“It’s not about your acquaintances, just because you have one black friend or black children with your black wife, that doesn’t mean you’re not racist, sir.”
“You cannot talk to me, you’re not wearing a mask, sir -
"One woman can make you fly like an eagle, another can give you the strength of a lion, but only one in The Cycle of Life can fill your heart with Wonder and The Wisdom That You Have Known a Singular Joy. I wrote that for my girlfriend." "Local gal?" "Diane Shapiro. PhD, Brandeis."
Fran asks Japanese johns to pick a lady from the line-up.
He was unable to finish the work; on 4 July 1789, he was transferred “naked as a worm” to the insane asylum at Charenton near Paris, two days after he reportedly incited unrest outside the prison by shouting to the crowds gathered there,
“They are killing the prisoners here!”
Sade was unable to retrieve the manuscript before being removed from the prison.
The storming of the Bastille, a major event of the French Revolution, occurred ten days after Sade left, on 14 July.
To his despair, he believed that the manuscript was destroyed in the storming of the Bastille, though it was actually saved by a man named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin two days before the Bastille was attacked.
It is not known why Saint-Maximin chose to bring the manuscript to safety, nor indeed is anything else about him known.
In June 1780, weary of the failed prosecution of the war in North America, and convinced that the ministry of Lord George North would bring eternal ruin to his dreams of permanent empire, Lord Shelburne, through the East India Company and its allied Baring Bank, bankrolled a Jacobin mob to descend upon London, ostensibly in protest over the granting of Irish reforms.
The so-called Irish reforms amounted to little more than forced conscription of Irishmen into the British Army to fight in North America--a move Shelburne hoped would also defeat the pro-American republican movement inside Ireland that had nearly launched its own revolt against Britain in 1779.
Led by Lord George Gordon, the Protestant rabble stormed Westminster, sending parliamentarians and lords alike down flights of stairs, out windows, and to the hospitals.
For eight days, London was ransacked, culminating in the storming of the Newgate Prison and the freeing of all the prisoners, who joined in the assault on the Parliament building.
Lord Shelburne, as head of the interior committee of the House of Lords, personally ensured the maximum terror by delaying the reading of the Riot Act (which would have called out the Home Guard) until violence had spread to every corner of the city.
When the flames subsided, the ministry of Lord North was in ashes as well.
North resigned as prime minister, and within months, Shelburne was himself in the new Rockingham cabinet as foreign secretary for the Northern District, subsuming the North American colonies.
From that post, he would be the principal negotiator in Paris across the table from Benjamin Franklin.
A postscript on Lord Gordon, Shelburne's agent provocateur:
After a brief stay in the Tower of London, foreshortened by Shelburne's personal intervention with the crown, Lord Gordon made off to friendlier ground in the Netherlands, where, to the astonishment of his Scottish Presbyterian cronies, he became a convert to Jewish cabbalism, taking the name Israel Bar Abraham.
He shortly thereafter surfaced in Paris as an occult adviser to Marie Antoinette, and from that position participated in Shelburne's intrigues against the French Bourbons.
The Jacobin insurrection in Paris during 1791-93 was a replay on grander scale of the earlier Shelburne-instigated Gordon Riots, down to the storming of the Bastille prison and the unleashing of the criminals.
"Behind you stands a Symbol of Oppression :- Blackgate Prison, Where a thousand men have languished under the name of THIS Man : Harvey Dent, who has been held up to you as The Shining Example of Justice! You have been supplied with a False Idol, to stop you from tearing down this corrupt city! Let me tell you The Truth about Harvey Dent from the words of Gotham’s Police Commissioner, James Gordon.
'The Batman didn’t murder Harvey Dent, he saved my boy.
Then took the blame for Harvey’s appalling crimes so I could, to my shame, build a lie around this fallen idol.
I praised the madman who tried to murder my own child, but I can no longer live with my lie.
It is time to Trust The People of Gotham with The Truth,
"America, and The World, has a Sin Problem." -- Why....? Because All Lif...
"If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door."
Well, I looked at lots of translations for this.
Actually, the next line is,
"And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him."
Alex :
No. No! NO!
Stop it! Stop it, please!
I beg you! This is sin!
This is sin! This is sin!
It's a sin, it's a sin, it's a sin!
Dr. Brodsky :
SIN?
WHAT’S ALL THIS ABOUT SIN?
Alex :
That! Using Ludwig van like that!
He did no harm to •anyone•.
Beethoven just wrote music!
Dr. Branom :
Are you referring to the background score...?
Alex :
Yes!!!
Dr. Branom :
You've heard Beethoven before?
Alex :
Yes!!!
Dr. Brodsky :
So, you're keen on music?
Alex :
YES!!!
[ Here comes the Rational-Liberal Torture Justification]
Dr. Brodsky :
Can't be helped.
Here's The Punishment Element perhaps.
Yes. What God actually says is something like this… "Things aren’t going so well for you, but if you were behaving properly, they would. But, instead, this is what you’ve done. Sin came to your door, and sin means to pull your arrow back and to miss the target. Sin came to your door. But he uses a metaphor. The metaphor is something like, "Sin came to your door like this sexually aroused cat-predator thing, and you invited it in. And then you let it have its way with you."
It’s like you entered into a creative — he uses a sexual metaphor. "You entered into a creative exchange with it, and gave birth to something as a consequence.
What you gave birth to, that’s Your Life. And you knew it.
You’re self-conscious, after all. You knew you were doing this. You conspired with this thing to produce the situation that you’re in.
Jung said something similar about the Oedipal mother situation. What he said was very politically incorrect. Of course, every single he wrote was politically incorrect. That’s how you could tell that he was a thinker, by the way. He talked about the unholy alliance between hyper-dependent children and their mothers. He said, well, it’s actually—Freud thought about it as a maternal thing. I’m not putting Freud down. Freud mapped out the Oedipal situation brilliantly. I’m not putting Freud down. But, you know, Jung was taking the ideas and expanding them outward. He said that there as actually an unholy alliance between a hyper-dependent child and an Oedipal, over-dependent mother. The alliance was, the mother would always offer—so maybe the kid is supposed to go off and do something that would require a little bit of courage and effort. The mother says, well, are you sure you’re feeling well enough to do it? And then the child could say, yes, or the child could say no. But the thing is, the child made the damn decision, too. You might think, well, that’s pretty harsh. But just because children are little, that doesn’t mean they’re stupid.
You don’t know children if you don’t know how children know how to manipulate. They are staggeringly good at that. They’re studying you nonstop, trying to figure out, A, what you’re up to, and B, how they can get what they want in the way that they want it. They can play a manipulative game, no problem, especially if they’re well schooled in it. It’s sort of like that. Maybe the mother is a little timid and a little inclined to over-protect, and maybe the child is a little manipulative, and a little willing to not take that courageous step out into the world, and to regress into infantile dependency, instead. Then you get a terrible dynamic building across time that is like a vicious circle, or like a positive feedback loop. It just expands and expands and expands. Sometimes, in families, you see a hyper-dependent child and a perfectly independent child, and the same mother. Mothers are very complex, and mother for child A and mother for child B are not the same mother, even if they happen to be the same human being. The literature’s quite clear on that, but you get my point.
God’s idea was that, not only are you not doing well, but you’re not doing well because you’ve actually really spent a lot of work figuring out how to not do well. This is like creative effort on your part. If you want to read about truly malevolent people, you could start with the Columbine killers. They left some very interesting diaries behind. I would recommend them. There’s plenty of serial killers you could read about, and the people who’ve really gone out and done dark things. I’ve read more than my fair share of that sort of thing, and I understand it quite well. If you really want to have your countenance fall and be wroth, 10 years of brooding on your own catastrophe, sort of alone, and letting your fantasies take shape, and egging them on, allowing them to flourish and, let’s say, take possession of you…That’s exactly the right way to think about it. That will get you somewhere like this. There are more people who are like that than you think, and you’re more like that than you think.
So, Cain is obviously not very happy about this whole answer. The last thing you want to hear if your life has turned into a catastrophe and you take God to task for creating a universe where that sort of thing was allowed, is that it’s your own damn fault, and that you should straighten up and fly right, so to speak, and that you shouldn’t be complaining about the nature of being. But that is the answer he gets. Then what happens? Well, we have to infer that, if Cain was angry before, he’s a lot more angry now. Of course, that’s exactly what the story reveals.... "
Documenting the increasing racial violence in Britain, concentrating on the British National Party (BNP) and their opposition in the form of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) and the Anti-Racist Alliance (ARA).
Examines the forms of violence, arson attacks, murders and vandalism attributed to the BNP. Then examines the rivalry and use of violent tactics by the anti-racist groups, in the light of the Welling riots in September 1993. Includes comments from families of murdered black youths who claim that the anti-racist parties hijacked their campaigns for justice for their own political ends.
Also looks at Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE) which has a 25-member `away team' which can cause confrontation and violence. Comments and interviews come from Mark Wandworth, National Secretary of the ARA; Ken Livingstone MP; Paul Holborow, national organiser of the ANL; Gary McFarlane ANL organiser; Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Osland of the Metropolitan Police; Paul Heron organiser of the YRE; Peter Kilfoyle MP; Richard Adams father of murder victim Rolan Adams; Ramesh Sharma uncle of murder victim Rohit Sharma; and Doreen Lawrence mother of murder victim Stephen Lawrence.
“These evil sorcerers, dugpas, they call them, cultivate evil for the sake of evil and nothing else.
They express themselves in darkness for darkness,without leavening motive.
This ardent purity has allowed them to access a secret place of Great Power, where the cultivation of evil proceeds in exponential fashion. And with it, the furtherance of evil's resulting power.
These are not fairy tales, or myths.
This Place of Power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilised in some fashion.
The dugpas have many names for it, but chief among them is The Black Lodge... But you don't believe me, do you?
You think I'm mad. Overworked.
Go away.”
"Once upon a time, there was a place of Great Goodness, called The White Lodge.
Gentle fawns gamboled there amidst happy, laughing spirits. The sounds of Innocence and joy filled the air. And when it rained, it rained sweet nectar that infused one's heart with a desire to live life in Truth and Beauty.
Generally speaking, a ghastly place, reeking of Virtue's sour smell.
Engorged with the whispered prayers of kneeling mothers, mewling newborns, and fools, young and old, compelled to do good without reason ...
But, I am happy to point out that our story does not end in this wretched place of saccharine excess.
For there's another place, its opposite: A place of almost unimaginable power, chock full of dark forces and vicious secrets.
No prayers dare enter this frightful maw.
The spirits there care not for good deeds or priestly invocations, they're as likely to rip the flesh from your bone as greet you with a happy "good day."
And if harnessed, these spirits in this hidden land of unmuffled screams and broken hearts would offer up a power so vast that its bearer might reorder The Earth itself to his liking.
“Dugpas (Tib.). Lit., “Red Caps,”a sect in Tibet. Before the advent of Tsong-ka-pa in the fourteenth century, the Tibetans, whose Buddhism had deteriorated and been dreadfully adulterated with the tenets of the old Bhon religion,—were all Dugpas.
From that century, however, and after the rigid laws imposed upon the Gelukpas (yellow caps) and the general reform and purification of Buddhism (or Lamaism), the Dugpas have given themselves over more than ever to sorcery, immorality, and drunkenness.
Since then the word Dugpas has become a synonym of “sorcerer”, “adept of black magic” and everything vile. There are few, if any, Dugpas in Eastern Tibet, but they congregate in Bhutan, Sikkim, and the borderlands generally.”
— Mme. Blavatsky
“I had a vision of a world without Batman —
The Mob ground out a little profit and The Police tried to shut them down one block at a time.
And it was so... boring.
I've had a change of heart : —
I don't want Mr. Reese spoiling everything, but why should I have all the fun?
And he smote the Men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked in The Ark of The LORD, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the LORD had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter.
And The Men of Bethshemesh said, 'Who is able to stand before this holy LORD God? and to whom shall he go up from us?'
And they sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kirjathjearim, saying, 'The Philistines have brought again The Ark of The LORD; come ye down, and fetch it up to you.'
" So I want to start with a story from the Old Testament.
There’s a scene in the Old Testament when the ancient Hebrews are moving the Ark of the Covenant.
The Ark of the Covenant was a device that was manufactured in order to contain
The Word of God.
OR
"A Radio for Talking to God"
(if you're into that)
And there was a rule among the ancient Hebrews which was :
“You are NOT to touch The Ark of the Covenant NO MATTER WHAT”
And there’s a story in the Old Testament where the bearers of the Ark of the Covenant (they used to carry it), the bearers of the Ark of the Covenant trip and a man reaches out to steady it and when he touches it,
** SMITE !! **
God strikes him DEAD.
And modern people look at a story like that and the first thing they think is :
“That seems a little bit harsh on the part of God, given that the man was attempting to do something that he believed was good.”
But what the story was designed to indicate, in my opinion, is that --
There are certain things that you touch at your peril, regardless of your intentions.
And those things that you touch at your peril, regardless of your intentions, most cultures regard as Sacred, as Untouchable.
I want to make a case for you today that those things exist and also WHY they exist and why it’s necessary for you to KNOW that they exist.
I would also say that if you’re educated educated in a university, especially with regards to The Humanities (which are in some conceptual trouble at the moment), what essentially happens to you is that you are introduced in a relatively secular way to the concept of The Sacred.
You are here, in The University, to learn about
The Eternal Values of Humankind.
And I think that people who tell you that those values Do Not Exist or that They’re Endlessly Debatable, do you an UNBELIEVABLE Disservice. "
So if you could give Charles Foster Kane advice....
What advice would you give him...?”
Trump :
Get Yourself a DIFFERENT WOMAN.
“ Autism has bedeviled psychiatric classifiers for decades because it is not a single, discrete disease. It’s usually described as a “spectrum” disorder because people can be more or less autistic, and it’s not clear where to draw the line between those who have a serious mental illness and those who are just not very good at reading other people. At the extreme end of the spectrum, autistic people are “mind-blind.”
They are missing the social-cognitive software that the rest of us use to guess the intentions and desires of other people. According to one of the leading autism researchers, Simon Baron-Cohen, there are in fact two spectra, two dimensions on which we can place each person: empathising and systemising.
Empathising is “the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion.”
If you prefer fiction to nonfiction, or if you often enjoy conversations about people you don’t know, you are probably above average on empathising.
Systemizing is “the drive to analyse the variables in a system, to derive the underlying rules that govern the behaviour of the system.”
If you are good at reading maps and instruction manuals, or if you enjoy figuring out how machines work, you are probably above average on systemising.”
- Johnathan Haidt,
The Righteous Mind
“Weisinger was in therapy, and he used the material from his sessions as raw plot ore for his writers to process into story material. The editor’s entire psychology was stretched naked on the dissecting table via some of the most outlandish and unashamed deployments of pure symbolic content that the comics had ever seen. Its like would not be truly viewed again, in fact, until the drug-inspired cosmic comics of the early seventies.
For example, there was the bottle city of Kandor. Kandor had been the capital city of Superman’s home world Krypton, thought destroyed. Shrunken and preserved by the villain Brainiac, Kandor was now a tiny city in a bell jar. This living diorama, this ant colony of real people, had great appeal for children, adding to the childlike nature of this era’s Superman. In Kandor, lost memories were preserved under glass, and Superman could go there, in private, to experience a world he left behind. Kandor was every snow globe and music box that stood for every bittersweet memory in every movie there would ever be. Kandor was the tinkling voice of a lost world, a past that might have been, unreachable. Kandor was survivor’s guilt endowed with new meaning.”
late 14c., "first in order," from Latin primus "first, the first, first part," figuratively "chief, principal; excellent, distinguished, noble" (source also of Italian and Spanish primo), from pre-Italic *prismos, superlative of PIE *preis- "before," from root *per- (1) "forward," hence "in front of, before, first, chief."
Meaning "first in importance" is from 1610s in English; that of "first-rate" is from 1620s. Arithmetical sense (as in prime number) is from 1560s; prime meridian "the meridian of the earth from which longitude is measured, that of Greenwich, England," is from 1878. Prime time originally (c. 1500) meant "spring time;" broadcasting sense of "peak tuning-in period" is attested by 1961.
prime (n.)
"earliest canonical hour" (6 a.m.), Old English prim, from Medieval Latin prima "the first service," from Latin prima hora "the first hour" (of the Roman day). Meaning "most vigorous stage" first recorded 1530s; specifically "springtime of human life" (often meaning ages roughly 21 to 28) is from 1590s. In classical Latin, noun uses of the adjective meant "first part, beginning; leading place."
prime (v.)
"to fill, charge, load" (a weapon), 1510s, probably from prime (adj.). Meaning "to cover with a first coat of paint or dye" is from c. 1600. To prime a pump (c. 1840) meant to pour water down the tube, which saturated the sucking mechanism and made it draw up water more readily. Related: Primed; priming.
LORE:
You did what you had to do?
What kind of answer is that?
SOONG:
The only one I can give you.
You were not functioning properly.
DATA:
Lore told me the colonists envied him because you made him so completely human.
SOONG:
I wouldn't exactly have used the word envious, Data.
LORE:
You disassembled me.
You took me apart.
DATA:
Lore also told me the colonists petitioned you to replace him with a less perfect android.
SOONG:
The last thing you should think of yourself as, Data, is less perfect.
The two of you are virtually identical, except for a bit of programming.
DATA:
It was a lie.
Another lie.
LORE:
I would have proven myself worth to you, if you'd just given me a chance.
But it was easier just to turn your back and build your precious Data.
SOONG:
You were the first.
You meant as much to me as Data ever did, but you were unstable.
The colonists were not envious of you, they were afraid of you.
You were unstable.
DATA:
I am not less perfect than Lore.
LORE:
Why didn't you just fix me?
It was within your power to fix me.
SOONG:
It wasn't as easy as that.
The next, the next logical step was to construct Data. Afterward, I planned to get back to you, to fix you.
LORE:
Next logical step.
DATA:
I am not less perfect than Lore.
LORE:
I am not less perfect than Lore.
SOONG:
Enough! Both of you, sit down. Sit down. For all these years I've been plagued by what went wrong. With all of your complexities, Lore, your nuances, basic emotions seemed almost simple by comparison. But the emotion turned, and twisted, became entangled with ambition. Lore, if I had known you were no longer sitting in pieces on some distant shelf, if I had known that I could simply press a button and bring you here, I would have spent those years trying to make things right for you as well. But all I knew of was Data. So I worked long and hard, and now I believe I've succeeded. This is why I brought you here, Data. Basic emotions. Simple feelings, Data.
Your feelings. I've imagined how hard it's been for you, living amongst beings so moved by emotion.
(Both androids stare at the tiny chip held in the tweezers)
LORE:
I don't have to imagine.
I know how hard it's been.
You'd be surprised, Data.
Feelings do funny things.
You may even learn to understand your evil brother.
To forgive him.
We will be more alike, Data, you and I.
You'll see.
I'm happy for you.
DATA:
I question your sincerity, Lore.
SOONG:
Perhaps with this you'll learn to be more trusting, Data.
Your brother has had good reason to be bitter.
DATA:
But sir, Lore was responsible for -
SOONG:
He wasn't given the chance that you and I were given, to live. But now I'm sure he understands why I had to do what I had to do.
If there were only time, Lore. What a shame. The procedure is quite simple. I'm tired. I need to rest, first, I'm tired.
“The central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case.
You can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of reality, then it serves some other master.
And so The Master that it hypothetically serves for the postmodernists is NOTHING BUT POWER because that seems to be EVERYTHING They believe in.
They don’t BELIEVE in Competence.
They don’t BELIEVE in Authority.
They don’t seem to believe in an Objective World, because everything is LANGUAGE-MEDIATED.
So it’s an extraordinarily cynical perspective: that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical.
You can attribute everything to Power and Dominance.
“What these Bloomington ladies are, or start to seem to me, is innocent. There is what would strike many Americans as a marked, startling lack of cynicism in the room.
It does not, for instance, occur to anyone here to remark on how it’s maybe a little odd that all three network anchors are in shirtsleeves, or to consider the possibility that Dan Rather’s hair’s being mussed might not be wholly accidental, or that the constant rerunning of horrific footage might not be just in case some viewers were only now tuning in and hadn’t seen it yet.
None of the ladies seem to notice the president’s odd little lightless eyes appear to get closer and closer together throughout his taped address, nor that some of his lines sound almost plagiaristically identical to those uttered by Bruce Willis (as a right-wing wacko, recall) in The Siege a couple years back.
Nor that at least some of the sheer weirdness of watching the Horror unfold has been how closely various shots and scenes have mirrored the plots of everything from Die Hard I-III to Air Force One.
Nobody’s near hip enough to lodge the sick and obvious po-mo complaint: We’ve Seen This Before.
Instead, what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. No one in Mrs. Thompson’s crew would ever be so nauseous as to try to get everybody to pray aloud or form a prayer circle, but you can still tell what they’re all doing.
Make no mistake, this is mostly a good thing. It forces you to think and do things you most likely wouldn’t alone, like for instance while watching the address and eyes to pray, silently and fervently, that you’re wrong about the president, that your view of him is maybe distorted and he’s actually far smarter and more substantial than you believe, not just some soulless golem or nexus of corporate interests dressed up in a suit but a statesman of courage and probity and … and it’s good, this is good to pray this way. It’s just a bit lonely to have to.
Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
I’m not for a moment trying to suggest that everyone I know in Bloomington is like Mrs. Thompson (e.g., her son F—- isn’t, though he’s an outstanding person). I’m trying, rather, to explain how some part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America, and F—-’s, and poor old loathsome Duane’s, than it was these ladies’.
