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Imagine going back to 2009 and telling your iPhone 3GS-carrying self that, by 2013, you’d be downloading apps by scanning your fingerprint on the Home button.
Federico Viticci, iOS 8 Wishes
It’s pretty great, some times, living in the future.
“So,” said Mercury, “where are we going?”
“I have to go see the Antichrist,” Christine said […]
“Oh jeez,” said Mercury. “Seriously? The Antichrist?” He said it as if she had announced she was going to a Nickelback concert.
“What do you have against the Antichrist?”
“He’s an ass, Christine. A real dickweed.”
“Well,” said Christine, “he is the Antichrist…”
“Hey, we all have our jobs to do. That’s no excuse for being a dickweed.”
Rob Kroese, Mercury Falls
If you love Douglas Adams’ humor, you’ll love Rob’s Mercury series.
The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.
Donna Tartt, author of The Secret History (via writewild)
No pressure or anything.
We opt for more instead of better. Better is better than more.
If we’re to take the “collective right” explanation on its face, then the Second Amendment created a right that the states are powerless to execute, that the Federal government has no duty to provide, and that would be useless and oxymoronic if the latter did so anyway. If one spends five minutes thinking about the “collective right” theory, it quickly becomes apparent that the individual right is the only one that can possibly function appropriately, and is thus the only right that the amendment was ever intended to protect. To put it bluntly, the “collective right” approach makes no sense.
Apparently, increasing the minimum wage was not important for American workers during the first five years of Obama’s presidency — least of all his first two years, when Democrats controlled Congress and could have passed anything. (And did!)
No. The minimum wage did not become a pressing concern until an election year in which the public’s hatred of Obamacare is expected to be the central issue.
[…]
The minimum wage is the perfect Democratic issue. It will screw the very people it claims to help, while making Democrats look like saviors of the working class, either by getting them a higher wage or providing them with generous government benefits when they lose their jobs because of the mandatory wage hike.
American workers are suffering as a direct result of the Democrats’ policies on immigration. Republicans might want to point that out.
Since the late 1960s, the Democrats have been dumping about a million low-skilled immigrants on the country every year, driving down wages, especially at the lower end of the spectrum.
According to Harvard economist Jorge Borjas, our immigration policies have reduced American wages by $402 billion a year — while increasing profits for employers by $437 billion a year. (That’s minus what they have to pay to the government in taxes to support their out-of-work former employees. Of course, we’re all forced to share that tax burden.)
–Ann Coulter, Raise the minimum wage to $14 an hour using this one weird trick!
Ann can be visceral and caustic and turn people off, but she hits it out of the park with this one.
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.
Even if what you’re working on doesn’t go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you’re doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.
[I]t is appropriate that we recall the first thanksgiving, celebrated in the autumn of 1621. After surviving a bitter winter, the Pilgrims planted and harvested a bountiful crop. After the harvest they gathered their families together and joined in celebration and prayer with the Native Americans who had taught them so much. Clearly our forefathers were thankful not only for the material well being of their harvest but for this abundance of goodwill as well. In this spirit, Thanksgiving has become a day when Americans extend a helping hand to the less fortunate. Long before there was a government welfare program, this spirit of voluntary giving was ingrained in the American character. Americans have always understood that, truly, one must give in order to receive. This should be a day of giving as well as a day of thanks. … Let us recommit ourselves to that devotion to God and family that has played such an important role in making this a great Nation, and which will be needed as a source of strength if we are to remain a great people.
If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.
I … place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. … Taxation follows that, and in its turn wretchedness and oppression.
No pecuniary consideration is more urgent, than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt: on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more valuable.
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. … This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy. … Interest payments are a significant tax on all Americans – a debt tax that Washington doesn’t want to talk about. If Washington were serious about honest tax relief in this country, we would see an effort to reduce our national debt by returning to responsible fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
Nothing so strongly impels a man to regard the interest of his constituents, as the certainty of returning to the general mass of the people, from whence he was taken, where he must participate in their burdens.
–George Mason, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788
If only there were means available to ensure Congresscritters always returned to the general mass of people and had to live exactly as the general mass do.
As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.
–Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
Not enslaving future generations to debt: common sense in 1776, unheard of in 2013.
The instability of our laws is really an immense evil. I think it would be well to provide in our constitutions that there shall always be a twelve-month between the ingross-ing a bill & passing it: that it should then be offered to its passage without changing a word: and that if circum-stances should be thought to require a speedier passage, it should take two thirds of both houses instead of a bare majority.
–Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, 1787
If only we paid more attention to the brilliance of our founders…
A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is natural to abuse it, when acquired.
–Alexander Hamilton
Seemed appropriate, given all we’ve recently learned about our government, especially the NSA.
A Constitution is not the act of a Government, but of a people constituting a government, and a government without a constitution is a power without right.