Sunday, February 19, 2006

"For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do..."

The Right to Read by Richard Stallman

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

6000 intriguing people you want to meet online before you die
Ok, well, maybe more like 20... but it's a start.
The great appear great in our eyes
Only because we are kneeling.
Let us rise!

--Loustalot, 1789

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Motto of the day:
Lege, lege, lege, labora, ora, et relege
An old alchemist maxim translated as:
Read, read, read, work, take, and reread.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

"I have received, Sir, your new book against the human race; for which I thank you... No one has ever used so much intelligence to try to render us Beasts. When one reads your works, it stirs a desire to walk on all fours."

Voltaire upon receiving the Discourse on Inequality from Rousseau

Sunday, January 01, 2006

Word of the day:

sinecure: A position or office that requires little or no work but provides a salary.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

War and the military are, without question, among the very worst of the earth’s afflictions,” an American conservative of distinction once wrote, “responsible for the majority of the torments, oppressions, tyrannies, and suffocations of thought the West has for long been exposed to. In military or war society anything resembling true freedom of thought, true individual initiative in the intellectual and cultural and economic areas, is made impossible—not only cut off when they threaten to appear but, worse, extinguished more or less at root. Between military and civil values there is, and always has been, relentless opposition. Nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion, and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind.

That was Robert Nisbet in 1975. In The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945, George Nash identified Nisbet, along with Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, as one of the three most noteworthy of those intellectuals he identified as traditional conservatives

Twilight of Conservatism

Saturday, November 19, 2005

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you" --Leon Trotsky

Friday, October 21, 2005

Pentagon investigations in to prisoner deaths are "grossly inadequate and flawed", according to Human Rights First (HRF), "a 25-year-old lawyers' group":

"...criminal investigators have routinely failed to interview key witnesses or collect and maintain usable evidence, such as body parts or basic ballistics evidence, for possible prosecution"

"In addition, commanders have often either repeated failed to even to report deaths of detainees in the custody of their command, or delayed reporting them for days or even weeks after they occurred, greatly complicating efforts to collect relevant evidence. In one case, a death of an Iraqi detainee was not reported until a year later, and the case was closed without any determination of the cause of death"

Monday, September 26, 2005

The residents of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, nicknamed soldiers at the nearby base "the Murderous Maniacs," New York-based Human Rights Watch said. "The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor."

Soldiers in the Army's elite 82nd Airborne Division vented their frustration by systematically torturing Iraqi detainees from 2003 into 2004, hitting them with baseball bats and dousing them with chemicals (according to HRW)...