“The Insidious Nature Of Panics…” JoAnn Wypijewski

“The insidious nature of panics is that they exceptionalize the ordinary, and then make ordinary the legal machinery supposedly instituted for extraordinary circumstances.”

JoAnn Wypijewski: What We’ve Become. The Nation, June 7, 2010 (Vol. 290, No. 22)

IMPUNITY, n.  Wealth. Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary (The Peter Pauper Press 1958)
Pp 31

“Crude Parodies Which No-One Has A Right To Erase:” Camille Paglia

“There are very few instances where speech properly falls under government scrutiny, and those involve either fraudulent representations in business contracts or disturbances of the peace, such as shouting “fire” in a crowded theater or disrupting residential neighborhoods or campuses by noisy late-night reveling. In the latter, if offensive epithets are used, it is not the content of the worlds that is punishable but the fact that anything at all is shouted at that hour. Epithets and stereotypes are not fraudulent in a commercial sense; they are crudely distorted or parodistic versions of a substratum of historical truth or perception, which no-one, however well-meaning, has a right to erase.”

Camille Paglia: Vamps and Tramps (New York: Random House, 1994).

Pp 50-51

CARTESIAN, adj. Ambrose Bierce: THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY

CARTESIAN,  adj. relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum  –whereby  he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am”; as close an approximation to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary (The Peter Pauper Press 1958). pp 14.

Link: Wikipedia Entry for Ambrose Bierce

Link: Powell’s -a Genuine Bookstore: Ambrose Bierce

“Our Incomprehension Does Not Impede Our Understanding…” Steven Pinker

“Our incomprehension of (_____) does not impede our understanding of how (_____) works in the least.”
This is a quote from a Scientist. Wizards, aren’t they? Has anyone ever said such a thing before and been Wrong?
…
“But saying that we have no sicentifc evidence of (_____) is not the same as saying that (_____) does not exist at all.”

Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, pp 147, 148.

Here’s how Pinker filled in the blanks:

“Our incomprehension of (sentience) does not impede our understanding of how (the mind) works in the least.”
“But saying that we have no sicentifc evidence of (sentience) is not the same as saying that (sentience) does not exist at all.”

“A Single Error More Than All The Others…” John Ruskin

“And, as far as I have taken cognizance of the causes of the many failures to which the efforts of intelligent men are liable, more especially in matters political, they seem to me more largely to spring from this single error more than from all the others, that the inquiry into the doubtful, and in some sort inexplicable, relations of capability, chance, resistance, and inconvenience, invariably precedes, even if it do not altogether supersede, the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just. Nor is it any wonder that sometimes the too cold calculation of our powers should reconcile us too easily to our shortcomings, and even lead us into the fatal error of supposing that our conjectural utmost is in itself well, or in other words, that the necessity of offences renders them inoffensive.”

John Ruskin: The Seven Lamps Of Architecture ( Boston: Thomas Crowell and Company, 1880). Pp 3.

Link: Wikipedia entry for John Ruskin Arts and Crafts Figurehead)

“These anti-democratic forces will use fear, chaos and hatred…” Chris Hedges

“At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or the possibility of totalitarianism as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. This is the bleak future. This is reality.” 

…

“There are powerful corporate entities, fearful of losing their influence and wealth, arrayed against us.  They are waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will allow them, in the name of national security and moral renewal, to take complete control. The tools are in place. These antidemocratic forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the Christian Right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the ruling elites, and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to extinguish our democracy. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order, and clutching the Christian cross. By then, exhausted and broken, we may have lost the power to resist.” Pp 189

Hedges, Christopher: Empire Of Illusion (New York: Nation Books 2009) pp 145, pp 189