Quotations
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Remember Sarah Beckstrom
Sarah Beckstrom was a National Guard member from Summersville, West Virginia. She died from bullet wounds while deployed to Washington, D.C. “She swore an oath to defend the Constitution. Donald Trump violated it to put her there. She should never have been deployed at all. A federal judge ruled last week that Trump’s activation of the National Continue reading
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I’ve visited Kansas…
…but I didn’t get the impression it was the sort of place where the Secretary of State would have to issue a public reminder to a newspaper that it wasn’t Election Day in the state, or that Kansans can’t vote in elections in other states. Continue reading
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Best quote from a republic ever
Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house and a leader in the republic party, just drooled this out:“Don’t get lost in the facts.” The great aspiration of the US has always been that people would be rational, honest actors. That’s clearly gone, at least among the republics. Continue reading
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Oh Those Economists 🙄
“…not being dead is presumably an important part of the quality of life.“ No comment. Continue reading
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Irony
This should be listed as the definition of “irony” in some dictionary. Stephen Miller…Stephen Miller! The “un-American political extremist.” He wrote this: “There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an Continue reading
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Passions, Products, and Utility
or: It’s Just a Phone The MacPsych blog has an interesting post about mobile phones, on the occasion of the latest Apple “event” introducing new iPhoniana. They say: “I have read lots of differing perspective online, from fanboy exclamations of ‘the best phone everrrrrr!’ through to the much more realistic ‘it’s just a fucking phone’. As time passes, Continue reading
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2025
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is Continue reading
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The crisis
Dornbusch’s law: “The crisis takes longer to happen than you can possibly imagine, then happens quicker than you can possibly imagine.” Rüdiger “Rudi” Dornbusch Continue reading
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Contradictions can both be true
“At every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of Continue reading
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Blaming
Politics in the US seems to be more about nonsensical blaming than it used to be. I think it’s because once they’re elected, the greedheads and powerheads just assume that the rest of us are stupid, and will just accept whatever tripe comes out of their mouths. This may be at least partly due to Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.