José Clemente Orozco

"One thing must be understood: I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it." --Maurice Blanchot

"Her father stabbed her 12 times in the chest, and made sure that she was beyond recovery before he called the police and the ambulance to come and get her."

"..the United Nations conservatively estimates that 5,000 women a year are killed in this way, and the majority of those women are killed in Jordan and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas... and that's a very conservative estimate on the United Nations' part, because the majority of these crimes are later classified as suicides and accidental deaths"

Honor Killings in Jordan

""Operation Keelhaul!" To this day, it is an unavenged post-war crime of immeasurable cruelty committed by the Allies"

"If you find an atheist in your neighborhood,
TELL A PARENT OR PASTOR RIGHT AWAY!

You may be moved to try and witness to these poor lost souls yourself, however
AVOID TALKING TO THEM!
Atheists are often very grumpy and bitter and will lash out at children or they may even try to trick you into neglecting God's Word.

Very advanced witnessing techniques are needed for these grouches. Let the adults handle them."

SETI signal verification attempts at Arecibo
Pics

Shaking Things Up: Progressive and Radical Librarians

Jake and Dinos Chapman, Great Deeds Against the Dead

Damien Hirst, Mother and Child Divided

on the acceptance of meteorites into scientific thinking : "If anyone were so credulous as to suggest that stones had fallen from the sky, he was reasoned with thus: In the first place, there are no stones in the sky; Therefore no stones can fall from the sky." "Even when meteorites were taken on board as being a genuine scientific phenomena, it was decreed that only objects of "True Meteoric Material" were meteorites, and that other material that fell had not come from space, but could be explained in the same fashion as meteorites had once been" --Charles Fort (first quote)

"...an excellent example of a good approximation of anti-entropic behaviour was given in the Xmas Royal Society Lectures this year. I big drum of colourless colloid had a vertical line of dye in it. It got stirred to smear the dye around and then *unstirred* to restore a fair semblance of a vertical blue line. My eyes nearly popped warching it!"

Jane Alexander

The Lighter Report

"Reserved for heretics and atheists (acording to my informant, who held a rare visiting fellowship), The Sixth Circle of Hell boasts the largest faculty of philosophers in the universe. Given its permanent endowment and aggressive recruiting methods, I expect the Sixth Circle to be the top- ranked philosophy department for quite some time, perhaps eternity. (But keep checking this space until then.) This school's secret? It's their retention program: faculty members are not permitted to leave, no matter how big the outside offer. The downside, of course, is that the worst damned philosophers gain effective tenure upon arrival. However, the distinguished senior faculty includes Socrates, Spinoza, Hobbes, Nietzsche, J.S. Mill, and Bertrand Russell, among many others."

Conference Alerts: Academic Conferences, worldside

Tips for the Top: How to be a Philosopher

Technique 1

"Begin by making a spurious distinction. Befuddle the reader with your analytic wizardry. The reader will enter a logical trance, from which she will be unable to recall the initial spurious distinction and will feel strangely compelled to accept your conclusions."

"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire. ... We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the source of love." --Mark Twain

"Modern man has heard enough of guilt and sin. He is sorely beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to know how he can reconcile himself with his own nature, how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother.

The modern man does not want to know in what way he can immitate Christ, but in what way he can live his own individual life, however meager and uninteresting it may be. It is because every form of imitation seems to him deadening and sterile that he rebels against the force of tradition that would hold him to well trodden ways. All such roads for him lead in the wrong direction. He may not know it, but he behaves as if his own individual life were God's special will which must be fulfilled at all costs." --C.G. Jung

"The indifference of American public culture to the experiences of other peoples is reflected in the lack of work translated from foreign languages. Without translations, Americans, who are notoriously monolingual, have access only to the perspectives of those who write and speak in English; thus the ideas of millions are lost to them.

About 3% of the fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999 was translated.

America compares unfavourably to almost every other country and most unfavourably to western Europe, the region closest to an ideological sibling... There, Germany translates the most works - about six times as many as the US each year. Spain is close behind, while the French publishing industry exceeds the US by four times.

Without translations, Americans, who are notoriously monolingual, have access only to the perspectives of those who write and speak in English; thus the ideas of millions are lost to them."

"Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now. But the real nature of things, that we shall never know, never." --Albert Einstein

Thomas Pynchon on 1984

Prison art

Ashcroft's detention camps for US citizens declared enemy combatants

Sex is a brain thing

Our Preposterous Universe

Spam, spam, spam, spam

A personal experience with the new police state.
(Working link, thanks to James)

Do not try this at home.
(Working link, thanks to James)

Word of the day: appurtenance
Something added to another, more important thing; an appendage

Bush is trying to suppress the 911 report