triangle. 1. Scarcity. All resources are scarce. We're about to run out of them. If we're not careful, we'll all freeze and starve in the dark. 2. The only interests that may legitimately served by government are business interests. 3. People are on their own. It's disgraceful even to contemplate help from government in any area of life.
-- bodiddley, Hullabaloo, comments

I would like to see a "real" christian. They are as hard to find as a god.
-- SandraM, All For Freedom, comments

I was interested to see that the New York Times has seen fit to give space to John Yoo, he of the infamous torture memos, to lecture the president elect on constitutional matters. What is next? Giving David Duke space to advice Obama on race relations?
-- thomas dumm, Glenn Greenwald's blog, comments

Besides, my eyes do not make noise when I roll them.
-- Zeno Ferox, "Speaking truth to priesthood," Halfway There

The discussion in Jesse's comments goes off down the rabbit hole of the merits of faking, faking till you make, making, and the critical difference between me taking your phone call when I'd just as soon be left alone and having you stick your dick in me when I don't want you to, the former being something I do to be nice and the latter being rape.
-- Athenae, "You Are From Uranus," First Draft

[Reagan] made America feel good about itself once again, in much the same way that getting drunk makes you forget that you’re broke and you lost your job.
-- r€nato, quoted at Balloon Juice

You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you.
-- Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Joe Scarborough

I am not only aware of all internet traditions, I am a native speaker of Islamic.
-- SpareTirade, Hullabaloo, comments

When it comes to airplanes, you'd better be a servant to the rules of nature or the airplane will go splat.
-- Greg Laden, "The natural basis for gender equality," Greg Laden's Blog

I have a reproducing mousetrap. It's a 13lb Hawaiian Tabby.
-- Stuart Weinstein, The Loom, comments

[I]t was no mistake that, during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the slogan was 'Peace, land, and bread.' Today, you are being asked to choose between bread and freedom. I suggest that the people on Main Street have said they prefer their freedom!
-- Republican Thaddeus Cotter, quoted at Hullabaloo

There really is nothing left for conservatives to argue beyond "that way lies socialism."
-- dday, "The Dead-End Kids," Hullabaloo

When you’re arguing against Reality in order to make Jesus The Intelligent Designer happy, logic and common sense are two of your most insatiable, bloodthirsty adversaries.
-- Stanton, The Panda's Thumb, comments

My New Year’s Resolution for Good Happy Success involves attempting to ignore most of the genuine evil in the world for a while so I can hopefully stop feeling like I should send a condolence card every time someone I know has a new baby.
-- Jillian, "Epic Fail," Sadly, No!

I spent the next 10 years without a tv, and I began to notice very weird things. I noticed how a ton of people couldn’t describe an event or situation without referring to some TV show. I call it the Seinfeld Effect, because at that time so many people would try to describe some event in their life and they just couldn’t without saying ‘Omygod it’s just like that Seinfeld where George and Jerry do that thing with..blah blah blah’.
-- binzinerator, Balloon Juice, comments

A dialog with god or dog
Is oftenest a monologue
-- Cuttlefish, OM, Pharyngula, comments

Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States, opening statement at Nuremberg, quoted at Cup O' Joe

I am privileged as a white person, a college- educated person, a middle- to- upper- middle class person, a more or less able bodied person, an American. I am marginalized as a woman, a queer, a bisexual, a fat person, an atheist. And my privileges don't confer wickedness onto me, any more than my marginalizations confer virtue.
-- Greta Christina, "How To Be An Ally With Atheists," Greta Christina's Blog

Lake Louise is living proof that God is a skier — and he lives here.
-- Sandy Best, quoted in "Canada's Quiet Star," The New York Times

Don't be a reasonable liberal. Now, what is a reasonable liberal? It is someone who uses incivility to excuse indecency. If someone does something which legitimately enrages us, don't lecture us about how rude we are being speaking up about it.
-- Bruce Gorton, Greta Christina's blog, comments

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.
-- Paul Krugman, "Bigger Than Bush," The New York Times

This guy could not get laid in a whorehouse if he was the only customer, he had a million bucks, and the rent was due.
-- Repack Rider, Hullabaloo, comments, on Dennis Prager

This could be the basis for a new reality show. We put a wingnut in the room with an eager and amorous woman, some champagne, satin sheets, and watch as he talks himself right out into the parking lot. He ends each episode begging for his pants through a closed door, while she signs a restraining order.
-- Mooser, Hullabaloo, comments

On the "left," for example, the push for CAM/IM [Complementary and Alternative Medicine/Integrative Medicine] is associated with a "wholistic" treatment and a whole lot of suspicion of big pharma, big medicine, and corporate interests. On the "right," CAM/IM is sold more as an issue of "health freedom," which in reality means "freedom for quacks to do whatever they want" and the removal of all protections against quackery, as represented by Ron Paul, who is one of the greatest enablers of quackery Congress has ever seen.
-- Orac, "The woo-meister supreme returns, and he's brought his friends," Respectful Insolence

[I]t's important to note that all the methodology in the world won't help if you lack the self-discipline to tell yourself to stop wasting time and simply get on with whatever tasks need doing.
-- Geoff Hart, TECHWR-L

For Gawds sake, leave them their sense of victimhood. Without it, they have no sense at all.
-- gocart mozart, Sadly, No!, on right-wingers

As I observed the mountains, my imagination took hold. One huge powdered crag looked like a 900-story pile of Turkish delight.
-- Matt Gross, "Canada's Quiet Star," The New York Times

Back in the Reagan Era, Ledeen, like nearly all neoconservatives, whole-heartedly signed on to the much-dread and now thankfully much-dead Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s formula that the United States could and should do business with “authoritarian” regimes (right-wing tyrants) not only because of their own supposed rationality and alleged ability to reform, but so as to sabotage the nefarious global designs of “totalitarian” regimes (left-wing, i.e. communist or “communist” tyrants, which could not, it was thought, ever reform). In the post I’ve shortered above, as in so much of his writing over the last decade or so, Ledeen has argued what is effectively the opposite: for if we accept his premise that the Iranian mullahacracy is a tyranny, what is it but a right-wing, religious one?
-- HTML Mencken, "Shorter Michael Ledeen," Sadly, No!, comments

Graaaaahggghhahaahaaarrrrgghhraaarhhgghhhharrraghgghhghghghggh!!! And that's my final word on the subject.
-- Rustin Wright, phone conversation, 9:00 PM EST, January 3, 2009

Still, before diving into Banff powder, certain matters must first be disposed of — where to sleep, for instance, during those awful hours when one cannot be on a mountain.
-- Matt Gross, "Canada's Quiet Star," The New York Times

By the way, this is yet another verification of Michael Parenti’s news path predictor (paraphrase from memory): "You know, it’s always amazing to me how certain news stories go from being dismissed as ‘crazy leftist conspiracy theory’ to ‘old news that we don’t need to be bringing up now’ without ever really making the front page."
-- El Cid, Balloon Juice, comments

[L]iving below the poverty line until you’re 32 really instills a desire to pilfer anything that’s not nailed down.
-- lisa, "A Peek Into Private Plane Travel," Sociological Images

No arrests were made for sedition. That’s what the article says. But if they find evidence of any illegal activity with a legal wiretap they can make a referral to whatever police agency controls that area of illegality. That’s the real chilling effect, as far as I’m concerned. The possible deleterious collateral effect of political speech. That’s effective.
-- Kay, Balloon Juice, comments

Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.
-- Frank Rich, "A President Forgotten But Not Gone," New York Times

[T]he national narrative about the Sixties became the opposite of the reality. When Reagan first started saying the Vietnam War was a "noble cause," I laughed. Ten years later, those of us who disagreed with Reagan had become the fringe, and we have to fly into an airport named
after him.
-- wilky, Hullabaloo, comments

Rarely has a movie this expensive provided so many quotable lines.
-- Roger Ebert, on Ghostbusters, quoted at Wikipedia

Evidence leads to consensus far quicker than any religion. Of course, anything's faster than 'roughly never.'
-- Bronze Dog, "Conversions," The Bronze Blog

I'd rather get the rep of "high maintenance bitch" than die, ya know?
-- reddheadd, Possummomma, comments, on food allergies

I have become so weary of the phrase "openly gay." I am openly heterosexual, but this is the first time I have ever said so.
-- Roger Ebert, "Milk," Suntimes.com

The SCA is much more interesting than LARPing. Plus, as with any outdoor festival of weird people with common interests, there’s usually casual sex.
-- The Cat, Sadly, No!, comments