“While it is never a good idea to violate the National Fire Codes, code violations, in and of themselves, are frequently nothing more than code violations. It would be difficult to conduct a thorough inspection of any residence and not detect at least one violation of a fire code.” – John J. Lentini, Scientific Protocols for Fire Investigation, Second Edition
“If you say A—equality, human rights, and freedom—you should not shirk from its consequences, and gather the courage to say B—the terror needed to really defend and assert the A.” – Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
“Even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.” – Stephen Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes
“Nothing is more critical to people’s health than food. The consequences of poor nutrition are devastating.” – Lisa Marsh Riyerson, President, AARP Foundation
“Opposites attract. They attract all right. Then they fucking kill each other.” – Chris J. Rice, Rambler American
“I’d listen to my conscience if I were sure it was really mine.” – James Richardson, “Vectors 4.2: Everyone Else”
“The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.” – Dean Young, “Believe in Magic?”
“He is not the cleanest who cleans the most, but rather, he who makes less of a mess.” –Enrique Sánchez, “Cómetelo”
“Our column continued forward, and my company shifted to the lead position on tanks. I rode behind the lead tank in the artillery jeep. The little country towns changed into small industrial towns, and we began to notice a scattering of red, white and blue Czechoslovakian flags in the towns in place of the usual white flags of surrender. Civilians waved at us guardedly from behind closed windows. The scattering of Czech flags should have warned us, but we were totally unprepared for the mad celebration which greeted us in the next town. We had suddenly crossed from the Sudetenland into Czechoslovakia proper. The houses were a riot of color with red, white and blue Czechoslovakian flags. Civilians lined the streets ten deep, cheering and waving their flags as if their lives depended upon it. Our column was forced to slow down, and the happy civilians pushed into the street and showered us with flowers and cakes and cookies. One old woman thrust a baked chicken into our jeep. Another old woman stood beside the road waving both hands in the sir, tears streaming down her wrinkled cheeks. Little children were wild with joy . . . some of them had never known anything but six years of Nazi occupation. The young men wore red, white and blue arm bands and carried German weapons, a part of the underground movement that was even now struggling against superior German forces in the capital city of Prague. Everyone was screaming the Czech words, “Nazdar! Nazdar!” and we wondered what they meant. I looked up and down the column at the soldiers in the company. Brilliant smiles wreathed their faces, and they waved cheerfully at the shouting crowds as if they had just won an election campaign and this was a personal triumph. Hardened, stubble-faced veterans had unashamed tears in their eyes. The unleashed joy of these oppressed people knew no bounds, and it was too much for us. Suddenly, I began to realize what no one had thus far been able in the war to put into words—what we were fighting for. And I found a lump in my throat which I could not swallow.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
“I entered the town with my CP group, Already at least fifty German soldiers were assembled before the second house, their hands raised high above their heads and dazed, startled expressions of incredulity on their faces. Others poured from every building as eager GIs sought them out with curses and shouts of derision. Some hurried alone down the street toward the assemblage, terror written on their faces. We moved on. I looked back and saw my support platoon move into the town and join in the mop-up operations. The fifth house was a mass of flame. Two cows stood nearby, chewing their cuds and staring without expression at the scene of destruction. A grey-haired German farmer stood with his arm around his aged wife and stared at the burning house, tears streaming down both their faces. ‘Alles ist kaput! Alles ist kaput!’ they sobbed hysterically as we passed. I was not impressed; instead, I was suddenly angry at them and surprised at my own anger. What right had they to stand there sobbing and blaming us for this terror? What right did they and their kind have to any emotions at all? ‘Thank Adolf!’ I shouted. ‘Thank Hitler!’ I pointed to the burning house and said, ‘Der Führer!’ and laughed.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
“Someone awakened me at three-thirty the next morning. It was cold in the room, and I shivered as I climbed from my sleeping bag. My mind was dulled with sleep, and I wanted to climb back into the warm sleeping bag and sleep on and on. I wanted to scream to hell with the war and go back to sleep. The sudden jolt of awakening was like emerging from a wonderful, peaceful world into a world of forbidding reality. There would be men hurt today, perhaps killed—men from my own company. It could be me. That seemed remote and impossible, but it did not remove my fear for the others. There were many responsibilities. Had I given the platoon leaders all the information they would need? How was my attack plan? Was there some important detail I had forgotten? Would Heimbach be defended? Would our attack be discovered as we crossed the flat, open field toward the town? Oh, God, if we could but rush from the house into the attack without thinking again. It was the waiting and the thinking and the wondering that got you.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
“Message after message came over the platoon phone. Lieutenant Wilson was badly wounded. He could not walk and must have a litter. Ammunition was running lower and lower. The M Company machine-gunners with the 1st Platoon were out of ammunition except enough to keep one gun firing a few minutes longer. The 60mm mortars found their ammunition supply so low that they fired only when the enemy was actually assaulting. Germans were being killed as close as ten yards to forward foxholes. Hand grenades were practically all gone. There was no solace from battalion. Each call for litter-bearers or additional ammunition was met with the maddening words: ‘We’re doing all we can.’ I told them we could not hold out much longer unless we got additional ammunition. Captain Montgomery said we must hold. ‘Our orders are to hold at all costs,’ he said. I wondered if he could possibly realize the meaning of those words. We must hold until every last man was killed or captured. Company I’s last stand! And what is to be gained? Nothing but time. Time born of the bodies of dead men. Time.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander (emphasis in original)
“OK,” [Private First Class Henry] Croteau interrupted. “I’ve got something to say. Tell them it’s too damned serious over here to be talking about hot dogs and baked beans and things we’re missing. Tell them it’s hell, and tell them there’s men getting killed and wounded every minute, and they’re miserable and they’re suffering. Tell them it’s a matter more serious than they’ll ever be able to understand.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
“I awoke the next morning at ten o’clock and stepped outside the pillbox. The sun was shining down with a light so intense that I blinked involuntarily and rubbed my eyes. The effect, after the days of rain and overcast skies, was exhilarating. All seemed right with the world and I wondered why we must be huddling in pillboxes and foxholes shooting at other men a few hundred yards away.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
“The characters in my story are not fictional, and any similarity between them and persons living or dead is intentional, and some of them are dead.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
“It appears that the historical function of neoconservatism was to supply an intellectual rationale for the worst impulses of traditional conservatism. The attack on the welfare state rationalized—in effect if not intention—greed and class privilege. With the same qualification, the attack on affirmative action rationalized racial hostility. The attack on multilateralism and international law has, less ambiguously, rationalized national chauvinism and aggressive tribalism.” – George Scialabba, “The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal”
“To a sufficiently sensitive and knowledgeable critic, everything will appear intelligent or unintelligent, skillful or shoddy, graceful or graceless, truthful or mendacious. In each of these pairs, the latter is—not immediately, perhaps, but ultimately, in some measure—a threat to our common life, our res publica. Intellectual virtues are civic virtues; intellectual vices leave the citizens vulnerable to superstition and demagoguery. There is, of course, no more sense in trying to legislate the intellectual virtues than the moral ones. But one can propagate intellectual virtue, first of all by example.” – George Scialabba, “The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal” (emphasis in original)
“The hacks of academe (new generation) have put it about that everything is political, especially textual analyses of great literature that reveal, through the application of emancipatory ideology and subversive wordplay, that the past was even less enlightened than the present. Besides allowing critical minnows to patronize artistic whales, this approach frees academic literary intellectuals from having to learn much about history, economics, politics, or how to compose English prose.” – George Scialabba, “The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal”
“However far you extend a horizontal, it will not turn vertical.” – Timothy Williamson
“There is something unbearably poignant about the human desire to know and be known, eternally at odds with the need for privacy and self-protection. We each are separated from one another by the things we keep secret or are unable to express; that distance, no matter how slender, imparts a loneliness to our existence that we can never quite overcome.” – Averil Dean, The Undoing
“To feel for someone with whom you fundamentally disagree takes a certain amount of perseverance.” – Averil Dean, The Undoing
“Everyone is stuck inside a doorless room. No one gets into anyone else’s head. Nobody can ever really get out of their own.” – Averil Dean, The Undoing
“You can tell the quality of a piece by the parts that aren’t supposed to show.” – Averil Dean, The Undoing
“Sexual ambiguity was an ethic of sorts—a knight’s move in the face of the fixed options of straight (and possibly also gay) identity.” – Brian Dillon, “Notes on Bowie”
“Why not lay aside questions of ultimate meaning for as long as there is unnecessary suffering in the world? I don’t mean necessary suffering, like disappointed love or the infirmities of age. I mean wholly unnecessary suffering, like undernourished, illiterate, or malarial children. When there are no more such, then let us begin asking again about the meaning of life and the existence of God.” – George Scialabba, “The Wreck of Western Culture”
“The burden of freedom, the responsibility of finding—or creating—one’s own purpose and meaning without the guidance of authoritative inherited creeds and values, is too heavy for all but a few. The rest of us cannot endure for long the tensions of uncertainty. We must, at some point, stop questioning, quiet our doubts, turn away from moral and metaphysical inquiry and toward life. Untrammeled skepticism ends in paralysis. That is true of societies as well as individuals. No purely rational justification can be offered for trust and self-sacrifice. But without them, social life is chaos, a war of all against all. Until a few hundred years ago, this problem scarcely existed. The authority of communities and traditions, though often enough evaded or defied, was rarely put in radical question. There were sinners, doubters, even heretics, but dogma and hierarchy, as the foundation of individual morality and social organization, were unchallenged. Then modernity happened. Beginning in fifteenth-century Europe, a critical, experimental, libertarian spirit began to flourish, which came to be known as ‘humanism.’ A crescendo of scientific discoveries, artistic innovations, geographical explorations, and political reforms ensued until, at the end of the eighteenth century, Kant hailed ‘humankind’s emergence from its self-imposed minority’ and baptized it ‘Enlightenment.’ At the same time, the prestige of the sacred and the supernatural, of what the Grand Inquisitor called ‘miracle, mystery, and authority’ and declared indispensable to ordinary people’s happiness, was correspondingly diminished. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, humanism’s luster was tarnished. First came the blight of early industrialization, then colonial brutality, totalitarian repression, and the technologies of extermination in concentration camps and global wars. Even after these horrors passed, in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, an epidemic of spiritual emptiness descended: alienation, consumerism, and the loneliness of mass society. Perhaps, as a minority of modern thinkers have always believed, we cannot live by reason alone. Perhaps modernity is a mistake.” – George Scialabba, “The Wreck of Western Culture”
6.1 Compare all the known data.
6.2 Determine whether the data support the hypothesis.
6.3 In the event that there are data that contradict the hypothesis, examine the data for credibility.
6.3.1 If the data that contradict the hypothesis appear credible, formulate a new hypothesis and begin the process again.
6.4 If all known credible data are supportive of the hypothesis, consider whether alternative hypotheses are also supported by these data.
6.4.1 If more than one hypothesis is supported by the data, it will be necessary to report all credible hypotheses.
– Sidebar 4.1, Section 6, “Hypothesis Testing”, John J. Lentini, Scientific Protocols for Fire Investigation, Second Edition
“All soldiers wanted to get the war over without being killed or wounded too seriously, but in the infantry this goal was especially difficult. Most quickly realized that once on the front line, the only way to leave while the war lasted was by stretcher.” – Robert Sterling Rush, Hell in Hürtgen Forest
“Soldiers became so tired that they drifted into sleep at the slightest slackening of effort, and leaders, themselves exhausted, found one of their greatest problems was keeping them awake. Soldiers could not remember what happened the previous day and found events blurring into one another. Even with their well-being dependent upon remaining alert, the soldiers became sluggish. They tired and lost the instinct for self-preservation as they failed to follow even the basic fundamentals of their combat training. Fatigue caused casualties. Soldiers walked instead of ran across open fields that were being shelled because they were too tired to run and had passed the point of caring whether they were hit or not.” – Robert Sterling Rush, Hell in Hürtgen Forest
“The soldiers of the regiment had been in the forest for twelve days. Their miserable existence consisted of dripping rain through the trees, endless mud, staying in wet clothes, never getting warm, no hot food, not enough sleep, and laying awake at night shivering, wrapped in raincoats in foxholes filled with cold water. Then, of course, other men were trying to kill them.” – Robert Sterling Rush, Hell in Hürtgen Forest