The only operant definition of a "free society"

Nowadays, the only operant definition of a "free society" seems to be that it isn't free. Freedom has been redefined as whatever the grunts overseas are fighting and dying for, even if that be merely loot for war profiteers.

-- Terry Mcintyre

When we tolerate small abuses

When we tolerate small abuses of common sense by the lawmakers, they progress to larger ones. This is enabled by stupid people who insist upon "law and order" above all, and who never demand that the law itself be orderly and reasonable and consistent with a "free society."

-- Terry Mcintyre

Suppose you were an idiot

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. - Mark Twain

The treating of facts as though they were opinions

What is in question [are] ... : the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
-- Gore Vidal

You can fool enough of them to rule a large country

It may be true … that "you can't fool all the people all the time", but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country. - Will & Ariel Durant

A man who fears suffering

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
-- Michel de Montaigne

Why can't it get us out?

If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
-- Will Rogers

You cannot create experience

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
-- Albert Camus

A belated advertisement

An epitaph is a belated advertisement for a line of goods that has been discontinued.
-- Irvin S. Cobb

Taking it out on someone else

"A variant of Weiss's experiment uncovers a special feature of the outlet-for-frustration reaction. This time, when the rat gets the identical series of electric shocks and is upset, it can run across the cage, sit next to another rat and ... bite the hell out of it. Stress-induced displacement of aggression: the practice works wonders at minimizing the stressfulness of a stressor. It's a real primate specialty as well. A male baboon loses a fight. Frustrated, he spins around and attacks a subordinate male who was minding his own business. An extremely high percentage of primate aggression represents frustration displaced onto innocent bystanders. Humans are pretty good at it, too, and we have a technical way of describing the phenomenon in the context of stress-related disease: "He's one of those guys who doesn't get ulcers, he gives them." Taking it out on someone else—how well it works at minimizing the impact of a stressor."

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson

In a perpetual state of fear

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.
Douglas MacArthur

The willingness to kill

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell

It fulfills our worst wishes

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Aldous Huxley

A man has the right to kill me

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
Blaise Pascal

To be a good patriot

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
Voltaire

Nationalism is an infantile disease

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
Albert Einstein

This country is superior to all others

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
   
George Bernard Shaw

Before dying, most of us will become old

"And, of course, before dying, most of us will become old,a process aptly described as not for sissies: wracking pain. Dementia so severe we can't recognize our children. Cat food for dinner. Forced retirement. Colostomy bags. Muscles that no longer listen to our commands, organs that betray us, children who ignore us. Mostly that aching sense that just when we finally grow up and learn to like ourselves and to love and play, the shadows lengthen. There is so little time."

"The universe is expanding."

"It first really dawns on us emotionally sometime around puberty. Woody Allen, once our untarnished high priest of death and love, captures its roundabout assault perfectly in Annie Hall. The protagonist is shown, in flashback, as a young adolescent. He is sufficiently depressed for the worried mother to drag him to the family doctor—"Listen to what he keeps saying, what's wrong with him, does he have the flu?" The Allenesque adolescent, glazed with despair and panic, announces in a monotone: "The universe is expanding." It's all there—the universe is expanding; look how big infinity is and how finite we are—and he has been initiated into the great secret of our species: we will die and we know it. With that rite of passage, he has found the mother lode of psychic energy that fuels our most irrational and violent moments, our most selfish and our most altruistic ones, our neurotic dialectic of simultaneously mourning and denying, our diets and exercising, our myths of paradise and resurrection. It's as if we were trapped in a mine, shouting out for rescuers, Save us, we're alive but we're getting old and we're going to die."

All of you damned medical experts

"Or I'll be at a scientific conference, this time barely understanding someone else's lecture, and amid the roomful of savants, the wave of bitterness will sweep over me. "All of you damned medical experts, and not one of you can make me live forever.""

Sleep Odities

"And this isn't even going into the subject of species that sleep with only half of their brain at a time, in order to keep one eye and half the brain open to look out for predators. Mallards, for example, that are stuck on the edge of their group at night keep their outward facing eye, and the half of the brain that responds to it, preferentially awake. As more oddities, dolphins can swim while sleeping and some birds can fly."

Sleeping is pretty creepy

"All things considered, sleeping is pretty creepy. For a third of your life, you're just not there, floating in this suspended state, everything slowed down. Except, at points, your brain is more active than when you're awake, making your eyelids all twitchy, and it's consolidating memories from the day and solving problems for you. Except when it's dreaming, when it's making no sense. And then you sometimes walk or talk in your sleep. Or drool. And then there's those mysterious penile or clitoral erections that occur intermittently during the night. Weird. What's going on here?"

we've got a dread vicious cycle on our hands.

"Not getting enough sleep is a stressor; being stressed makes it harder to sleep. Yup, we've got a dread vicious cycle on our hands."

My brain is my second-favorite organ

 

"My brain is my second-favorite organ."

Woody Allen

Politicians are always interested in people

Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.

- P.J. O'Rourke

To automatically transfer knowledge and sophistication

"This inability to automatically transfer knowledge and sophistication from one situation to another, or from theory to practice, is a quite disturbing attribute of human nature."

You cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver

"Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver ; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times , I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge of the future."

Those who make peaceful change impossible

Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F. Kennedy

Never to have been born at all

Sleep is good, death is better; but of course,
The best would be never to have been born at all.
~ Heinrich Heine

Never to have been born is best

Never to have been born is best
But if we must see the light, the next best
Is quickly returning whence we came.
When youth departs, with all its follies,
Who does not stagger under evils? Who escapes them?
~ Sophocles

Breeders enhance their value by having children

"Another way in which pro-natalism operates, even in the moral (and not merely the political) realm is that breeders enhance their value by having children. Parents with dependents are somehow thought to count for more. If, for example, there is some scarce resource—a donor kidney perhaps —and of the two potential recipients one is a parent of young children and one is not, the parent, all things being equal, will likely be favoured. To let a parent die is not only to thwart that person’s preference to be saved, but also the preferences of his or her children that their parent be saved. It is quite true, of course, that the death of the parent will harm more people, but there is nonetheless something to be said against favouring parents. Increasing one’s value by having children might be like increasing one’s value by taking hostages. We might find it unfair and decide not to reward it. That may make children’s lives worse, but must the cost of preventing that outcome be placed on the shoulders of those who do not have children?"

It is curious how democracy favours breeding over immigration

"Moreover, it is curious how democracy favours breeding over immigration. Offspring have a presumed right to citizenship, while potential immigrants do not. Imagine a polarized state consisting of two opposing ethnic groups. One increases its size by breeding and the other by immigration. Depending on who holds power, the group that grows by immigration will either be prevented from growing or it will be accused of colonialism.²° But why should democracy favour one indigenous group over another merely because one breeds rather than increases by immigration? Why should breeding be unlimited but immigration curtailed where political outcomes are equally sensitive to both ways of enhancing population? Some may seek to answer this question by arguing that a right to procreative freedom is more important than a right to immigrate. That may indeed be an accurate description of the way the law actually works, but we can question whether that is the way it should be. Should somebody’s freedom to create a person be more inviolable than somebody else’s freedom to have a friend or family member immigrate?"

Democracy has an inherent bias towards pro-natalism

"Even where democracies take no formal steps to increase the birth rate, we should note that democracy has an inherent bias towards pro-natalism. Given that the majority prevails (even if within certain liberal constraints), each sector of a democracy’s population is incentivized to produce extra offspring in order for its interests and agendas either to prevail or at least to hold their own. Notice, by extension, that in a democracy those committed to non-procreation could never, in the long run, prevail politically against those committed to procreation."

The secret of freedom lies in educating people

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny lies in
keeping them ignorant

- Maximilien Robespierre.

One is either backward or selfish if one does not

"The pro-natal bias manifests itself in many ways. For example, there is the assumption that one should (get married or simply cohabit in order to) produce children, and that, infertility aside, one is either backward or selfish if one does not.¹³ The assumption of ‘backwardness’ draws on an ontogenetic or individual developmental paradigm—children do not have children, but adults do. Thus if one has not (yet) started breeding, one is not fully adult. But it is far from clear that this is the appropriate paradigm. First, knowing when not to have a baby and having the self-control to follow through with this is a sign of maturity not immaturity. There are all too many (pubescent) children who are having children without being adequately prepared to rear them. Second, is a related point: from a phylogenetic perspective, the impulse to procreation is extremely primitive. If ‘backward’ is understood as ‘primitive’ it is procreation that is backward, and rationally motivated nonprocreation that is evolutionarily more recent and advanced."

There exists nobody whom the odds favoured

"Of all the trillions of possible people who could have come into existence and assessed the odds, every one of those who is in a position to assess the odds is unlucky whereas there exists nobody whom the odds favoured. One hundred per cent of assessors are unlucky, and nought per cent are lucky. In other words, given procreation there was an excellent chance that somebody would be harmed, and although the chances of any person coming into existence are small, the chances of any existing person having been harmed are one hundred per cent."

When it applies to themselves

"people find the conclusion hardest to accept when it applies to themselves"

They just make one

"Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child’s sake."

Microscopic View of Bloodsucking Mosquito Will Basically Ruin Your Day

Microscopic View of Bloodsucking Mosquito Will Basically Ruin Your Day

Mosquito mouthparts are freakishly flexible. We think of hypodermic needles as these fragile, brittle things. And they are. But a mosquito's blood-sucking kit is like a god-forsaken bendy straw of malaria-ridden doom.
    What looks like a single blood-sucking apparatus is actually comprised of six distinct mouthparts: a pair of mandibles, a pair of maxillae, a saliva-injecting hypopharynx and a bloodmeal-syphoning labrum.
    Mosquitos infected with malaria-inducing parasites spend more time probing for blood vessels than their uninfected counterparts. Which is just terrifying and fascinating and awful all at the same time.

On average, they drink for around 4 minutes and at higher magnifications, [Pasteur Institute researcher Valerie Choumet, who conducted the study] could actually see red blood cells rushing up their mouthparts. They suck so hard that the blood vessels start to collapse. Some of them rupture, spilling blood into the surrounding spaces. When that happens, the mosquito sometimes goes in for seconds, drinking directly from the blood pool that it had created.

Strangers invade the homes of giant bacteria

Strangers invade the homes of giant bacteria

At the bottom of the eastern Pacific off Mexico we find one of the largest bacteria in the world: Thioploca. It is so large that it can be seen with the naked eye, and it lives together with other family members in bundles of long fluffy white cell strands that look like Chinese noodles. Thioploca feeds on nitrate, which it absorbs from the water, and when it has gathered a portion of nitrate, it retires to a dwelling site under the seabed. The bacteria withdraws through an up to 20 cm long sheath to its dwelling site, and when it is again ready to feed, it returns through the tube to the ocean water.

"We have long thought that a surprisingly large amount of nitrate disappears here. When we investigated the case, we saw that Thioploca is not solely responsible for all nitrate removal. Inside the tubes we found some smaller cells, so-called anammox bacteria that steal nitrate from Thioploca when it retires through the sheath with its harvest of nitrate"

The discovery is now helping to explain why in some parts of the oceans large quantities of nutrients disappear.

"The newly discovered symbiotic relationship increases nitrogen metabolism in the sea. This leads to fewer algae in the water and thus less food for marine organisms. The consequence is that there is less food for the fish"

If we landed on Europa, what would we want to know?

If we landed on Europa, what would we want to know?

The team found the most important questions clustered around composition: what makes up the reddish "freckles" and reddish cracks that stain the icy surface? What kind of chemistry is occurring there? Are there organic molecules, which are among the building blocks of life?

how active is the surface? How much rumbling is there from the periodic gravitational squeezes from its planetary host, the giant planet Jupiter? What do these detections tell us about the characteristics of liquid water below the icy surface?

In other words, the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology

"Every living thing has at least one parasite that lives inside it or on it. Many, like leopard frogs and humans, have many more. There's a parrot in Mexico with thirty different species of mites on its feathers alone. And the parasites themselves have parasites, and some of those parasites have parasites of their own. Scientists such as Brooks have no idea just how many species of parasites there are, but they do know one dazzling thing: parasites make up the majority of species on Earth. According to one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one. In other words, the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology."