The Information Super-Frog

"To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair - despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless… You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation - survival." - Audre Lorde

"Demanding money under threat of extinction -- money that will then be given to the very people who created the threat of extinction in the first place -- is only called “extortion” if you use a gun and ask for less than seven figures.

And is only called “Socialism” if you use tanks and ask for a few billion.

But if you use a television camera and ask for a trillion, it's wise fiscal policy and everyone should just shut up, jump on board the Free Market Unity Pony and stop pointing fingers at people."

-- Driftglass

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Quote of the day:

New Orleans writer Poppy Z. Brite on communications with a New York editor regarding a manuscript:

" [M]y editor finds it [a detail about how things are done in New Orleans] implausible [...] To me, this is nothing more or less than business as usual as I have observed it [...]

I'm not going to depict things inaccurately in order to make them more plausible to non-New Orleanians, [...] The trick, I think, is to make the reader understand that New Orleans itself is a wholly implausible place. " (emphasis added)

This sort incomprehension and disbelief at my home town by those in larger supposedly more sophisticated cities of thing comes up all too often. Local writers (not just fiction), researchers, producers, etc. often have their horror stories. This is why "Confederacy of Dunces" wasn't published while John Kennedy Toole was still alive. I don't think I've heard the challenge summarized so well before though. Thanks, docbrite!

He said things like "The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without." While I certainly can't agree with all of his polticial decisions-- some I would rank very negatively in fact -- he seemed to have a element of common sense and compassion lacking in more recent leaders of his party.

I am talking, of course, about Dwight David Eisenhower, who 60 years ago led the Allied assault against the Fascist forces on D-Day.

On the 20th anniversary of D-Day, in an interview with Walter Cronkite on Omaha Beach, Normandy, Eisenhower remarked:

"These young boys were cut off in their prime. I devoutly hope that we will never again have to see such scenes as these. I think and hope, and pray, that humanity will have learned. We must find some way to gain an eternal peace for this world." - 6 June 1964

Imagine that. The USA had a President who served in war himself, and was wary of sending other people to die in wars.

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity." - January 10, 1946

Can you picture any of "Ike"'s quotes here comming from the mouths of this country's current "leadership"?

"I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it." - August 31, 1959

"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

"Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose." - Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

"We have arrived at that point, my friends, when war does not present the possibility of victory or defeat. War would present to us only the alternative in degrees of destruction." - 1954

"There is no way in which a country can satisfy the craving for absolute security, but it can bankrupt itself morally and economically in attempting to reach that illusory goal through arms alone."

"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads"- 1949

"The only way to win World War III is to prevent it." - Radio and TV Address, September 19, 1956

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." - April 16, 1953

"May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."

"A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility. I don't believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing." - Press conference in 1954