Quote Only Thread

[Iamwhomiam]

Hmm. As I was just saying recently, imagine if we as a country defined national security as the health, well-being, education and gainful employment of our citizens, and not as the ability to deliver bombs on targets.

Susie Madrak

[Stephen Morgan]

"Working to the Member Insight and Engagement Manager, they will be responsible for detailing key customer journeys for all member segments, using the member engagement strategy to capture the objectives for all member touch-points identified in the journeys, and relating these to relevant member insights. They will document the communication deliverables that will support these journeys, and work to ensure consistency and join-up between them."
-- Job Description

[Ben D]

Superior virtue does not know virtue,
Inferior virtue practices virtue.

- Taoism

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find
all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.

- Sufism - J. Rumi

[Project Willow]

Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.

- Chuck Close

[Allegro]

[jam.fuse]

The Horoscope Of The World
Youre Under Surveillance

An astrological view of politics, the world, and your place in it

Tuesday 7 june

Nations, cities and corporations have horoscopes, too, just like people. They are set for the dates and times they are either incorporated or formal documents are signed bringing them into existence as separate functioning entities.

Since they exhibit traits of their “signs”, just as their leaders and all people to, they are therefore subject to the same cosmic laws and planetary vibrations as human beings are. As the planets move along the Zodiac they create period of ease or difficulty, prosperity or crisis that can be accurately measured and predicted.

The United States, for example is a Cancer. The Islamic republic of Iran, an Aries.

New York City is a Capricorn, while Washington D.C. is a Pisces. As the planets describe the changes in the corporations, cities or nations, the vibrations affect the people associated with them in various ways, some in very obvious ways, other more subtly.

So what's happening now(?)

What is going on in government now is an attempt to hook up to life support a System that has become corrupt, perverted and utterly unmanageable. The current planetary transits are witnesses to transformation, not renovation.

We’re not being asked to redecorate our culture. We’re being told to overhaul it.

We either develop a new consciousness and grow gracefully into a new role, or in the rest of the world's eyes, we end up looking as preposterous as an aging Hollyood actor shot up with botox.

This is an inexorable process of evolution, one we’ve never seen in modern times, so naturally it’s scary. The reason so many solutions seem not to be working, however, is that we are still at the end of major planetary cycles.

Such a period can be agonizing, mainly because even if you do everything possible to stay stable, keep things as they are and try not to be swept away in chaos, attachment to what was turns out to be folly. It can be agonizing and frustrating because everything you try works for a little while than you’re back where you were, hoping for a miracle.

Despite the claims and efforts of the Administration in the USA and in governments around the world, to put a rapid end to a crisis that has been long in coming, we are at the threshold of a volatile period in our history. Some people are going to get impatient, angry and desperate, and when that happens governments take stern measures to maintain order. The resulting open conflict is as inevitable at this time as it is frightening to contemplate, but it needs to be seen as a necessary part of the evolutionary process taking place.

It’s ridiculous, therefore, to ask when things are going to get better. Things are already getting better. Awareness of a problem is the first step toward solving it, but we need to have a lot of faith now, not in the politicians, of course, but in the process of social evolution. It’s easy to have faith when you don’t need it, but over the next few years we will need to have faith even if there won’t always seem to be a reason to have any.

Global resources are being stretched to the max and are going to be stretched much further, and more than they have ever been challenged, but in reality, we have barely begun to tap into them.

...

Is the Economy getting better?

That's what they keep telling us on TV in between advertsements for anti-depressants. So gee whiz, maybe it is. So many small business still seem to be closing their doors, to be replaced by banks and drugs stores. There seem to be a lot of homeless on the streets and people without jobs--one look at Craig's list will tell you that and unless you've made a lifetime study of economic cycles, it doesn't really seem as if the global markets are all that stable either.

AND YET

with Jupiter in Taurus there's going to be plenty of money around. Plenty of people are raking in fortunes. And not just rappers and ball players either.
Financiers are eating cherries while others are on public assistance and food stamps. Jupiter in Taurus IS prosperity. Or is just a pumped up inflationary illusion that the economy is improving? Business does tend to thrive during this transit so there is an upswing, more confidence, more optimism and a sense of the return of well being.

That is real.

But here comes the Wicked Witch again. Pluto is STILL in Capricorn and this could be an inflationary pumped up illusion...

--Michael Lutin

http://www.michaellutin.com

[MacCruiskeen]

We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

- W. H. Auden, "The Age of Anxiety"

[justdrew]

a compilation of Shiticisms...

"We’re sailing into a shit typhoon, we’d better haul in the jib before it gets covered in shit."

"I’m watching you, like a shithawk"

"You know what you get when two shit-tectonic plates collide? Shitquakes."

"Shit moths. You see, they started off as tiny shit larva. Then they grew into shitapillers, a pandemic of shitapillers, everywhere you look - shitapillers. They almost drove me over the goddamn edge boy. I tried to exterminate them, I tried to put an end to the shitapiller’s life cycle…but I failed. And now…shit moths, every-fuckin’- one of them."

"He’s about to enter the shit tornado to Oz"

"When you plant shit seeds, you get shit weeds"

"How dare you involve my daughter in your hemisphere of shit"

"Captain Shittacular"

"Tic Toc, Shit clock’s tickin’"

"Never Cry Shitwolf"

"Like shit and strawberry shortcake"


Jim Lahey - Trailer Park Boys

[Stephen Morgan]

We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war, but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in the past centuries."
-- Rockefeller, 1991

"We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world."
—Arnold Toynbee, 1931

[MacCruiskeen]

(...) More than once in my life I have had what I felt was a profound insight, forced upon me by my work, only to discover later that it had already been anticipated by Proust. And this is what happened here. I wrote Making Mistakes in 2006–2008, and it was published in 2009. Recently I’ve been re-reading A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, what Scott Moncrieff called Within a Budding Grove, and I came across this passage. Elstir, the painter Marcel has got to know at Balbec, and whose work is to prove so important for his development as a man and an artist, has just revealed to Marcel that he was none other than the ridiculous figure known as M. Biche, who had been a member of Mme Verdurin’s circle in the old days. Marcel can’t believe it, and Elstir proceeds to deliver what is in effect a little secular sermon. ‘There is no man,’ he says,

... however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man – insofar as it is possible for any of us to be wise – unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays. They may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives, they could publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done, but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile [ce sont de pauvres esprits, descendants sans force de doctrinaires, et de qui la sagesse est négative et stérile]. We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we are at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot certainly be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, … extracted something that transcends them.

In Search of Lost Time, 1992 Chatto 6-volume reprint, pp. 512–13; 1954 Pléiade, I, p. 864]

This is a sermon about life, but it is also about art. What I learned from Proust when I first read him at seventeen – and it was a liberating blast that transformed my life for ever – was the rule that you do not need, when you start a novel, to have a great plot or a profound thought or moral to expound – what you need is to trust enough in your ability, in time, and in the material, to plunge in, with nothing more than a rhythm and a desire – the precise contours of both certainly hidden from you, but a sense of them there, driving you forward. There is no ‘father’ to guide you, no Virgil to show you the way – there are only other pilgrims who can provide you with comfort – pilgrims like Proust himself, or, in his case, Elstir.

What this passage now brings home to me is how in Proust, and, indeed, in all great art since the Romantics, life and art are deeply intertwined – not, as modern biographers want to suggest, because the details of an artist’s life can be clues to his or her art, but because the same imperatives apply for both: ‘We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us. The lives you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings… They represent a struggle and a victory.’ Ethics and aesthetics cannot be separated; the Proustian law applies to both.

It is an exciting but a difficult law to put into practice. Not to have a model and a sure guide, to have to rely on instinct and on trust in time and the material, is hard indeed. The up side, though, where art is concerned, is that, if you can carry it through, you will end up not with a story but with an object, I would even say a moving object – moving in both senses of the word – something that cannot be pinned down because it is always in motion and something that moves the reader because it is alive. And so my hope is that Making Mistakes will be closer, in the reading, to listening to the performance of a quartet than to the reading of a novel by Balzac or even Tolstoy.

- Gabriel Josipovic

http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=8316

This article is taken from PN Review 200, Volume 37 Number 6, June - July 2011.

[MacCruiskeen]

"There's nowhere in the world where someone can just go and scream." - R.D. Laing

[Jeff]

- our great adversary remains The Apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier or the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.

[MacCruiskeen]

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

[crikkett]

Hey guys - if we don't raise the debt ceiling the market will drop 500 points. Bwahahahahah!

[jam.fuse]

Keep bangin' on the wall
Keep bangin' on the wall
OF FORTRESS EUROPE!

2022 -A new European order
Robot guards patrolling the border
Cybernetic dogs are getting closer and closer
Armoured cars and immigration officers
A burning village in Kosovo
You bombed it out now you're telling us go home
Machine guns strut on the cliffs of Dover
Heads down people look out! we're going over
Burnin up! can we survive re-entry
Past the mines and the cybernetic sentries
Safe european homes built on wars
You don't like the effect don't produce the cause
The chip is in your head not on my shoulder
Total control just around the corner
Open up the floodgates Time's nearly up
Keep banging on the wall of Fortress Europe

Keep banging
Keep banging on the wall of Fortress Europe
We got a right, know the situation
We're the children of globalisation
No borders only true connection
Light the fuse of the insurrection
This generation has no nation
Grass roots pressure the only solution
We're sitting tight
Cos assylum is a right
Put an end to this confusion
Dis is a 21st century Exodus
Dis is a 21st century Exodus

Burnin' up can we survive re-entry
Past the landmines and cybernetic sentries
Plane, train, car, ferry boat or bus
The future is bleeding coming back at us
The chip is in your head not on my shoulder
Total control around the corner
Open up the floodgates Time's nearly up
Keep banging on the wall of Fortress Europe

Keep banging
Keep banging on the wall of Fortress Europe
This is a 21st century Exodus
This is a 21st century Exodus

They got a right - listen not to the scaremonger
Who doesn't run when they feel the hunger
From where to what to when to here to there
People caught up in red tape nightmares
Break out of the detention centres
Cut the wires and tear up the vouchers
People get ready it's time to wake up
Tear down the walls of Fortress Europe

== Asian Dub Foundation