#cs

We owe Clint Eastwood a debt of thanks. Not only because it was truly a hilarious twelve minutes of improvised "awesome" in a week of scripted "blah". But because it advanced our understanding. This president has issues, and there are very legitimate debates about his policies and actions, and successes and or failures as president - I mean, tune in next week. But I could never wrap my head around why the world, and the president republicans describe, bears so little resemblance to the world and the president that I experience. And now I know why : There is a president Obama that only republicans can see ↗

— Jon Stewart

#current-events #politics #presidents #republicans #tea-party

Contrary to the media circus which portrayed politicians as all-powerful figures, Kentbridge knew from experience the vast majority of US Government officials – elected or otherwise – were puppets who only had the illusion of power. ↗

— James Morcan

#mystery #politics #thriller #experience

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#aesthetics #consumerism #photography #society #experience

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion, but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life, that it is in this way that poetry becomes the greatest truth, by intensification, condensation of experience. While poetry is considered by most as illusion or delusion, it is the only reality, the moment when we are completely alive. ↗

— Anais Nin

#mystics #passion #poetry #truth #experience

In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. "Pro-maternity" propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: "Have babies, it's wonderful, you'll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever," but do it in a society in freefall in which waged work is a condition of social survival but guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible. ↗

— Virginie Despentes

#consumerism #female-authors #feminism #motherhood #politics

My first thought was, “I got a haircut and trimmed my pubes for this job interview?” Then I thought, “Maybe being a political intern isn’t such a bad gig after all. I could learn the ropes that bind the people into bondage.”
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#dirty #haircut #intern #internship #interview

Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence. ↗

— Olaf Stapledon

#philosophy #self-identity #experience

If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment. ↗

— Ernest Rutherford

#science #statistics #experience

She closed her eyes briefly, feeling sick. Olivia had experienced strangulation before. Having to look directly into the face of the person who was killing you made the experience beyond awful. But there were worse things than that. Staring into the void of unresolved memory, living an eternal mystery, waking up night after night seeing the face of someone you desperately wanted to save but having not the slightest clue how to do it—all that was worse. If going through with this experience gave her the answers she needed, if it gave her peace, it would be well worth one-hundred-and-thirty seconds of fear and pain. ↗

— Leslie Parrish

#paranormal #psychics #romance #romantic-suspense #thrillers

Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining. ↗

— Bill Gaede

#fact #gaede #hypothesizing #mathematical-physics #prediction