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[Jeff]

"It makes me nervous," Emily whispered; she held a magazine on her lap but was unable to read. "It's so - unnatural."

"Hell," Hnatt said vigorously, "that's what it's not; it's an acceleration of the natural evolutionary process that's going on all the time anyway, only usually it's so slow we don't perceive it. I mean, look at our ancestors in caves ... they evolved to meet the Ice Age; we have to evolve to meet the Fire Age, just the opposite. So we need that chitinous-type skin, that rind and the altered metabolism that lets us sleep in midday and also the improved ventilation...."

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

[Allegro]

… The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything. [Refer.]

[Stephen Morgan]

Thus the greatest drive and the greatest war in history which has been paid for by men and organizations owning a vast part of the world's wealth and covetous of all of it, will come to an end with the destruction of the world's special interests. A world ends for Privilege, the great day dawns for the peoples of the earth.
-- George Seldes, Facts and Fascism

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
-- Major General Smedley Butler

“I do not peddle in jam!”
-- Paul vanden Boeynants

“From our comfortable seat in life … we never could have imagined that thousands of well-off adults, integrated and even cultured, find pleasure in seeing children tortured and killed.”

-- Corriere della Sera

"Consider, for a moment, what it might mean to have an organization around that could pull off the following:
Manipulate the Central Intelligence Agency and the spy agencies of Britain, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Syria, Israel and who knows how many others all at the same time...;
Help Pakistan buy nuclear technology on the international black market...;
Launder drug money for the Medellin cocaine cartel in Colombia;
Bankroll Abu Nidal, the most notorious terrorist in the world;
Handle Manuel Noriega's finances in Panama;
Procure prostitutes, some of them children, for traveling Middle Eastern potentates;
Rig international commodity markets so that a few insiders could make hundreds of millions of dollars in a single day..."
-- Jack R. Payton, St. Petersburg Times (editor), October 1992

[Allegro]

.
Refer compared2what? comment.

from first paragraph
… the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

final two paragraphs | some paragraph spacings added by poster for an easy read
This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way [the paranoid style] may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties.

In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies.

Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.

The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery.

A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well. [Refer.]

[Bruce Dazzling]

...we no longer take effective action, because it has become impossible to identify what we might do to change anything. Instead, we react to events. That is what the ruling class wants, because if we are reactive, then outcomes can be controlled by controlling the stimuli. Keep 'em dazzled with foot work. So the stimuli keep coming at us faster than we can think. And they are presented as fate, or the result of "fast changing world events," or a banking collapse no one could have predicted -- things to which we must respond immediately. Most of us just give up. Which again, is what the ruling class wants us to do -- become a uniformly pliant mass.

~ Joe Bageant

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/08/u ... .html#more

[Allegro]

.
Refer RI comments.

A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves. [Refer Destruction Accomplished: The Great Success of the Iraq War, Swans dot com; Tony Judt: An Appreciation, Swans dot com.]

[Gouda]

"The only thing that interests me anymore is my daily wage. A loaf of bread is my political party. I want to help my country -- give me work and I'll pay taxes! But our honor as first-class skilled workers, as heads of families, as Greeks, is being dragged through the dirt!"

~ Panayiotis Peretridis, Greek skilled worker.

"If you take away my family's bread, I'll take you down -- the government needs to know that. And don't call us anarchists if that happens! We're heads of our families and we're desperate."

~ Nikos Meletis, Greek shipbuilder

[Allegro]

Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. [Refer the Paul Valéry introduction to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936, by Walter Benjamin.

Introduced here by compared2what?, August 27, 2009.

[Allegro]

History is a vast early warning system. [Refer.]

[Allegro]

We do acknowledge this paradox of war. It is, you know, absolutely frustrating in that [war] is compelling as well as horrific, but we can arm ourselves with the danger. Would you give up and not paint Guernica? Would you not show what it is like because it wouldn’t work? …So let us not stop bearing witness to what takes place. Let us not stop organizing that material into some coherent narrative that suggests the possibility that we might mitigate or check that seemingly natural inclination toward the bellicose, toward the pugnacious. And that’s—I’m sorry to say, in some ways—the best we can hope for. [Refer Ken Burns’s conversation with Chris Lydon of Radio Open Source dot org; recorded in First Parish Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 23, 2007.]

[Allegro]

We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evil-doers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the “weakness of indoctrinational work,” that they are growing up “indifferent.” Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.

It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country! [Refer The Gulag Archipelago]

[Allegro]

To get it right, be born with luck or else make it. Never give up. Get the knack of getting people to help you and also pitch in yourself. A little money helps, but what really gets it right is to never — I repeat — never under any conditions face the facts. [Refer.]

[MinM]

Quick aside... I came across Ruth Gordon in David Talbot's book Brothers. Which referenced her son, Jones Harris, one of the early researchers into the JFK Assassination...

The Vaccination Certificate - The Education Forum

As for the Garrison code of phone number, I think that originated with one Jones Harris, one of the most bizzarre "researchers" on the planet, the Truman Capote of JFK researchers.

William King Harvey aka Oliver Hardy - The Education Forum

[Allegro]

Quick aside... I came across Ruth Gordon

MinM, let’s have another quick aside… Ruth Gordon was a creative and perhaps a business associate with Katharine Hepburn whose long time friend was Laura Harding, heiress to American Express founded by her father in, I think, Paris, France. IIRC, Katharine’s maternal grandparents founded Corning, as in Corning Ware. So, I’ve assumed a lot of female actors knew very well the masters of western European financial houses, at the time, and who also knew the brutal masculine world they entered whether or not in the film industry. Also, see a text by Barbara Leaming, titled Katharine Hepburn, much of the early chapters regard Ms. Hepburn’s parents.

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

—

You can’t change the music of your soul.

—

The thing about life is that you must survive. Life is going to be difficult, and dreadful things will happen. What you do is move along, get on with it, and be tough. Not in the sense of being mean to others, but being tough with yourself and making a deadly effort not to be defeated.

—

What you see before you, my friend, is the result of a lifetime of chocolate. [Refer.] [Katharine Hepburn]

[Jeff]

You know the song, "I Fought the Law and the Law Won"? Well, I fought the system and it kicked the living shit out of me.