“What is man, what are men, what are they. I do not say that they haven’t kind hearts, if I fall down in a faint, they will rush to pick me up, if my house is on fire, they will rush in to put the fire out and help me, yes they have kind hearts but they are afraid, afraid, they are afraid, they are afraid. They fear women, they fear each other, they fear their neighbor, they fear other countries and then they hearten themselves in their fear by crowding together and following each other, and when they crowd together and follow each other they are brutes, like animals who stampede.” – Gertrude Stein, The Mother of Us All
Author: Tetman Callis
“‘Traditional values’ are ignorant and grotesque and usually code for sexism, homophobia or transphobia. No one ever talks about ‘traditional values’ when it does not relate in some way to subjugating people.” – Robyn Pennacchia, “Right-Wing Incels Lose Their Shit Over ‘Unmarried Concubine’ Nancy Mace,” Wonkette, July 29, 2023
“The total charge in the world is always constant—there is never any net gain or loss of charge.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II
“Men can not count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so. There is a devil creeps into men when their hands are strengthened. Men want to be half slave half free. Women want to be all slave or all free, therefore men govern and women know, and yet.” – Gertrude Stein, The Mother of Us All
“The right to sleep is given to no woman.” – Gertrude Stein, The Mother of Us All
“There are so many points of view in a Frenchman, of course he cannot agree with any other Frenchman but he cannot even agree with himself.” – Gertrude Stein, Yes Is For a Very Young Man
“The only best part of death is that it happens to everyone.” – Amanda Goldblatt, Hard Mouth
“We exist with sets of stories or lists: the ways we must feel during loss or solitude, the ways we must present the self to others, the ways we must act. But there are other and scarier ways to be.” – Amanda Goldblatt, Hard Mouth
“To see a door did not mean you had to go through it.” – Amanda Goldblatt, Hard Mouth
“Human sciences dissect everything to comprehend it, and kill everything to examine it.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“My tongue is my enemy.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“Whenever you see a sweeping statement that a tremendous amount can come from a very small number of assumptions, you always find that it is false. There are usually a large number of implied assumptions that are far from obvious if you think about them sufficiently carefully.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II
“I spoke on the phone with Elena, an employee at a zoo outside Kharkiv, an area subject to constant onslaught. She is the director of the zoo’s children’s theater, where children perform together with dogs, mice, and rats. Since the war started, employees have been trying to feed and evacuate the animals. But as soon as the Russian army sees any cars, bullets begin to fly. On March 7, Elena tried to reach the zoo one last time in order to bring food to the animals. On the phone she explained to me that many animals remain in their pens: ‘The deer were shot at. Some of them died. Others managed to escape through the ruined fence into the forest. When we arrived by bus, the shelling started. We ran out of the bus with the feed and made it to the pens. Some great apes had been shot. We ran through the damaged rooms trying to distribute as much of the feed as possible. Then we ran to the bus, but the driver was already dead. We tried to get another car to go back and transport his body to the city. Another colleague was fatally injured. Only one other person and I were able to escape. I can’t cry,’ she went on to say. ‘I can’t even believe what happened. I keep seeing the exhibit window where the monkeys were waiting for us. Many of them were standing there with babies pressed against their bodies. They were hoping for food, but we didn’t manage to feed them that day.’ Elena has stopped going to the zoo for the moment, but other staff members are trying to reach the pens so that the animals, the ones still alive, don’t die of hunger. I don’t want to write a ‘last’ sentence. Every day we encounter our choices.” – Yevgenia Belorusets, “Day 27, Tuesday March 22, The Houses That Disappeared,” War Diary (trans. Greg Nissan)
“Is it possible to condemn me, my city, the people of Mariupol, the people of Melitopol and of all those other cities to death? Is it possible to play this game of annihilation with us, in front of the whole world? I keep thinking about these questions. What happened to us all that this became possible? I think the answer will determine the future of a great many people.” – Yevgenia Belorusets, “Day 25, Sunday March 20, Drones over Kyiv,” War Diary (trans. Greg Nissan)
“During the day I saw many smiling people—for example, a woman who was sitting next to two big shopping bags on a park bench. She spoke to me in an absurdly happy voice, saying that she was waiting for her nephew to help her carry the bags home. ‘I’m so happy to have you standing next to me now, talking to me,’ she said. ‘When there are two of us, I’m less afraid of the artillery.’ She used to work as a museum guide at Saint Sophia Cathedral, and now she’s a pensioner. She is convinced that Ukraine will defeat the Russian invaders: ‘When I think about the frescoes of Saint Sophia, I believe that Ukraine will be protected by the whole world.’ She smiled, tears welling in her eyes. ‘We will win,’ she said. I didn’t know if she was crying more or laughing more, but I felt her courage and admired her. Is today only the third day of the war? Mariupol: fifty-eight civilians wounded. Kyiv: thirty-five people, including two children. This is far from a complete account. It feels strange to find myself in this broad, unarmed, almost delicate category: ‘civilians.’ For war, a category of people is created who live ‘outside the game.’ They are shelled, they must endure the shelling, they are injured, but they do not seem to be able to give an adequate response to it. I don’t believe this to be the case. There is something hidden in the smiles that I saw several times today—a secret weapon, an uncanny one.” – Yevgenia Belorusets, “Day 3, Saturday February 26, Bomb Shelter,” War Diary (trans. Greg Nissan)
“‘Come, let’s argue then,’ said Prince Andrew, ‘You talk of schools,’ he went on, crooking a finger, ‘education and so forth; that is, you want to raise him’ (pointing to a peasant who passed by them taking off his cap) ‘from his animal condition and awaken in him spiritual needs, while it seems to me that animal happiness is the only happiness possible, and that is just what you want to deprive him of. I envy him, but you want to make him what I am, without giving him my means. Then you say, “lighten his toil.” But as I see it, physical labor is as essential to him, as much a condition of his existence, as mental activity is to you or me. You can’t help thinking. I go to bed after two in the morning, thoughts come and I can’t sleep but toss about till dawn, because I think and can’t help thinking, just as he can’t help plowing and mowing; if he didn’t, he would go to the drink shop or fall ill. Just as I could not stand his terrible physical labor but should die of it in a week, so he could not stand my physical idleness, but would grow fat and die. The third thing—what else was it you talked about?’ and Prince Andrew crooked a third finger. ‘Ah, yes, hospitals, medicine. He has a fit, he is dying, and you come and bleed him and patch him up. He will drag about as a cripple, a burden to everybody, for another ten years. It would be far easier and simpler for him to die. Others are being born and there are plenty of them as it is. It would be different if you grudged losing a laborer—that’s how I regard him—but you want to cure him from love of him. And he does not want that. And besides, what a notion that medicine ever cured anyone! Killed them, yes!’ said he, frowning angrily and turning away from Pierre.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“It is not given to man to know what is right and what is wrong. Men always did and always will err, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“To an imagination of any scope the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of the Law”
“It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of the Law”
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” – Cardinal Richelieu (as quoted by Fraud Guy in bmaz, “Jeffrey Clark: Physics Takes Over the Investigation Now,” emptywheel)
“Nobody knows how many federal criminal laws are really on the books BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY TO COUNT AND TRACK. Last best estimate I heard was about 5,000, but my guess is it may be higher, given all the regulatory crimes in the CFR. Everything is now a federal crime, and that is ludicrous.” – bmaz, “Jeffrey Clark: Physics Takes Over the Investigation Now,” emptywheel (emphasis in original)
“What we call the stars are only inferences, inferences drawn from the only physical reality we have yet gotten from them—from a careful study of the unendingly complex undulations of the electric and magnetic fields reaching us on earth.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II
“By experiments with charges and currents we find a number c2 which turns out to be the square of the velocity of propagation of electromagnetic influences. From static measurements—by measuring the forces between two unit charges and between two unit currents—we find that c=3.00×108 meters/sec. When [James Clerk] Maxwell first made this calculation with his equations, he said that bundles of electric and magnetic fields should be propagated at this speed. He also remarked on the mysterious coincidence that this was the same as the speed of light. ‘We can scarcely avoid the inference,’ said Maxwell, ‘that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.’ Maxwell had made one of the great unifications of physics. Before his time, there was light, and there was electricity and magnetism. The latter two had been unified by the experimental work of Faraday, Oersted, and Ampère. Then, all of a sudden, light was no longer ‘something else,’ but was only electricity and magnetism in this new form—little pieces of electric and magnetic fields which propagate through space on their own.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II
“The Supreme Court’s decision to block student loan forgiveness is a reminder that the crimes of the rich are more readily absolved than the debts of the poor.” – Trevor Jackson, “The Unforgiven”
“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“If we were serious about crime, we’d take most of the cops off the streets and replace them with accountants. Taking down the financial underpinnings of a criminal enterprise is way more effective than busting their entry level contractors. Money laundering can be incredibly simple — Joe sells weed, Bill has a sandwich shop. Joe needs pay stubs so he can buy a house, Bill’s shop isn’t making quite enough money yet. Joe hands Bill $500 in cash a day, Bill puts Joe on payroll. Bill rings the $500 through the cash register as 10 extra orders, pays Joe (including payroll taxes) $250 a day of legal money, and keeps the rest as profit. Assuming Joe doesn’t get busted, this can continue indefinitely as long as they keep trusting each other.” – C Zed, “Foundations of the #MoneyLaundry – A Twitter Seminar”
“Live for the sensation of life, not for the story you tell about your life. But never take anything, including that commandment, too seriously. That’s the great lesson from our feline friends. No animal is more spontaneously playful than cats. Which is why, if they could philosophize, it would be for fun.” – John Gray, quoted by Sean Illing in “Why Cats Rule”
“Humans are the only creature on earth capable of building a rocket ship or developing a vaccine. That makes us intelligent, not wise.” – Sean Illing, “Why Cats Rule”
“It’s easy for people to forget that they are not discovering the story, but creating it from random data.” – Rabbit Rabbit, “A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon”