Aphorisms & Snippets

♦ So here we are, with years of light behind, and now the dim bulb of our lives' remainder bores into the universal darkness.
♦ The oil and gas moguls are aware of something most consumers may not be thinking about. The oil men know that the fossil fuel in the earth was predicted, at one time many (perhaps 30) years ago, to be exhausted in 50 years. If that is the case, then they also must see that adding expensive capital improvements, which would become useless with the disappearance, is imprudent use of capital to increase oil and gas supplies. The pressure to build fuel efficient autos that use alternative sources of energy is another factor not in their favor. Will they drag their feet like the auto manufacturers in the U.S. have done? Perhaps they are going to take the profits and run. Or are they taking sufficient interest in investing their profits in those alternative sources? Do U.S. citizens have faith that our industries will be able to compete without favors from government protection? Do we now have developing here an "infant industry" that will need and seek protection, as was done in our earlier history?
♦The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves. What are those faults? Passion. Intellect. Endurance. Stamina. Prescience. (The Opposite:) Historicity.
♦ Intellect is always at odds with reflex and habit. Intellect can override reflex to provide more suitable action (more survivability). Through self-discipline, acts of creative thinking, humankind substituted intellect for instinct over long periods of time.
♦ To survive, we must begin to deem the unthinkable thinkable.
♦ Look at his body. Do you see pride of ownership? Or do you see a slumlord?
♦ Suicide mass murderers are being culled from the gene pool by their own hand. But so are their victims. Except that the perps are always of one kind, where the victims are of a heterogeneous lot. The non-perps have the edge, except that the perp's victims are more numerous. The survival edge goes back to the perps?
♦ I believe since Shakespeare the British have lived with an elevated expectation of articulate and eloquent speech with strong elements of class distinctions. By contrast, the U.S. Americans have lived with a lowered expectation of fine diction as a function of the leveling effects of middle class democratic values. The juxtaposition of Tony Blair and George W. Bush exemplifies the two electorates. Shakespeare wrote of kings and princes and found tragedies among the royals and comedy among the commoners. Americans produce "tch-tch" tragedy and "one-liner" comedy. Is there an American Shakespeare?
♦ For lovers, hope springs nocturnal.
♦ Nobody is punishing me. I am never being punished by some higher power as the theocratic Pat Robertsons of the world claim for Ariel Sharon who was stricken for "dividing the Holy Land" or the people of towns who "rejected intelligent design" and were stricken with an environmental disaster. I am receiving the environmental feedback of negative reinforcement for my personal nonadapted acts deficient in knowledge and reason.
♦ If there is any design, it is that of the survival of those self-selected by knowledge and reason.
♦ I have a nostalgia for a future!
♦ If you start with a theory, you tend to leave out data that does not conform to the theory — a natural tendency to be right?
♦ When things go wrong, it's evil, ignorance, accident, or disease that's behind it. Evil and ignorance defy the odds. Intelligence betters the odds.
♦ If you are demonstrating, you are in the minority.
♦ Questioning authority, the basis of all science. Question the authority: What kind of sources? How many? How are they qualified? What is their track record? How long has each source been used?
♦ There never was nothing.
♦ If you had any devotion to the principle of justice, you would have an understanding of the processes of investigation.
♦ I do not want the soothing assurances and silky mendacity. I want the unvarnished, absolute, plain and simple truth. One example: you are a beautiful person, but you have let yourself go.
♦ A great while is required to learn how to use freedom.
♦ Someday I hope to stand in your presence again. I have some old farts to recycle.
♦ Who enjoys the belittling of great men?
♦ Eloquence is the marriage of heart and brain.
♦ A: That was a 100 calorie kiss. B: Lost or gained? A: Like celery. The gain from devouring lips and tongue is offset by the energy.
♦ What brought all this into being? Science. Any other view is arrogant anthropomorphism. Science. Physics. Geophysics. Chemistry. Physiology. Evolution: differentiation for advantage and survivability within environmental constraints.
♦ Are more bodies separated from life by evil, accident, ignorance, or disease?
♦ Our political compact (the social contract): civic virtues and character; cultivating community through nurturing democratic republics; a requirement of all citizens to nurture democratic republics; central to our mission; no choice—no self interest here.
♦ They have turned patriotism into the service of lost empire and remembered glory of triumph in battle. Citizens have one interest, all institutions of government serving a patriotism bound to civic duty.
♦ They impoverish our political society who foster a community estranged from that society.
♦ Waiting for a settled peace. Waiting. Patience. Incessant waiting.
♦ It's impossible for me to believe that there is anything but death after death.
♦ Intelligent use requires prudence, circumspection, sensitivity, bibliotherapy. That last is arming yourself with Consumer Reports when you have some material problem.
♦ To imagine the discomfort of others is one marker of maturity.
♦ The significant thing is not that we've done all these things, but that we saw the need for their being done and found the way out of a desperate need.
♦ Diddlee-dinky-danky-doo, diddley-dumpty-di!
♦ In the hours that span the passing of our loved ones, the habits that we've adopted in lesser emergencies restrain our grief in all but two or three rare moments. We are not accustomed to the intelligence and teachings of death. Then the body is shaken with emotion at the awesome insight, the inevitability, the finality. It is the consolation of being learned that eases one over the pain of substituting new for old modes of thinking.
♦ Any day, any moment, through any of myriad means, the dying and death could come; I could join the simple, senseless elements, that form of energy transmuted into light's and time's plaything with no past or present. What grows, decays—except man's manufactured junk—, and decaying loses complexity, life.
♦ To survive, we must begin to deem the unimaginable imaginable.
♦ Steps on an ant-hill. They're workers. Give them something to do.
♦ He's one who walks forward looking backward. He bumps into things.
♦ Go play with your cactus.
♦ Pain theory of learning: "He always does the unpleasant things first. He has gone through life wearing tight shoes, always in anticipation of things to come: his foot may grow larger and in the meantime he enjoys the prospect of taking the shoes off in the evening."
♦ He's the kind who wants to go through the door before it's opened.
♦ On the eve of my birthday, I should go out and do something that people 42 can do that people 43 can't do.
♦ On the brink as I am of blah-blah-blah, I want to teeter a bit with a brief digression.
♦ Thinking covers more time faster than clock-watching.
♦ Individual conscience is a better governor than law. Conscience is inherently individual, having its location within the body. Law is the expression of social conscience. Lawyers carry more of the law around with them than most individuals can carry. In the absence of the substance of law, the individual can only apply to any situation how he feels or what he knows or believes at the moment, and that is often ignorant of the substance of the law. The trouble with the law is that it is written, paragraphed, printed, bound, and shelved or sold to lawyers and judges who memorize, internalize and retrieve for a fee. Law does not flow in the memory traces of most individuals. Where the law is concerned, most people know little. Individual conscience, defined as a self-concept of the ideal self, is better than nothing in social circumstances. The trouble with individual conscience is that acts proceeding from it must be judged now, while the innovations of conscionable acts must wait for time to judge and vindicate them. To be too quick to condemn is to require society (law) to make war against the individual (conscience) which is always too weak to win against superior numbers. To cause suffering for acts that in time are vindicated is to cause innocent suffering, particularly reprehensible in capital cases. We must either. then, make the law simpler and more memorable for our present modest capacities, or make the individual capable of carrying with him in his memory traces the substance of the body of the law. Miniaturization in technology may hold the answer, together with lessons in style and diction for practitioners.
♦ No man knows the morality of his acts unless and until he observes what everyone else does. The creative artist especially is working in an atmosphere without morality, or merely with a ghostly presence of it. The artist is particularly vulnerable.
♦ Honesty has no system of philosophy. Honesty is based on experience and better observing of experience, and calling it by its proper label, honesty of intention, or honesty of recall, etc. Honesty is a method, not a trait. Hence, it can be avoided, situationally, as an alternative; a trait or lack of trait cannot be avoided situationally. Avoiding honesty is often deemed the better course because the avoidable truth is deemed more unpleasant. (The "trait" is a reasonably stable element of personality distinguishing one person from another.)
♦ Courage is enduring discomfort with fortitude. Hemingway said, "Courage is grace under pressure."
♦ Gotta wound? An ancient treatment: stew in your own juices. Does it work on mental "wounds"? These web pages are my testament.
♦ Aggressive humanism, where no one is at the mercy of any other or god or act of god, is the proper goal of humankind.
♦ Each person is constantly called upon to create her own future.
♦ Our fearless leaders' homilies, platitudes, and reachings for ethos are triumphs of common sense and defeats of intelligence and reason.
♦ The outcry against the Calley verdict demonstrates the defective conscience of a vast number of so-called "democratic" Americans, from the President to the Texas legislature. No voice of conscience, a feeling of lawfulness that lies deep within every human being, spoke to them. The Isreali court's condemnation of Eichman featured the "concept of justice grounded in the depths of everyman", a perspective on life that "is presented solely as a substitute for familiarity with the law. Its plausibility rests on the assumption that the law expresses only what every man's conscience would tell him anyhow." (Arendt) A referee in any game or human transaction should have a "feeling of lawfulness", and only the socialized being attains such a perspective of human affairs, a conscience. I believe conscience speaks from the mouth of the ideal self.
♦ As I act, I legislate for all people. In my behavior is the social contract I live by. If I meet unjust action, I will not let that legislate for my action.
♦ Heaven is where people hear you the first time.
♦ "It's generally conceded that silence will get you more votes than talk." (Eric Sevareid, before the 1972 presidential election.)
♦ "Don't change dicks in the middle of a screw. Vote for Nixon in '72." Men's room wall at an interurban station.(Chicago-South Bend)
♦ Ego disengagement means generosity, trust, self-criticism, rejection of self-interest.
♦ Grant a second and third term, or as many termes as he wants, to a president who is able to win a series of ten debates every three years. No king-making.
♦ To survive, we must begin to deem the unspeakable speakable.
♦ J____ hired out as a professional conversationalist. He set up shop in a corner salon outfitted for conversation. He served drinks in an abundant variety of beverages, but since the purpose was not to profit by drinks, he sold them cheap. He sold talk. There was no fee schedule. The patron paid what the time was worth to him. He had some help, more to create a buzz of white noise than to increase profits. He was untiring in his dedication. He never ended a conversation for any concern of his. He was a Western Geisha, an American Gesprächmeister. He did not take a back seat to his partner, however. He pursued his own interests in the effort as if he were himself paying for the privilege, but he knew how to build on his partner's view and make a mutual induction.
♦ Gather round me, you cuddlies and snuggle down, snuggle down, snuggle down.
I'm going to talk to you about chickenhood, about chickenhood, about chickenhood!
on this warm sunnyside of the barn, of the barn, of the barn, of the barn.
Chickiehood,chickiehood,
there's nothing better than chickiehood.
Roosterhood and hennihood got nothin' to do with chickiehood.
Hennies cackle and roosters crow,
and chickies peck and peep and grow.
Chickiehood,chickiehood,
there's nothing better than chickiehood.
For all his crowing the rooster can't fly.
For all his crowing the rooster can't fly.
Chickiehood,chickiehood,
there's nothing better than chickiehood.
For all her clucking the hen must cry.
Chickiehood,chickiehood,
there's nothing better than chickiehood.
♦ Failure is not an option. But does that make "success" the only alternative?
♦ I live with your extreme bias the same way I would live in a cage with a boa constrictor.
♦ A theory is a statement that attempts to account for all the known facts of the case. A theory of evolution is not a speculation.
♦ Caveat emptor, hell! Who can say, "Caveat vendor!"
♦ Democracy by definition is a liberal philosophy. Capitalism by its acquisitive nature is a conservative philosophy.
♦ Democracy can be captured by the arisocratic "establishment" with a "system" that pays lip service to democracy. It enthralls people not familiar with the philosophy of democracy. Democracy will someday become the system. That is the way the world is tending.
♦ How could a very wealthy John F. Kennedy be such a liberal thinker, while Richard Nixon, coming from a more modest family background, be such an arch conservative scratching and clawing his way to the top? There are studies of such phenomena.
♦ I cannot talk religion with some who want to quote the scriptures to me. Implied in the notice of those biblical quotes is the idea that I have of them as awestruck by the claims to know a god. I understand evolution but I am not a practitioner of the science of evolution. The scriptures indicate they are smitten with awe in "seeing" those "invisible qualities" in his "eternal power" and no lover of reason. I do not know god. I am saying many things about "if there were a god" (the conditional phrase indicating a condition contrary to fact, in my book), and I must conclude that god would surely not be anything like s-he is made out to be by most people. I cannot discuss these things with "true believers". I want to avoid endless, emotional, fruitless arguments. I've done it in the past because I was young headed. I do not want to convert them or defend my secular humanism. I can only explain me, but then that would encourage them to try to show me the error of my ways, and I know what I know not as error but as my perception of the world, involving my sense (my individual angle of vision) and memory. They will probably need to grant me that.
♦ "Theatre" is the art. "Theater" is the facility. (William Kinser, now deceased, professor, Indiana University.)
♦ Chinese saying: when the house is on fire, it's too late to dig a well. Our environment may be "on fire".
♦ Is there life after death? Of course there is. Life goes on after I die, not for me, but for all remaining. My faith is in that life. I'm not so important that I must have another life, especially since I've squandered so much of this one.
♦ My impression of the pop scene? Planned sin.
♦ We should think of divorce, drugs, abandonment, infidelity, lying, cheating, alcohol, gluttony, and so on, as alternative forms of suicide.
♦ There is no moment between human beings that cannot be recorded. There is no message that cannot be figured out. (The Conversation, a movie with Gene Hackman, 1974.)
♦ A high note would shatter his ego.
♦ Longevity is a test of life philosophies.
♦ In that film was one acre of bed and a square inch of love.
♦ Can you list 100 ways religion retards human development? Where is the Martin Luther of humanism when we need him now? The church door is in need of papering!
♦ Unethical communication may conceal itself and serv the user. Ethical communication may appear as a weakness in honesty.
♦ Where does the moral imperative come from? Seeing the relation between acts and consequences, acts and immediate consequences and with increasing maturity, acts and remote consequences. A society overrun by immaturity — incapable of seeing remote consequences — will undergo cataclysmic events of adjustment and destruction.
♦ Can morality of communication be legislated? institutionalized?
University speech codes issued by university administrators are ordering what professors in certain department are teaching as outcomes, or specific objectives, of a liberal education. I taught ethics of communication, freedom of speech, intercultural communication, nonverbal communication, etc. What administrators are mandating are the learning objectives of selected university courses. Instead of mandating codes, they should make sure that the behavior they desire is being taught and required in their course offerings. Political correctness, the much disparaged "PC", is not a bad thing. It is the attempt to incorporate cultural astuteness (sensitivity) in a person's interpersonal and public communicative behavior. Administrators seem to be trying to legislate it and make it some kind of punishable offense if it is not practiced. But what they want must be learned, first, which requires the defeat of old habits by new ones. I, too, found it, and still find it absolutely astounding that university administrators, working in an authoritarian (undemocratic, autocratic, top-down) hierarchy, have little notion of First Ammendment rights and principles. I devised and ran a university forum that developed topics and held debates on the Brit model (to make it fun and fair) that should become standard practice on all campuses and in every community. I also developed a town hall for the Speech Communication Association (since renamed National Communication Association) at their annual conventions. Popular. Big draw. The spirit of discussion, argumentation and debate needs a renaissance. Especially at the presidential campaign level.
♦ I say, time to evolve consciousness beyond political parties by going above them, making them obsolete, in favor of unaffiliated candidates put through a national winnowing process of a series of debates and a series of votes by rankings using C-SPAN. Or some such.
♦ There is power-hungering and power-savoring behavior which tends to repeat at the moment of feeling power what gave rise to the power feedback, such as repetition of such as the informative fact, the creative simile, the persuasive aphorism.
♦ The great enemy to fight in all things is arbitrariness. Giving raises. Giving jobs. The death penalty.
♦ Human reaction time in car accidents may be analogous to human reaction time in environmental destruction, just as the batters with the better reaction time have the higher batting percentage and the higher value for the team, (and the $ to prove it).
♦ "Luck is the residue of design and desire." (Howard Cosell quoting Branch Rickey.)
♦ Death is mainly ego-obliteration. What others may retain of the departed ego is not the ego obliterated.
♦ Is "smidgen" the diminutive of "smudge"?
♦ Political correctness is cultural astuteness. The former is the attempt to show in public policy a sensitivity for the latter.
♦ Truisms of sex, as hypothesized by the author:
♦ Nearly every human being is the result of a male orgasm, but not of a female orgasm.
♦ Every human being stands as a testament to a woman's enforced fortitude in the presence of pain, courage in the face of danger.
♦ (A) "Why don't you speak? A man without words is a man without brains." (B) "Until words are better than silence, a man should keep his mouth shut."
♦ When I've been frank with someone, I often wish I hadn't. Being frank takes art to get the truth across unmistakebly, without brutality.
♦ If societies can produce great geniuses in art, philosophy, science, music, medicine, and so forth, why can they not produce great politicians who will lead society to great achievements in public policy? The simple answer is that the former produces works of individual genius. The latter, the political leader, is produced by the collective opinion.
♦ Fighting a war is one thing. The need for a war is another. Does the concept of "God" stand behind the ideas that prop up the need for war? The only peace to come from war is that which surrounds the war's dead.
♦ Seven years is the distance between Earth and Mercury.
♦ I have seen a man with an Afro lighting a cigarette. The flame leapt to his hair. I ran across the street and threw my best overcoat over it putting it out. I watched two blind men tapping there way down the sidewalk approaching each other. Oh-oh. And it happened as I thought it would. I was watching an old tree when a very large lower limb just fell off.
♦ It's in me bloomin' duty oyam always struggling to cut the Gordian knot of moy existence.
♦ PUN INTENDED (do-it-yourself): dresser, drawers
♦ A most poingant moment described by the announcer as I was watching TV the morning of 9/11: A little boy was in the living room watching with his mother as the towers tumbled down. "Cool!" he yelled. His mother, in tears, said, "Your father's in that building." What is that a comment on?
♦ Child, on the death of seven astronauts: "I wish people could stay alive."
♦ I have a private life of thought, a plague and a pleasure.
♦ Religion will hijack the minds of the unimaginative. But like the 9/11 plane passengers who hijacked the hijackers, a mutinous act is required to restore the individual system of imagination. A Christian imagination is life lived in abject poverty of the riches of time and space.
♦ If there were a god, would it want me to pray, or would it be indifferent? If someone prays, asks for something, and gets it, that would be a coincidence.
♦ Leni Riefenstahl called Hitler's decade the "Triumph of the Will". That is nothing more than the Triumph of Ideology.
♦ The average life span is ego time, years and decades. The age of Earth is five billion years; five hundred million decades; fifty million centuries; five million millenia; (eons, [eras, (periods, [epochs])]). The earth will begin to perish when the sun enlarges to become a red giant, in five billion years, engulfing the Earth and the solar system. Will life be prolonged if human life migrates to the planets farther out from the enlarging sun? Five billion years after that the sun will become a dead white dwarf, if there is no supernova in the meantime. Do I have that right?
♦ The b(nasal effluent)s of my mind, picked and flicked here.
♦ Time is elastic. As I used to jog past a row of houses or other objects, the time seemed shorter than jogging past open fields. Consequently, the busy mind passes time faster than the idle mind. An extra-busy mind needs an extra-long life span to experience a normal lifetime.
♦ I was very proud that the students wanted to call me "Dr. D." or "Dr. John". The perfect indication of respect. Before the Lubbock tornado hit, one of the first things they sought to save was the notebook I required, and one of the first things they sought to retrieve from the wreckage after it was over.
♦ What do you want? I'm multi-tasking. Tell me quick.
♦ You oughta cut the grass....You oughta vacuum the floors.... You oughta water the trees.... You oughta fill the bird-bath — yauta - yauta - yauta -- (I feel like I've been run over by an oughta.)
♦ To the non-predatory fish, the prey, safety is in large numbers against the predators of the sea. Al Qaida are the predators. Citizens of a democracy are the non-predators. Our men-at-arms would be safer in large numbers. Increase the forces.
♦ To the extent that intelligence rules passion, habit, and, yes, reason, is the extent of one's maturity and mental health. Look out for the infantile personality.
♦ If you encounter a person for whom you have some regard and who is obviously troubled with a problem, your obligation is to listen actively and understand, not comfort with vague nostrums and platitudes. Active listening is saying back to the troubled one your paraphrase of what you hear him or her saying to the satisfaction of him or her. That is the operational definition of "understanding". That is a very rare thing in interpersonal relationships.
♦ Another rare thing in human intercourse is asking probing questions, beyond the first two or three, that take you down the path of the other person's point of view. That's how you walk a mile in the shoes of the other person. You, by doing so, will be much prized as a friend.
♦ I once taught a class for an hour in which I said nothing that was not a question. At the end, my final question was, "What did I do today?" They said many versions of "You made us think". Not once did anyone say, "Everything you said was a question." I had to tell them. If someone had seen it, that would have required a knowledge of "meta-comminication".
♦ I once taught a class in which I instructed the students to spend the hour in silence. At the end, I asked them what had happened. Guess what?
♦ I taught an interpersonal class in which the students rotated through everyone else in the class, shaking hands, introduction, conversation for two minutes, shaking hands and moving on. Then I had them sit in a circle and say the name of everyone else around the circle. Guess what?
♦ Oh, I think I know George Bush. I've seen him many times. He has the walk where he hangs muscle at both sides heading for the object of his rage, beckoning with both hands, "Come on, buddy, bring it on! Bring it on!" But only like the little guy taunting from behind the biggest guy on the block. "Lemme attim! Lemme attim!" When the depraved Al Qaida proves too shadowy and elusive for him, he turns to the Iraqi tyrant who is so openly evil, with the confidence of pulling the levers operating the greatest military power on Earth, the easy target displacing the real enemy. I've seen such macho types take their frustrated rage to some other person or thing in lieu of the real quarry. Mr. Bush likes to imbed himself in the flight suit and the aircraft carriers, the veterans, the NASCAR drivers, the NFL players, where "Gentlemen, start your engines!" is his order. That is not the character of a Commander-in-Chief I would want for my president. The Commander-in-Chief is a civilian power in control of the military forces, whose primary aim is peace, not bellicosity and go-it-alone xenophobia.
♦ Hindsight knows everything. Foresight knows nothing. Judgment is prudent. Prejudgment is reckless. Wuda. Shuda. Cuda.
♦ If there were a god, it would not be arbitrary, erratic, capricious. If there were a god, it would be located in the nature of things, such as evolution, which is not a belief, but understanding and knowledge.
♦ We are humans and do what Earthlings do. Any god would have nothing to do with it. We know excellence because we have seen it. I have seen it. Some people are excellent. Some pursue excellence. Most have given up on achieving excellence, in diet, in healthful behaviors, in knowing and understanding, in physical, intellectual, ethical, civil, and social habits.
♦ Nearly all of our elected office holders have flaws seen in the glare of public opinion. As do we all. Even the most overtly moral and upstanding have a basement or an attic in their life history storing memories of incommunicable and well hidden private deeds. Like slivers, they will probably work their way to the surface someday.
♦ Living is but a momentary delay in the onrush of eternal time. The living have a myopic, a miroscopic view of time, bending their heads down to watch its insect crawl.
♦ Let the lives of others flow through you, and the only way is to be an observer; through reflection you become full. Living your own life is not living life fully. Do not limit your life to one. Travel, reflect, and live the many lives you see and reflect on. Then see the reflection of yourself in others. Then see your appearance as the self you want to be, you ought to be, you could be, you are expected to be. Know thyself.
♦ "Having a compulsive talker in a position of authority is a useful tool." (FBI man in film "Attack on Terror", covering the murder by Klansmen of three civil rights workers in 1964. A technique for infiltrating and influencing an organization.)
♦ Deliver me from morning network TV "news" "shows" where the childish hoot screams in the background, where the anchors get what they always wanted, star status on "shows", not programs, and where the pitiful, frantic clawing the air for recognition by the crowd behind is exploited to excite viewer passions for the anchor's celebrity. They have eschewed their proper roles as conduits, and substituted celebrity worship and pandering.
♦ What fireworks on Earth could be seen from the moon?
♦ The blunt-force trauma of wealth on the young.
♦ The face of ignorance can make you look dumb if you ask a smart question.
♦ Echoes from the past have implications for our future. Our potential for destruction from ecological disasters comes out of SCIENCE, out of the study of the collapse of other civilizations, which in our time is made worse by exponential rates of change, giving ever shorter lead time to make preparations. But still, it seems to me, decisions are being made without regard for long term consequences.
♦ Hand in hand with that, political practitioners will lead with too much regard for the "lowest common denominator" where the majority of votes are garnered. The LCD is defined as "the most basic, least sophisticated level of taste, sensibility, or opinion among a group of people." In fairness, the LCD is not always to be avoided. It has been determined that, if you want your web message to be most widely accessible, you should code it in "HTML" because it is the LCD coding system, having the most currency. And speaking of common currency, well, you know what that is. It is in politics that the best vote-getters are not the intellectuals, whom I regard as those in policy making who are more inclined to use science.
♦ One of the largest errors of our time: making immediate decisions without regard for long-term consequences. (1) The most prominent testaments to that truth sit in prison cells or on death row. (2) At the mid-level of prominence are people who lie in intensive care units, as well as those being eaten away by chronic diseases such as diabetes, etc. (3) The least prominent or most obscure models of that truth are people living in zones of projected ecological disasters, such as recurrent hurricanes, where each year they can be seen going to Home Depot for plywood for window covers. (You mean to tell me they do not have a standing, proven defense stored in their garages? And the architecture!!) (4) Another obscure example is the voters who cannot discern the candidate who is most likely to make statements that would make that truth a self-defeating prophecy, from the candidate who dumbs down the message for the LCD.
♦ I get the feeling that my genes are able to take me much farther down the road, but I am not cooperating.
♦ It is hard, no, almost impossible to think of yourself as a nothing in the universe. Then I look at a star, and understand. Eternity began before me and reaches beyond me. Infinity begins with me.
♦ Wasn't it the deistic Zeitgeist that empowered our founding generation to develop the democracy we now have? They outlawed theocracy, and all theocratic notions.
♦ The mighty Alexander was never influenced by force, but only by persuasion. He was fearless. The terrorists of our day act only as if fear and fearful acts are their greatest and only weapons. I would hope all theocrats could see the extreme end result of their "philosophy" in the terroristic methods. We must always be ready to take on the theocrats in democratic discussion and debate, and remain fearless in non-democratic contexts.
♦ We have had centuries of renaissance, reformation and revolution under the philosophies of humanism which has fueled terrorism. It's the terrorists who are terrified of humanist movements.
♦ I love this poem, The Man with the Hoe, by Edwin Markham (1852-1940). The italicized phrase from the first stanza sticks and reverberates in my memory at times appropriate. In fact, my Aunt Cora had a print of the picture on her wall when I was a child, and that sticks, too.

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

♦ I have had a click in my left knee when I sit or rotate it on the recumbent exercycle. The ache whimpers like a wounded animal in the wilderness. So I have favored it by walking much less. By chance I climbed aboard my son's treadmill with a twenty degree incline, and I saw that I did not stride with a fully extended knee walking on a flat surface. I have not used the treadmill I have for several years, but have started again in the full incline position. The click has subsided. The ache has subsided. A case of body wisdom. You do not do things because they taste or feel good. You do things because they are good for you: making immediate decisions with regard for long-term consequences.
♦ P.S. I do not believe that wounded animals whimper in the wilderness. Whimpering is a human thing, a communication thing. Come to think of it.
♦ "Get a life!" That's not credible coming from a corpse.
♦ The seven stages of life: inheritance; presence; competence; ascendance; eminence; impermanence; imminence. (But only in a democracy.)
♦ Our sun is a star, and we are tolerated to live at an optimum distance from it as it fuels our needs. It is in late middle age. It has burned its non-renewable store of fuel for 15 billion years, may burn another five billion before it runs low, becoming a red giant engulfing its planets and then becoming a white dwarf. The planets become dead cinders as space debris, that will crash eventually into the ozone layer of another planet somwhere. The sun is not eternal. Only the universal process it lives in, eternal recycling, is eternal. Something of our substance will become part of the other parts of our universe. The stars are our friends.
♦ How would you measure a complete turnover of the Earth's population? Would you choose to mark it by the birth-to-death life-cycle of the Earth's oldest person? Or would it be impossible to measure?
♦ I would guess that the chances are one in ten billion that someone could ever have spoken English in the style of William Shakespeare as an everyday diction. Is that a useless speculation?
♦ The goal of the terrorists is to make the world safe for terrorists.
♦ The ant is a living fossil, unchanged in millions of years.
♦ Reasoning is the symbolic balancing of alternatives. Science is a method of reasoning.
♦ What are the retarding influences on human betterment? Diet. Illiteracy. Poverty. Autocratic, oligarchic, theocratic and totalitarian governments.
♦ We need religion for those who are not able to think for themselves about the universe and our place in it.
♦ As many waves as lap a day the shore, so generations spend themselves in toil against the sand created there by grind.
♦ Here!      Here!    Here!
Head!      Heart!    Knee!
Intellect!  Passion!  Physique!
♦ I entered a contest once. Write a second verse to this jingle: "You'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent." My entry: "It doesn't matter where it goes, so long as it's not there under your nose."
♦ What we are witnessing and experiencing is the deconstruction of institutions of religion and government by the heat that they breed. That is, more heat is generated by dictatorships than by democracies. Dictatorships are consumed by their own heat. They breed great conflagrations, where the democracies breed isolated brush fires.
♦ When I drink tea, I drink the color, the heat, the aroma, the flavor, the texture, the tactile sensation of the mug, the context of the company, the setting, the intercourse.
♦ It preys on my mind, like some great beast whose fangs have clamped down on my gray matter, that I know people who have become so religiously and politically intolerant that I cannot continue to write them.
♦ Romance is art. Marriage is science.
♦ CURSUM PIRFICIO. Latin inscription on an entry tile at Marilyn Monroe's house: "My journey is over."
♦ Am I a Literalist or a Metaphorician?
♦ They do not put sidewalks where I want to walk.
♦ The majority conform and deny protection to those who do not. (Nazi Germany, 1933. Then they invented the emblem of conformity, the Nazi salute.)
♦ Book title: People Without Teleology.
♦ Presidential candidate #1: passion minus poise. #2: poise minus passion. Eloquence equals poise plus passion.
♦ Ontology recapitulates phylogeny. Adaptability precludes adaptation. Adaptation precludes adaptability. Silence is consent.
♦ Choice v. no choice is reason v. unreason.
♦ When is "sh" not censorship?
♦ I am sensitive enough to censure my own acts of cultural transgression, but I am still not sensitive enough to censure my acts before the fact.
♦ Two people living together: #1-what's yours is yours, what's mine is mine. #2-what's yours is mine, what's mine is yours. Origin?
♦ The human race is in an embryonic stage of development. Each of us is a cell in the system in the womb of nature, but our consciousness is fissured and our hand has functional autonomy. It reaches out to take hold of the umbilical of our lifeline to all our resources. Our hand wants to make mischief with our survival by squeezing to severely constrict the umbilical. We are not behaving as a system; we are out of sync within ourselves because we have a sundered national consciousness. We do not have the communication within our body politic. Our discussion is fragmented and truncated where it should be concerted and complete. And we are out of sync with other organisms. Interactional synchrony with other civilization projects is the ultimate organism. We should seek to restore self-synchronous communication before we seek international synchrony. We should build the institutions of interaction, forums, networks and pure electronically mediated democracy, to restore significant communication, rather than diffused communication.
♦ I would like my political party to be founded on, and to function with the principle vision of futurism, to make policy decisions.
♦ One great enemy of democracy in our society today is the private enterprise and commercialism aspects of the mass media. Those activities should be suspended at times of great decision making that impact every citizen. The media should be required to turn over their technology to deliver a mass audience for free speech discussion.
♦ He who hath not hith head thcrewed on, looketh forth to a goodly thcrewing. — Confuscius.
♦ Never come between a hippo and water.
♦ Oftentimes, I don't know what I think until I see what I say.
♦ The squeaking wheel gets the grease. The squeaking board gets replaced.
♦ When the house is on fire, it's too late to dig a well. (Old Chinese trusim)
♦ LABOR OMNIA VINCIT IMPROBUS. The (Wiekamp) family motto on our (presumed) coat of arms. (Steady Working Conquers All)
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Last updated on January 07, 2006)