readable bits archive mar 2003

.....readable bits.....

.....this is where the march bits fell.....

Interior states...

External states...

31st March 2003

"...the Iraqis are now going to have to be "forced to be free"

29th March 2003

"I kept walking for a while and wondered what would happen if we allowed some of the fossils to simply lie there under the sand..."

Tom Hayden:

"Bush's fundamentalist coalition of Christian evangelicals and Jewish neoconservatives seems to anticipate the second term as the Second Coming."

28th March 2003

G. K. Chesterton:

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.

$75 Billion [the estimated cost of Bush Jr.'s war] could buy ...free health care for 50,000,000 people in the developed nations (based on current per-capita expenditures in Canada)

As any reader of the Book of Job knows, evil is no stranger to humanity, nor to God.

27th March 2003

Samuel Johnson:

"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life"

...those who are tired of Google are tired of life.

26th March 2003

Seneca:

...it is much better to surrender yourself to a few authors than to wander through many.

25th March 2003

It is a Humanist dictum that this life is all and enough.

“Ninety-nine percent of Americans don’t know the country they’ll be bombing is Mesopotamia,”

...the war in Iraq could have dire consequences for the archaeological treasures in Iraq, which record the birth of human civilisation.

21st March 2003

And so they attack Iraq. But they are really attacking ... democracy ... you and I ... and everything the word "America" once stood for.

19th March 2003

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."

15th March 2003

"So what exactly does science have to offer the arts?"

14th March 2003

"God must, by necessity, peel from those who enter heaven the very things that constitute them as individual, free-willed, and knowledgeable beings."

Robetrt Frost:

You know my mild prejudice against Ghost Writers. But I am sublimated out of my shoes by the thought that in Heaven we will all be Ghost Writers if we write at all. Maybe we won't write any more than we marry there. Everything will be done out of wedlock and said off the record.

9th March 2003

Soren Kierkegaard:

"Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays."

8th March 2003

"Due to the time constraints imposed by long periods of deep contemplation, Socrates can't engage in online conversations, but if you email your question..."

Robert Frost:

"I'm always saying something that's just the edge of something more."

"While it has often been tough to find good conversation in the bars and cafes around Chapel Hill, it has never been so on our Web sites..."

7th March 2003

At Zola's funeral Anatole France declared. 'He was a moment of the human conscience.'

"Every few years a book is published that commands our attention and causes us to consider questions that challenge our basic assumptions about ourselves. This month marks the publication of such a book..."

"By removing the lens, Katinka's work bypasses an entire stack of added layers and takes us back to when we saw more by looking at less."

4th March 2003

Thomas Jefferson:

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

3rd March 2003

"The American Poet Laureate Billy Collins says that he used the first two lines [of this poem] in many a conquest he tried to make in college. It proved, he notes, the maxim that poetry makes nothing happen...."

31st March 2003

Many Arabs already define this neo-colonial war as a historic turning point which might have as profound an effect on the Arab psyche as September 11 did on Americans.

29th March 2003

"In San Francisco, about 75 monks, priests, rabbis and other clergy were taken into custody."

28th March 2003

"Iraq's desperate humanitarian situation has suddenly become a retroactive justification for the war"

"...an article in The New Yorker by Seymour M. Hersh...disclosed that Mr. Perle had lunch earlier this year with the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Mr. Perle responded to the article by calling Mr. Hersh a terrorist..."

Lawrence of Arabia warned: "The foreigner and Christian is not a popular person in Arabia"

27th March 2003

This is after all a demonstration war, designed to cow and discipline both the enemies and allies of the US.

Nobel Winners Arrested at White House War Protest

26th March 2003