If oxidative damage causes aging then we all burn up in the end, Mr Vonnegut
One cannot have subtlety without context.
re The volunteer firement trying to prevent their loved ones from combining with oxygen, in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater
...ok, I had way too much fun writing this review...I picked up this book while walking around Barnes and Noble last night and well, you can read...F*ck your Book
..."I've made it not because I assimilated, or because I have a little bit of money, or because my voice be heard. I've made it because I can disagree with and question what America is really all about. I've made it because I can demand more from my country."
-- Julissa Arce, My American Dream, p 285
..."It [providence] has shown the heaven and earth to every child, and filled him with a desire of the whole; a desire raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be filled with planets; a cry of famine, as of devils for souls. Then for the satisfaction, - to each man is administered a single drop, a bead of dew of vital power, per day, a copy as large as space, and one drop of the water of life in it. ....
In every house...this chasm is found - between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience"
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Writings p376
...Just finished "Its kind of a Funny Story", great book, looked up the author and found he committed suicide in 2013, 9 years after he wrote the book about depression and real friends and creativity and his 5 days in a psych ward.
And tried to find his writings, like blogs, and found this - another fan, her words made a lot of sense to me:
"If there is one thing I have learned from Vizzini, it’s that struggles are not written in pencil. You can’t erase the past, and if you try to cross it out, it only looks worse. If you try to rip out the pages of your story that you don’t like, the book won’t make any sense."
https://twloha.com/blog/thank-you-ned-vizzini/
...In the intro, Hamilton wrote
"It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force."
And, he expected Americans, common man in the street, to read it! Its ok to communicate complex ideas to each other, really it is...
...Just finished reading Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. I liked it fairly well, found it actually pretty inspiring about 2/3 of the way through, but he lost me at the end when he seemed to imply that his Theory of Constraints could solve every problem known to business, education or human endeavor. Its the be-all-end-all syndrome that is so prevalent with consultants and trainers, because the success of consultancy is dependent on being The One with the answers.
The thing is, its ok to have a fairly good and somewhat original idea, that is sometimes helpful. That's better than average and its a good thing. Nothing in this book is earth-shaking, but it does show some effective sounding approaches for optimizing messy, dependent chains of operations. It has enough concrete details that it convinces me that the author knows at least something about manufacturing. And the idea of searching for bottlenecks, constraints and maximum leverage is a good one to keep in mind. Its an easy read and worth an afternoon, just skip over the puffery stuff at the end.
...I really like these quotes from his debate with Douglass: "This they said and this they meant (the equality of those certain unalienable rights). They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated....the assertion that "all men are created equal" was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use." -- quoted in Stephen Prothero's The American Bible p.80
I think this is a key point, that declaring what is right or just describing an idea has power even though the writer doesn't have the ability to enforce or implement it, and may not in
...Quotes from Shoot an Iraqi by Wafaa Bilal and Kari Lydersen.
Thought-provoking book...raw, kind of a flat humor without hatred even though a US military drone killed his brother, and Saddam killed numerous other family members. Some quotes :
"Solitude was such sweetness to me that it was worth risking my life for some time alone" - when staying at an aunt's empty house in Kufa during bombing, because he wanted to paint
I love this geography professor - "A joke started to circulate about [Ba'ath] Party officials telling a geography professor he must integrate party philosophy into his lessons. "How? I teach geography." They insisted. So he told his students "Iraq used to have a cold, wet climate in the winter and a hot, dry climate in the summer, without a drop of rain." (which is the reality). "But," he'd continue, "thanks to the Ba'ath Party, it's nice all year round now." "
"He (a cousin in Kufa) was arrested (for being a member of the Dawa Party, a militant Shia religious party), and later his body was returned to the family along with a bill for 72 dinars for the bullets used to execute him. He had been an
...Made a good haul at the Book Stop on 4th Ave recently - they have an excellent collection of classic sci-fi, as well as really good kids authors like Avi and Roald Dahl.
Bandersnatch by Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. A first novel, which I generally like - fresh if sometimes rough. Here's a book-length fable to go with Hillel's "If I'm not for myself, who will be?" - in Bandersnatch's world, if you don't stick up for yourself you become a target fast.
...