“…A world without nuclear weapons”

Can we really conceive what is and isn’t possible for self-organizing physical processes to achieve in the timespans of billions and billions of years?

The human tribe’s crusade to light the darkness of interplanetary and interstellar night.

“The only way true composing can occur would be to destroy completely all music that came before”- Wolfgang Fortner

The least we can expect for our $35 billion is to NEVER AGAIN hear the words that American industry, or markets in general, ‘don’t need government’ telling them how to conduct business.

There’s talk this week about Wachovia (a medium-sized bank) failing. But its a big ‘if’ for Wachovia to fail. I can’t say it Won’t Happen, (and with the way things have been going these past months…?) but never count out the desire to avoid pain if at all possible. The more US […]

We are only ever going to be able to approximate God in the manipulation of nature. Its time to stop believing in the Perfectability Of Man, as expressed in the interminable moralizing of so many American politicians (usually of the ‘conservative’ stripe), and start believing in the management of his imperfections. Our species inhabits […]

A Persian bomb will make American involvement in the Middle East a virtual requirement for the forseeable future. Precisely the recruiting tool needed by Al Qaeda. As with the Soviets in Afghanistan, it will be death by a thousand cuts.

Either we’re for a free market, or we’re not.

Since we purport to be the leaders of the free world, we legitimize torture for everyone else. And for what? So John McCain can be president? How dare he play politics with torture!

It may yet come to pass that American civilians will implicitly be asked to sacrifice lives as well, for the steadfast refusal to allow the worst in human nature to win over a people of liberty, to win over enlightened citizens of the federal republic we call the United States of America.

As citizens, we risk losing control of our government, and slowly but inexorably, our liberty, if we do not rise above the assumptions we make about the purpose of government, its implementation of laws, and its relationship to the corporate, private, interest.

The US military seems to simply be a prop on a stage containing grand delusions of statesmanship these guys believe themselves engaged in.

We really need to understand how our era of campaigns is different from the first 150 years of American politics.

The hubris of the neo-cons meets the interests of American energy companies as they bankroll and groom the entire political establishment to reflect the corporate interest of American energy companies with global reach and disguise it, with the imprimatur of the White House and Congress, as the public interest.

Just as no one can outlaw the depiction of a tree, mountain, or landscape, no one should be able to litigate the depictions of corporate identity in works of art.

There was a time when descriptions of violence were enough to outrage a society. Now we find ourselves barely reacting to a daily parade of images of violence - sometimes done in our name - that exist at least as much to sell domestic advertising as it might to elicit a genuine response of concern.

A great nation cannot, for long, suffer the incompetent, before the edifice, collapsing into itself is beyond holding its ideals in anything less than cold cynicism.

Shaking the bushes of bureaucracy allows mid-level management to put their institutional responsibilities above their fears and intra-organizational politics.

The struggle between an institution that has no mandate, much less the means, to express a morality beyond the maximization of profit and yield, and an institution that is fundamentally about the necessary, and moral, good of securing a reasonable future for a maximum number of citizens in a reasonably consensual manner.

The goal is to remove extraordinary fundraising that only serves the purpose of satisfying a for-profit business model of broadcast and cable media access.

Since when does a statistical analysis of relative incomes constitute a ‘politics of envy’? Methinks he doth protest too much.

The ‘Left’ feels threatened by a political attitude of exclusivity based on the strength of one’s faith.

The faithful have a duty not only to know what it is that they have faith in, but also something about what it is they lack faith in.

The role of government is not to ‘do good’, it is to render service to those communities that have given consent to share in the benefits and costs of providing and maintaining such services.

Senator Frist will only be “fully justified” in bringing the rule change to the floor if the reader willfully ignores the inconvenient fact about, as Senator Dole describes it, the ‘bi-partisan pedigree’ of past handling of judicial nominations.

We fear that the world will ask more of us than we’re willing to give. We fear that the world might be more complex than we care to comprehend.

The more ‘pure’ and ‘fundamental’ a political theory or philosophy, the more likely it will contain the seeds of its demise in actual implementation.

Business…risk[s] becoming either irrelevant or demonized by public opinion.

Thanks to steganography-powered digital rights management by corporations, the arts are threatened with a loss of basic material and inspiration.