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“ World War III will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
Culture is our Business, Marshall McLuhan. 1970.
“ I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Letter to Harry S. Truman, Albert Einstein. 1948.
“The passenger pigeons were the most numerous birds that ever lived in the history of the planet. It’s almost disturbing how numerous — billions upon billions of birds. It was a fecundity that was almost disgusting. I started thinking about a blame-the-victim kind of attitude you could take to that… to make it seem like they had it coming, that there was this disgusting empire of birds and that it was corrupt like Rome… that it was bound to fall. So I invest the passenger pigeons with every kind of sin that I can imagine. And the bough, this gigantic branch, is falling under their tremendous weight. Meanwhile they go about their bickering and their lusts and foibles and all the disgusting things that they are doing.”
Falling Bough, Walton Ford. 2002.
via Mark James Adams.
“ Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.
The Invisibles, Grant Morrison. 1994.
“ Often people cannot move on because they cannot yet grieve… In neuroplastic terms, if the romantic or the widow is to begin a new relationship without baggage, each must first rewire billions of connections in their brains. The world of mourning is piecemeal, Freud noted… We grieve by calling up one memory at a time, reliving it, and then letting it go.
The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge. 2007.
Relevant for any kind of letting go, as well as finding and eradicating the unconscious “bugs” that litter our minds until we learn (+ apply, repeatedly) the process of identification + re-integration.
via Diana Wolf.
Nature is a slut for life (flowers time lapse).
(Also, the drun ‘n’ bass version.)
both via my mother.
“ We care about the small people.
BP Board Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, one of the people we’ve made rich buying oil-based products.
This happened yesterday.
Also, finally the first piece I’ve read to attribute blame to the consumers of oil, which is us all:
“Because if you’re honest, no matter where you stand, no matter your politics, religion, income or mode of transport, you see this beast of creeping death and you understand: That is us. The spill may be many things, but more than anything else it is a giant, horrifying mirror.”
“As if oil wasn’t woven like oxygen into every single aspect of American life, as if fully 30 percent of domestic transportation fuel didn’t come from the gulf, as if shutting down a fraction of those wells wouldn’t re-devastate the economy, as if petroleum and coal weren’t powering the very energy plants that deliver the electricity that charges the iPhones that allows everyone to Tweet their angry complaints through all the various energy-sucking server farms the size of a small country.”
Behold our dark, magnificent horror, Mark Morford, SF Gate.
“ There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Newsweek interview, Isaac Asimov. 1980.
“Throughout Sandy Kim, there is a lot of blood, but that blood is never the same—blood on her sheets after sex, blood from a dead body covered in a sterile white sheet, blood on the hand of a friend after an unknown accident. He’s smiling, looking straight at the camera, at Sandy. They both know it will heal.”
