"Heaven is on the other side of that feeling you get when you're sitting on the couch and you get up and make a triple-decker sandwich. It's on the other side of that, when you don't make the sandwich. [...] It's about giving up the things that basically keep you from feeling. That's what I believe, anyway. I'm always asking, "What am I going to give up next?" Because I want to feel." - Jim Carrey

"The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget. With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the state, and if the state resists they can purchase the firepower to outgun it."

- Judge Gomez Hurtado, Colombian High Court, Father of the Columbian constitution, in 1993.


"Álvaro Gómez was murdered by gunmen on November 2, 1995 in Bogota while exiting the Sergio Arboleda University where he was a professor. It was later suggested that Gómez was extrajudicially killed by former members of the Colombian National Police."

- Wikipedia


The US defense budget is currently about 500 billion; I don't know what it was in 1993 but the income of the drug barons probably rose as it rose.

"Power can mean one of two things, domination or potency. Far from being identical, these two qualities are mutually exclusive. Impotence, using the term not only with regard to the sexual sphere but to all spheres of human potentialities, results in the sadistic striving for domination; to the extent to which an individual is potent, that is,able to realize his potentialities on the basis of freedom and integrity of his self, he does not need to dominate and is lacking the lust for power. Power, in the sense of domination, is the perversion of potency, just as sexual sadism is the perversion of sexual love." - Erich Fromm

MRDA titled the entry will-to-potency, a reference to the belief that the concept of the will-to-power in Nietzsche's philosophy is often incorrectly understood as being a will to domination, when it's in fact a will to potency. I suspect this came about due to difficulties in translation; in German the distinction between potency-power and domination-power is probably more clear.

"Clearly, language threatening to wipe a nation or a group of people off the map is to be condemned by all civilized people. And I do condemn any such language. But why does threatening Iran with a preemptive nuclear strike, as many here have done, not also deserve the same kind of condemnation? Does anyone believe that dropping nuclear weapons on Iran will not wipe a people off the map?" -Ron Paul

"One's outlook on life and its purposes may greatly modify one's attitude toward goods in which fashion is prominent. At the present time, not a few people in western nations have departed from old-time standards of religion and philosophy, and having failed to develop forceful views to take their places, hold to something that may be called, for want of a better name, a philosophy of futility. This view of life (or lack of a view of life) involves a question as to the value of motives and purposes of the main human activities. There is ever a tendency to challenge the purpose of life itself. This lack of purpose in life has an effect on consumption similar to that of having a narrow life interest, that is, in concentrating human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption." -Paul Nystrom (a professor of marketing, said in 1928)

This guy (who made the documentary above) is pretty talented.

I'm thinking that the public education system would work about five hundred times as well as it does now if it got rid of that textbook and chalkboard and homework nonsense and all it did was have kids watch one documentary a day.

*

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world, no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." ~Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States

"All of the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arises, not from the defects of the Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation." ~John Adams, Founding Father of the American Constitution

"The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George the III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the Revolutionary War." ~Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father of the American Constitution

"Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate." ~James A. Garfield, assassinated president of the United States

"The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity." ~Abraham Lincoln, assassinated president of the United States

(Note that JFK, too, was taking action against the Fed and wanted to limit its powers.)

"The purpose of propaganda is to present an ostensible diversity behind which lies an actual uniformity." - Goebbels

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble." - Helen Keller

"In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience." - Charles Sanders Peirce

"What is the point of work? Is it to increase production and consumption? Or is it to promote the development and growth of human beings?" - Erich Fromm

I learned a nice term today: ikigai; apparently it means sense of purpose in Japanese; those who get up each day to do something. It shouldn't be confused with ambition, which is those who get up each day to get things done. Seems to be more in the Karma Yoga tradition than the Protestant work ethic tradition.

Remember that old talk about type A and type B personalities? I don't really like either. Type A is someone who is a workaholic and doesn't take time to enjoy everyday pleasurable things, and type B is a person who cares less about their work than about other things like friends and social connections and having a good time.

But why not a type that enjoys work as a way to have a good time, and works hard but not for monetary gain or fame, but for self-development and the feeling of bringing things into existence which didn't exist before? Like in Ikiru.

"The first rule of being a great propaganda system -- and why our system is vastly superior to anything in the old Soviet Union -- is to not let people think they are being subjected to propaganda. If people don't think that, if they aren't looking for that, they're much easier to propagandize." -Bob McChesney

I don't like Neil Gaiman's writings that much, in that a lot of them seem like more than they are, but this is a great quote of his I found today:

"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe."

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." -Einstein

"Once I had an amazing vision. I saw myself transported through time and space. Millions, no, billions, trillions, Godzillions of years passed. Not figuratively, but literally. Whizzed by. I found myself at the very rim of time and space, a vast giant being composed of the living minds and bodies of every thing that ever was. It was an incredibly moving experience. Exhilarating. I was high for weeks. Finally I told Nishijima Sensei about it. He said it was nonsense. Just my imagination. I can't tell you how that made me feel. Imagination? This was as real an experience as any I've ever had. I just about cried. Later on that day I was eating a tangerine. I noticed how incredibly lovely a thing it was. So delicate. So amazingly orange. So very tasty. So I told Nishijima about that. That experience, he said, was enlightenment."

http://homepage.mac.com/doubtboy/boring.html via heraclitus