Copyleft/CAL 2006 (except attributed quotations) by Lorraine Lee, all rights reversed.
Support our troops-oppose our foreign policy
Keep your laws off my body!-well-known pro-choice slogan
Keep your
invisible hands off my head!Keep your
NDA's off my research!-(may as well have been) Shevek, protagonist of The DispossessedMirror shades≠transparency. (Please[!], think about it, Dr. Brin)
Mirror shades=
TAIWAN (total asymmetric information warfare against nescients). That's why cops wear 'em, but the metaphorical ones at the HR Dept. are far more powerful.Maybe government off YOUR back=deregulation. Government off OUR back=civil liberties.
"Interest only"=indenture in perpetuity
Asymmetric warfare does not justify terrorism, but neither does the latter justify the former.
Capitalism is to capital as monarchism is to monarch
Free enterprise is making an enterprise out of everything that used to be free.-(??), quoted in the Detroit Free Press, circa 1980
Free people, then enterprise
Self-directed migration, then free trade
Liberation before globalization
Tough love is an oxymoron
Legitimate authority is an oxymoron
Rugged individualism is an oxymoron
You can't blow up a social relationship, but you can sure have fun trying-BAD Brigade(?)
The Moral Majority is neither
Country music is neither
Neoliberalism=neoconservatism by liberal means
Yes, Virginia, I'm not a liberal
A one-party system is only half as democratic as a two-party system
it's the System, stupid
it's majority public opinion, stupid
The American System in a nutshell: Wall Street says "jump." Washington says "how high?"
Anti-freeze may be fatal or cause blindness if swallowed. I'm pro-freeze.
Capitalism is like a
shit sandwich-the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat.-Tim MoonDemocracy is control from the bottom up. Majority rule is yet another rule.
Capitalism is a
majority shareholder and several million proxy voters voting on what to have for lunch.Leviathan is the problem. Human nature is the solution.
Human nature is inherently good. Human institutions are inherently evil.
Neither political power nor corruption is unique to the governmental sector.
The so-called political class is merely a training ground for the real ruling class.
The only safety net worth a damn is job security.
Oligopolism in defense of job security is no vice.
Job security at the expense of persons lower on the food chain is no vice, it is a Sin.
Job security at the expense of persons higher on the food chain is no virtue, but it's conceivable to me that in certain rare instances it might be justifiable cannibalism.
Inflation control at the apparent expense of job security was the first of Reagan's many sins (as President.)
Technology export control was far and away Clinton's most grievous sin. Worse even than letting job security issues interfere with his more-righteous-than-naïve Rwanda agenda.
Carter's only real sin was founding Habitat for Humanity, but the 'simple, affordable' part of the mission more than makes up for the 'molding tenants into homeowners with middle class worldviews' part.
Single-family housing is about as simple as earning about a dozen journeyperson cards, and as affordable as a speeding ticket or two a month.
In America today, the "new" housing market has two segments-the exurban McMansion segment and the charitable segment, a.k.a. Habitat.
In Canada, the radio industry consists of exactly two entities-CBC/SRC and the CHUM group.
The 'mixed economy' (in the Canadian sense) has been selected to follow Communism into the ash-heap of history.
Maybe they're just rebelling against authority.-Fmr. Amb. Jim Blanchard, re. the so-called "Battle of Seattle"
TVOntario may be an authoritarian institution, but at least it has the intellectual honesty to make no bones about it. Of course, the same could be said of Pres. Bush.
One nation under God: Iran-bumper sticker seen in Detroit (and countless other places, one would assume) circa 1979
Single sex classrooms: Pre-invasion Afghanistan
Personal fulfillment is a full refrigerator.
Every kid there had a pretty good shot
to get at least as far as their old man got-Billy Joel
In post-Reagan America, the height of success is finally landing that coveted and more-than-paid-for promotion to full-time "status."
If you thought the pursuit of full time status was a darwinian rat race in the worst sense, just wait until you try out for disability status.
In the United Federation of Planets, upward mobility is being the first member of your species to attend the Academy.
Teach a man to fish, and the fisheries labor market will be even more glutted. Teach a man to sell ice cubes to Inuit, and there'll be one more human being with whom the Welfare Dept. will never ever have to concern itself.
The American System is also a textbook example of a "mixed economy." This variant on the mixed economy metaphor is defined as an economy that uses both enforced idleness and enforced non-idleness as human resource motivators, simultaneously, during good times and bad.
The main$tream American labor movement must confront its role, partly via its ageist seniority rules, but to a much greater degree its aggressively stingy policies with apprenticeship opportunities post-Reagan-revolution, in stunting the careers and intellects of Generation X. But they're only about 10% of the problem. And it is, admittedly, in self defense, which cannot be said of the other 90%.
Pre-merger, the AFL was simply Ghibelline elitism re-branded, while the CIO was at least an authentic grass-roots movement, albeit an overtly communist (worse, statist communist) one. Post-spinoff, the Teamsters are still a racket and the SEIU still doesn't seem to get it about the song lyric "which side are you on?" At least they seem (so far) to understand what the "I" in SEIU stands for.
The wobbly slogan "one big union" isn't monopolistic in spirit, since anarchist values prohibit allowing group entities (i.e. institutions) the honor of being considered "economic actors." The AFL-CIA is not, and never has been, one big union. It's not even big any more. Look in the damn mirror for clues as to why.
Making FEMA a wholly-owned subsidiary of DHS didn't turn FEMA into a totalitarian institution. It was founded as such. The hostile takeover simply turned it into a totalitarian institution with an explicitly non-civilian mission, along with virtually the rest of the federal "civil" "service."
Lefties are roundly criticized, and rightly so, for referring to the present American Status Quo as 'fascist.' But what adjective would you suggest to describe a System of Government in which voting rights acts come with sunset clauses and homeland security acts come without?
Individualism is not a wholly owned subsidiary of capitalism, but they can have it, over my dead body.
Voting with one's feet, when one is a commercial entity, constitutes de facto collective punishment.
The fact that de facto means something and de jure does not is intuitively obvious enough for any child (and most adults) to understand, yet it didn't make it into the published literature until Machiavelli wrote The Prince. Of all the movement politics flying around during the glorious sixties, only the civil rights movement showed any signs of getting it about the Machiavellian implications of anything, let alone de facto apartheid. What the hell is a silver right, anyway?
Maybe silver rights is to gold rights as GHWB's "good society" was to LBJ's so-called "great society."
I've heard rumors that a sizeable majority of the text in bills before Congress is drafted, as a matter of course, within the private sector. What is the average number of pages per bill up to these days, anyway?
For those of us blissfully lucky enough to have been born American, charity really should start far from home-the farther the better.
Regime change starts at home. This is true for people of virtually all nationalities.
Competition taken to its logical conclusion is global thermonuclear war.
The 'pro-life' movement taken to its logical conclusion is Romania under the Ceausescus.
Warlordism (a.k.a. 'anarchy in Somalia') is not anarchism taken to its logical conclusion. It is the exact opposite, which is to say primate dominance and submission paradigms taken to their logical conclusion.
Murder in cold blood, genocide and warfare are aren't unique to the human condition. They're also part of the chimpanzee condition. I saw the shockumentary footage on PBS. The anarchist movement (which I love dearly) simply must get over its infatuation with the mythical prehistory it has invented for itself and confront the fact that anarchy must be a technology (perhaps a 'memetic' technology, in the spirit of some tactless secularists' characterizations of religion-in-general), not a return to some halcyon age that simply never was.
Winning the lottery should easily allow you to dress like the super-rich, but it might not get you invited to their cocktail parties.
The vainglorious Eighties were, in pop cultural terms, the Eat to Win decade. In empirical terms, it was the "Win to Eat" decade.
Back around the turn of the century, a little-known apparent senior CGI design project turned trendy dotcom in search of a bu$iness model posed an important question: How does one (say in the year 2038 or something (with another nod to Dr. Brin)) refer to the first decade of the third millennium? There were numerous suggestions, but no apparent consensus. In recenter months, the domain in question seems to have dimmed to a flicker, flickering between the tightly managed but nevertheless largely HTML-empowered webboard of its youth, and an apparent e-Billboard for an apparent proprietary T&D solution with implementations perhaps including e-Suggestion-box, e-Idea-bucket, e-Tcetera, etc. Mercifully, chances to check back up on the name-this-decade 'bucket' have been frequent, so far. I have decided to put their address on my to do list, on the off chance a consensus has somehow been reached.
"Drawers OS," as I called it. Its official name was the somehow unintuitive 'Intuition;' alternatively 'Workbench' depending on which Amiga™ publication one consults. It stands as a monument to the idea that it is a good idea to implement access violation protocols before (i.e. 'not after') implementing semaphores. It also stands as a stark reminder of the empirical validity of Brin's notion of 'pants-up transparency.'