December 14, 2010
"

We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don’t bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

"

— Charlie Stross, Invaders from Mars (Emphasis mine)

9:43pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zr23Zy2AHPcq
December 13, 2010
"It’s the standard bribery model of legislating that has come to characterize Washington in the era of oligarchy: if you want to put food on the table of the unemployed, you must lavishly wine and dine the CEOs and bankers who laid them off."

— Christopher Hayes, “Tax Cuts Forever?”

9:29am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zr23Zy299ByG
December 11, 2010
"The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction."

— J. G. Ballard

2:04pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zr23Zy21lAYI
November 9, 2010
"I probably won’t even vote for the guy [John McCain]… I had to endorse him. But I’d have endorsed Obama if they’d asked me."

— George W. Bush 

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November 5, 2010
Inconvenient

On progressive taxation:

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property [….] Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. 

—Thomas Jefferson (well-known Marxist Fascist)

8:21pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zr23Zy1OwP2m
November 2, 2010
"Our sole consolation is the prospect of doom. For a while, email, in its efficiency, had seemed to serve very nicely the means of production and their owners. But lately, the business pages report a dialectical reversal whereby the means of communication overwhelm the means of production, so that the class of owners and managers can hardly do or even supervise any work; they can only discuss, over email, the things they should be doing. Sabotage and slowdown—old techniques of worker resistance—have become impossible to distinguish from white-collar office jobs. Yes, it may be that all of us together, tapping out ephemera at our keyboards, will bring down this civilization once and for all. But not before human flesh has turned to spam."

— n+1: Against Email

(Source: shoulders)

10:21pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zr23Zy1NSLxI
(Notes: 3)
  
October 28, 2010
"The middle class doesn’t like to get welfare checks, so instead it gets tax credits and deductions for doing things middle-class people generally do anyway."

— Will Wilkinson (in The Economist)

5:04pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zr23Zy1K-LSp
October 18, 2010
"As Attorney General of Kentucky, I’m always amused to get a lecture in constitutional law from a self-certified ophthalmologist."

— Jack Conway

8:24am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zr23Zy1G5ETQ
October 14, 2010
"

The Republican party is almost unique among major political parties across the world in its overwhelming skepticism of the science of global warming. […] It poses an enormous problem to the leaders of the world’s other major powers, and there is almost nothing they can do about it.

[…] Imagine the world’s major powers sitting down in the early 20th century to negotiate a treaty on the law of the sea, only to have one of America’s major political parties vow to defeat any settlement, on the grounds that the world is in fact flat.

"

— Ryan Avent

9:54pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zr23Zy1EWR3S
October 4, 2010
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

— Niels Bohr

12:10am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zr23Zy19y8JU