Let us just say this is not the usual raincoaster lifestyle, and that is a very good thing, otherwise the number of mass murders in this city would tend to increase over time in a dramatic, action-orientated, not-for-profit-but-intensely-rewarding-nonetheless GTD out-of-the-box (unless you’re making a reference to Se7en) manner.
The Fun Never Ends! Or at least, the meetings never do!
From TheProfessionalSuperhero, passed along by BugGirl.
My cousin emailed me this. No idea where she stole it from, because for once it didn’t have a hundred thousand email addresses in the forwarding history:
The provincial government is sending each of us a $100 Carbon Tax rebate.
If we spend it at Wal-Mart, the money will go to China.
If we spend it on gasoline, the money will go to the Arabs.
If we purchase a computer it will go to India.
If we purchase fruit and vegetables it will go to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.
If we purchase a good car, it will go to Japan.
If we purchase useless crap it will go to Taiwan,
and none of it will help the B.C. economy.
The only way to keep the money here at home is to spend it on prostitutes, weed,
beer and tattoos since these are the only products still produced in British Columbia.
Thank you for your help and please support B.C.
So today we get TWO quotes o’ the day, but when presented with a bounty one must simply accept it and share it with one’s friends. Really, this one is a stunner. I’d add my own thoughts, but what Benjamin Franklin and Gore Vidal have said really cannot be improved upon by my words. It would be like painting the Lincoln Memorial or something.
From We Are the Patriots, by Gore Vidal, here is what Benjamin Franklin had to say about the future and the implications of the newly-written Constitution of the United States of America:
“There is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
And here is what Gore Vidal has to say in his opening paragraphs:
I belong to a minority that is now one of the smallest in the country and, with every day, grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that’s that. We won. And those who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity—Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But no matter how corrupt our system became over the last century—and I lived through three-quarters of it—we still held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once believed that I would see a great part of the nation—of we the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of war and peace-demonstrating in such numbers against an arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded.
During Vietnam Bush fled to the Texas Air National Guard. Cheney, when asked why he avoided service in Vietnam, replied, “I had other priorities.” Well, so did 12 million of us sixty years ago. Priorities that 290,000 were never able to fulfill.
Where is Metro when you need him? Probably sulking because Blogger won’t let me leave any golden droppings in his comment section.
Stolen from the comments on Gawker:
Oh, look what’s lying right here on the coffee table, one of my favorite passages by Gore Vidal:
“Although the Soviets still wanted to live by our original agreements at Yalta and even Potsdam, we had decided, unilaterally, to restore the German economy in order to enfold a rearmed Germany into Western Europe, thus isolating the Soviet, a nation which had not recovered from the Second World War and had no nuclear weapons. It was Acheson– again– who elegantly explained all the lies that he was obliged to tell Congress and the ten-minute-attention-spanned average American: “If we did make our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise…Qualification must give way to the simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” Thus were two generations of Americans treated by their overlords until, in the end, at the word “Communism”, there is an orgasmic Pavlovian reflex just as the brain goes dead.”
Gore Vidal, Dreaming War, New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press, p.117-118.
Bonus points for the following as well:
Well, that didn’t take long, did it?
In the wake of the newest reports setting the death toll from the Chinese earthquake north of 50,000, the government response of 50,000 troops, which was initially hailed as a superb example of the actions of a government in complete control of its situation, is looking a little less adequite.
It takes two soldiers to carry one body.
May 14, The Guardian:
Duncan Campbell
Initial indications are that the Chinese feel they have sufficient resources and experience to deal with the earthquake’s aftermath, although aid organisations and foreign governments have offered help, both financially and in terms of expertise…
Among international agencies and governments, the general feeling that seems to be emerging is that China has the infrastructure, the personnel, the resources and the experience to deal with the crisis without significant outside help. Whereas it was immediately clear that Burma would not be able to cope with the scale of their disaster on their own, China, with its vast army and its previous knowledge of severe earthquakes, presented a very different picture.
May 17th, The Guardian:
Julian Borger
For the first time, Beijing has accepted aid from abroad and invited rescue teams from Japan, Russia, South Korea, Singapore and even Taiwanese charities. US offers of direct assistance were declined but China’s embassy in Washington encouraged Americans to send cash and supplies, a distinct break with the past.
May 21st, The Guardian:
Jonathan Watts
Chinese police have detained a political dissident because of remarks he made about the government’s handling of the Sichuan earthquake, according to his family and supporters.
Guo Quan, the founder of the China Democracy party, was seized outside his home by seven or eight police officers four days ago. They searched his house and confiscated his computer.
“They waited outside and caught him as he was taking our child to school,” said his wife Li Jing…
In the past week, he is said to have raised questions about the emergency services’ response to the quake and the safety of nuclear facilities in Sichuan. Fellow members of his small party believe his detention is connected to last week’s disaster.
Well then, I think we can all understand why Duncan Campbell was being so boosterish, can’t we? That must be pretty strong Kool-Aid they have in China, I’m thinking, except that … Duncan Campbell is actually in the UK and Jonathan Watts is in Beijing.
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raincoaster 