The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 580-84 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 08:36 AM And then, to the north, St John’s Chapel stands out menacingly across a sea of roof-tops, to send us back from excitement to a shuddering foreboding. Rumour says that it has only once been climbed, and then by a party of experts, heavily roped. Even the participants are silent on this subject, and rumour continues its tale that one of them fell off, and owed his life to the rope. Lest others should attempt the ascent of this terrible climb and perish, they swore themselves to secrecy (telling only enough people to ensure the perpetuation of their epic) and went off to try Everest instead. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Note Loc. 584 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 08:37 AM From "Night Climbers of Cambridge" ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Note Loc. 584 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 08:46 AM From "Night Climbers of Cambridge" ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 330-34 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 11:04 AM Little Peggy touched the woman's womb. The boy's mind was empty, except for a feeling of pressure and gathering cold as he emerged into the air. But the very emptiness of his mind let her see things that would never be plainly visible again. The billion billion paths of his life lay open before him, waiting for his first choices, for the first changes in the world around him to eliminate a million futures every second. The future was there in everyone, a flickering shadow that she could only sometimes see, and never clearly, looking through the thoughts of the present moment; but here, for a few precious moments, little Peggy could see them sharp. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 769-70 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 05:47 PM Not once, but many times, dozens of times, the hope of food, the confidence that no harm would come; then disappointment-- nothing to eat, nothing at all-- and after disappointment, terror and injury and death. Each small trusting life, betrayed, crushed, battered. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 774-77 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 05:48 PM They had been promised something about the world, they had been made sure of it, and then it was a lie. Death was a fearful thing, yes, flee that room; but in the other room, there was worse than death-- there the world had gone crazy, it was a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place. The worst place. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Bookmark Loc. 777 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 05:48 PM ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 811-13 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 05:51 PM So Alvin made the most solemn promise of his whole life, right then and there. He had a knack, and he'd use it, but there was rules in things like that, rules that he would follow even if it killed him. "I'll never use it for myself again," said Alvin Junior. And when he said the words he felt like his heart was on fire, it burned so hot inside. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1163-68 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 09:26 PM “Circumstances prevented further activity, so that, having heard Jones express the opinion that the top part might go, if surveyed first with a rope from above, some of us decided that an investigation might be worth while. Accordingly we secured, by nefarious means, a duplicate key to the staircase which led from the balustrade to the top of the tower. Judge our joy when we discovered that the sloping overhang of the coping could be negotiated quite simply by the aid of some ornamentation on its under side, which proved an efficient hand-hold, so that one could lower oneself sufficiently to grasp the diamond pillar. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 2 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 78-80 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 09:52 PM It’s a beautiful place. 40,000 people visit each year and it’s the #1 tourist destination that people go back to. Probably because of it’s natural beauty and extreme isolation. In nature we are reminded of that which we really are. Nature. A piece of the Earth itself. Which is part of the larger universe. And in that place we’re reminded that we are billions of years old, if not older. Even wiser. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 2 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 80 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 09:54 PM kind of a twit to promote Antarctic tourism in an article meant to push people to sacrifice for the sake of climate change ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 11-13 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 09:58 PM I didn’t write this book to make money. I wrote it because sustainable energy is important. If you would like to have the book for free for your own use, please help yourself: it’s on the internet at www.withouthotair.com. ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Note Loc. 13 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 10:00 PM Really excellent book on the essentials of renewable energy. And free! ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 84-89 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 10:31 PM The result of this lack of meaningful numbers and facts? We are inundated with a flood of crazy innumerate codswallop. The BBC doles out advice on how we can do our bit to save the planet – for example “switch off your mobile phone charger when it’s not in use;” if anyone objects that mobile phone chargers are not actually our number one form of energy consumption, the mantra “every little helps” is wheeled out. Every little helps? A more realistic mantra is: if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. For the benefit of readers who speak American, rather than English, the translation of “every little helps” into American is “every little bit helps.” ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Note Loc. 89 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 10:31 PM scale is important ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Bookmark Loc. 102 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 10:33 PM ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 411-18 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 10:36 PM 4“water-powered car” New Scientist, 29th July 2006, p.35. This article, headlined “Water-powered car might be available by 2009,” opened thus: “Forget cars fuelled by alcohol and vegetable oil. Before long, you might be able to run your car with nothing more than water in its fuel tank. It would be the ultimate zero-emissions vehicle. “While water is not at first sight an obvious power source, it has a key virtue: it is an abundant source of hydrogen, the element widely touted as the green fuel of the future.” The work New Scientist was describing was not ridiculous – it was actually about a car using boron as a fuel, with a boron/water reaction as one of the first chemical steps. Why did New Scientist feel the urge to turn this into a story suggesting that water was the fuel? ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Note Loc. 418 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 10:36 PM dangers in journalism ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 118-19 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 10:40 PM Is someone who advocates windmills over nuclear power stations “an enemy of the people”? ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Note Loc. 119 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 10:41 PM major political questions! ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 119-23 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 10:41 PM If climate change is “a greater threat than terrorism,” should governments criminalize “the glorification of travel” and pass laws against “advocating acts of consumption”? Will a switch to “advanced technologies” allow us to eliminate carbon dioxide pollution without changing our lifestyle? Should people be encouraged to eat more vegetarian food? Is the population of the earth six times too big? ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 141-42 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 10:44 PM And the main reason we burn fossil fuels is for energy. So to fix climate change, we need to sort out a new way of getting energy. The climate problem is mostly an energy problem. ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 191-93 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 11:45 PM From 1769 to 2006, world annual coal production increased 800-fold. Coal production is still increasing today. Other fossil fuels are being extracted too – the middle graph of figure 1.7 shows oil production for example – but in terms of CO2 emissions, coal is still king. ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 230-32 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 11:48 PM Burning fossil fuels is undeniably increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and in the surface oceans. No climate scientist disputes this fact. When it comes to CO2 concentrations, man is significant. ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 234-37 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 11:49 PM carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Not the strongest greenhouse gas, but a significant one nonetheless. Put more of it in the atmosphere, and it does what greenhouse gases do: it absorbs infrared radiation (heat) heading out from the earth and reemits it in a random direction; the effect of this random redirection of the atmospheric heat traffic is to impede the flow of heat from the planet, just like a quilt. So carbon dioxide has a warming effect. ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 241-43 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 11:53 PM The consensus of the best climate models seems to be that doubling the CO2 concentration would have roughly the same effect as increasing the intensity of the sun by 2%, and would bump up the global mean temperature by something like 3°C. This would be what historians call a Bad Thing. ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 257-59 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 11:55 PM In the year 2000, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions were about 34 billion tons of CO2-equivalent per year. An incomprehensible number. But we can render it more comprehensible and more personal by dividing by the number of people on the planet, 6 billion, so as to obtain the greenhouse-gas pollution per person, which is about 5½ tons CO2e per year per person. ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Note Loc. 259 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 11:56 PM too high, but per capita in canada dramatically higher ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 270-74 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 11:58 PM The major countries with the biggest per-capita emissions are Australia, the USA, and Canada. European countries, Japan, and South Africa are notable runners up. Among European countries, the United Kingdom is resolutely average. What about China, that naughty “out of control” country? Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s, but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average. India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries. ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 278 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 11:58 PM most able to pay. ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 277-78 | Added on Wednesday, May 02, 2012, 11:59 PM average. Countries that are most able to pay. ========== Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (David J.C. MacKay) - Highlight Loc. 278 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:01 AM most able to pay. ========== The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version - Highlight Loc. 65-66 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:43 AM 1:12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. ========== The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version - Note Loc. 66 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:43 AM duty to protect nature ========== The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version - Highlight Loc. 75-77 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:44 AM 1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. ========== The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version - Highlight Loc. 77-78 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:44 AM 1:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. ========== The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version - Highlight Loc. 83-84 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:45 AM 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. ========== The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version - Bookmark Loc. 85 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:45 AM ========== The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version - Highlight Loc. 86-88 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:45 AM 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. ========== The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain) - Highlight Loc. 157-58 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:53 AM Like many other simple-hearted souls, it was her pet vanity to believe she was endowed with a talent for dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she loved to contemplate her most transparent devices as marvels of low cunning. ========== The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain) - Highlight Loc. 182-84 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:59 AM Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles. Not because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him than a man's are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore them down and drove them out of his mind for the time—just as men's misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises. ========== The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain) - Highlight Loc. 336 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:14 AM in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. ========== The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain) - Highlight Loc. 409-11 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:23 AM Then her conscience reproached her, and she yearned to say something kind and loving; but she judged that this would be construed into a confession that she had been in the wrong, and discipline forbade that. So she kept silence, and went about her affairs with a troubled heart. ========== 2001 A Space Odyssey - Highlight Loc. 60-61 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:31 AM Yet the thousands of tons of succulent meat roaming over the savanna and through the bush was not only beyond their reach; it was beyond their imagination. In the midst of plenty, they were slowly starving to death. ========== Oxford Dictionary of English - Highlight Loc. 72-73 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:36 AM The New Oxford Dictionary of English is a dictionary of current English and it is informed by currently available evidence and current thinking about language and cognition. ========== Oxford Dictionary of English - Highlight Loc. 81-83 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:37 AM In the New Oxford Dictionary of English, meanings are linked to central norms of usage as observed in the language. The result is fewer meanings, with sharper, crisper definitions. ========== Oxford Dictionary of English - Highlight Loc. 187137-40 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:39 AM late 16th century: from late Middle English dorryng do ‘daring to do’, used by Chaucer, and, in a passage by Lydgate based on Chaucer's work, misprinted in 16th-cent. editions as derrynge do; this was misinterpreted by Spenser to mean ‘manhood, chivalry’, and subsequently taken up and popularized by Sir Walter Scott. ========== Oxford Dictionary of English - Highlight Loc. 788393-95 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:43 AM 1 whether one likes it or not: he would be forced to collaborate willy-nilly. 2 without direction or planning; haphazardly: politicians expanded spending programmes willy-nilly. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1217-21 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:54 AM As may be seen, the upper part of this climb is tremendously exposed, and anyone making the “sensational step” on to the capitals of the pillar might well wonder if he could get back again. He might also wonder if the lichen-covered stone would crumble under his feet.* And a very severe climb with a 70-ft. drop may unnerve the most steady climber when he knows it has never yet been done. The first man to achieve it had the comfort of having previously done it on a rope, and therefore knowing it to be within his scope. ========== butler (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 157-63 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:57 AM My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has decided to establish a committeeto review intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. This committee will be composed of Privy Counsellors. It will have the following terms of reference: to investigate the intelligence coverage available in respect of WMD programmes in countries of concern and on the global trade in WMD,taking into account what is now known about these programmes; as part of this work,to investigate the accuracy of intelligence on Iraqi WMD up to March 2003,and to examine any discrepancies between the intelligence gathered,evaluated and used by the Government before the conflict,and between that intelligence and what has been discovered by the Iraq survey group since the end of the conflict; and to make recommendations to the Prime Minister for the future on the gathering,evaluation and use of intelligence on WMD,in the light of the difficulties of operating in countries of concern. ========== butler (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 253-56 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 02:01 AM “Much of the intelligence that we receive in war is contradictory, even moreofitis plain wrong, and most of it is fairly dubious. What one can require of an officer, under these circumstances, is a certain degree of discrimination, which can only be gained from knowledge of men and affairs and from good judgement. The law of probability must be his guide.” [Clausewitz, On War, Vol I, Bk I, Ch VI] ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1080-85 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 12:58 PM "So are you, Reverend Thrower. In the long run, even if we disagree here and there, I think we both want the same thing. We want this whole country to be civilized and Christian. And neither one of us would mind if Vigor Church became Vigor City, and Vigor City became the capital of the whole Wobbish territory. There's even talk back in Philadelphia about inviting Hio to become a state and join right in, and certainly they'll make such an offer to Appalachee. Why not Wobbish someday? Why not a country that stretches from sea to sea, White man and Red, every soul of us free to vote the government we want to make the laws we'll be glad to obey?" ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1171-72 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:20 PM "I don't know," said Taleswapper, growing confused. Being young then, not yet thirty, he was easily confused in the presence of the great man. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Bookmark Loc. 1172 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:20 PM ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1170-71 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:21 PM "God or the devil? When you're surrounded by light, Bill, how do you know whether it's the glory of God or the flames of hell?" ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1238 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:36 PM Taleswapper put a great deal of trust in the sort of man who spoke his mind to all men, even strangers, even enemies. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1304-5 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:57 PM The preacher retreated to authority as soon as he feared his ideas could not stand on their own merit. Reasonable argument was impossible when authority became the arbiter; ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1308-9 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 01:58 PM It did not bother Taleswapper when people got angry at him. It meant they were listening, and at least half believing him. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1351-52 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 02:02 PM Whatever constraints had been placed upon him, they were not meant to enslave him. And that, he knew, was one of the marks of a goodly spell-- not the hidden chains of a tormentor. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1251 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 02:21 PM A man who can do the Bridge will never be kept out of Pembroke. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1365-66 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 02:32 PM In the dead of night men on nefarious business feel very conspicuous; in the evening, if they are sufficiently hard-boiled, they can talk and joke with their pursuers, unknown and unsuspected. (Burglars, please note.) It is the unexpected that has the best chance of success. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1409-10 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 03:46 PM It is the custom of humanity to look at its boots as it walks; we have often proved it. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1416-17 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 03:56 PM This pastime is not dignified, but we repeat, rather fun. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1438-39 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 04:57 PM The one thing on which a night climber should pride himself is on leaving no trace of where he has been, and doing no damage. Otherwise he ceases to be a nuisance and becomes a menace. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Note Loc. 1439 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 04:58 PM code of honour ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1621-22 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 05:12 PM The most evil creatures don't desire the destruction of everything-- they only desire to exploit it for themselves." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1634-35 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 05:13 PM Maybe the whole world was in terrible danger, and it was Alvin's job to fight it off, to beat it back, to keep the thing at bay. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1660-63 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 05:18 PM "If they keep at it long enough, the bricks will crumble into dust when they pick them up, their own hands will rot and slough like slime from their bones, until brick and flesh and bone alike all break down into the same indistinguishable dust. Then the Unmaker will sneeze, and the dust win be infinitely dispersed so that it can never come together again. The universe will be cold, still, silent, dark, and at last the Unmaker will be at rest." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Note Loc. 1663 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 05:18 PM entropy ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1728-29 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 06:20 PM Old Ben knew that if people could once start thinking of themselves as Americans, we'd become a nation. ========== Orson Scott Card - Ender's Saga 2 - Speaker for the Dead - Highlight Loc. 6-7 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 06:41 PM Xenocide of the Buggers by the Monstrous Ender, ========== Orson Scott Card - Ender's Saga 2 - Speaker for the Dead - Highlight Loc. 11-14 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 06:42 PM Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals but fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence. ========== Orson Scott Card - Ender's Saga 2 - Speaker for the Dead - Bookmark Loc. 14 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 06:42 PM ========== Orson Scott Card - Ender's Saga 2 - Speaker for the Dead - Note Loc. 14 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 06:43 PM scope of moral considerability ========== Orson Scott Card - Ender's Saga 2 - Speaker for the Dead - Highlight Loc. 43-45 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 06:47 PM Another trap. What, Pipo, xenologer, will you humiliate this individual of the community you're studying? Or will you adhere to the rigid law set up by Starways Congress to govern this encounter? There were few precedents. ========== Orson Scott Card - Ender's Saga 2 - Speaker for the Dead - Highlight Loc. 60-61 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 06:48 PM Tangents. The best parts of my intellectual life are tangential, in areas outside my expertise. ========== George Monbiot – Career advice - Highlight on Page 2 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 06:55 PM The idea, so often voiced by new recruits who are uncomfortable with the choice they have made, that they can reform the institution they join from within, so that it reflects their own beliefs and moral codes, is simply laughable. For all the recent guff about “corporate social responsibility”, corporations respond to the market and to the demands of their shareholders, not to the consciences of their employees. Even the chief executive can make a difference only at the margins: the moment her conscience interferes with the non-negotiable purpose of her company – turning a profit and boosting the value of its shares – she’s out. ========== George Monbiot – Career advice - Highlight on Page 3 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 06:56 PM How many times have I caught up with those people several years later, to discover that they have acquired a lifestyle, a car and a mortgage to match their salary, and that their initial ideals have faded to the haziest of memories, which they now dismiss as a post-adolescent fantasy? How many times have I watched free people give up their freedom? ========== George Monbiot – Career advice - Highlight on Page 3 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 06:57 PM So my second piece of career advice echoes the political advice offered by Benjamin Franklin: whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will end up with neither. People who sell their souls for the promise of a secure job and a secure salary are spat out as soon as they become dispensable. The more loyal to an institution you are, the more exploitable, and ultimately expendable, you become. ========== George Monbiot – Career advice - Highlight on Page 4 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 07:00 PM If you can live on five thousand pounds a year, you are six times as secure as someone who needs thirty thousand to get by. ========== George Monbiot – Career advice - Highlight on Page 5 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 07:01 PM detached men and women in the corporate newsrooms who have themselves lost their dreams, and who know as little about the real world as the careers advisors who helped land them in those jobs in the first place. ========== George Monbiot – Career advice - Highlight on Page 5 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 07:02 PM All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the loss of your freedom. ========== George Monbiot – Career advice - Highlight on Page 6 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 10:48 PM You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead? ========== George Monbiot – Career advice - Note on Page 6 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 10:50 PM career advice from george monbiot ========== Dogwalker (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 9-10 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 10:53 PM They packed my head with supergoo and light pipe, but they didn't know which neutron was supposed to butt into the next so my alchemical brain got turned from rust to diamond. Goo Boy. The Crystal Kid. ========== Dogwalker (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 10 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 10:54 PM becoming post-human ========== Dogwalker (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 13-14 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 11:08 PM the judge prints out in my favor ========== Dogwalker (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 17-21 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 11:09 PM I dress good and I ride the worm and I don't pay much income tax. Because I am the Password Man. Give me five minutes with anybody's curriculum vitae, which is to say their autopsychoscopy, and nine times out of ten I'll spit out their password and get you into their most nasty sticky sweet secret files. Actually it's usually more like three times out of ten, but that's still a lot better odds than having a computer spend a year trying to push out fifteen characters to make just the right P-word, specially since after the third wrong try they string your phone number, freeze the target files, and call the dongs. ========== Dogwalker (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 140-41 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 11:20 PM Jesse was one ordinary dull rat. Regulation good grades in school, regulation good evaluations on the job, probably gave his wife regulation lube jobs on a weekly schedule. ========== Dogwalker (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 201-2 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 11:26 PM I know he's paranoid because you don't get to his level in the fed without you know how to watch behind you and kill the enemy even before they know they're out to get you. ========== Dogwalker (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 208-9 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 11:27 PM he had eyes in his elbows, ears in his knees, by which I mean he noticed everything there was to notice and then he thought of new things that weren't even noticeable yet and noticed them. He earned his forty percent. And he earned part of my twenty, too. ========== Dogwalker (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 209 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 11:27 PM good talents ========== Dogwalker (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 250-53 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 11:46 PM I began to see that Jesse H. Hunt barely touched his family at any pont. He stood like a waterbug on the surface of life, without ever getting his feet wet. He could die, and if nobody tripped over the corpse it would be weeks before they noticed. And yet this was not because he did not care. It was because he was so very very careful. He examined everything, but through the wrong end of the microscope, so that it all became very small and far away. ========== Dogwalker (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 340-42 | Added on Thursday, May 03, 2012, 11:56 PM You're only afraid because nothing could ever go so right for you, you can't believe that anything could ever make you rich and safe. I say this stuff so much that I believe it, and I don't really, not down deep, and so I shiver again and finally I cry, because after all my body still believes I'm nine, and nine-year-olds have tear ducts very easy of access, no password required. ========== 20120127_CowardsPart1 - Highlight on Page 1 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 12:14 AM But science is now pitted in public debate against the talk-show method, which consists of selective citation of anecdotal bits that support a predetermined position ========== 20120127_CowardsPart1 - Highlight on Page 1 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 12:16 AM Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces -- all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability. ========== 20120127_CowardsPart1 - Highlight on Page 3 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 08:25 AM ========== 20120127_CowardsPart1 - Note on Page 3 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 08:26 AM climate ethics ========== 20120127_CowardsPart1 - Highlight on Page 4 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 08:27 AM There is a huge gap between rhetoric about reducing emissions and reality. Governments and businesses offer assurances that they are working to reduce emissions, but only a few nations have made substantial progress. Reality exposes massive efforts to expand fossil fuel extraction, including oil drilling to increasing ocean depths, into the Arctic, and onto environmentally fragile public lands; squeezing of oil from tar sands and tar shale; hydro-fracking to expand extraction of natural gas; and increased mining of coal via mechanized longwall mining and mountain-top removal. ========== 20120127_CowardsPart1 - Highlight on Page 6 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 08:32 AM leaving most remaining fossil fuels in the ground ========== 20120127_CowardsPart1 - Highlight on Page 7 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 08:34 AM A rising carbon price is the sine qua non for fossil fuel phase out, but it is not sufficient. Other needs include investment in energy R&D, testing of new technologies such as low-loss smart electric grids, electrical vehicles interacting effectively with the power grid, energy storage for intermittent renewable energy, new nuclear power plant designs, and carbon capture and storage. Governments must support energy planning for housing and transportation, energy and carbon efficiency requirements for buildings, vehicles and other manufactured products, global monitoring systems, and climate mitigation and adaptation in undeveloped countries. ========== 20120127_CowardsPart1 - Note on Page 7 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 08:47 AM James Hansen om climate solutions ========== Moby Dick, or, the whale (Herman Melville) - Highlight Loc. 413-16 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 08:55 AM Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content. ========== Moby Dick, or, the whale (Herman Melville) - Highlight Loc. 439-40 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 08:57 AM I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1802-3 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 09:06 AM There was no reason why a great man's words should look any different on a page than the words of a fool. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 1817 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 09:07 AM "A Maker is born." ========== 20110603_SilenceIsDeadly - Highlight on Page 1 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 10:47 AM An overwhelming objection is that exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts. The tar sands are estimated (e.g., see IPCC AR4 WG3 report) to contain at least 400 GtC (equivalent to about 200 ppm CO2). Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 well above 400 ppm. However, if emissions from coal are phased out over the next few decades and if unconventional fossil fuels are left in the ground, it is conceivable to stabilize climate2,3 Phase out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over. There is no practical way to capture the CO2 emitted while burning oil, which is used principally in vehicles. . ========== 20110603_SilenceIsDeadly - Note on Page 1 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 10:47 AM Hansen on why the oil sands must not be exploited ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1456-59 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 05:34 PM “To grasp the ledge above the final pitch requires a reach of 8 ft. 3 ins. from tiptoe. As the majority of people cannot manage this, the climb must be classed as severe, because of its extreme exposure. The leader should not rope for this climb, as the weight of so great a length might drag him off the final pitch.” So speaks the Guide. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1480-83 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 05:36 PM On such occasions it is a case of sauve qui peut. To be seen is nearly as bad as to be caught, for one’s face can be recognized or remembered. If the party scatter in all directions, the pursuit will be perplexed, and each individual fugitive will be harder to locate. In other words, Nos. 1 and 2 left No. 3 to his fate. Vaulting the balustrade, they made their way out of the college and waited by the car. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1541 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 05:43 PM We admire the hardiness of the first man to have tried the classical method. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1585-86 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 05:48 PM The rules do not permit violence. The climber, like a fox which is hard-pressed, should always have one more trick in his bag. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Note Loc. 1586 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 05:48 PM good proverb ========== Moby Dick, or, the whale (Herman Melville) - Highlight Loc. 458 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 06:00 PM With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1671-72 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 11:48 AM “Alpine Sports in Cambridge”, published anonymously in the Cambridge Review in 1924. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1689-90 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 11:49 AM This climb is interesting in that the arms play a more important part than the legs. Seldom does a climber have to do a straight pull-up, yet here he must do several, since there is not the scratch of a foot-hold to help him on the three seven-foot pitches. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1738-42 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 11:53 AM One of the photographers, not himself a climber, fell off below the clock face and landed on his back on the slates. It was only a few feet, and he did not hurt himself, but he cracked some slates which had to be replaced. This cost the college three pounds. The news reached us that the head porter attributed this to the clumsiness of some builders some months previously. In pursuance of their no-damage policy, the photographers sent an anonymous letter with three pounds, entitled “conscience money”. The bursar must have been considerably surprised. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 2548 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 03:34 PM "It's the victim of deviltry that concerns me, not his foolish and superstitious family." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 2558-59 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 03:35 PM It was a comfort to Alvin, but it was also a burden. He kept thinking he ought to hurry up and die so they could all get back to their regular lives. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 2622-23 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 03:40 PM But Faith was there and had already uttered the threat of Lysistrata. A man does not have fourteen children if his wife's bed holds no attraction to him. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 2780 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 03:50 PM It was Al's leg, after all, and if he wanted a whistling surgeon, he'd get one. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 2945 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:04 PM A man who can't read only knows what other folks tell him." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 2952-53 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:05 PM "The curse of civilized man," said Taleswapper. "When a man can't get folks to believe his lies anymore, then he hires him a professional to lie in his place." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 2982-83 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:08 PM Most parents didn't have much use for a halfgrown child. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 2989-90 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:09 PM The moment a man answered her right back instead of getting his dander up, why, she flashed a smile fit to charm the warts off a toad. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 1 - Seventh Son - Highlight Loc. 2995-96 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:09 PM She's young, that's all. Give her time, and she'll learn to love such goodness as she finds, and forgive the rest. ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 9 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:21 PM We have a bad habit in the humanities of assuming that scientists have the last word. But when I was doing the research for my chapter on cannabis in the book, I remember asking a pharmacologist in New York, who had studied drugs for years and years, “Well, what does it mean scientifically to be high?” He said something very interesting: “Well, you know, we don’t understand consciousness yet scientifically, so how can we hope to understand changes in consciousness scientifically?” He and others basically told me that, for now, you’re better off with the poets on this one. This is one area where the philosophers and the poets may yet have much to teach the scientists ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 11 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:24 PM Plants, too, evolve to gratify our desires—a certain select group of angiosperms, the domesticated plants—which we happen to reproduce. We give them more habitat, and we carry their genes all around the world. This is what I mean by the botany of desire. Our desire, and the desire we’re going to talk about tonight—specifically the desire for intoxication, for changes in consciousness— possesses a powerful force in natural history, in evolution, in much the same way that the hummingbird’s desire and love of red is a case of co-evolution ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 11 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:25 PM So even though I’m going to use this language of intention, I don’t think plants are conscious. I’m not the Oliver Stone of the plant world. There’s no conspiracy here ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 12 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:28 PM Another species we’ve mapped at the same time is rice. You know how many genes rice has, first count? 50,000. 15,000 more genes that we have. Why should this be? I don’t know that that’s a fair standard for being more advanced, but it is one snapshot on complexity. The reason for its complexity probably has to do with the fact that everything rice does depends on producing interesting molecules— proteins—and you need genes to do that. So perhaps that’s why ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 13 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:29 PM Apparently, all cultures except the Inuit have used plants to change consciousness, and the Inuit are truly the exception that proved the rule. The reason the Inuit never did it is that nothing very psychoactive grows where they live. As soon as plants with these powers were introduced, they took to them pretty quickly. ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 14 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:31 PM you figure out a way to trick the brain into triggering its reward system ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 15 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:32 PM Drugs also can relieve existential pain and boredom. There’s this very depressing quote from Huxley: “Most men and women lead lives that are so painful, at the best, so monotonous, poor, and limited, that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves, if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 16 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:33 PM It was probably purely accidental that this plant, this chemical, happened to be active in the human brain. But that’s no different from any other of the accidents on which evolution and co-evolution are built. The plant seized on this acciden ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 18 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:37 PM David Lenson, an interesting literary critic and musician, has written a great book, called On Drugs. I recommend it, though it got very little attention when it came out a couple years ago. Lenson writes: “Our operative idea of imagination, dating back to the tail end of the eighteenth century, is inextricably linked to our history of intoxication. However criticism has tried to sanitize this process, we have to face the fact that some of our poets and theorists when apparently talking about imagination are really talking about getting high ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 18 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:38 PM ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Note on Page 18 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:39 PM interesting summary ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 19 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:41 PM Think of Harold Bloom’s idea of the creativity of productive misreading. If nothing else, drugs lead to plenty of misreadings, most of them stupid. But every now and then, one comes along that changes everything. And that’s really what I’m talking about, that drugs can do this for us. ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Note on Page 19 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:42 PM enlightenment requires inspiration and sober reconsideration ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 19 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:43 PM Four years later, in 1992, Mechoulam discovers what this endogenous cannabinoid is, and he names it anandamide, which is the Sanskrit word for inner bliss. This is a man working in Israel and not in the U.S., under a grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse. I don’t think that that name would have washed here. Later, another cannabinoid called, less poetically, 2AG was also discovered ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 20 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:52 PM So it appears that anandamide acts in a kind of see-saw relation with another chemical called lepton, the brain’s signal for satiety. This opens up enormous possibilities for control of appetite, a very significant finding ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 21 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 04:53 PM forgetting is not a defect of a mental operation, although it can certainly be that; forgetting is a mental operation. It’s almost as important as remembering. ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 25 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 06:45 PM Is a chemically conditioned spiritual experience any less real? Does it make a difference that the chemical involved is endogenous or artificial, and why? Huxley wrote about this a little bit. He said that all our experiences are chemically conditioned, of course, and if we imagine that some of them are purely spiritual, purely intellectual, or purely aesthetic, it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence. So humans have found many ways to fiddle with their brain chemistry. And that’s exactly what’s going on—meditation, fasting, risk. Even with the placebo effect, we’re not just fooling ourselves into thinking we’re happier when we take a placebo antidepressant, we’re actually producing more serotonin ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 25 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 06:47 PM We have a name for someone who believes spiritual knowledge might come from such a corridor, and it’s pagan. And we have the story about that, and it’s called Genesis. So what was the knowledge God wanted to keep from Adam and Eve in the garden? I would argue that the content was not nearly as important as the form, that there was spiritual knowledge to be had from nature, from a plant. The tree in the garden was a seriously psychoactive plant, and the new monotheistic faith had sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our gaze to a single God in the sky. But this new God can’t just pretend the tree of knowledge doesn’t exist, not when generations of plant worshiping and consuming pagans know better. So the tree of knowledge is allowed to grow in the Garden of Eden, but ringed around it now is the powerful taboo—taste it and you will be punished. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Bookmark Loc. 285 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 07:29 PM ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 285-87 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 07:29 PM "Burn a village?" asked Ta-Kumsaw. "Shoot down our babies? Our old people? Our women?" "Where do you get these ideas?" said Harrison. He sounded downright offended, even though Hooch knew right well that Ta-Kumsaw was describing the typical army operation. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 300-301 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 07:31 PM when both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same as telling the truth. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 474-76 | Added on Saturday, May 05, 2012, 07:53 PM Then one winter he was old enough to talk, and he told her why he cried. "All the bees are dying," he said. That was Lolla-Wossiky, the only Shaw-Nee who ever felt the death of bees. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 484-89 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 02:08 PM But the White man never guessed at what the Red man saw and heard and felt. The White man brought death and emptiness to this place. The White man cut down wise old trees with much to tell; young saplings with many lifetimes of life ahead; and the White man never asked, Will you be glad to make a lodgehouse for me and my tribe? Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man's way. Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The White man killed animals he didn't need, ammals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge. He never felt the balance of the land at all. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 509-13 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 02:14 PM Ta-Kumsaw said nothing, but he could feel how the Reds who drank this poison were cut off from the land. They did not twist the green of life the way the White man did; rather it was as if they did not exist at all. The Red man who drank whisky was already dead, as far as the land knew. No, not even dead, for they give nothing back to the land at all. I stand here to watch them be ghosts, thought Ta-Kumsaw, not dead and not alive. He said this only inside his head, but the land felt his grief, and the breeze answered him by weeping through the leaves. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 533-36 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 02:18 PM As he stood there near the bank of the Hio, he felt like he was the face of the land. The fire of the sun, the breath of the air, the strength of the earth, the speed of the water, all reached into him and looked out on the world through his eyes. I am the land; I am the hands and feet and mouth and voice of the land as it struggles to rid itself of the White man. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 548-49 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 02:20 PM The White men chasing Lolla-Wossiky came to the gate, clamoring for the guard to open it. I have to remember this, thought Ta-Kumsaw. This is a way to get them to open the gate for me. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 609-12 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 02:38 PM "Now, now, Frederic. Even in humor, you mustn't accuse me of being anti-monarchist. M. Guillotin's clever meat-slicing machine awaits anyone convicted of that." "Oh, do be serious, Gilbert. They'd never use it against a marquis. They don't cut off the heads of aristocrats who propound these insane democratic ideas. They just send them to Quebec." Frederic smiled-- he couldn't resist driving home the nail. "The ones they really despise, they send to Niagara." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 663-64 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 02:52 PM "My lord Governor," said Bonaparte-- naturally getting the form of address all wrong, "I have never known the amenities of Paris. All my happiest moments have been in the field." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 666 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 02:53 PM I will remember every slight, Gilbert, and I will repay. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Note Loc. 666 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 02:54 PM lots of resentful underlings in this book ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 773-76 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 03:12 PM Don't worry, Robespierre, my dear fellow, thought La Fayette. Bonaparte will live. He thinks he is manipulating Canada to serve his ends, but I will manipulate him to serve the ends of democracy. Bonaparte does not suspect it now, but when he returns to France he will be ready to take command of a revolutionary army, and use his knack to end the tyranny of the ruling class instead of using it to add meaningless crowns to King Charles's most unworthy head. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 777-78 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 03:25 PM La Fayette knew upon meeting them what other men and women wanted most. And knowing that, everything else could be guessed at. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 797-98 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 03:30 PM Nobody guesses, nobody reckons, nobody calcalates, nobody figures. They know Lolla-Wossiky always needs likker. Never nobody thinks maybe Lolla-Wossiky has pain so bad he hopes to die. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 813-14 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 03:32 PM Four is all. Four is the end. Four is the true number, the whole number, the square number. Four swallows. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Note Loc. 814 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 03:32 PM dosage ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 830 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 03:34 PM gave consent ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 836-38 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 03:36 PM He did not make a fire. Too dangerous, and there was no time to smoke the meat, not this close to White Murderer Harrison's fort. There wasn't much meat anyway; he ate it all, raw so it took chewing but the flavor was very strong and good. If you can't smoke meat, Red man knows, carry all you can in your belly. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 840-44 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 03:37 PM White man heard about dream beasts. White man thought the Red man went out into the forest and had dreams. Stupid White man, never understood. All of life at first is a long sleep, a long dream. You fall asleep at the moment you are born, and never wake up, never wake up until finally one day the dream beast calls you. You go then, into the forest, sometimes only a few steps, sometimes to the edge of the world. You go until you meet the beast who calls you. The beast is not in a dream. The beast wakes you up from the dream. The beast shows you who you are, teaches you your place in the land. Then you go home awake, awake at last, and tell the shaman and your mother and your sisters who the dream beast was. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 992-93 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:00 PM Armor wanted to be a good man, he just didn't know how. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1037-38 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:06 PM make his hexes out of living things. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1079-80 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:10 PM Lolla-Wossiky didn't have any idea what Thrower was talking about, so he nodded silently. This usually worked with White men who were talking nonsense, and Thrower was no exception. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1107-8 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:13 PM "Who knows what he can become, when the likker ain't in him?" ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1173-76 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:24 PM Call them why? Who wanted roaches? But he was only a boy. There didn't have to be sense in it. Just the discovery that the little life would come when you called it. Red boys learned this, but always with their father or a brother, always out on the first hunt. Kneel and speak silently to the life you need to take, and ask it if this is a good time, and if it is willing to die to make your life strong. Is it your time to die? asks the Red boy. And if the life consents, it will come. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1179 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:24 PM It was a sanctuary, a reserve. A very silly thing, a child playing with things he didn't understand. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1182-84 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:26 PM Alvin didn't fit himself into anything. The land fit itself to him. If he wanted the roaches to live a certain way, to make a bargain, then that was how the land ordered itself. In this small place, for this time, with these tiny lives, Alvin Junior had commanded and the land obeyed. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1200-1202 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:32 PM And then the parents and brothers rushing into their room. And the stomping. The stomping, the smashing, the murders of the roaches. Lolla-Wossiky closed his eye and felt the deaths, each one a pinprick. It had been so long with the black noise masking all the deaths behind one vast memory of murder that Lolla-Wossiky had forgotten what the small pains felt like. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1204-5 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:32 PM their death was an evil noise, their useless murder because they believed in a lie. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1272-73 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:39 PM Silence. Green silence. The black noise was utterly, completely gone. His land-sense had returned, and the ancient injury was healed. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1322-24 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:49 PM It didn't matter. No one ever looked for it. No one ever missed it. No one mourned when it broke apart from ice in the winter, the fragments tumbling down the tree into the snow. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1339-41 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:51 PM Tell him that one day a fire will start in his own house. No man's hand will set this fire. Only rain will put out this fire, and before the fire dies, it will cut off something he loves more than a hand or a foot or an eye, and he will not have the power to restore it, either." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Note Loc. 1341 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:51 PM prophesy ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1369-70 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 04:56 PM Carthage City's gone and turned into a river town, a saloon town. Nobody wants to live around here, with all these river rats. It's a whisky town. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1450 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 05:04 PM Ain't no chicken smart enough to live long in the woods. It's just Christmastime for foxes, that's all it is." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1470-73 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 05:07 PM Don't drink likker. Not a drop. Give it up, stay away from it. Likker is the chain of the White man, the chain and the whip, the chain and the whip and the knife. First he'll catch you, then he'll whip you, then he'll kill you, likker will, and when the White man's killed you with his whisky, he'll come in and steal your land, destroy it, make it unfit, dead, useless." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1542-43 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 05:21 PM He stomped the guard in the face and kicked his head, which probably broke his neck, but Hooch didn't think of that as murder. He thought of it as justice, cause the guard had been all set to leave him locked in his cell to burn to death. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1548-50 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 05:22 PM Maybe Harrison could think that way, but Hooch couldn't. It actually took him by surprise, to tell the truth. He was more like Andrew Jackson than he ever supposed. He had a line he wouldn't cross. He drew it in a different place than old Hickory did, but still, he had a line, and he'd die before he crossed it. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1677-78 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 06:04 PM He just knew his pa well enough to trust his judgment. Simple as that. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1682-83 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 06:05 PM She just kissed his hand and clung on, to it, and looked him in the eye and said, "If I let you go today, I'll never see you with my natural eyes again, as long as I live." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1706-9 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 06:08 PM Now, Al knew he could've used his knack to change the wood of that tree inside, to make it split apart in all the right places. But that wouldn't have been right, he knew. The Shining Man wouldn't've stood for that-- it would've been pure selfishness, pure laziness, and no good to anybody. So he hacked and tugged and sweated right alongside Measure. And it wasn't so bad. It was good work, and when it was all done it was no more than an hour. It was time well spent. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1776-79 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 06:18 PM It would be for his brother, and for his family, and in a funny way he knew it would be for the Reds, too, because if there was something real, if some White boys really did get tortured to death, then there'd be a war, there'd be a real knock-down-drag-out fight between Reds and Whites, and a lot of people on both sides would die. As long as he didn't kill anybody, then, it would be all right for Al to use his knack. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Note Loc. 1779 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 06:19 PM ethic of over-riding priority ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1808-9 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 06:25 PM Al thought of making the blade razor sharp right then, but no, no, the rule was to use his knack to make things right, not to cause injury. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 1855-57 | Added on Sunday, May 06, 2012, 06:30 PM Having been caught in such mischief himself sometimes, he almost felt a little sympathy, till he remembered that what his captors had had in mind was cruel death for him and his brother. Just because they ended up without a scratch didn't mean them Reds weren't guilty of the bad intent. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 2090-91 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 09:02 AM Armor laughed. "Sometimes, Reverend, I think you are as trusting as a little child." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 2196-97 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 09:10 AM The people there, they weren't perfect-- they were sometimes angry, sometimes sad. But nobody was hungry, and nobody was ignorant, and nobody had to do something just because somebody else made them do it. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 2236-38 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 09:14 AM They'd come, and for a time they'd live their old-world life in America, trying to build fast, and breed fast, and kill as much as they could. Like a sickness. But then they'd either join in with the Reds and disappear, or get killed off. None of them ever kept up their old-world ways. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 2352-55 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 12:17 PM Grief swept across Tenskwa-Tawa's face, and he moaned sharply. "Then all the land will die, not just a part. If you don't do what I say today, then White man will kill all the land, from one ocean to the other, from north to south, all the land dead! And Red men will die except a very few, who will live on tiny pieces of ugly desert land, like prisons, live there all their lives, because you did not obey what I saw in my vision!" ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 2368-69 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 12:20 PM Alvin stood up, all ten years and sixty inches of him, and took charge. ========== Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes) - Highlight Loc. 599-600 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 02:06 PM For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? ========== Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes) - Highlight Loc. 610-11 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 02:07 PM Secondly, How, and by what Covenants it is made; what are the Rights and just Power or Authority of a Soveraigne; and what it is that Preserveth and Dissolveth it. ========== Candide (Voltaire) - Highlight Loc. 120-22 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 02:13 PM Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron's castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 210-11 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 02:49 PM the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 211 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 02:49 PM power to prevent umjustified and avoidable harm to others ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 211 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 02:50 PM power to prevent unjustified and avoidable harm to others ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Bookmark Loc. 223 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 02:51 PM ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 223 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 02:51 PM Hobbes' leviathon ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 234-36 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:47 PM A time, however, came, in the progress of human affairs, when men ceased to think it a necessity of nature that their governors should be an independent power, opposed in interest to themselves. It appeared to them much better that the various magistrates of the State should be their tenants or delegates, revocable at their pleasure. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 236 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:47 PM democracy as constraint ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 246-48 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:48 PM Those who admit any limit to what a government may do, except in the case of such governments as they think ought not to exist, stand out as brilliant exceptions among the political thinkers of the Continent. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 257-59 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:49 PM The "people" who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the "self-government" spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 259 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:50 PM in one sentence, the two sides of the climate problem ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 259 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:53 PM Mill expresses two sides of the climate problem in one sentence - choices imposed on future&present ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 261-63 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:54 PM The limitation, therefore, of the power of government over individuals, loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the strongest party therein. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 272-77 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:55 PM Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 277 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:55 PM individuals must be free to be different ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 290 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:57 PM relation to intuitive thinking in moral reasoning? ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 312-14 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:58 PM The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance, under the penalties of law or opinion. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 323-24 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 03:59 PM minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becoming majorities, were under the necessity of pleading to those whom they could not convert, for permission to differ. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 344-49 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:02 PM Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly instigate the government to undertake the business; while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one to the departments of human interests amenable to governmental control. And men range themselves on one or the other side in any particular case, according to this general direction of their sentiments; or according to the degree of interest which they feel in the particular thing which it is proposed that the government should do, or according to the belief they entertain that the government would, or would not, do it in the manner they prefer; but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently adhere, as to what things are fit to be done by a government. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 349 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:02 PM B - taxing and spending ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 353-56 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:03 PM That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 356 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:03 PM Harm Principle ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 361 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:04 PM Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 375-76 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:05 PM I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 376 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:05 PM utilitarian ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 379 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:06 PM compelled to perform; ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 379 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:06 PM not just a duty to refrain from unsocial acts ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 381-82 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:06 PM interposing to protect the defenceless against ill-usage, ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 382 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:07 PM climate and future generations ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 382-85 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:07 PM A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. The latter case, it is true, requires a much more cautious exercise of compulsion than the former. To make any one answerable for doing evil to others, is the rule; to make him answerable for not preventing evil, is, comparatively speaking, the exception. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 385 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:07 PM level of certainty matters ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 392-93 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:08 PM judging himself all the more rigidly, because the case does not admit of his being made accountable to the judgment of his fellow-creatures. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 393 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:09 PM importance of integrity in judging one's own case ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 2646-48 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:16 PM The swarthy Frenchmen didn't show the same hostility toward Reds that Americans often seemed to have. Ta-Kurnsaw understood that this was because the French in Detroit weren't there to settle. They didn't think of Reds as rivals for possession of the land. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 2652-53 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:17 PM How could the land accept the kind of man who would kill every beaver in a pond, just for the pelts, leaving the meat to rot, and no beaver left to bear young? ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Note Loc. 2653 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 04:17 PM sustainability ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3029-30 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 06:15 PM Knowing they could not die without defending themselves, they left, so that not one Red would mar the perfection of the Prophet's refusal to fight. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3038-40 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 06:17 PM In all those paths, the Red men dwindled, confined to tiny preserves of desolate land, until the whole land was White, and therefore brutalized into submission, stripped and cut and ravished, giving vast amounts of food that was only an imitation of the true harvest, poisoned into life by alchemical trickery. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Bookmark Loc. 3054 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 06:18 PM ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Note Loc. 3054 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 06:18 PM like Alvin's roaches believed ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3208-10 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 06:30 PM That's how it will be for the rest of your lives-- every man and woman that you meet will have to hear the true story from your lips, or your hands will be filthy again. And if you ever, for any reason, kill another human being, then your hands and face will drip with blood forever, even in the grave." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3228-29 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 06:31 PM When you tell your story, tell White men this-- that west of the Mizzipy is Red man's land. Don't come there. The land can't bear the touch of a White man's foot. You breathe out death; your touch is poison; your words are lies; the living land won't have you." ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3260-62 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 06:34 PM As he had so many times before, Taleswapper addressed a few silent words to God, which always came down to this question: Why do you put us to so much trouble, when it all comes to nought in the end? Taleswapper couldn't bear the futility of it. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3491-94 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 06:55 PM No, I do this because a terrible, humiliating defeat in Canada is exactly what France needs, especially if it can be seen that the defeat is caused by King Charles's direct intervention. Such a direct intervention as removing popular and brilliant Bonaparte from command on the eve of battle, and replacing him with an ass like de Maurepas, all for the sake of Charlie's own vanity. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3528-30 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 06:59 PM the young men would be drawing their flint-edged knives gently across their own thighs, drawing faint lines of blood, teaching their knives to be thirsty, teaching their own bodies to seek out pain and love it. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3537-38 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 07:00 PM Or wasn't that their natural right, to know the truth so as to be able to let the truth lead them to do good or evil, as they chose? ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3583-84 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 07:04 PM This was civilization, one household butting up into the next one, all elbows jostling, all the land parceled out till nobody had no doubt at all who owned every inch of it, who had the right to use it and who was trespassing and better move along. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Note Loc. 3584 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 07:04 PM the end of nature ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 259 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 08:11 PM Mill expresses two sides of the climate problem in one sentence - choices imposed on future&present ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 402-4 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 10:09 PM Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 404 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 10:10 PM plurality of life projects ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 437-38 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 10:13 PM This one branch is the Liberty of Thought: from which it is impossible to separate the cognate liberty of speaking and of writing. ========== Proposed-Pipelines-and-Tanker-Spill-Risk-for-BC-May-6-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 28-32 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 10:15 PM What has not been widely reported, and lies buried in the thousands of pages of information requests and evidence filed with the National Energy Board (NEB), is Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline is designed to expand from the initial capacity of 525,000 barrels per day to 850,000 barrels per day—a 60 percent increase in capacity. The condensate pipeline is designed to expand from 193,000 barrels per day to 274,000 barrels per day—a 40 percent increase in capacity. All that is required for this expansion, once the pipelines are built, is the addition of pump stations and pump units. ========== Proposed-Pipelines-and-Tanker-Spill-Risk-for-BC-May-6-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 60-63 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 10:19 PM Enbridge's various environmental risk analyses submitted to the NEB have all been undertaken using crude oil flow volumes and oil tanker traffic density well below what is planned. Without a proper scope of risk assessment, the NEB is not able to conduct due consideration of the environmental risk Northern Gateway presents to BC, and therefore it cannot fulfill its responsibility to adequately address the public interest. ========== Proposed-Pipelines-and-Tanker-Spill-Risk-for-BC-May-6-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 63 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 10:21 PM British Columbians are not being fully informed about the risks of being a conduit for dirty oil ========== Proposed-Pipelines-and-Tanker-Spill-Risk-for-BC-May-6-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 89-91 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 10:22 PM Enbridge experienced the largest inland crude oil pipeline spill in North American history. On July 26, 2010, Line 6B erupted spilling almost 25,000 barrels of bitumen into the Kalamazoo River in Marshall, Michigan. Almost two years later clean-up continues and costs have reached a reported $765 million. The spill is far from being remediated. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3700-3701 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 10:54 PM there's some things folks just do, without knowing how," ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 2 - Red Prophet - Highlight Loc. 3955-60 | Added on Monday, May 07, 2012, 11:15 PM And as Alvin watched Ta-Kumsaw paddle steadily down the river out of sight, it occurred to him that it just didn't feel like Ta-Kumsaw had lost. It was as if the battle wasn't about Ta-Kumsaw. It was about White men, and their worthiness to have this land. They might think they won, they might think the Red man slunk away or bowed his head in defeat, but in fact it was the White man who lost, because when Ta-Kumsaw paddled down the Wobbish to the Hio, down the Hio to the Mizzipy, and crossed the fogs of the river to the other side, he was taking the land with him, the greensong; what the White man had won with so much blood and dishonesty was not the living land of the Red man, but the corpse of that land. It was decay that the White man won. It would turn to dust in his hands, Alvin knew it. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Bookmark Loc. 458 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:20 AM ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 454-59 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:21 AM Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in or opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 461-64 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:21 AM But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 464 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:24 AM Censorious politicians, note Mill's robust defence of free speech ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 483-85 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:35 AM He devolves upon his own world the responsibility of being in the right against the dissentient worlds of other people; and it never troubles him that mere accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his reliance, and that the same causes which make him a Churchman in London, would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 494-95 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:36 AM It is the duty of governments, and of individuals, to form the truest opinions they can; to form them carefully, and never impose them upon others unless they are quite sure of being right. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 515-16 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:39 AM He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 519-22 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:40 AM In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 522 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:41 AM B - please argue with me ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Highlight Loc. 534-40 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:43 AM The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it. ========== On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) - Note Loc. 540 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:44 AM dealing with uncertainty ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 48-50 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:48 AM The taste of a french fry is largely determined by the cooking oil. For decades McDonald’s cooked its french fries in a mixture of about seven percent cottonseed oil and 93 percent beef tallow. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 59-61 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:49 AM The canning, freezing, and dehydrating techniques used in processing destroy most of food’s flavor — and so a vast industry has arisen in the United States to make processed food palatable. Without this flavor industry today’s fast food would not exist. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 89-90 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:52 AM In addition to being the world’s largest flavor company, IFF manufactures the smells of six of the ten best-selling fine perfumes in the United States, ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 101-3 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:53 AM Your brain combines the complex smell signals from your olfactory epithelium with the simple taste signals from your tongue, assigns a flavor to what’s in your mouth, and decides if it’s something you want to eat.   ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 135-38 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:56 AM The quality that people seek most of all in a food — flavor — is usually present in a quantity too infinitesimal to be measured in traditional culinary terms such as ounces or teaspoons. The chemical that provides the dominant flavor of bell pepper can be tasted in amounts as low as 0.02 parts per billion; one drop is sufficient to add flavor to five average-size swimming pools. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 172-75 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 08:58 AM Distinctions between artificial and natural flavors can be arbitrary and somewhat absurd, based more on how the flavor has been made than on what it actually contains.   “A natural flavor,” says Terry Acree, a professor of food science at Cornell University, “is a flavor that’s been derived with an out-of-date technology.” Natural flavors and artificial flavors sometimes contain exactly the same chemicals, produced through different methods. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 306-9 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 09:12 AM Bartenders, busboys, wait staff, line cooks — the people you meet in restaurants are far more interesting than most. Many have creative pursuits, ill-advised tattoos, recreational drug habits, sordid tales from their past, and fascinating sex lives. And they’ll tell you everything. You’ll learn more in 10 minutes than you’ll ever know about the colleagues you see five days a week. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 327-28 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 09:14 AM The reason so many creative, scenester types work in restaurants — besides the flexible schedules and the decent haul — is that it doesn’t suck out your mental energy and soul like office jobs can. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 489-92 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 09:25 AM High school drop-outs and graduates of third-rate community colleges convince the public that Stephane Dion, a professor who single-handedly clipped the wings of Quebec separatists, Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard PhD who’s internationally famous as a journalist and scholar, and Bob Rae, a Rhodes scholar, are unfit to govern. Instead, we get Bev Oda. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 548-52 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 09:33 AM On the elitism side, you know, to me the issue is not elitism. The issue is authority. I think it’s terribly important for smart 21st-century societies to respect knowledge. And to respect the authority that comes from knowledge. And if you start to have a popular culture that regards abstruse, difficult, serious knowledge as elitist, your whole country doesn’t have much of an economic future. All of the stuff that will be creating the jobs in 15, 25 years is elitist, hard to understand and difficult. Get used to it. That’s the key to the future for our country. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 552 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 09:34 AM Ignatieff on elitism and knowledge ========== parl_cesd_201205_00_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 53-54 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:21 AM Although the federal government has begun to lower greenhouse gas emissions, right now the reductions are not happening fast enough to meet the 2020 target. ========== parl_cesd_201205_00_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 66-69 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:22 AM The government’s stated rationale for withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol was the prohibitive projected cost to the economy, estimated at $14 billion in December 2011. Accordingly, I expected that the government would have calculated the projected costs to the Canadian economy of its regulatory approach to meeting its new target of reducing greenhouse gases by 17 percent below our 2005 level by 2020. Right now, it has not done so. The result is that Parliament lacks a full picture of the combined costs of reaching the 2020 target. ========== parl_cesd_201205_00_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 81-82 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:23 AM estimates by Statistics Canada show that in 2008, Canadian businesses spent over $9 billion on environmental protection, mostly to deal with pollutants after they had been generated. ========== parl_cesd_201205_00_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 100-106 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:24 AM The White House Office of Management and Budget looked at how the costs and benefits of environmental protection compare. It found that the combined costs of all US federal clean air and water regulations between 1999 and 2009 were between $26 and $29 billion a year. At the same time, it found between $82 and $533 billion in annual benefits—including lower costs for treating fewer diseases, such as smog-related respiratory illnesses. Similarly, a recent study by the New York Academy of Sciences found that the damage costs from coal-fired electricity in the United States were approximately $345 billion a year. The costs included the combined impacts of aerosolized, solid, and water pollutants associated with the mining, processing, transport, and combustion of coal, and the impact of those pollutants on families and communities. ========== parl_cesd_201205_01_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 28-30 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:42 AM Recent reports by the federal government indicate that every region of Canada has already been affected by the changing climate; in particular, Canadian communities and critical infrastructure are vulnerable to extreme weather events, such as drought, heat waves, flooding, and coastal storms. ========== parl_cesd_201205_01_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 48 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:45 AM ensure ========== parl_cesd_201205_01_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Note Loc. 48 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:45 AM hah! ========== parl_cesd_201205_01_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 168-69 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:49 AM Canada will not meet its greenhouse gas emissions target initially agreed to under the Kyoto Protocol ========== parl_cesd_201205_01_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 176-79 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:50 AM More specifically, this means that for this five-year period, total GHG emissions in Canada should not exceed 2,792 million tonnes. Given the actual emissions for 2008 and 2009 (732 and 690 million tonnes, respectively) as well as the reductions anticipated from the measures in the 2011 plan, GHG emissions are expected to be some 805 million tonnes above Canada’s Kyoto Protocol target of 2,792 million tonnes during the 2008 to 2012 period. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 23-25 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:52 AM The Government of Canada has now committed to reduce its economy-wide GHG emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, in alignment with the United States. This target was set internationally in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and has also been communicated in the 2010 Federal Sustainable Development Strategy. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Note Loc. 25 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:53 AM Canada's current medium-term climate target ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 31-33 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:53 AM Environment Canada has indicated that the Government of Canada will use a sector-by-sector approach to regulate GHG emissions. We found that this approach lacks an overall implementation plan designed to achieve the 2020 target, as well as economic analysis to estimate what the approach will cost the Canadian economy. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 36-41 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:54 AM In July 2011, Environment Canada released Canada’s Emissions Trends, a document that outlines GHG emission reductions expected by 2020 under various scenarios. This document is an important planning tool and a step toward a transparent accounting for Canada’s efforts to reduce GHG emissions. However, the document indicates that in 2020, Canada’s GHG emissions will be 7.4 percent above 2005 levels instead of 17 percent below, and it estimates that Canada will need to reduce emissions by 178 million tonnes to meet the 2020 target. Therefore, according to Environment Canada’s forecasts, the 2020 target will not be met with existing measures. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Note Loc. 41 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:55 AM EC says plan not sufficient to meet target ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 42-45 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:55 AM Existing federal regulations are expected to reduce GHG emissions by 11 to 13 million tonnes in 2020. Given that an additional 178 million tonnes in reductions are needed to meet the 2020 target, it is unlikely that enough time is left to develop and establish GHG regulations that together will contribute sufficient GHG reductions to meet the 2020 target. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 71-72 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:57 AM an average of 6 percent below its 1990 emission level over the 2008–2012 period. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Note Loc. 72 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:58 AM Canada's Kyoto target ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 76-78 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:58 AM The plan reiterates the government’s commitment as indicated in “Turning the Corner” and adds a commitment to reduce Canada’s total GHG emissions by 60 to 70 percent by 2050. These targets were repeated in the 2008 and 2009 climate change plans. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Note Loc. 78 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:59 AM Canada's current long-term target ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 119-20 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 11:01 AM Environment Canada cannot reasonably determine whether Canada will meet the 2020 target and how much it will cost to do so. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 133-35 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 11:01 AM Environment Canada has not conducted a comprehensive analysis to estimate the combined cost of the sector-by-sector approach to regulating GHG emissions. Nor has it estimated the impact on or costs to the Canadian economy of aligning its approach with the United States, ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 152-53 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 11:53 AM Development of further regulations in the electricity, oil and gas, and emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries (such as cement, chemicals, and iron and steel) are also at the conceptual stage. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 209-11 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 11:54 AM However, 34 of the 47 coal-fired electricity-generating plants operating in Canada would not be subject to the proposed performance standard until after 2020. In addition, any newly built plant in operation before the proposed regulations take effect on 1 July 2015 would not be ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 230-32 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 11:55 AM While regulations are in place or have been proposed for the highest and third-highest emitting sectors (transportation and electricity), none are yet in place for the second-highest, the oil and gas sector. This sector was responsible for 21 percent of GHG emissions in 2005, and emissions from oil sands production and upgrading are expected to increase by 62 million tonnes by 2020. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Note Loc. 232 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 11:56 AM no action to date on oil and gas ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 345-48 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:00 PM Canada has made a variety of commitments and set a number of targets to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since 1992. These targets have become significantly less ambitious over time (Exhibit 2.7). For example, the Kyoto Protocol target aimed to reduce emissions to 6 percent below the 1990 level between 2008 and 2012. Canada’s Copenhagen Accord target for 2020 is 3 percent (or 17 million tonnes) above the 1990 level. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Note Loc. 348 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:01 PM Canada's dwindling ambition ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Highlight Loc. 363-66 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:04 PM The modelling presented in Environment Canada’s Emissions Trends report shows that with existing measures, Canada will be 54 million tonnes (or 7.4 percent) above the 2005 level of GHG emissions in 2020 instead of the targeted 17 percent below it. According to these emissions forecasts, with existing measures, Canada will need to reduce GHG emissions by 178 million tonnes by 2020 to meet its target. ========== parl_cesd_201205_02_e (Milan.Ilnyckyj@ec.gc.ca) - Note Loc. 366 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:05 PM B - climate targets ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 607-11 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:43 PM Indeed, for most of the 20th century, the Philippines played a more central role in American foreign policy than present perceptions suggest. A U.S. colony in the first half of the 20th century, the Philippines was America’s early and prominent effort at democracy-building overseas. The 1951 U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty predates alliances with Japan and South Korea, and during the Cold War, the islands housed the United States’ two largest overseas bases — Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 718-22 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:49 PM Fukuyama: I am at a loss, too. Where is this uprising from the left? This is a crisis that began on Wall Street. It really was rooted in the particular American model of liberalized finance. It hurt ordinary people tremendously, and it benefited the richest part of the country — the finance sector — which came through the crisis very well, thanks to government bailouts. You would have thought that this would pave the way for a rise of left-wing populism as seen in the 1930s. A Tea Party on the left, so to speak. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 722 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:50 PM perhaps the left lacks the necessary coherence and discipline for such an uprising? or perhaps the middle class remains too contented ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 722-27 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:52 PM Fukuyama: I really do not take this movement seriously, because its social base is extremely narrow. It consists mostly of the same kids that were protesting in 1999 in Seattle against the World Trade Organization — anti-capitalists. The big problem sociologically for the left in the United States is that the white working class and lower middle class, that in Europe would be reliably social democratic in their political behavior, tends to vote Republican or is easily brought into the Republican camp. Until the Occupy Wall Street people can connect up with that demographic group, there is not going to be a big left-wing populist base of support in the US. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 727 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:53 PM Fukuyama on why the Occupy movement didn't achieve much ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 730-31 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:54 PM I believe that the only solution to our current problems is to restructure all these big banks, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and Bank of America, and turn them into smaller entities that could then be allowed to go bankrupt. They would no longer be “too big to fail.” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 747-48 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:56 PM So I think the convictions of Tea Party activists are sincere, they are not manipulated by billionaires. But it is true that they mobilize against their own economic interests and for the interests of elites they should despise. I still do not fully understand why they do that. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 769-70 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:57 PM All modern democracies have a disease, which is that the democratic process tends to be captured by well-organized groups that are not representative of the general public. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 786-89 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 12:58 PM Fukuyama: No. China is never going to be a global model. Our current Western system is really broken in some fundamental ways, but the Chinese system is not going to work either. It is a deeply unfair and immoral system where everything can be taken away from anyone in a split second, where people die in train accidents because of a rampant lack of public oversight and transparency, where corruption rules. We are already seeing huge protests in all parts of China … ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 957-61 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 01:04 PM “We don’t know how bad this is going to be, and we don’t know when it is going to get bad,’’ Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist with the Carnegie Institution, told me. In 2007, Caldeira was a principal contributor to an I.P.C.C. team that won a Nobel Peace Prize. “There are wide variations within the models,’’ he said. “But we had better get ready, because we are running rapidly toward a minefield. We just don’t know where the minefield starts, or how long it will be before we find ourselves in the middle of it.” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1038-41 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 01:11 PM The best solution, nearly all scientists agree, would be the simplest: stop burning fossil fuels, which would reduce the amount of carbon we dump into the atmosphere. That fact has been emphasized in virtually every study that addresses the potential effect of climate change on the earth—and there have been many—but none have had a discernible impact on human behavior or government policy. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1144-48 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 01:17 PM Unlike some other scientists engaged in geoengineering, Eisenberger is not bothered by the notion of tinkering with nature. “We have devised a system that introduces no additional threats into the environment,’’ he told me. “And the idea of interfering with benign nature is ridiculous. The Bambi view of nature is totally false. Nature is violent, amoral, and nihilistic. If you look at the history of this planet, you will see cycles of creation and destruction that would offend our morality as human beings. But somehow, because it’s ‘nature,’ it’s supposed to be fine.’’ ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, May. 8 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1178-79 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 01:26 PM Unfortunately, the least risky approach politically is also the most dangerous: do nothing until the world is faced with a cataclysm and then slip into a frenzied crisis mode. The political implications of any such action would be impossible to overstate. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 179-81 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 03:39 PM Many things, Marly, are perpetrated in my name. Aspects of my wealth have become autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 199-200 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 03:41 PM The Virek Collection, you see, is a sort of black hole. The unnatural density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works of the human spirit. An autonomous process, and one I ordinarily take little interest in." ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 534-35 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 05:24 PM He had his cash money, but you couldn't pay for food with that. It wasn't actually illegal to have the stuff, it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate with it. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 683-84 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 05:45 PM postmen had once made daily deposits of mail through those slots; ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 684 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 05:46 PM no more Amazon orders? ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 915-16 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 06:08 PM The content of a given squirt was meaningless, but the sequence in which they were broadcast would convey simple messages. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 916 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 06:09 PM steganography ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 5-7 | Added on Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 11:18 PM The point is that St Cedd’s College is a completely fictitious assemblage, and no correspondence is intended between any institutions or characters in this book and any real institutions or people, living, dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 41-44 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 09:15 AM The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 74-75 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 09:19 AM The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 133-35 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 09:24 AM Professor Urban Chronotis, the Regius Professor of Chronology, or ‘Reg’ as he insisted on being called had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly, in that it was colourful, flitted prettily hither and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 142-45 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 09:26 AM His professorship was an obscure one, to say the least, and since he dispensed with his lecturing duties by the simple and time-honoured technique of presenting all his potential students with an exhaustive list of books that he knew for a fact had been out of print for thirty years, then flying into a tantrum if they failed to find them, no one had ever discovered the precise nature of his academic discipline. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 145 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 09:27 AM An excellent professorial strategy, courtesy of Douglas Adams ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 151 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 09:28 AM a comfortable if frugal place to spend your life. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 156-57 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 09:29 AM Thin natural scientists who had spent months locked away in their rooms growing white and fishlike, emerged blinking into the light. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 197-99 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 09:35 AM Two places away to the left was the don who had been Richard’s Director of Studies in English, who showed no signs of recognising him at all. This was hardly surprising since Richard had spent his three years here assiduously avoiding him, often to the extent of growing a beard and pretending to be someone else. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 322-24 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 09:45 AM the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 432-34 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 09:57 AM He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief? ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 480-82 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 10:03 AM By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 543-44 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 11:24 AM He felt a tug of sadness that someone who had seemed so shiningly alive within the small confines of a university community should have seemed to fade so much in the light of common day. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 621-22 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 11:31 AM Just make sure he realises that WayForward Technologies is meant to be an expanding commercial business, not an adventure playground for crunch- heads. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 622 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 11:32 AM as issue at Google perhaps ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 655-56 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 12:56 PM ‘Odd,’ agreed Reg. ‘I’ve certainly never come across any irreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field. Have you spoken to any spatial geometricians?’ ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 685-87 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 01:00 PM Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 687 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 01:02 PM The perfect machine for decision-makers everywhere - from DNA's Dirk Gently ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 89-91 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 03:11 PM “If you look at your own body, your cells are specialized, but every single one of them has the master plan for the whole body. We think our company will be the best possible company if every single person working here understands the whole master plan and can use that as a yardstick to make decisions against. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 132-33 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 03:15 PM In 1991, two years after she met him following an informal lecture at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Laurene was his pregnant bride, married by a Buddhist monk at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 173-76 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 03:18 PM This time, there was no flighty discussion of an “open” corporation. “Incentive structures work,” he told me. “So you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do, because various incentive structures create all sorts of consequences that you can’t anticipate. Everybody at Pixar is incented to build the company: whether they’re working on the film; whether they’re working on a potential direct-to-video product; whether they’re working on a CD-ROM. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 222-24 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 03:22 PM Jobs may have been impulsive at times, but he was always methodical. This kind of nature suited an autodidact with eclectic tastes, empowering him either to obsess impatiently about a pressing problem that had to be dealt with immediately—much like an engineer—or else to let an idea steep and incubate until he got it right. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1117-18 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 10:05 PM ‘You are speaking with Svlad, commonly known as “Dirk” Cjelli, currently trading under the name of Gently for reasons which it would be otiose, at this moment, to rehearse. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1118 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 10:06 PM HH - trust a murderer to have a fancy prose style ========== Lolita (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 55-56 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 10:07 PM Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. ========== Lolita (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 57-58 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 10:08 PM She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. ========== Lolita (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 61 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 10:18 PM You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1119-20 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 11:01 PM If you wish to know more I will be at the Pizza Express in Upper Street in ten minutes. Bring some money.’ ‘Dirk?’ exclaimed Richard. ‘You... Are you trying to blackmail me?’ ‘No, you fool, for the pizzas.’ There was a click and Dirk Gently rang off. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1167 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 11:10 PM a sharp intake of breath. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1167 | Added on Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 11:11 PM surprise and anger ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1389 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:05 AM (Missing cats and messy divorces a speciality) ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1577-80 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:23 AM ‘Really,’ said Richard. ‘Then what about the exam papers?’ The eyes of Dirk Gently darkened at the mention of this subject. ‘A coincidence,’ he said, in a low, savage voice, ‘a strange and chilling coincidence, but none the less a coincidence. One, I might add, which caused me to spend a considerable time in prison. Coincidences can be frightening and dangerous things.’ ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1590-91 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:24 AM Furthermore the doctor who examined the body is of the opinion that Mr Way was in fact strangled after he was shot, which seems to suggest a certain confusion in the mind of the killer. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1624-25 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:28 AM In his own world when people were shot at like that they came back next week for another episode, but he didn’t think this person would be doing that. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1625 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:29 AM truly muddled by television ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1671-72 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:33 AM Believe me, it is a great deal better to find cast-iron proof that you’re innocent, than to languish in a cell hoping that the police -- who already think you’re guilty -- will find it for you.’ ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1711-14 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:36 AM Plenty of people didn’t care for him much, but there is a huge difference between disliking somebody -- maybe even disliking them a lot -- and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house on fire. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1764 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:43 AM slimy things with legs that had crawled on the slimy sea. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1764 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:44 AM Coleridge - Rime... ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2088-90 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 06:02 PM ‘If anyone can hear me, hear this. My mind is my centre and everything that happens there is my responsibility. Other people may believe what it pleases them to believe, but I will do nothing without I know the reason why and know it clearly. If you want something then let me know, but do not you dare touch my mind.’ ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 2090 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 06:02 PM assertion of sovereignty ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2339 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 06:23 PM ‘it is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2362 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 06:25 PM Close rapports with people are dangerous if you have a secret to hide. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Bookmark Loc. 2458 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 06:32 PM ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 2458 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 06:33 PM Coleridge - Rime... ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2491-93 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 06:36 PM ‘Oh, that’s one of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges,’ said Reg, ‘everyone is so discreet. If we all went around mentioning what was odd about each other we’d be here till Christmas. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 2514 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 06:37 PM one linear history subject to modification ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2568-70 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:04 PM I went through a rather elaborate bit of business to achieve a very small result. Cheering up a little girl, charming, delightful and sad though she was, doesn’t seem to be enough explanation for -- well, it was a fairly major operation in time-engineering, now that I come to face up to it. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2578-80 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:07 PM You can be made to do all kinds of absurd things, and will then cheerfully invent the most transparent rationalisations to explain them to yourself. But -- you cannot be made to do something that runs against the fundamental grain of your character. You will fight. You will resist!’ ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 45-48 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 09:58 PM This was by no means the first time that Kaplan, the 48-year-old boss of the Electrum Group, a firm with big investments in gold mines, had found that his belief in the precious metal had gone down about as well as serving a bacon sandwich at a bar mitzvah (a culinary error this Jewish New Yorker would never make). ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 1490-91 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:00 PM historic reasons gold is measured in troy ounces of 31.1g, which are larger than the 28.35g ounce normally used in weights and measures. All gold prices refer to the standard troy ounce. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 62-63 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:03 PM Furthermore, he expects that, no doubt with some more bumps along the way, it will climb to a far higher price. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 69 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:04 PM We expect 2012 to be a make or break year for gold. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 75-76 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:05 PM It requires us to address crucial questions, such as what, exactly, is money; can we rely on our governments to keep it sound; and can innovators in the private sector do a better job of supplying it? ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 84-85 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:07 PM Mr T is certainly right that humanity has long regarded gold as special. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 79-85 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:09 PM "The Incas, or the Mayans, they said that gold was the sweat from the sun, or tears. Gold has always been special. In Jesus' and Moses' days, you know, the Ark of the Covenant was made of pure gold...Gold was one of the three gifts the wise men brought to Jesus." So says Mr T, the hard-man star of the 1980s hit TV show "The A-Team", talking about his lifelong passion for gold during an interview on Bloomberg TV in 2010. His trademark mohawk haircut is getting a bit straggly with the passing years, but the gold wrapped around his neck and dripping from his ears and fingers has not lost its lustre. Mr T is certainly right that humanity has long regarded gold as special. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Note Loc. 85 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:09 PM Mr. T on economics ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 94-95 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:14 PM According to the World Gold Council, today the total amount of gold in existence above ground is 166,600 tonnes that in volume terms would only fill three and a half Olympic-size swimming pools. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 108-13 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:18 PM There was Mr T, who loves gold but cheerily confesses to having no clue about its value. Indeed, he actually appeared on television to encourage people to sell rather than buy gold, plugging ‘Gold Promise', a campaign run by Cash America International to get Americans to convert their jewellery into cash. (He is not alone in urging people to take advantage of the surging price of gold. The rapper MC Hammer and Tonight show sidekick Ed McMahon, both of whom were well known for their financial troubles, starred in a 2009 Superbowl ad for a rival gold buying scheme enthusing about the opportunity of cashing in on gold records and gold hip replacements, respectively.) ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Bookmark Loc. 123 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:19 PM ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 121-24 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:20 PM Then there is a group of conservative prophets of doom who seem to believe that gold will provide the only financial protection during the fast approaching End of Days. By 2010, Glenn Beck, a conservative conspiracy-theory-peddling populist, was arguably the leading public spokesman for gold — both during his TV show that he then ran on Fox News and on ads touting investing in the precious metal. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 125-28 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:21 PM "For some people, it's become a political statement: ‘I like gold because I believe the world is coming to an end'," says Jim Cramer, an investment pundit on the CNBC business channel. Cramer has backed gold as a serious investment even though, as he is quick to point out, he is both a liberal Democrat and bullish on America. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 132-35 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:22 PM Nicknamed the "Oracle of Omaha" because of his money-making wisdom (and his birth in Nebraska's largest city), Buffett has long been famously sceptical about gold. As he once explained: "Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head." ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 140-42 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:23 PM For Buffett, because there is no fundamental value to gold, figuring out whether its price is likely to rise or fall is a matter of guessing what other people are likely to value it at — the kind of speculation he avoids like the plague. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 157-59 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:28 PM The loss to the British taxpayer of selling at the bottom of the market was more than $18 billion, based on what the Treasury could have raised from a sale in early 2012. Kaplan has a kick-ass phrase to describe this feckless decision to sell at the low-point of the gold price: the Brown Bottom. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 159-61 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:31 PM The error that Brown, Buffett and other sceptics make is that "gold is not an investment, in the classic sense," says Kaplan. "Gold is a financial asset that is fundamentally a currency." ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 178-80 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:38 PM Gold's rise to ever higher prices has coincided with — and some would say, been driven by — a loss of faith in fiat money as doubts have grown about the basic economic competence of the world's most important governments and economic institutions, since the near-catastrophic meltdown of the financial markets in September 2008. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 187 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:43 PM for reasons that are hard to fathom, ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Note Loc. 187 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:44 PM because people thought the gold price was a bubble? ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 215-17 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 10:59 PM Money is a technology, invented by humans as a tool to help us get things done. Throughout the ages, money's role has been to provide a readily accessible ("liquid") store of value that acts as a unit of account, to compare the value of different things, and as a medium of exchange between buyers and sellers. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 230-31 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 11:00 PM Perhaps the greatest unknown is whether new forms of money will be invented that are sounder than both traditional fiat money and gold. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 245-46 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 11:03 PM But the most interesting innovation so far has been the launch in 2009 of bitcoin, a digital currency with an encrypted soundness algorithm designed to allow the supply of bitcoin to grow in a way that is mathematically inflation-proof. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 247 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 11:04 PM Satoshi Nakomoto, ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 260-61 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 11:06 PM its price will remain volatile, with plenty of ups and downs along the way, ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 273-74 | Added on Thursday, May 10, 2012, 11:08 PM Many governments face huge and growing debt problems, which will worsen dramatically without a rapid return to economic growth. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 348-49 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 09:08 AM paranoia, which is the security services' professional obligation. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 354-56 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 09:09 AM A combination of President George W. Bush's tax cuts and Obama's post-financial-crash stimulus had, in a decade, taken federal debt from 33% of US national income to 62% in 2010. Unreformed, it was projected to keep rising, to 90% in 2020 and 185% of GDP by 2035. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 393-94 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 09:13 AM After all, with so many dollars in its reserves, any major sell-off by China would drive down the value of US Treasuries, thus costing China a fortune in losses on those it had yet to sell. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Note Loc. 356 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 09:20 AM The scale and origins of American public debt ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 496-98 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 09:26 AM A period of deflation or stagnant prices could make America's debts seem unsustainable and default almost inevitable — unless, that is, the money-printing presses were turned on to pay it off, the risk of triggering a surge in inflation notwithstanding. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 613-16 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 09:36 AM Today, gold bugs talk about gold having been money for millennia, which is actually rather misleading. For most of human history, the metal that was typically used as money was silver. By contrast, gold was too rare to be widely used in a liquid market (a necessary condition for a commodity to be money). Silver was more abundant and deposits of it were more evenly distributed around the world, which led to it being widely adopted as the main monetary metal. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 813-14 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 12:16 PM the gold standard era was to survive, in its purest form, for little more than half a century, and in a weaker form for half a century more, and was plagued throughout by problems. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 837 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 12:20 PM finds of gold reserves to mine occurred extremely unevenly and certainly without regard to the economy's monetary needs. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 863-65 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 12:28 PM The idea that a return to the gold standard today would be an easy process that would usher in an era of stability and prosperity simply does not stand up to scrutiny. In the 19th century, Britain and America each implemented harsh economic policies to preserve sound money at the expense of supplying enough money to keep the economy growing fast enough to generate all the jobs people needed. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 892-96 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 12:30 PM That same month FDR pushed through the Emergency Banking Act, which authorised the federal government to regulate or prohibit the hoarding or export of gold and the US Treasury to require the surrender of gold to the government. In April 1933, he issued an executive order demanding that all gold be exchanged for paper money or bank deposits. Then, with tools in place to prevent a damaging run on the banks in reaction to this order, FDR dropped his bombshell in July, abandoning the gold standard and allowing the price of gold to rise from the hallowed $20.67 to $35 an ounce. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 907-9 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 12:32 PM Rather than every currency being fixed against so many grains of gold, the dollar was to be the anchor of the new global monetary system and the value of the dollar alone would be set against gold, at $35 an ounce. The rest of the world would then 'peg' their currencies against the dollar. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 933-35 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 12:35 PM The system's foundational principle that $35 would always be worth an ounce of gold was not tenable except in the peculiar circumstances of 1944 when America held the lion's share of the world's gold. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 1015-17 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 04:01 PM American Treasury Secretaries and legislators blame the US trade deficit on Chinese manipulation of its currency, the yuan, but they might be better off pinning the blame on the dollar. For it was the dollar's unique status as the world's reserve currency that allowed America to borrow cheaply, almost without limit, before the crash of 2008. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 1112-15 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 04:13 PM Bitcoin was then hit by a torrent of security problems, as well as criticism from politicians such as Senator Chuck Schumer, who said it was being used to buy illegal drugs online. As bitcoin exchanges were corrupted and bitcoin wallets mysteriously emptied, its price plunged to close to $2 by the end of the year. Crucially, however, these problems did not appear to undermine the bitcoin money supply algorithm. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 1181-83 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 04:24 PM Potential investors in gold should have no doubt that the rocket scientists in financial firms and academia will be fully focused on creating new alternatives, which spells trouble for the gold price should they succeed on a significant scale. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 1197-1200 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 04:27 PM This innovation is the exchange-traded fund (ETF), which essentially allows people to buy and sell shares whose price is tied directly to the price of gold — thus allowing them to invest without the cost, hassle and security risks of buying and selling physical gold, and none of the complexity or divergences from the current price of gold of the traditional main alternatives, gold futures contracts and shares in gold mining companies. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 1216-22 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 04:31 PM If the price of gold were then determined primarily by its "Bling!" and dental value, it could fall even below the Brown Bottom of $300. Today, this seems highly improbable, but gold bears would point out that even if the price of gold were merely to return to its real long-run average since the early 19th century, it would still fall to a range of $475 to $650 an ounce in today's dollars, well below current prices. At the other end of the scale, some economists estimate that if America were to return to some sort of formal link between the dollar and gold, the price would easily rise to $10,000 an ounce. Such a wide range of possible values of gold is a powerful illustration of the massive uncertainty that our economically-challenged world is currently experiencing, not least about the future of money and gold's place in it. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Note Loc. 1222 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 04:33 PM Huge uncertainty in the future price of gold, largely due to unknown future government actions ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 1307-8 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 05:34 PM As its deficit gets ever bigger, and other economic woes mount, there will be a growing temptation for the US government to try to inflate its troubles away. ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Highlight Loc. 1397-98 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 05:43 PM What is in it for political leaders to risk provoking the ire of voters who do not want to hear that the party is over? ========== In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single) (Michael Green and Matthew Bishop) - Note Loc. 1398 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 05:44 PM also true for climate change ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2688-89 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 05:59 PM If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.’ ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 2818 | Added on Friday, May 11, 2012, 07:17 PM actually, there is evidence of life for most of the history of the Earth, but small stuff until the Cambrian explosion ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2889-91 | Added on Saturday, May 12, 2012, 04:57 PM He knew he had been listening to the music of life itself. The music of light dancing on water that rippled with the wind and the tides, of the life that moved through the water, of the life that moved on the land, warmed by the light. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 3 - Prentice Alvin - Highlight Loc. 9-12 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 07:23 PM Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer's table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk. ========== Orson Scott Card - The Tales of Alvin Maker 3 - Prentice Alvin - Highlight Loc. 13-14 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 07:24 PM this is a part of my tale that children ought not to hear, for it deals with hungers they don't understand too well, and I don't aim for this story to teach them. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1105-7 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 07:59 PM "So," Beauvoir said, "we are concerned with getting things done. If you want, we're concerned with systems. And so are you, or at least you want to be, or else you wouldn't be a cowboy and you wouldn't have a handle, right?" ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1112 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:00 PM the caspers, ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1112 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:01 PM spooks? ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1117-18 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:02 PM 'To serve with both hands' is an expression we have, sort of means they work both ends. White and black, got me?" ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1124-25 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:04 PM You've seen a lot of cowboy kinos, right? Well, the stuff they make up for those things isn't much, compared with the kind of shit a real heavy operator can front. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1133-34 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:06 PM "Still, an icebreaker that'll really cut is worth mega, I mean beaucoup. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1134 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:07 PM alas French does not seem destined to be much of a global langage ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1141-45 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:11 PM What he does, he picks a base out in the Midwest that's full of tax-dodge programs and yen-laundry flowcharts for some whorehouse in Kansas City, and everybody who didn't just fall off a tree knows that the motherfucker is eyeball-deep in ice, black ice, totally lethal feedback programs. There isn't a cowboy in the Sprawl or out who'd mess with that base, first, because it's dripping with defenses; second, because the stuff inside isn't worth anything to anybody but the IRS, and they're probably already on the owner's take." ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1155-56 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:13 PM Oh, he'd have been real apologetic, for sure, and you'd have gotten a new target and a new icebreaker, and he'd have taken the first one back to the Sprawl and said it looked okay. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1156 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:13 PM report up but also keep the product ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 3007-8 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:22 PM ‘That,’ said Dirk, ‘was your sofa being delivered. The man asked if we minded him opening the door so they could manoeuvre it round and I said we would be delighted.’ ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 3008 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:22 PM paradox resolved ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 3014-16 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:24 PM ‘Who wrote it?’ ‘Well, Bach I expect. If you think about it.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Watch my lips. Bach. B-A-C-H. Johannes Sebastian. Remember?’ ‘No, never heard of him. Who is he? Did he write anything else?’ Susan put down her bow, propped up her cello, stood up and came over to him. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 3027 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:25 PM Dangerous sort of chap to have on the loose I think. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 3027 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:25 PM understatement ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 3031-32 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:26 PM ‘Well, the time machine won’t work now. Burnt out. Dead as a dodo. I think that’s it I’m afraid. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 3039-40 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:28 PM The new bill reads “To saving human race from total extinction -- no charge.”’ ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Bookmark Loc. 6 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:40 PM ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2-6 | Added on Sunday, May 13, 2012, 08:40 PM When a passenger check-in desk at Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport, shot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flame the usual peaple tried to claim responsibility. First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all. ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 77-81 | Added on Monday, May 14, 2012, 10:28 PM She tried to shut all this out of her mind, and even shut her eyes for a second. She wished that when she opened them again there would be a sign in front of her saying "This way for Norway" which she could simply follow without needing to think about it or anything else ever again. This, she reflected, in a continuation of her earlier train of thought, was presumably how religions got started, and must be the reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts. They know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance. ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 372-74 | Added on Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 05:43 PM A minute or two later Dirk paused to consider his best strategy. Rather than arrive five hours late and flustered it would be better all round if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command. "Pray God I am not too soon!" would be a good opening line as he swept in, ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 645-46 | Added on Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 08:00 PM Dirk was unused to making quite such a minuscule impact on anybody. He checked to be sure that he did have his huge leather coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly and dramatically silhouetted by the light of the doorway. ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 723-24 | Added on Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 08:09 PM The explosion was now officially designated an "Act of God".     But, thought Dirk, what god? And why? ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1286-88 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 08:19 AM No company man would have been capable of taking the initiatives Turner was required to take in the course of an extraction. No company man was capable of Turner's professionally casual ability to realign his loyalties to fit a change in employers. Or, perhaps, of his unyielding commitment once a contract had been agreed upon. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1288 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 08:20 AM mercenary and professional ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1313-15 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 08:22 AM The blue eyes were inhumanly perfect optical instruments, grown in vats in Japan. She was both actress and camera, her eyes worth several million New Yen, and in the hierarchy of Sense/Net stars, she barely rated. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1404-6 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 08:31 AM You're up there, Turner thought, all alone, in the warmest clothes you own, wearing a pair of infrared goggles you built for yourself, and you're looking for a pair of dotted lines picked out for you in hand warmers. "You crazy fucker," he said, his heart filling with a strange admiration, "you really wanted out bad." ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 807-9 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 08:41 AM Sister Bailey regarded him  with  a  sort  of  proprietary fondness. She did not know that he was a god as such, in fact she thought he was probably an old film producer or Nazi war criminal. Certainly he had an accent she couldn't quite place and his careless civility, his natural selfishness and his obsession with personal hygiene spoke of a past that was rich with horrors. ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 928-32 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 08:54 AM He always used to have such a wonderful time getting angry. Great gusts of marvellous anger would hurl him through life. He felt huge. He felt flooded with power and light and energy. He had always been provided with such wonderful things to get angry about - immense acts of provocation or betrayal, people hiding the AtIantic ocean in his helmet, dropping continents on him or getting drunk and pretending to be trees. Stuff you could really work up a rage about and hit things. In short he had felt good about being a Thunder God. Now suddeniy it was headaches, nervous tension, nameless anxieties and guilt. These were new experiences for a god, and not pleasant ones. ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1005-6 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 09:16 AM When the girl sitting at the next table looked away for a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened. ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1006 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 09:17 AM taking incomprehensible liberties ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1047-48 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 09:20 AM "Gaining access to houses in the absence of their owner is only one of the panoply of skills with which my lads are blessed. Let me know if you find anything missing afterwards, by the way." ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1115-16 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 09:25 AM "Inquisitive  and presumptuous. I do not deny it. But I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous. Not as often or copiously as I would wish, but I am nevertheless inquisitive and presumptuous on a professional basis." ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1197 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 09:31 AM It was odd, Kate reflected, that people who needed to bully you were the easiest to push around. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1622-24 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 01:08 PM Bobby was working on a new theory of personal deportment; he didn't quite have the whole thing yet, but part of it involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1624 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 01:08 PM look like a dove but be a hawk ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1674 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 01:12 PM the carbon edge of illicit fossil fuels. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1737 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 01:18 PM They built the first computers to crack German ice. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1737 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 01:18 PM Bletchley Park ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1773-74 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 01:22 PM The Wig reasoned that all that obsolete silicon had to be going somewhere. Where it was going, he learned, was into any number of very poor places struggling along with nascent industrial bases. Nations so benighted that the concept of nation was still taken seriously. ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Bookmark Loc. 1823 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 01:27 PM ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1823 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 01:27 PM Neuromancer ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 2327 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 02:51 PM Neuromancer ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2544-46 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 03:16 PM "When I last requested a remote visual of the vat I inhabit in Stockholm, I was shown a thing like three truck trailers, lashed in a dripping net of support lines . . . If I were able to leave that, Marly, or rather, to leave the riot of cells it contains . . . Well," he smiled his famous smile again, "what wouldn't I pay?" ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2761 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 03:49 PM You can't hand-over-hand up monomolecular filament; your fingers fall off." ========== William Gibson - Count Zero (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 3197 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 04:57 PM And I knew you'd never sell out. Mr Instant Loyalty, right? Mr. Bushido. You were bankable, ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1666-69 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 05:48 PM "David  says  it's the first thing any publisher looks for in a new author. Not, `Is his stuff any good?' or, `Is his stuff any good once you get rid of all the adjectives?' but, `Is his last name nice and short and his first name just a bit longer?' You see? The `Bell' is done in huge silver letters, and the `Howard' fits neatly across the top in slightly narrower ones. ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1696 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 05:51 PM "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1799-1801 | Added on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 06:02 PM "I am Thor. I am the God of Thunder. The God of Rain. The God of the High Towering Clouds. The God of Lightning. The God of the Flowing Currents. The God of the Particles. The God of the Shaping and the Binding Forces. The God of the Wind. The God of the Growing Crops. The God of the Hammer Mjollnir." ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1927-30 | Added on Thursday, May 17, 2012, 01:25 PM In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships' motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other's songs or messages. ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2442-43 | Added on Friday, May 18, 2012, 10:30 AM Here were the people that nobody wanted anything from at all. This was where they gathered for shelter until they were periodically shooed out. There was something people wanted from them, in fact - their absence. That was in hot demand, but not easily supplied. Everybody has to be somewhere. ========== Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, The (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 2607-11 | Added on Friday, May 18, 2012, 10:41 AM "It's an affliction, dear, which only gods get. It really means that you can't take being a god any more, which is why only gods get it you see."     "I see."     "In the final stages of it you simply lie  on  the  ground and after a while a tree grows out of your head and then it's all over. You rejoin the earth, seep into its bowels, flow through its vital arteries, and eventually emerge as a great pure torrent of water, and as like as not get a load of chemical waste dumped into you. It's a grim business being a god nowadays, even a dead god. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1769-70 | Added on Sunday, May 20, 2012, 08:40 PM Anyone who desires an evening of roof-hiking without the preliminary climbing can get out from the top window above the second overhang. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Bookmark Loc. 1772 | Added on Sunday, May 20, 2012, 08:40 PM ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1773-75 | Added on Sunday, May 20, 2012, 08:42 PM We have no crystal to amplify this light, no magic mirror to reflect the vanished happenings of the past. Epics may have escaped our notice, tremendous deeds of valour dismissed in a line for want of further information. But what little we have found we will record. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Note Loc. 1775 | Added on Sunday, May 20, 2012, 08:42 PM creed of historians ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1777-78 | Added on Sunday, May 20, 2012, 08:44 PM “Let not thy voice be heard among us, lest angry Fellows run upon thee” Judges xviii. 25 (A.V.) ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1823-25 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 11:30 AM The young man, known to his friends as “The Admiral”, demurred against firing upon the British Flag. The dean, with the steeplejack’s fee of twenty pounds in his mind, tried to uproot these feudal scruples, but The Admiral was loyal to the core. He drew himself up to his full height. “Sir,” he said, “I cannot shoot upon the Union Jack.” ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Note Loc. 1893 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:21 PM musical reference may date story? speculative ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1939-40 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:31 PM The time was 4.30 a.m. Again the clan had the Glen Coe feeling, though the next day our Diplomatic Correspondent, acting according to his own methods, ascertained the cause. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1951-52 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:34 PM While No. 4 went off to collect this, No. 1 collected a number of oddments – about a dozen arrows, hundreds of yards of string, tennis-balls and so on. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1970-71 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:36 PM This wild scheme in which Charles was involved may have been part of the cause of the next climb, on April 26th, 1936. Charles was dead, and he had dearly wanted to climb the Chapel. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1982-84 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:38 PM For No. 1 was in a quandary. He had lost the two bits of string wherewith to tie the flag to the point of the lightning-conductor, and had to hold the flag while he chewed off two more bits of string – a lengthy and tiring business. He longed for the canine incisors of his simian ancestors, and replied to the testy enquiries of No. 2 that he was “looking at the view”. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1997-98 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:39 PM Although the press tried to obtain the names of the climbers, they maintained their modest anonymity, for which they were later to thank their lucky stars. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 1998-2000 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:40 PM When the calls were over, the operator rang up the college, repeated what he had heard and apologized for not having obtained the names of the climbers. So does prudence occasionally rear up its head in triumph. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2014-16 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:42 PM The college authorities were grievously shocked at the idea of the red, yellow and green of Ethiopia adorning a prominent building. For this reason, the two climbers lay very low. The names of their assistants became known (among the Élite) but for months scarcely a soul in Cambridge knew the principals. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Note Loc. 2016 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:42 PM operational security ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Note Loc. 2085 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:50 PM good that he looked ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2097-98 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:52 PM Having come through three doors, they left every door locked or bolted behind them. There was no magic in it; they knew where to find the keys. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2103-4 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:52 PM When not in bad company Eric is astonishingly virtuous. The coolness with which he sometimes substitutes crime for good behaviour is only equalled by the infectious efficiency which he has brought to bear on our problems. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2134-35 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 09:56 PM Strange it is how the prosaic present may hide the exciting past. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2158-59 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 10:24 PM If seen by anyone, draw your gown round your chin, mutter Latin and look ghoulish, furtive, Rabelaisian, or what you will. The passer-by will then take no notice. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2195-97 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 11:02 PM We have called the chimney severe, but this is more owing to its psychological effect than to any technical difficulty. Anyone who has once done it would do it again, rain or fine, tired or fresh, drunk or sober, and think nothing of it. A really severe climb, however often one does it, still commands the respect of the climber. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2220-21 | Added on Monday, May 21, 2012, 11:05 PM With three simultaneous grips ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2260-61 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 11:59 AM If you slip, you will still have three seconds to live. However, if it has not rained for twelve hours, this hyper-sensational traverse is not difficult. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2294-99 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 12:02 PM Perhaps the first feeling is one of disappointment. The ambition of which you have been dreaming for weeks, or even months, is finished, and you must find another to replace it. You have been dreaming, glorying in the thought of it, and now in a few drab moments after the thrill of endeavour you are in the throes of success. You are standing on the peak of what is held to be a considerable achievement. Climbers may think that unknown heroes have been at work, and only you know yourself for what you are, a very naked body behind it all. You feel a usurper, a filcher of honours which the truly brave would scorn to earn. The height does not inspire you. You simply feel a very insignificant man standing on a monument of insignificance. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2300-2303 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 12:03 PM But the exaltation will come later. When all is over, you will enjoy facing your bed-maker’s cross-examination, replying to her queries by a bland look of innocence and a rather fatuous grin. You will bounce about with tremendous satisfaction, and feel more pleasure in living than you have ever known. The exaltation resulting from a difficult climb lasts for about three days, and during this time you will feel the devil of a fellow. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2325-27 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 12:05 PM Cambridge brings back a jumble of pipes and chimneys and pinnacles, leading up from security to adventure. We think of those nights spent with one or more friends, nights when we merged with the shadows and could see the world with eyes that were not our own. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2337-38 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 12:07 PM human motives are more complex than the strangest chemical compound. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2343-46 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 12:08 PM Summoning the last vestiges of mental energy, we vowed to do the hardest thing we could think of. Instead of failing, through lack of interest, in the multitude of things that had grown so tiresome, we would come back to life, not quietly, but with a gigantic achievement as a kick-off. It was the only hope. With something like this behind us, the effort of living would become easier, and the successful effort would embody itself in our character. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Highlight Loc. 2365-67 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 12:11 PM There is a kind of fear which is very closely akin to love, and this is the fear which the climber enjoys. It is, to use a contradictory term, a brave fear; a fear which announces its presence, perhaps very loudly, but raises no insuperable barrier to achievement. The climber enjoys being frightened, because he knows the fear is no impediment. ========== The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Whipplesnaith) - Note Loc. 2457 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 12:17 PM grotesques ========== Instapaper: Saturday, May. 19 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 143-45 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 12:28 PM After joining the CIA in 1951, my father was sent to “the Farm,” the agency’s training facility at Camp Peary near Williamsburg. He was taught espionage tradecraft and paramilitary techniques. He learned how to recruit agents, hand off secret documents and blow up enemy installations. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, May. 19 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 560-63 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 01:46 PM Whenever the federal government is involved in litigation before the Supreme Court, the Office of the Solicitor General handles the representation. In an age when the reputations of many government agencies have suffered, the Solicitor General’s office has remained a symbol of excellence: small, élite, and respected by its most important audience, the Justices. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, May. 19 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 647-48 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 01:52 PM As every sophisticated observer of the Court knew, the Court did not ask whether cases should be overruled unless a majority of the Justices were already prepared to do so. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, May. 19 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 697-99 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 01:56 PM The Court said that, under the First Amendment, Congress could not restrict campaign expenditures. Spending money was like speech itself, because “every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.” That included printing handbills, renting halls, and buying ads on television. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, May. 19 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 784-86 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 02:03 PM “Speech is an essential mechanism of democracy, for it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people,” he wrote for the Court in his familiar rolling cadence. “The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.” ========== Instapaper: Saturday, May. 19 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 913-15 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 02:11 PM I’d imagined living in a house of hungry, half-crazed artists somewhere, a place with secondhand furniture and thirdhand lovers, all of us thumbing our noses at society while we aged gracelessly into fame. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, May. 19 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1499-1501 | Added on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 05:39 PM Deibert’s Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation,” explored those historical connections, noting the printing press’s role in the declining influence of the post-Reformation Catholic Church. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, May. 19 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 2276-77 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 07:56 PM The fog of losing, which feels like a seething, dirty steam in the veins, seeps into everything. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 35-38 | Added on Friday, June 08, 2012, 09:59 PM TO WHAT expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the Constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 38 | Added on Friday, June 08, 2012, 09:59 PM hamilton or madison ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 52-54 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 05:41 PM But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 55-56 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 05:42 PM Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 57-59 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 05:42 PM If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 60-64 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 05:43 PM This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 99-103 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 05:47 PM In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradnally induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 103 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 05:47 PM protecting minorities ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 2787-88 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 06:11 PM Radiohead’s selling point is not their identification with any one genre but their way of ranging over music as a whole. They have intensity, intelligence, a personality in sound. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 2955-63 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 06:34 PM “Creep,” as Butt-head must have noticed, was the first of many Radiohead songs that used pivot tones, in which one note of a chord is held until a new chord is formed around it. (In the turn from G to B, the note B is the pivot point.) “Yeah, that’s my only trick,” Yorke said, when this was pointed out to him. “I’ve got one trick and that’s it, and I’m really going to have to learn a new one. Pedals, banging away through everything.” But a reliance on pedal tones and pivot tones isn’t necessarily a limitation: the Romantic composers worked to death the idea that any chord could turn on a dime toward another. Yorke’s “pedals” help give Radiohead songs a bittersweet, doomy taste. (“Airbag,” for example, being in A major, ought to be a bright thing, but the intrusion of F and C tones tilts the music toward the minor mode. “Morning Bell” sways darkly between A minor and C-sharp minor.) It’s a looser, roomier kind of harmony than the standard I-IV-V-I, and it gives the songs a distinct personality. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 2963 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 06:34 PM feature of the Radiohead style ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 3162-65 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 07:59 PM Warning of an “increasing need of high-level intelligence in the constant struggle against criminals and terrorism,” the document touted Eagle’s ability to capture bulk Internet traffic passing through conventional, satellite, and mobile phone networks, and then to store that data in a filterable and searchable database. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 3178-82 | Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012, 08:04 PM Behind it, analysts sat at their terminals and used a web browser to log on to the Eagle system, where they would peruse their latest intercepts or search for new targets to monitor using keywords, phone numbers, or email and IP addresses. The system was capable of collecting email, chat and voice-over-IP conversations, file transfers, and even browsing histories from anyone who used broadband or dialup Internet in Libya. The analysts could call up social-network diagrams for the targets they were hunting, with the links between each suspect showing the frequency and type of communication. Emails of interest were labeled “follow-up” for the security services. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 57-58 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:34 AM Paul gave the short bow his dancing master had taught -- the one used "when in doubt of another's station." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 59-60 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:35 AM For a heartbeat, fear pulsed through her palm. Then she had herself under control. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 60 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:36 AM override reflex ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 80 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:39 AM It's a needle with a drop of poison on its tip. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 84-85 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:40 AM It kills only animals." Pride overcame Paul's fear. "You dare suggest a duke's son is an animal?" he demanded. "Let us say I suggest you may be human," ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 90-91 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:42 AM "Servants will not pass your mother who stands guard outside that door. Depend on it. Your mother survived this test. Now it's your turn. Be honored. We seldom administer this to men-children." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 93 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:42 AM Litany against Fear ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 94-96 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:43 AM "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 98 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:45 AM gom jabbar -- the death so swift it's like the fall of the headsman's axe. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 104 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:46 AM He felt the fingernails of his free hand biting the palm. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 104 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:47 AM trick for enduring pain ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 123-24 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:49 AM "Hope clouds observation." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 134-36 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:52 AM He understood terrible purposes. They drove against all odds. They were their own necessity. Paul felt that he had been infected with terrible purpose. He did not know yet what the terrible purpose was. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 164-65 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 09:57 AM Many men have tried the drug . . . so many, but none has succeeded." "They tried and failed, all of them?" "Oh, no." She shook her head. "They tried and died." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 198 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:00 AM "Of a certainty, Baron. Enfin! ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 198 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:00 AM Piter knows his fate but does not try to flee ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 227-28 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:03 AM Efficient, Piter, but he's still emotional and prone to passionate outbursts. Efficient, Piter, but he still can err." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 232 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:04 AM "My dear Piter, your pleasures are what tie you to me. How could I object to that? ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 232 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:05 AM MICE ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 247-48 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:07 AM become renegade Houses, taking family atomics and shields and fleeing beyond the Imperium." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 250 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:08 AM "There are certain preparations that indicate when a House is going renegade. The Duke appears to be doing none of these things." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 250 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:08 AM intelligence ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 266-68 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:10 AM "Hawat's mind will be so filled with this prospect it'll impair his function as a Mentat. He may even try to kill her." Piter frowned, then: "But I don't think he'll be able to carry it off." "You don't want him to, eh?" the Baron asked. "Don't distract me," Piter said. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 268 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:11 AM hope clouds judgment ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 290-91 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:13 AM He might weigh two hundred Standard kilos in actuality, but his feet would carry no more than fifty of them. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 293-95 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:14 AM "The Reverend Mother must combine the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her youth endure. For when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the place-between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of cunning and resourcefulness." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 295 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:15 AM control through sex ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 313-14 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:17 AM The race knows its own mortality and fears stagnation of its heredity. It's in the bloodstream -- the urge to mingle genetic strains without plan. The Imperium, the CHOAM Company, all the Great Houses, they are but bits of flotsam in the path of the flood." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 334-36 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:29 AM "You make me feel like a little girl again -- reciting my first lesson." She forced the words out: " 'Humans must never submit to animals.' " A dry sob shook her. In a low voice, she said: "I've been so lonely." "It should be one of the tests," the old woman said. "Humans are almost always lonely. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 336 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:29 AM time to think and remember, ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 360-61 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:34 AM You've depths in you; that I'll grant." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 373-74 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:36 AM "You've been training him in the Way -- I've seen the signs of it. I'd have done the same in your shoes and devil take the Rules." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 374 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:36 AM justified in emergencies ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 421-24 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:41 AM A world is supported by four things . . . " She held up four big-knuckled fingers. ". . . the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing . . . " She closed her fingers into a fist. ". . . without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!" ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 436-37 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:43 AM "She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 472-73 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:48 AM "And it was decided in council that you being such a poor fighter we'd best teach you the music trade so's you won't waste your life entire." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 484-86 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:50 AM "In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack," Paul said. "Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!" ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 491-92 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:51 AM "Mood?" Halleck's voice betrayed his outrage even through the shield's filtering. "What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises -- no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 498-99 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:52 AM slow interchange along barrier edges ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 509-11 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 10:54 AM As to your father -- the Duke'd punish me only if I failed to make a first-class fighting man out of you. And I'd have been failing there if I hadn't explained the fallacy in this mood thing you've suddenly developed." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 556-57 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:01 AM "They compose poems to their knives. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 569-70 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:03 AM "It's so small." "But it has eighteen hundred pages. You press the edge -- thus, and so . . . and the charge moves ahead one page at a time as you read. Never touch the actual pages with your fingers. The filament tissue is too delicate." He closed the book, handed it to Paul. "Try it." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 578-79 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:05 AM "Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? What is there around us that we cannot --" ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 579 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:06 AM sense of mystery ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 584 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:30 AM "It has much historical truth in it as well as good ethical philosophy." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 612-13 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:36 AM even dangerous facts are valuable if you've been trained to deal with them. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 614-17 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:37 AM "Few products escape the CHOAM touch," the Duke said. "Logs, donkeys, horses, cows, lumber, dung, sharks, whale fur -- the most prosaic and the most exotic . . . even our poor pundi rice from Caladan. Anything the Guild will transport, the art forms of Ecaz, the machines of Richesse and Ix. But all fades before melange. A handful of spice will buy a home on Tupile. It cannot be manufactured, it must be mined on Arrakis. It is unique and it has true geriatric properties." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 623-25 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:39 AM Think how they'd react if I were responsible for a serious reduction in their income. After all, one's own profits come first. The Great Convention be damned! You can't let someone pauperize you!" A harsh smile twisted the Duke's mouth. "They'd look the other way no matter what was done to me." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 627-28 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:39 AM "Knowing where the trap is -- that's the first step in evading it. This is like single combat, Son, only on a larger scale -- a feint within a feint within a feint . . . seemingly without end. The task is to unravel it. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 643-44 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:42 AM "There are proven ways: play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering. It can be done. It has been done on many worlds in many times." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 644 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:42 AM how to train special forces ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 649-50 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:43 AM We know the Harkonnen policy with planetary populations -- spend as little as possible to maintain them." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 650 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 11:44 AM crude imperialism ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 679-80 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 01:36 PM With the Lady Jessica and Arrakis, the Bene Gesserit system of sowing implant-legends through the Missionaria Protectiva came to its full fruition. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 748-49 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 01:43 PM this planetologist the Emperor and the Landsraad installed as Judge of the Change cannot be bought. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 802-3 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 01:49 PM "This is an unfixed blade, my Lady. Keep it near you. More than a week away from flesh and it begins to disintegrate. It's yours, a tooth of shai-hulud, for as long as you live." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 945-46 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 02:13 PM The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable--slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 1015-17 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 02:27 PM He paused for the mnemonic blink that would store the pattern of her face in his memory--prune-wrinkled features darkly browned, blue-on-blue eyes without any white in them. He attached the label: The Shadout Mapes. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 1071-72 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 02:32 PM The visible note contained the code phrase every Bene Gesserit not bound by a School Injunction was required to give another Bene Gesserit when conditions demanded it: "On that path lies danger." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 1076-80 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 02:34 PM "Your son and Duke are in immediate danger. A bedroom has been designed to attract your son. The H loaded it with death traps to be discovered, leaving one that may escape detection." Jessica put down the urge to run back to Paul; the full message had to be learned. Her fingers sped over the dots; "I do not know the exact nature of the menace, but it has something to do with a bed. The threat to your Duke involves defection of a trusted companion or lieutenant. The H plan to give you as gift to a minion. To the best of my knowledge, this conservatory is safe. Forgive that I cannot tell more. My sources are few as my Count is not in the pay of the H. In haste, MF." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 1134-36 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 02:38 PM The answer was obvious: the communinet was certain to be tapped now by agents of the Duke Leto. Light signals could only mean that messages were being sent between his enemies--between Harkonnen agents. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 1212-13 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 02:48 PM Command must always look confident, he thought. All that faith riding on your shoulders while you sit in the critical seat and never show it. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 1378-79 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 03:06 PM a certain responsibility falls on those who have seen a crysknife." He passed a dark glance across Idaho. "They are ours. They may never leave Arrakis without our consent." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 1438-40 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 03:14 PM For the first time, Paul allowed himself to think about the real possibility of defeat--not thinking about it out of fear or because of warnings such as that of the old Reverend Mother, but facing up to it because of his own assessment of the situation. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 1546-47 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2012, 03:26 PM "You lead well," Paul protested. "You govern well. Men follow you willingly and love you." "My propaganda corps is one of the finest," the Duke said. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 2435-36 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 08:27 AM There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 2483 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 08:31 AM a twisted Mentat. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 2488-90 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 08:33 AM He fears the questioning of a Truthsayer, Jessica thought. Who? Ah-h-h, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen, of course! If he knows he must face her questions, then the Emperor is in on this for sure. Ah-h-h-h, my poor Leto. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Bookmark Loc. 2526 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 08:36 AM ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 2526 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 08:36 AM twice underestimated ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 2547 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 08:38 AM And there'll be watchers for the watchers, too. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 2733 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 08:56 AM how much hell there was so near him--only a nerve's thickness away. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 2955 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 11:12 AM And there's no doubt of my course: a broodmare preserving an important bloodline for the Bene Gesserit Plan. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 2997-99 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 11:16 AM The other path held long patches of grey obscurity except for peaks of violence. He had seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the universe with the Atreides green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic legions drunk on spice liquor. Gurney Halleck and a few others of his father's men--a pitiful few--were among them, all marked by the hawk symbol from the shrine of his father's skull. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 3000-3004 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 11:17 AM He remained silent, thinking like the seed he was, thinking with the race consciousness he had first experienced as terrible purpose. He found that he no longer could hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor or even the Harkonnens. They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way for this--the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Bookmark Loc. 3019 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 11:19 AM ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 3019 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 11:19 AM not actually omniscient - can be tricked ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 3064 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 11:24 AM This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow's life. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 3099-3100 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 12:01 PM More than a hundred brigades--ten legions! The entire spice income of Arrakis for fifty years might just cover the cost of such a venture. It might. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 3133 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 12:06 PM The Harkonnens have not water enough to buy the smallest child among us." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 3155-56 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 12:08 PM "Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die," the Fremen said. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Bookmark Loc. 3192 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 12:11 PM ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 3192 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 12:12 PM mutually incompatible ways of thinking each look like naivete to the other ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 3369-70 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 12:41 PM "He did what any good guerrilla leader would," Paul said. "He separated us into two parties and arranged that he couldn't reveal where we are if he's captured. He won't really know." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 3454-55 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 12:54 PM "The way to control and direct a Mentat, Nefud, is through his information. False information--false results." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 3634 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 01:10 PM imperfect prescience ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 4039-40 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 03:50 PM "The more life there is within a system, the more niches there are for life," ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 4041-43 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 03:50 PM "Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life," his father said. "Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 4075-76 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 03:56 PM "How strange that so few people ever looked up from the spice long enough to wonder at the near-ideal nitrogen-oxygen-CO2 balance being maintained here in the absence of large areas of plant cover. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 4076 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 03:57 PM often ignored in science fiction ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 4326-27 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 04:17 PM We bribe the Guild with a monstrous payment in spice to keep our skies clear of satellites and such that none may spy what we do to the face of Arrakis." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 4327 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 04:18 PM counterintelligence ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 4412-13 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 04:25 PM The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 4803-4 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 05:25 PM My mother is my enemy. She does not know it, but she is. She is bringing the jihad. She bore me; she trained me. She is my enemy. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 5303-4 | Added on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 06:07 PM But it was unlike any other drug of her experience, and Bene Gesserit training included the taste of many drugs. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 5783-84 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 09:08 AM "Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him . . . once . . . long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 6308-11 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 04:42 PM In the future, when searching Sardaukar, remember this. Remember, too, that each has a false toenail or two that can be combined with other items secreted about their bodies to make an effective transmitter. They'll have more than one false tooth. They carry coils of shigawire in their hair -- so fine you can barely detect it, yet strong enough to garrote a man and cut off his head in the process. With Sardaukar, you must scan them, scope them -- both reflex and hard ray -- cut off every scrap of body hair. And when you're through, be certain you haven't discovered everything." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 6544-45 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 05:10 PM His body had slowly acquired a certain spice tolerance that made prescient visions fewer and fewer . . . dimmer and dimmer. The solution appeared obvious to him. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 6617-18 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 05:18 PM "They believe Paul is in a sacred trance, gathering his holy powers before the final battles. This is a thought I've cultivated." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 6679-81 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 05:27 PM "Not the future," he said. "I've seen the Now." He forced himself to a sitting position, waved Chani aside as she moved to help him. "The Space above Arrakis is filled with the ships of the Guild." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 6692-93 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 05:28 PM "The Water of Death," he said. "It'd be a chain reaction." He pointed to the floor. "Spreading death among the little makers, killing a vector of the life cycle that includes the spice and the makers. Arrakis will become a true desolation -- without spice or maker." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 6755-56 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 05:33 PM The language of the Great Convention is clear enough: 'Use of atomics against humans shall be cause for planetary obliteration.' ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 6872-73 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 05:43 PM "Have you taken hostages?" the Emperor asked. "It's useless, Majesty," the Baron said. "These mad Fremen hold a burial ceremony for every captive and act as though such a one were already dead." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 6902-4 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 07:26 PM "Unfortunately," the Emperor said, "I only sent in five troop carriers with a light attack force to pick up prisoners for questioning. We barely got away with three prisoners and one carrier. Mind you, Baron, my Sardaukar were almost overwhelmed by a force composed mostly of women, children, and old men. This child here was in command of one of the attacking groups." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 6907-9 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 07:27 PM "My Sardaukar used the attitudinal jets on their carrier as flame-throwers," the Emperor said. "A move of desperation and the only thing that got them away with their three prisoners. Mark that, my dear Baron: Sardaukar forced to retreat in confusion from women and children and old men!" ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7004-7 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 07:39 PM "Nothing money won't repair, I presume," Paul said. "Except for the lives, m'Lord," Gurney said, and there was a tone of reproach in his voice as though to say: "When did an Atreides worry first about things when people were at stake?" But Paul could only focus his attention on the inner eye and the gaps visible to him in the time-wall that still lay across his path. Through each gap the jihad raged away down the corridors of the future. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Note Loc. 7006 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 07:40 PM fearful of greater loss of life ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7051-52 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 07:46 PM "Where is Alia?" she asked. "Out doing what any good Fremen child should be doing in such times," Paul said. "She's killing enemy wounded and marking their bodies for the water-recovery teams." "Paul!" ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7079-80 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 07:50 PM And he thought then about the Guild -- the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7083-84 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 07:51 PM The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7131-32 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 08:01 PM "I used atomics against a natural feature of the desert," Paul said. "It was in my way and I was in a hurry to get to you, Majesty, to ask your explanation for some of your strange activities." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7317-19 | Added on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 08:23 PM Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern -- a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7357-59 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 12:23 AM Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7368-70 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 12:25 AM Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life -- all life -- is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7381-82 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 12:51 PM No man arrived on Arrakis without a full dossier finding its way into the Fremen strongholds. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7452-55 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 01:05 PM "The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem," Kynes said, "is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7465-68 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 01:06 PM Even shai-hulud had a place in the charts. He must never be destroyed, else spice wealth would end. But his inner digestive "factory," with its enormous concentrations of aldehydes and acids, was a giant source of oxygen. A medium worm (about 200 meters long) discharged into the atmosphere as much oxygen as ten square kilometers of green growing photosynthesis surface. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7473-74 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 01:10 PM the thing would not come in the lifetime of any man now living, nor in the lifetime of their grandchildren eight times removed, but it would come. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7487-89 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 01:11 PM The agnostic ruling class (including the Guild) for whom religion was a kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep it docile, and who believed essentially that all phenomena -- even religious phenomena -- could be reduced to mechanical explanations; ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7560-61 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 01:19 PM We are daily confronted by the terrifying instability of all things human, yet we permit our religions to grow more rigid and controlled, more conforming and ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7560-62 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 01:20 PM We are daily confronted by the terrifying instability of all things human, yet we permit our religions to grow more rigid and controlled, more conforming and oppressive. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7565-66 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 01:21 PM "Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7594-97 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 01:25 PM And it's well to note that Fremen ritual gives almost complete freedom from guilt feelings. This isn't necessarily because their law and religion were identical, making disobedience a sin. It's likely closer to the mark to say they cleansed themselves of guilt easily because their everyday existence required brutal judgments (often deadly) which in a softer land would burden men with unbearable guilt. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 7608-10 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 01:30 PM The Bene Gesserit program had as its target the breeding of a person they labeled "Kwisatz Haderach," a term signifying "one who can be many places at once." In simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental powers permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions. ========== Uncensored (Eric Ries and Hunter Walk) - Highlight Loc. 1570-71 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2012, 06:15 PM Hunter’s rule: Any communication service which publicly displays a metric serving as a proxy for popularity will cause users to take steps to increase that number. ========== Uncensored (Eric Ries and Hunter Walk) - Highlight Loc. 2239-43 | Added on Saturday, June 16, 2012, 07:48 PM Winston Churchill after the evacuation of Dunkirk: “We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” ========== Uncensored (Eric Ries and Hunter Walk) - Highlight Loc. 2602-7 | Added on Saturday, June 16, 2012, 08:05 PM And while SOPA and PIPA supporters might argue that the bills are necessary to make cases like the MegaUpload takedown easier to launch and prosecute, it’s not clear that making that kind of case even easier is something worth supporting. It may have taken two years, but the FBI and the Department of Justice were still able to shut down a website, seize all its assets and arrest its entire staff without ever having to prove (except to a grand jury in Virginia) that the company is actually involved in wilful and deliberate copyright infringement — and the case against MegaUpload is far from a slam-dunk. ========== Uncensored (Eric Ries and Hunter Walk) - Highlight Loc. 2819-20 | Added on Saturday, June 16, 2012, 08:22 PM It took just 30 hours for all 2,500 to sell out, bringing in $750,000 in just over a day. For music he was giving away for free. ========== Uncensored (Eric Ries and Hunter Walk) - Bookmark Loc. 2927 | Added on Saturday, June 16, 2012, 08:42 PM ========== Uncensored (Eric Ries and Hunter Walk) - Highlight Loc. 2985-89 | Added on Saturday, June 23, 2012, 12:20 PM No, when an organization’ problems are tough (and interesting problems are all tough) the issue is rarely stupid people. Rather, what limits success, growth, and winning is something more like blindness. Blindness, as in we doesn’t know the whole context, or see an issue in its full complexity. As in, we are blind in not knowing what we don’t know. Smart people know how to solve most problems and so when they are failing, it’s usually the fact that we can’t see what we can’t see because we are experts and we stopped looking at it fresh a long time ago. ========== Montaigne - Inconsistency (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 3 | Added on Wednesday, July 11, 2012, 08:21 PM impatience can be a virtue ========== Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse) - Highlight Loc. 2367-68 | Added on Thursday, July 12, 2012, 07:24 PM I am a shrewd observer, and there had been something in Tuppy's manner as he booted that plate of ham sandwiches that seemed to tell me that he would not lightly forgive. ========== Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse) - Highlight Loc. 2404 | Added on Thursday, July 12, 2012, 07:27 PM He little knew, about summed up what I was thinking. ========== Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse) - Note Loc. 2404 | Added on Thursday, July 12, 2012, 07:28 PM unusually articulated phrase ========== Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse) - Highlight Loc. 2442 | Added on Thursday, July 12, 2012, 07:31 PM Fate made me the sort of chap who can't say 'bo' to a goose." ========== Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse) - Highlight Loc. 2515-17 | Added on Thursday, July 12, 2012, 07:35 PM "Whisky. At least, that was the label on the decanter, and I have no reason to suppose that a woman like your aunt—staunch, true-blue, British—would deliberately deceive the public. If she labels her decanters Whisky, then I consider that we know where we are." ========== Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse) - Highlight Loc. 2544-46 | Added on Thursday, July 12, 2012, 07:37 PM I mean, I had wanted a braced Fink-Nottle— indeed, all my plans had had a braced Fink-Nottle as their end and aim —but I found myself wondering a little whether the Fink-Nottle now sliding down the banister wasn't, perhaps, a shade too braced. ========== Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse) - Highlight Loc. 2568-69 | Added on Thursday, July 12, 2012, 07:40 PM Since you last saw him, Gussie has been on a bender. He's as tight as an owl." ========== Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse) - Highlight Loc. 2583-84 | Added on Thursday, July 12, 2012, 07:41 PM I think that there can be little doubt, Jeeves, that the entire contents of that jug are at this moment reposing on top of the existing cargo in that already brilliantly lit man's interior. Disturbing, Jeeves." ========== Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse) - Highlight Loc. 3246-49 | Added on Friday, July 13, 2012, 09:13 AM Aunt Dahlia's face grew darker. Hunting, if indulged in regularly over a period of years, is a pastime that seldom fails to lend a fairly deepish tinge to the patient's complexion, and her best friends could not have denied that even at normal times the relative's map tended a little toward the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression. ========== Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse) - Highlight Loc. 3750-51 | Added on Friday, July 13, 2012, 09:41 AM The fact that pigs were abroad in the night seemed to bring home to me the perilous nature of my enterprise. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 168-69 | Added on Friday, July 13, 2012, 05:50 PM However, now that I was a Ph.D. student, research was my only job, and I wouldn't be able to earn a degree unless I succeeded at it. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 302-3 | Added on Friday, July 13, 2012, 06:01 PM Be proactive in talking with professors to find research topics that are mutually interesting, and no matter what, don't just hole up in isolation. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 425-27 | Added on Friday, July 13, 2012, 06:09 PM In the cutthroat world of academic publishing, simply being passionate about a topic is nowhere near sufficient for success; one must be well-versed in the preferences of senior colleagues in a particular subfield who are serving as paper reviewers. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 472-73 | Added on Friday, July 13, 2012, 06:13 PM Each university department offers at most one or two tenure-track professor job positions per year, and over a hundred highly-qualified senior Ph.D. students, postdocs (temporary postdoctoral researchers), and research scientists fight for those coveted spots. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 552-53 | Added on Friday, July 13, 2012, 06:19 PM Only about 1 out of every 75 Ph.D. students from a top-tier university has what it takes to become a professor at a school like Stanford (or maybe 1 out of every 200 Ph.D. students from a regular university). ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 656-57 | Added on Friday, July 13, 2012, 06:26 PM From this experience, I learned about the importance of being endorsed by an influential person; simply doing good work isn't enough to get noticed in a hyper-competitive field. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 687-90 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:18 PM Tom deserves lots of credit: Since he was a veteran insider in the empirical software measurement subfield, he knew how to advise me as a technical mentor and also how to craft the nuances of our paper submissions to maximize their chances of acceptance. In contrast, Dawson was an outsider who merely had a passing interest in these topics, so he had neither the motivation nor the abilities to advise projects in this subfield (even though he was world-famous in another subfield—software bug-finding). ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 723-24 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:21 PM Thankfully, nobody had created exactly what I was planning to create, but there were some past research projects with a similar flavor. That was fine, though; no idea is truly original, so there will always be related projects. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 740-43 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:23 PM Most Ph.D. students in my department work on projects that their advisors or other professors are interested in, since it's much easier to publish papers with the help of professors' enthusiasm and expertise. However, even without professor backing, my hunch was that IncPy could become a publishable idea; I had accumulated enough battle scars from the past three years of research failures to develop better intuitions for which ideas might succeed. Trusting this gut instinct became the turning point of my Ph.D. career. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 749-50 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:24 PM To eventually graduate, I needed to form a thesis committee consisting of three professors who agree to read and approve my dissertation. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 766-68 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:28 PM The argument I wanted to make was that lots of computational researchers in diverse fields struggle with several common inefficiencies in their daily programming workflow, and IncPy provides a new kind of fully automated solution to such inefficiencies that nobody else has previously implemented. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 769 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:29 PM thousands of hours of hard labor—grinding—required to turn IncPy from an idea into a real working prototype tool. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 769-71 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:30 PM I had spent the end of my summer playing the “professor role” of sketching out high-level designs, giving talks, and refining conceptual ideas. Now I was ready to play the “student role” of massively grinding throughout the next year to implement IncPy. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 777-78 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:31 PM Implementing IncPy involved some of the grimiest programming grind that I had ever done. If I didn't have all of those hours of trial-by-fire training over the past decade, then I would have never even attempted such a labor-intensive project. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 783-85 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:32 PM Over the next three years (2009 to 2011), I grinded non-stop on creating five new prototype tools to help computational researchers (IncPy was the first), published one or more first-author papers describing each tool, and then combined all of that work together into a Ph.D. dissertation that I was extremely proud of. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 787-91 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:33 PM I became fiercely self-driven by an enormous amount of productive rage. I turned steely, determined, and ultra-focused. Every time I reflected back on the inefficiencies, failures, and frustrations that I had endured during my first three years of grad school, I would grow more enraged and push myself to grind even harder; I was motivated by an obsessive urge to make up for supposedly lost time. Of course, those early years weren't actually lost; without those struggles, I wouldn't have gained the inspiration or abilities to create the five projects that comprised my dissertation. ========== My Clippings - Highlight Loc. 1588-92 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:38 PM I became fiercely self-driven by an enormous amount of productive rage. I turned steely, determined, and ultra-focused. Every time I reflected back on the inefficiencies, failures, and frustrations that I had endured during my first three years of grad school, I would grow more enraged and push myself to grind even harder; I was motivated by an obsessive urge to make up for supposedly lost time. Of course, those early years weren't actually lost; without those struggles, I wouldn't have gained the inspiration or abilities to create the five projects that comprised my dissertation. ========== My Clippings - Note Loc. 1592 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:38 PM Reading the accounts of succesful PhD students can be a bit disturbing. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 818-20 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:47 PM this strategy of finding and setting short-term deadlines for myself would work wonders in keeping me focused throughout the rest of my Ph.D. years. Without self-imposed deadlines, it becomes easy to fall into a rut and succumb to chronic procrastination. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 832-34 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 02:48 PM The biggest difference between a workshop and a conference paper is that a conference paper must have a convincing experimental evaluation that shows the effectiveness of the tool or technique being described in the paper. ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 28 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 03:01 PM POLLAN: There’s a chapter in the book on genetically modified plants, because that’s really where we’re moving in this relationship with plants. I grew a genetically modified potato that I had obtained from Monsanto in my garden. I had wonderful access; they let me walk through their labs, and learn how it was done. I don’t think I could write another piece on genetically modified food and ever get into another company like that again. Some of these pieces are pieces you can only do once, because once you’ve published your views, your access ends. I was able to approach Monsanto as a gardener, which sounded very benign to them, I think, and I think that was one of the reasons I had success ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 30 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 03:03 PM . Domesticated plants, we tend to disrespect in a funny way. I mean, I found this writing about animal rights. The animal rights people hear this a lot: “Well, pigs won’t exist without people eating pork, because they’re domesticated animals…” Actually, pigs could survive, but chickens or beef cattle would go extinct. Animal rights people tend to say, “Fine, that’s great, you know, we won’t miss them. They’re not free enough, they’re not wild enough.” I don’t have any patience for that attitude. Mutual dependence, interdependency, is how nature works. I don’t think of these plants as weaklings in any way, or any less impressive than the tree that would survive without us ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 30 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 03:04 PM But I can totally understand why someone would think otherwise. Underlying your questions is cultural worship of the wild and wilderness. We look to nature for that which stands apart from us, you know, pristine and unaffected, and has that autonomy. And that is certainly a wonderful part of nature, but the part that is the product of our presence, that is the largest force in evolution right now. And the great winners in evolution, if we have to cast it in those terms, are the species that have learned to take advantage of our presence. There are, you know, fifty million dogs in this country and ten thousand wolves; the wolf if the ancestor of the dog. There’s a glamour we attach to the wolf because of that, but in evolutionary terms, it’s the dog who came up with the more effective strategy ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 31 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 03:05 PM POLLAN: Well, I mean, I think there is a war. There is a war between, you know, the Appolonian and Dionysian as Nietzsche put it, and the plants are also very much on the Dionysian side of the equation, and that’s one of the things that makes them very threatening to civilization. On the other hand, there are exceptions. There are things like coffee, tea, and nicotine, which were evil drugs until in the industrial revolution people figured out, “Oh, people work better with these drugs.” You can look at a culture and see what it values. A lot of the drugs that we say are okay or have said are okay, tend to work very well with capitalistic systems. ========== cannabis_culture13 (Aileen Paterson) - Highlight on Page 31 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 03:05 PM Desire is an interesting question. You can also make a distinction between desire and pleasure—and now I’m going to improvise. There are drugs of desire, which I don’t think marijuana is. I think cocaine is a drug of desire. Desire is about the future, in a way. Desire is always pitched forward, and that’s what the cocaine experience is about, whereas marijuana is very much about the present, which is about pleasure, satisfaction. You know, a Marxist-type critique of all this would be that marijuana is frowned upon because it doesn’t do anything to make you want to buy things. On marijuana, anything is really interesting, anything in front of you—these flowers, this desk, this room, it’s fine. I don’t need anything else. I don’t have to go to the movies, I don’t have to buy anything. Cocaine is very much a drug of desire and futurity and endless dissatisfaction. So it is, in a way, the perfect drug for a commodity culture. That’s one way to look at it, there’s my improvisational rift. ========== Ulysses (James Joyce) - Highlight Loc. 53-54 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 03:11 PM —God! he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 922-26 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 03:16 PM I wish I could say that my solo brainstorming sessions were motivated by a true love for the pure essence of academic scholarship. But the truth was that I was driven by straight-up fear: I was afraid of not being able to graduate within a reasonable time frame, so I pressured myself to come up with new ideas that could potentially lead to publications. I was all too aware that it might take two to three years for a paper to get accepted for publication, so if I wanted to graduate by the end of my sixth year, I would need to submit several papers this year and pray that at least two get accepted. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 978-81 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 08:01 PM However, the unspoken shame in modern science is that it's nearly impossible to reproduce or verify any of those findings, since the original computer code and data sets used to produce those findings are rarely available. As a result, lots of papers containing egregious errors—due to both honest mistakes and outright fraud—have gone unchallenged, sometimes resulting in scientific claims that have led to human deaths. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 3346-54 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 11:40 PM Amesys, with its Eagle system, was just one of Libya’s partners in repression. A South African firm called VASTech had set up a sophisticated monitoring center in Tripoli that snooped on all inbound and outbound international phone calls, gathering and storing 30 million to 40 million minutes of mobile and landline conversations each month. ZTE Corporation, a Chinese firm whose gear powered much of Libya’s cell phone infrastructure, is believed to have set up a parallel Internet monitoring system for External Security: Photos from the basement of a makeshift surveillance site, obtained from Human Rights Watch, show components of its ZXMT system, comparable to Eagle. American firms likely bear some blame, as well. On February 15, just prior to the revolution, regime officials reportedly met in Barcelona with officials from Narus, a Boeing subsidiary, to discuss Internet-filtering software. And the Human Rights Watch photos also clearly show a manual for a satellite phone monitoring system sold by a subsidiary of L-3 Communications, a defense conglomerate based in New York. (Amesys, ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jun. 6 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 3359-63 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2012, 11:41 PM “Massive intercept” technology, like countless other innovations of the West’s military-industrial complex, has now become cheap, small, and simple enough to export as a commercial, off-the-shelf technology, for sale to any government that can cough up a few tens of millions of dollars. Today you can run an approximation of 1984 out of a couple of rooms filled with server racks. And that’s precisely what Libya’s spies did—and what dictatorships all around the world continue to do. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 998-1000 | Added on Thursday, July 19, 2012, 12:28 PM Dependency hell is especially widespread on Linux-based operating systems due to the multitude of semi-incompatible Linux variants that people use; programs that run on one person's Linux computer are unlikely to run on someone else's slightly different Linux computer. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 1121-23 | Added on Thursday, July 19, 2012, 12:39 PM Back when he was a Ph.D. student, Jeff published 19 papers mostly in top-tier conferences, which is five to ten times more than typical computer science Ph.D. students. That's the sort of intensity required to get a faculty job at a top-tier university like Stanford. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 1211-14 | Added on Thursday, July 19, 2012, 12:46 PM Thus, I read some of her recent papers and grant applications to get a sense of her research philosophy so that I could cater my ideas towards her tastes. By now, I understood the importance of aligning with the subjective preferences of senior collaborators (and paper reviewers), even when doing research in supposedly objective technical fields. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 1230-33 | Added on Thursday, July 19, 2012, 12:47 PM In early November 2011, I turned into a programming beast for the final time in grad school to transform my Burrito idea into a working prototype. I did 72 consecutive days of programming with only 5 days of breaks spread intermittently throughout the 2.5-month sprint. This period was the longest I had ever sustained an almost-painful level of nonstop intensity thus far. ========== The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (Philip Guo) - Highlight Loc. 1434-36 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 03:44 PM This journey has taught me that creative ideas mean nothing without the extreme effort to bring them to fruition: showing up to the office, getting my butt in the seat, grinding hard to make small but consistent progress, taking breaks to reflect and refresh, then repeating day after day for over two thousand consecutive days. ========== TLotR - 01.0 - The Fellowship of the Ring - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 412-18 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 06:28 PM Nonetheless, ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough. They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill; and they were, perhaps, so unwearyingly fond of good things not least because they could, when put to it, do without them, and could survive rough handling by grief, foe, or weather in a way that astonished those who did not know them well and looked no further than their bellies and their well-fed faces. Though slow to quarrel, and for sport killing nothing that lived, they were doughty at bay, and at need could still handle arms. They shot well with the bow, for they were keen-eyed and sure at the mark. Not only with bows and arrows. If any Hobbit stooped for a stone, it was well to get quickly under cover, as all trespassing beasts knew very well. ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 107-8 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 10:11 PM where it touched bundles of rare and dry herbs in the storerooms of the drugmasters it made men go mad and talk to God. ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 113-14 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 10:12 PM The smoke from the merry burning rose miles high, in a wind-sculpted black column that could be seen across the whole of the Discworld. ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 276-77 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 10:31 PM Yet around his neck was a chain bearing the bronze octagon that marked him as an alumnus of Unseen University, the high school of magic whose time-and-space transcendent campus is never precisely Here or There. ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 279-80 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 10:32 PM sapient pearwood ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 401-3 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 10:43 PM (wizards, even failed wizards, have in addition to rods and cones in their eyeballs the tiny octagons that enable them to see into the far octarine, the basic color of which all other colors are merely pale shadows impinging on normal four dimensional space. It is said to be a sort of fluorescent greenish yellow purple). ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 489-90 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 10:50 PM Almost all of them had crude magic swords, whose unsuppressed harmonics on the astral plane played hell with any delicate experiments in applied sorcery for miles around, but Rincewind didn’t object to them on that score. ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 501-2 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 10:52 PM The Watch were always careful not to intervene too soon in any brawl where the odds were not heavily stacked in their favor. The job carried a pension, and attracted a cautious, thoughtful kind of man. ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 530-31 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 10:54 PM “He’s got a box with a demon in it that draws pictures,” said Rincewind shortly. “Do what the madman says and he will give you gold.” ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 587-89 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 11:01 PM Even a failed wizard knew that some substances were sensitive to light. Perhaps the glass plates were treated by some arcane process that froze the light that passed through them? Something like that, anyway. Rincewind often suspected that there was something, somewhere, that was better than magic. He was usually disappointed. ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 628 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 11:04 PM grimoire, ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 46 | Loc. 697-700 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 11:10 PM “Can’t tell you. Don’t really want to talk about it. But frankly,” he sighed, “no spells are much good. It takes three months to commit even a simple one to memory, and then once you’ve used it, poof! it’s gone. That’s what’s so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you’re so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half blind from reading old grimoires that you can’t remember what happens next.” ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 731-32 | Added on Friday, July 20, 2012, 11:13 PM The guard glanced down the deserted street, and now caught the glimmer of moonlight on something lying in the mud a few yards away. He picked it up. The lunar light gleamed on gold, and his intake of breath was almost loud enough to echo down the alleyway. ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1002-3 | Added on Sunday, July 22, 2012, 02:14 PM Rincewind the wizard (B. Mgc., Unseen University [failed]). ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1012-16 | Added on Sunday, July 22, 2012, 02:18 PM He tried to explain that magic had indeed once been wild and lawless, but had been tamed back in the mists of time by the Olden Ones, who had bound it to obey among other things the Law of Conservation of Reality; this demanded that the effort needed to achieve a goal should be the same regardless of the means used. In practical terms this meant that, say, creating the illusion of a glass of wine was relatively easy, since it involved merely the subtle shifting of light patterns. On the other hand, lifting a genuine wineglass a few feet in the air by sheer mental energy required several hours of systematic preparation if the wizard wished to prevent the simple principle of leverage flicking his brain out through his ears. ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1309-11 | Added on Sunday, July 22, 2012, 02:41 PM After the first Age of Magic the disposal of grimoires began to become a severe problem on the Discworld. A spell is still a spell even when imprisoned temporarily in parchment and ink. It has potency. This is not a problem while the book’s owner still lives, but on his death the spell book becomes a source of uncontrolled power that cannot easily be defused. ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Bookmark on Page 101 | Loc. 1546 | Added on Sunday, July 22, 2012, 03:02 PM ========== D - 01.0 - The Colour of Magic - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3028-30 | Added on Sunday, July 22, 2012, 05:32 PM The Luggage had an elemental nature, absolutely no brain, a homicidal attitude toward anything that threatened its master, and he wasn’t quite sure that its inside occupied the same space-time framework as its outside. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 280-83 | Added on Sunday, July 22, 2012, 05:54 PM But when reality must be represented in language with no ambiguity (or with precisely delineated ambiguity, which is even harder), we’re stuck with the messiest parts of the problem. Philosophers began to tackle this problem toward the end of the 19th century, with Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the logical positivists (who believed language could be represented logically) taking an early lead, only to find themselves abandoned in the 1940s by a former adherent (Wittgenstein) and routed in the 1950s by W. V. O. Quine. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 424-30 | Added on Sunday, July 22, 2012, 06:10 PM Dana Priest and William Arkin’s excellent series on US intelligence in the Washington Post in 2010 reported that “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications.” All are sorted and analyzed with ontological models no more definite or complete than those of Twitter or Wikipedia. In signals intelligence nowadays, there isn’t enough human intelligence to process all the signals. Computers pick up the slack, with all their deficient understanding. We see it in health insurance, where claims are questioned or denied through partly automated processes that determine what treatment is “reasonable” and what premiums people should pay. At a certain scale, the quantitative must take over.  ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 437-38 | Added on Sunday, July 22, 2012, 06:11 PM Everything and everyone is being profiled all the time, often incompetently. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 948-53 | Added on Sunday, July 22, 2012, 07:12 PM But while the economy now may bear a strong resemblance to that of the 1930s, the political scene does not, because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are what once they were. Coming into the Obama presidency, much of the Democratic Party was close to, one might almost say captured by, the very financial interests that brought on the crisis; and as the Booker and Clinton incidents showed, some of the party still is. Meanwhile, Republicans have become extremists in a way they weren’t three generations ago; contrast the total opposition Obama has faced on economic issues with the fact that most Republicans in Congress voted for, not against, FDR’s crowning achievement, the Social Security Act of 1935. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1067-69 | Added on Sunday, July 22, 2012, 07:19 PM We have a huge battle over deficits, not because deficits actually pose an immediate problem, but because conservatives have found deficit hysteria a useful way to attack social programs. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1193-95 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 09:46 AM The dividing line between books I liked, books I thought I would like, books I hoped I would like and books I didn’t like now but thought I might at some future date was rarely distinct. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1367-71 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 01:05 PM Records show that 6B had a history of corrosion problems. In 2008, Enbridge identified [12] 140 corrosion defects on 6B as serious enough to fall into the 180-day category. But the company repaired just 26 of them during that period. In 2009, Enbridge self-reported a separate set of 250 defects [13] to PHMSA. The company fixed only 35 of them within 180 days. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 1371 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 01:05 PM #Enbridge was aware of hundreds of corrosion problems with the pipeline that spilled in Kalamazoo ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1543-45 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 01:16 PM First, and most importantly, espresso is not a roasting method. It is neither a bean nor a blend. It is a method of preparation. More specifically, it is a preparation method in which highly-pressurized hot water is forced over coffee grounds to produce a very concentrated coffee drink with a deep, robust flavor. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1547-49 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 01:17 PM A jet of hot water at 88°-93° C (190°-200°F) passes under a pressure of nine or more atmospheres through a seven-gram (.25 oz) cake-like layer of ground and tamped coffee. Done right, the result is a concentrate of not more than 30 ml (one oz) of pure sensorial pleasure. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1611-12 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 01:24 PM with the invention of the high-pressure lever machine came the discovery of crema – the foam floating over the coffee liquid that is the defining characteristic of a quality espresso. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1687-88 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 01:30 PM The Pakistanis, on America’s behalf, made the colonel the usual offer: a condo in Phoenix, a Ford F-150 pickup truck, a good dog, and a good life. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jul. 17 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1731-34 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 01:34 PM Shebarshin later told me in a letter that while emptying out his personal safe during the coup attempt — after he had destroyed all even remotely incriminating papers — he had cleaned and oiled his service pistol, a Makarov 9 mm semiautomatic. He described the gun as a “simple, dependable item whose mass fits nicely into the palm of one’s hand.” “The lead content of a single round of ammunition,” he wrote, “was the equivalent of a person’s life, any life, whether worthy or pitiful.” ========== The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 332-35 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 02:20 PM God will bring about his Kingdom in his own way, and when he chooses. Do you think your mighty organisation would even recognise the Kingdom if it arrived? Fool! The Kingdom of God would come into these magnificent courts and palaces like a poor traveller with dust on his feet. The guards would spot him at once, ask for his papers, beat him, throw him out into the street. “Be on your way,” they’d say, “you have no business here.” ’ ========== The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 470-71 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 04:36 PM ‘Those who are not sick need no doctor,’ he said. ‘And there’s no need to call righteous people to repent. To speak with sinners is exactly why I’ve come.’ ========== The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 586-87 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 04:44 PM ‘And remember this: take the hard road, not the easy one. The road that leads to life is a hard one, and it passes through a narrow gate, but the road to destruction is easy, and the gate is broad. ========== The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 587-88 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 04:45 PM Plenty take the easy road; few take the hard one. Your job is to find the hard one, and go by that. ========== The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 62 | Loc. 939-42 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 05:08 PM He does things out of passion, and I do them out of calculation. I can see further than he can; I can see the consequences of things he doesn’t think twice about. But he acts with the whole of himself at every moment, and I’m always holding something back out of caution, or prudence, or because I want to watch and record rather than participate.’ ========== The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1094-96 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 05:17 PM ‘You scribes and Pharisees, if you’re listening – be damned to you. You take endless scruples over the tiniest matters of the law, while you let the great things like justice and mercy and faith go unnoticed and forgotten. You strain the gnats out of your wine, but you ignore the camel standing in it. ========== The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1319 | Added on Monday, July 23, 2012, 05:31 PM childhood, when it had been so easy to be good. ========== The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1409-17 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 09:39 AM As soon as men who believe they’re doing God’s will get hold of power, whether it’s in a household or a village or in Jerusalem or in Rome itself, the devil enters into them. It isn’t long before they start drawing up lists of punishments for all kinds of innocent activities, sentencing people to be flogged or stoned in the name of God for wearing this or eating that or believing the other. And the privileged ones will build great palaces and temples to strut around in, and levy taxes on the poor to pay for their luxuries; and they’ll start keeping the very scriptures secret, saying there are some truths too holy to be revealed to the ordinary people, so that only the priests’ interpretation will be allowed, and they’ll torture and kill anyone who wants to make the word of God clear and plain to all; and with every day that passes they’ll become more and more fearful, because the more power they have the less they’ll trust anyone, so they’ll have spies and betrayals and denunciations and secret tribunals, and put the poor harmless heretics they flush out to horrible public deaths, to terrify the rest into obedience. ========== The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 1428-33 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 09:40 AM ‘Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive. That it should be not like a palace with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood for the carpenter; but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place. ========== The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 1442-44 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 09:41 AM and we’ll feed the lambs and reap the corn and press the wine, and sit under the tree in the cool of the evening, and welcome the stranger and look after the children, and nurse the sick and comfort the dying, and then lie down when our time comes, without a pang, without a fear, and go back to the earth. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 127-31 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 12:22 PM Mr 'Buckley' - well-spoken, intelligent, curious - had heard virtually nothing of modern science. He had a natural appetite for the wonders of the Universe. He wanted to know about science. It's just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, our educational system, our communications media had failed this man. What society permit­ted to trickle through was mainly pretence and confusion. It had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation. He knew nothing about how science works. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 155-57 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 12:25 PM Surveys suggest that some 95 per cent of Americans are 'scientifically illiterate'. That's just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War - when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 169-71 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 12:26 PM It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponen­tial population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 287-89 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 12:37 PM These are all instances of pseudoscience. They purport to use the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature – often because they are based on insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way. They ripple with gullibility. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 340 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 12:42 PM sacerdotal ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 393 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 12:47 PM I try not to use the word 'cult' in this book in its usual meaning of a religion the speaker dislikes, ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 419-20 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 12:49 PM people systematically err in understanding numbers, in rejecting unpleasant evidence, in being influenced by the opinions of others. We're good in some things, but not in everything. Wisdom lies in understanding our limitations. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 434-35 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 12:50 PM The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 479-81 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 12:58 PM Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it's like democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 487-88 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 12:59 PM every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 493 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 01:02 PM veridical ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 547-51 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 01:06 PM Again, the reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend - substantively and in depth. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 613-14 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 01:10 PM Science, Ann Druyan notes, is forever whispering in our ears, 'Remember, you're very new at this. You might be mistaken. You've been wrong before.' ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 733-35 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 05:15 PM The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes, most of which took place before humans, before mammals, before vertebrates, before multicelled organisms, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 782-83 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 05:19 PM Michell describes as 'materialism' and a 'nineteenth-century delusion'. 'Conditioned by rationalist beliefs, our view of the world is duller and more confined than nature intended.' By what process he has plumbed the intentions of Nature is not revealed. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 53 | Loc. 803-6 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 05:21 PM Even a succession of professional scientists - including famous astronomers who had made other discoveries that are confirmed and now justly celebrated - can make serious, even profound errors in pattern recognition. Especially where the implications of what we think we are seeing seem to be profound, we may not exercise adequate self-discipline and self-criticism. The Martian canal myth constitutes an important cautionary tale. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1093-96 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 05:45 PM everything hinges on the matter of evidence. On so important a question, the evidence must be airtight. The more we want it to be true, the more careful we have to be. No witness's say-so is good enough. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes. People stretch the truth for money or attention or fame. People occasionally misunderstand what they're seeing. People sometimes even see things that aren't there. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1237-39 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 05:58 PM There are reliably reported cases that are unexotic, and exotic cases that are unreliable. There are no cases - despite well over a million UFO reports since 1947 - in which something so strange that it could only be an extraterrestrial spacecraft is reported so reliably that misapprehension, hoax or hallucination can be reliably excluded. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 1250-53 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 05:59 PM Gullibility about UFOs thrives on widespread mistrust of government, arising naturally enough from all those circumstances where, in the tension between public well-being and 'national security', the government lies. As government deceit and conspiracies of silence have been exposed on so many other matters, it's hard to argue that a cover-up on this odd subject is impossible, that the government would never hide important information from its citizens. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 1391-92 | Added on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 06:15 PM With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. ========== Lyra's Oxford (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 303-5 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 09:11 AM But she kept the image of Will firm in her mind: what would he do? He'd be still, he'd wait for an opening, he'd make sure of his footing, he'd be perfectly balanced; and she was ready, as the witch rushed at her, to meet her force with all the courage she could summon. ========== Lyra's Oxford (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 361-64 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 09:16 AM Lyra realized, with a little blow to her pride, how simple she'd been. Miss Greenwood and Dr. Polstead were not fools; once she was found to be missing, it would take very little time to connect her with the famous Oxford alchemist, and Mr. Shuter would remember Jericho and the directory. Oh, how stupid she could be when she was being clever! ========== Lyra's Oxford (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 379-81 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 09:17 AM “Thank you,” she said. “Mr. Makepeace, do you really turn lead into gold?” “No, of course not. No one can do that. But if people think you're foolish enough to try, they don't bother to look at what you're really doing. They leave you in peace.” ========== Pale Blue Dot (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 169-71 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 09:29 AM For 99.9 percent of the time since our species came to be, we were hunters and foragers, wanderers on the savannahs and the steppes. There were no border guards then, no customs officials. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the Earth and the ocean and the sky—plus occasional grumpy neighbors. ========== Pale Blue Dot (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 233-36 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 09:35 AM In the last few decades, the United States and the former Soviet Union have accomplished something stunning and historic—the close-up examination of all those points of light, from Mercury to Saturn, that moved our ancestors to wonder and to science. Since the advent of successful interplanetary flight in 1962, our machines have flown by, orbited, or landed on more than seventy new worlds. We have wandered among the wanderers. ========== Pale Blue Dot (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 243-46 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 09:36 AM By discovering what else is possible, by coming face to face with alternative fates of worlds more or less like our own, we have begun to better understand the Earth. Every one of these worlds is lovely and instructive. But, so far as we know, they are also, every one of them, desolate and barren. Out there, there are no "better places." So far, at least. ========== Pale Blue Dot (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 267-69 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 09:50 AM I have tried to present more than one facet of an issue. There will be places where I seem to be arguing with myself. I am. Seeing some merit to more than one side, I often argue with myself. I hope by the last chapter it will be clear where I come out. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 22-23 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 09:58 AM No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 52-56 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 10:02 AM How long can we maintain? I wondered. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection when my attorney starts screaming about bats and huge manta rays coming down on the car? If so - well, we’ll just have to cut his head off and bury him somewhere. Because it goes without saying that we can’t turn him loose. He’ll report us at once to some kind of outback nazi law enforcement agency, and they’ll run us down like dogs. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 122-24 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 11:14 AM Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 95-96 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 08:49 AM Lyra could feel Pantalaimon bristling with anxiety, though he made no sound. For herself, she was pleasantly excited. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 139-45 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 08:53 AM “Don’t be stupid,” Lyra said. “I can’t sit in here and watch them give him poison!” “Come somewhere else, then.” “You’re a coward, Pan.” “Certainly I am. May I ask what you intend to do? Are you going to leap out and snatch the glass from his trembling fingers? What did you have in mind?” “I didn’t have anything in mind, and well you know it,” she snapped quietly. “But now I’ve seen what the Master did, I haven’t got any choice. You’re supposed to know about conscience, aren’t you? How can I just go and sit in the library or somewhere and twiddle my thumbs, knowing what’s going to happen? I don’t intend to do that, I promise you.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 150-51 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 08:54 AM The two of them sat in silence for a while, Lyra uncomfortable on the hard floor of the wardrobe and Pantalaimon self-righteously twitching his temporary antennae on one of the robes. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 202-4 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 08:57 AM She saw him fully, and marveled at the contrast he made with the plump Butler, the stooped and languid Scholars. Lord Asriel was a tall man with powerful shoulders, a fierce dark face, and eyes that seemed to flash and glitter with savage laughter. It was a face to be dominated by, or to fight: never a face to patronize or pity. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 258 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 09:01 AM Lyra couldn’t see the door, but she heard an intake of breath as the first man came in. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 272-74 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 09:03 AM They might even have felt like a family if she knew what a family was, though if she did, she’d have been more likely to feel that about the College servants. The Scholars had more important things to do than attend to the affections of a half-wild, half-civilized girl, left among them by chance. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 275-77 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 09:04 AM Poppy was always served after a feast: it clarified the mind and stimulated the tongue, and made for rich conversation. It was traditional for the Master to cook it himself. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 286-87 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 09:05 AM Lord Asriel’s presence is required early tomorrow morning in White Hall, and a train is waiting with steam up ready to carry him to London as soon as we have finished our conversation here; ========== My Clippings - Highlight Loc. 1615-20 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 09:28 AM Underlying your questions is cultural worship of the wild and wilderness. We look to nature for that which stands apart from us, you know, pristine and unaffected, and has that autonomy. And that is certainly a wonderful part of nature, but the part that is the product of our presence, that is the largest force in evolution right now. And the great winners in evolution, if we have to cast it in those terms, are the species that have learned to take advantage of our presence. There are, you know, fifty million dogs in this country and ten thousand wolves; the wolf if the ancestor of the dog. There’s a glamour we attach to the wolf because of that, but in evolutionary terms, it’s the dog who came up with the more effective strategy ========== My Clippings - Note Loc. 1620 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 09:28 AM Michael Pollan on domestication and evolution ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 460-62 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 09:49 AM Barnard and Stokes were two—how shall I put it—renegade theologians who postulated the existence of numerous other worlds like this one, neither heaven nor hell, but material and sinful. They are there, close by, but invisible and unreachable. The Holy Church naturally disapproved of this abominable heresy, and Barnard and Stokes were silenced. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 470-72 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 09:50 AM Lyra has a part to play in all this, and a major one. The irony is that she must do it all without realizing what she’s doing. She can be helped, though, and if my plan with the Tokay had succeeded, she would have been safe for a little longer. I would have liked to spare her a journey to the North. I wish above all things that I were able to explain it to her...” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 482-83 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 09:51 AM “That’s the duty of the old,” said the Librarian, “to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 507-12 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 09:54 AM In many ways Lyra was a barbarian. What she liked best was clambering over the College roofs with Roger, the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war. Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child’s life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming? ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 516-18 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 11:42 AM There were twenty-four colleges, which allowed for endless permutations of alliance and betrayal. But the enmity between the colleges was forgotten in a moment when the town children attacked a colleger: then all the collegers banded together and went into battle against the townies.This rivalry was hundreds of years old, and very deep and satisfying. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 530-34 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 11:43 AM That was Lyra’s world and her delight. She was a coarse and greedy little savage, for the most part. But she always had a dim sense that it wasn’t her whole world; that part of her also belonged in the grandeur and ritual of Jordan College; and that somewhere in her life there was a connection with the high world of politics represented by Lord Asriel. All she did with that knowledge was to give herself airs and lord it over the other urchins. It had never occurred to her to find out more. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 620-24 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 11:48 AM He’s lost already. He was lost the moment his slow-witted dæmon hopped onto the monkey’s hand. He follows the beautiful young lady and the golden monkey down Denmark Street and along to Hangman’s Wharf, and down King George’s Steps to a little green door in the side of a tall warehouse. She knocks, the door is opened, they go in, the door is closed. Tony will never come out—at least, by that entrance; and he’ll never see his mother again. She, poor drunken thing, will think he’s run away, and when she remembers him, she’ll think it was her fault, and sob her sorry heart out. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 658-60 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 11:50 AM But one thing on which everyone agreed was the name of these invisible kidnappers. They had to have a name, or not be referred to at all, and talking about them—especially if you were safe and snug at home, or in Jordan College—was delicious. And the name that seemed to settle on them, without anyone’s knowing why, was the Gobblers. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 663-65 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 11:50 AM “Let’s play kids and Gobblers!” So said Lyra to Roger, one rainy afternoon when they were alone in the dusty attics. He was her devoted slave by this time; he would have followed her to the ends of the earth. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Note on Page 44 | Loc. 665 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 11:51 AM Ironic / foreshadowing ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 679 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 11:52 AM inveigled ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 46 | Loc. 696-97 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 11:54 AM Tunnels, shafts, vaults, cellars, staircases had so hollowed out the earth below Jordan and for several hundred yards around it that there was almost as much air below ground as above; Jordan College stood on a sort of froth of stone. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1418-25 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:07 PM Lorenzo of Valla was one of the polymaths of the Italian Renaissance. A controversialist, crusty, critical, arrogant, a ped­ant, he was attacked by his contemporaries for sacrilege, impu­dence, temerity and presumption, among other imperfections. After he concluded that the Apostles' Creed could not on grammatical grounds have actually been written by the Twelve Apostles, the Inquisition declared him a heretic, and only the intervention of his patron, Alfonso, King of Naples, prevented his immolation. Undeterred, in 1440, he published a treatise demon­strating that the Donation of Constantine is a crude forgery. The language in which it was written was to fourth century court Latin as Cockney was to the King's English. Because of Lorenzo of Valla, the Roman Catholic Church no longer presses its claim to rule European nations because of the Donation of Constantine. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1458-61 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:13 PM It's telling that emotions can run so high on a matter about which we really know so little. This is especially true of the more recent flurry of alien abduction reports. After all, if true, either hypothesis - invasion by sexually manipulative extraterrestrials or an epidemic of hallucinations - teaches us something we certainly ought to know about. Maybe the reason for strong feelings is that both alternatives have such unpleasant implications. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1518-20 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:18 PM In the good old days before the alien abduction paradigm, people taken aboard UFOs were offered, so they reported, edifying lectures on the dangers of nuclear war. Nowadays, when such instruction is given, the extraterrestrials seem fixated on environmental degradation and AIDS. How is it, I ask myself, that UFO occupants are so bound to fashionable or urgent concerns on this planet? ========== My Clippings - Highlight Loc. 1824-25 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:28 PM every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. ========== My Clippings - Note Loc. 1825 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:28 PM Carl Sagan on science 1/2 ========== My Clippings - Highlight Loc. 1821-23 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:29 PM Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it's like democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action. ========== My Clippings - Highlight Loc. 1821-23 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:30 PM Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it's like democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action. ========== My Clippings - Note Loc. 1823 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:30 PM Carl Sagan on science 2/2 ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 1665-68 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:36 PM It makes good evolutionary sense for children to have fantasies of scary monsters. In a world stalked by lions and hyenas, such fantasies help prevent defenceless toddlers from wandering too far from their guardians. How can this safety machinery be effective for a vigorous, curious young animal unless it delivers industrial strength terror? Those who are not afraid of monsters tend not to leave descendants. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 1733-36 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:40 PM When St Paul complained (Ephesians vi, 12) about wickedness in high places, he was referring not to government corruption, but to demons, who lived in high places: For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the dark­ness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 118 | Loc. 1801-4 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:49 PM Then there was a bonus to the members of the tribunal for each witch burned. The convicted witch's remaining property, if any, was divided between Church and State. As this legally and morally sanctioned mass murder and theft became institutionalized, as a vast bureaucracy arose to serve it, attention was turned from poor hags and crones to the middle class and well-to-do of both sexes. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 118 | Loc. 1808-11 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:50 PM The Bible had counselled, ‘Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.’ Legions of women were burned to death.* And the most horren­dous tortures were routinely applied to every defendant, young or old, after the instruments of torture were first blessed by the priests. Innocent himself died in 1492, following unsuccessful attempts to keep him alive by transfusion (which resulted in the deaths of three boys) and by suckling at the breast of a nursing mother. He was mourned by his mistress and their children. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1850-55 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 12:57 PM In the sixteenth century the scholar William Tyndale had the temerity to contemplate translating the New Testament into English. But if people could actually read the Bible in their own language instead of arcane Latin, they could form their own, independent religious views. They might conceive of their own private unintermediated line to God. This was a challenge to the job security of Roman Catholic priests. When Tyndale tried to publish his translation, he was hounded and pursued all over Europe. Eventually he was captured, garrotted, and then, for good measure, burned at the stake. His copies of the New Testament (which a century later became the basis of the exquisite King James translation) were then hunted down house-to-house by armed posses - Christians piously defending Christianity by preventing other Christians from knowing the words of Christ. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 1989-92 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 01:59 PM Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth, we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it's incubi and succubi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial beings are plausible, then that's where our hypnogogic imagery tends. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 2443-44 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 04:45 PM iatrogenic ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2516-19 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 04:50 PM Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experi­ment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 2666-68 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 05:03 PM I'm frequently asked, 'Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?' I give the standard arguments - there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 53 | Loc. 806-9 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 05:17 PM No one worried about a child gone missing for a few hours, certainly not a gyptian: in the tight-knit gyptian boat world, all children were precious and extravagantly loved, and a mother knew that if a child was out of sight, it wouldn’t be far from someone else’s who would protect it instinctively. But here was Ma Costa, a queen among the gyptians, in a terror for a missing child. What was going on? ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1135-37 | Added on Friday, July 27, 2012, 05:37 PM Pantalaimon watched with powerful curiosity until Mrs. Coulter looked at him, and he knew what she meant and turned away, averting his eyes modestly from these feminine mysteries as the golden monkey was doing. He had never had to look away from Lyra before. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1288-89 | Added on Saturday, July 28, 2012, 11:43 AM “My dear, she is the Oblation Board. It’s entirely her own project—” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1299-1302 | Added on Saturday, July 28, 2012, 11:44 AM General Oblation Board. Very old idea, as a matter of fact. In the Middle Ages, parents would give their children to the church to be monks or nuns. And the unfortunate brats were known as oblates. Means a sacrifice, an offering, something of that sort. So the same idea was taken up when they were looking into the Dust business....As our little friend probably knows. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1421-25 | Added on Saturday, July 28, 2012, 12:05 PM Pantalaimon became a wildcat and scanned the dark all around with his night-piercing eyes. Every so often he’d stop, bristling, and she would turn aside from the entrance she’d been about to go down. The night was full of noises: bursts of drunken laughter, two raucous voices raised in song, the clatter and whine of some badly oiled machine in a basement. Lyra walked delicately through it all, her senses magnified and mingled with Pantalaimon’s, keeping to the shadows and the narrow alleys. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1743-45 | Added on Saturday, July 28, 2012, 05:08 PM I don’t suppose the Costas have set foot anywhere since then without being reminded of it. You better leave a guard on your boat, Tony, people say. Fierce little girls round here! Oh, that story went all over the fens, child. But we en’t going to punish you for it. No, no! Ease your mind.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 1777-79 | Added on Saturday, July 28, 2012, 08:03 PM “But Lord Asriel wouldn’t stand for that. He had a hatred of priors and monks and nuns, and being a high-handed man he just rode in one day and carried you off. Not to look after himself, nor to give to the gyptians; he took you to Jordan College, and dared the law to undo it. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1218-20 | Added on Monday, July 30, 2012, 12:16 PM It was a wonderful machine: Ten grand worth of gimmicks and high - priced Special Effects. The rear - windows leaped up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond. The white canvas top ran up and down like a roller - coaster. The dashboard was full of esoteric lights dials meters that I would never understand - but there was no doubt in my mind that I was into a superior machine. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1290-94 | Added on Monday, July 30, 2012, 12:24 PM We be attending the conference under false pretenses and from the start, with a crowd that was convened for d purpose of putting people like us in jail. We were the Menace - not in disguise, but stone - obvious drug abusers, with a flagrantly cranked - up act that we intended to push all the way to the limit . . . not to prove any final, sociological point, and not even as a conscious mockery: It was mainly a matter of life - style, a sense of obligation and even duty. If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top - level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 1556-57 | Added on Monday, July 30, 2012, 12:46 PM His performance had given me a bad jolt. For a moment I thought his mind had snapped-that he actually believed he was being attacked by invisible enemies. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 1638-41 | Added on Monday, July 30, 2012, 05:29 PM But the best technicians available to the National DAs' convention in Vegas apparently couldn't handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to address his troops during the Seige of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phase with the speaker's ges tures. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1852-56 | Added on Tuesday, July 31, 2012, 08:39 AM The big hotels and casinos pay a lot of muscle to make sure high rollers don't have even momentary hassles with "undesirables." Security in a place like Caesar's Palace is super tense and strict. Probably a third of the people on the floor at given time are either shills or watchdogs. Public drunks known pickpockets are dealt with instantly - hustled out parking lot by Secret Service type thugs and given a impersonal lecture about the cost of dental work and of trying to make a living with two broken erms. The ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1852-56 | Added on Tuesday, July 31, 2012, 08:39 AM The big hotels and casinos pay a lot of muscle to make sure high rollers don't have even momentary hassles with "undesirables." Security in a place like Caesar's Palace is super tense and strict. Probably a third of the people on the floor at given time are either shills or watchdogs. Public drunks known pickpockets are dealt with instantly - hustled out parking lot by Secret Service type thugs and given a impersonal lecture about the cost of dental work and of trying to make a living with two broken erms. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1900-1901 | Added on Tuesday, July 31, 2012, 08:43 AM About ten minutes later, when she brought the hamburg ers, I saw my attorney hand her a napkin with something printed on it. He did it very casually, with no expression at all on his face. But I knew, from the vibes, that our peace was about to be shattered. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2117-21 | Added on Tuesday, July 31, 2012, 08:58 AM The only hope now, I felt, was the possibility that we'd gone to such excess, with our gig, that nobody in a position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it. Particularily not since we'd signed in with the Police Conference. When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don't waste any time with cheap shucks and misde minors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies. The mentality of Las Vegas is so grossly atavistic that a really massive crime often slips by unrecognized. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 2174-83 | Added on Tuesday, July 31, 2012, 09:05 AM But what is sane? Especially here in "our own country"-in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "con sciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him . . . but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badiy for himself, because he took too many oth ers down with him. Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding fot three bucks a hit. But their failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 23 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 61 | Added on Thursday, August 02, 2012, 06:46 PM Saying things are terrible does not automatically establish the reliability of your account. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 23 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 73-79 | Added on Thursday, August 02, 2012, 06:47 PM First, if, God willing, you have studied some history while you were here, you will have helped guard against the most empty-headed of these: the disposition to suppose that everything is happening for the first time – that every human foible and ethical lapse you see is not just the first, but also the worst. This is uneducated and ahistorical. In the great preacher wars and revelations now going on, for instance, some of us may be meeting Jim and Tammy Baker for the first time. But history isn’t. They and many of the other principals in the drama are well known. Will Rogers and H. L. Mencken knew them. So did Mark Twain. So did Edward Gibbon and Geoffrey Chaucer and Lucretius, all of whom had plenty to say about what they regarded as religious flummery. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 23 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 85-89 | Added on Thursday, August 02, 2012, 06:48 PM History helps guard against moral smugness too, or it should, anyway. For you are obliged, if you are honest, to acknowledge at least some reflection or resonance of the fallen ones in your own nature. Such humility is a conspicuously missing aspect of our contemporary culture, however. What might be a becoming spell of moral introspection, tends instead to become an orgy of bashing and blaming. I observe that now, as always in this country, when people speak of a terrible, all embracing decline in ethical standards, they are invariably speaking of the decline in their next door neighbor’s standards, not their own. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 23 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 166-69 | Added on Thursday, August 02, 2012, 07:06 PM You fix this thing, you’re the next greatest generation, people. You do this—and I believe you can—you win this war on terror, and Tom Brokaw’s kissing your ass from here to Tikrit, let me tell ya. And even if you don’t, you’re not gonna have much trouble surpassing my generation. If you end up getting your picture taken next to a naked guy pile of enemy prisoners and don’t give the thumbs up you’ve outdid us. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 23 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 179-80 | Added on Thursday, August 02, 2012, 07:07 PM As a freshman I was quite a catch. Less than five feet tall, yet my head is the same size it is now. Didn’t even really look like a head, it looked more like a container for a head. I looked like a Peanuts character. Peanuts characters had terrible acne. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 23 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 193-95 | Added on Thursday, August 02, 2012, 07:08 PM But the unfortunate, yet truly exciting thing about your life, is that there is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective. The paths are infinite and the results uncertain. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, May. 23 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 197-99 | Added on Thursday, August 02, 2012, 07:09 PM Success is defined in myriad ways, and you will find it, and people will no longer be grading you, but it will come from your own internal sense of decency which I imagine, after going through the program here, is quite strong…although I’m sure downloading illegal files…but, nah, that’s a different story. ========== TLotR - 01.0 - The Fellowship of the Ring - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Bookmark on Page 40 | Loc. 611 | Added on Thursday, August 02, 2012, 10:10 PM ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 2451-54 | Added on Thursday, August 02, 2012, 11:45 PM Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits- a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wine to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage. ========== Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (Hunter S. Thompson) - Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2503-4 | Added on Thursday, August 02, 2012, 11:48 PM I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger . . . a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1822-25 | Added on Friday, August 03, 2012, 07:23 PM “You got three hands you can control,” Farder Coram explained, “and you use them to ask a question. By pointing to three symbols you can ask any question you can imagine, because you’ve got so many levels of each one. Once you got your question framed, the other needle swings round and points to more symbols that give you the answer.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1846-47 | Added on Friday, August 03, 2012, 07:25 PM I see the Master as a man having terrible choices to make; whatever he chooses will do harm, but maybe if he does the right thing, a little less harm will come about than if he chooses wrong. God preserve me from having to make that sort of choice. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1870-72 | Added on Friday, August 03, 2012, 07:37 PM But, being Lyra, she didn’t fret about it for long, for there was the fen town to explore and many gyptian children to amaze. Before the three days were up she was an expert with a punt (in her eyes, at least) and she’d gathered a gang of urchins about her with tales of her mighty father, so unjustly made captive. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1896-1901 | Added on Friday, August 03, 2012, 07:40 PM “Swords? Great God, girl, you dreaming?” Ma Costa said. “Mr. Coulter had a gun, and Lord Asriel knocked it out his hand and struck him down with one blow. Then there was two shots. I wonder you don’t remember; you ought to, little as you were. The first shot was Edward Coulter, who reached his gun and fired, and the second was Lord Asriel, who tore it out his grasp a second time and turned it on him. Shot him right between the eyes and dashed his brains out. Then he says cool as paint, ‘Come out, Mrs. Costa, and bring the baby,’ because you were setting up such a howl, you and that dæmon both; and he took you up and dandled you and sat you on his shoulders, walking up and down in high good humor with the dead man at his feet, and called for wine and bade me swab the floor.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 1928-30 | Added on Friday, August 03, 2012, 07:42 PM We’re a going to charter a ship and sail north, and find them kids and set ’em free. From what we know, there might be some fighting to do. It won’t be the first time, nor it won’t be the last, but we never had to fight yet with people who kidnap children, and we shall have to be uncommon cunning. But we en’t going to come back without our kids. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 1979-84 | Added on Friday, August 03, 2012, 07:46 PM “Nothing will hold my hand, Margaret, save only judgment. If I stay my hand in the North, it will only be to strike the harder in the South. To strike a day too soon is as bad as striking a hundred miles off. To be sure, there’s a warm passion behind what you say. But if you give in to that passion, friends, you’re a doing what I always warned you agin: you’re a placing the satisfaction of your own feelings above the work you have to do. Our work here is first rescue, then punishment. It en’t gratification for upset feelings. Our feelings don’t matter. If we rescue the kids but we can’t punish the Gobblers, we’ve done the main task. But if we aim to punish the Gobblers first and by doing so lose the chance of rescuing the kids, we’ve failed. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 1984-87 | Added on Friday, August 03, 2012, 07:46 PM “But be assured of this, Margaret. When the time comes to punish, we shall strike such a blow as’ll make their hearts faint and fearful. We shall strike the strength out of ’em. We shall leave them ruined and wasted, broken and shattered, torn in a thousand pieces and scattered to the four winds. Don’t you worry that John Faa’s heart is too soft to strike a blow when the time comes. And the time will come under judgment. Not under passion. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 2040-42 | Added on Friday, August 03, 2012, 07:52 PM it was the grossest breach of etiquette imaginable to touch another person’s dæmon. Dæmons might touch each other, of course, or fight; but the prohibition against human-dæmon contact went so deep that even in battle no warrior would touch an enemy’s dæmon. It was utterly forbidden. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 2307-10 | Added on Saturday, August 04, 2012, 11:26 AM The witches have the power to separate theirselves from their dæmons a mighty sight further’n what we can. If need be, they can send their dæmons far abroad on the wind or the clouds, or down below the ocean. And this witch I found, she hadn’t been resting above an hour when her dæmon came a flying back, because he’d felt her fear and her injury, of course. And it’s my belief, though she never admitted to this, that the great red bird I shot was another witch’s dæmon, in pursuit. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 2315 | Added on Saturday, August 04, 2012, 11:27 AM They live in forests and on the tundra, not in a seaport among men and women. Their business is with the wild. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 2317-22 | Added on Saturday, August 04, 2012, 11:29 AM She wandered along the deck toward the bows, and soon made the acquaintance of an able seaman by flicking at him the pips she’d saved from the apple she’d eaten at breakfast. He was a stout and placid man, and when he’d sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends. He was called Jerry. Under his guidance she found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was very taken with this notion, and later on she folded the blankets on her bunk in a seamanlike way, and put her possessions in the closet in a seamanlike way, and used “stow” instead of “tidy” for the process of doing so. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 2452-53 | Added on Monday, August 06, 2012, 04:48 PM “They’re going to pretend to attack it, but they’re not really going to, because it’s too far away and they’d be too stretched out,” she said. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 163 | Loc. 2491-92 | Added on Monday, August 06, 2012, 04:51 PM “He knew the answer about the Tartars before I did,” Lyra told Farder Coram. “The alethiometer told me, but I never said. It was the crucible.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 163 | Loc. 2497-2502 | Added on Monday, August 06, 2012, 06:17 PM Then Farder Coram took Lyra to the best outfitter’s in town and bought her some proper cold-weather clothing. They bought a parka made of reindeer skin, because reindeer hair is hollow and insulates well; and the hood was lined with wolverine fur, because that sheds the ice that forms when you breathe. They bought underclothing and boot liners of reindeer calf skin, and silk gloves to go inside big fur mittens. The boots and mittens were made of skin from the reindeer’s forelegs, because that is extra tough, and the boots were soled with the skin of the bearded seal, which is as tough as walrus hide, but lighter. Finally they bought a waterproof cape that enveloped her completely, made of semitransparent seal intestine. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2519-23 | Added on Monday, August 06, 2012, 06:20 PM A pitted alley beside it led to a sheet-metal gate into a rear yard, where a lean-to shed stood crazily over a floor of frozen mud. Dim yellow light through the rear window of the bar showed a vast pale form crouching upright and gnawing at a haunch of meat which it held in both hands. Lyra had an impression of bloodstained muzzle and face, small malevolent black eyes, and an immensity of dirty matted yellowish fur. As it gnawed, hideous growling, crunching, sucking noises came from it. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 2557-63 | Added on Tuesday, August 07, 2012, 07:34 AM “I know the people you are seeking, the child cutters,” the bear said. “They left town the day before yesterday to go north with more children. No one will tell you about them; they pretend not to see, because the child cutters bring money and business. Now, I don’t like the child cutters, so I shall answer you politely. I stay here and drink spirits because the men here took my armor away, and without that, I can hunt seals but I can’t go to war; and I am an armored bear; war is the sea I swim in and the air I breathe. The men of this town gave me spirits and let me drink till I was asleep, and then they took my armor away from me. If I knew where they keep it, I would tear down the town to get it back. If you want my service, the price is this: get me back my armor. Do that, and I shall serve you in your campaign, either until I am dead or until you have a victory. The price is my armor. I want it back, and then I shall never need spirits again.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 170 | Loc. 2607 | Added on Tuesday, August 07, 2012, 07:37 AM Witches and their dæmons felt no cold, but they were aware that other humans did. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 2623-27 | Added on Tuesday, August 07, 2012, 07:38 AM “They have put up buildings of metal and concrete, and some underground chambers. They burn coal spirit, which they bring in at great expense. We don’t know what they do, but there is an air of hatred and fear over the place and for miles around. Witches can see these things where other humans can’t. Animals keep away too. No birds fly there; lemmings and foxes have fled. Hence the name Bolvangar: the fields of evil. They don’t call it that. They call it ‘the station.’ But to everyone else it is Bolvangar.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2639-42 | Added on Tuesday, August 07, 2012, 07:43 AM “Yes,” he said. “Witches have known of the other worlds for thousands of years. You can see them sometimes in the Northern Lights. They aren’t part of this universe at all; even the furthest stars are part of this universe, but the lights show us a different universe entirely. Not further away, but interpenetrating with this one. Here, on this deck, millions of other universes exist, unaware of one another....” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2700-2703 | Added on Tuesday, August 07, 2012, 07:49 AM A bridge between two worlds...This was far more splendid than anything she could have hoped for! And only her great father could have conceived it. As soon as they had rescued the children, she would go to Svalbard with the bear and take Lord Asriel the alethiometer, and use it to help set him free; and they’d build the bridge together, and be the first across.... ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2742-46 | Added on Friday, August 10, 2012, 11:35 PM She knew what he was doing. Dæmons could move no more than a few yards from their humans, and if she stood by the fence and he remained a bird, he wouldn’t get near the bear; so he was going to pull. She felt angry and miserable. His badger claws dug into the earth and he walked forward. It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your dæmon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. And she knew it was the same for him. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Bookmark on Page 184 | Loc. 2807 | Added on Friday, August 10, 2012, 11:44 PM ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 183 | Loc. 2806-15 | Added on Friday, August 10, 2012, 11:45 PM His dæmon, a husky dog, darted at the bear’s throat, but Iorek Byrnison took no more notice of him than he would of a fly, and dragging the sentry to him with one vast paw, he bent and enclosed his head in his jaws. Lyra could see exactly what would happen next: he’d crush the man’s skull like an egg, and there would follow a bloody fight, more deaths, and more delay; and they would never get free, with or without the bear. Without even thinking, she darted forward and put her hand on the one vulnerable spot in the bear’s armor, the gap that appeared between the helmet and the great plate over his shoulders when he bent his head, where she could see the yellow-white fur dimly between the rusty edges of metal. She dug her fingers in, and Pantalaimon instantly flew to the same spot and became a wildcat, crouched to defend her; but Iorek Byrnison was still, and the riflemen held their fire. “Iorek!” she said in a fierce undertone. “Listen! You owe me a debt, right. Well, now you can repay it. Do as I ask. Don’t fight these men. Just turn around and walk away with me. We want you, Iorek, you can’t stay here. Just come down to the harbor with me and don’t even look back. Farder Coram and Lord Faa, let them do the talking, they’ll make it all right. Leave go this man and come away with me....” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2965-67 | Added on Saturday, August 11, 2012, 04:31 PM “I don’t think he’s dead,” said Lyra, but she was far from sure. The alethiometer had indicated something uncanny and unnatural, which was alarming; but who was she? Lord Asriel’s daughter. And who was under her command? A mighty bear. How could she possibly show any fear? ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3011-12 | Added on Saturday, August 11, 2012, 04:33 PM She lifted the lantern high and took a step into the shed, and then she saw what it was that the Oblation Board was doing, and what was the nature of the sacrifice the children were having to make. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3012-15 | Added on Saturday, August 11, 2012, 04:34 PM The little boy was huddled against the wood drying rack where hung row upon row of gutted fish, all as stiff as boards. He was clutching a piece of fish to him as Lyra was clutching Pantalaimon, with her left hand, hard, against her heart; but that was all he had, a piece of dried fish; because he had no dæmon at all. The Gobblers had cut it away. That was intercision, and this was a severed child. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3099-3100 | Added on Saturday, August 11, 2012, 04:38 PM Pantalaimon was a snarling snow leopard, just like Lord Asriel’s dæmon, but she didn’t see that; all she saw was right and wrong. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 3354-55 | Added on Saturday, August 11, 2012, 05:16 PM She decided to play slow and dim-witted and reluctant, and dragged her feet as she stepped over the high threshold into the building. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 3373-75 | Added on Saturday, August 11, 2012, 05:18 PM Lyra had been told that she was small for her age, whatever that meant. It had never affected her sense of her own importance, but she realized that she could use the fact now to make Lizzie shy and nervous and insignificant, and shrank a little as she went into the room. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 3499-3501 | Added on Saturday, August 11, 2012, 06:02 PM Being a practiced liar doesn’t mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it’s that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 241 | Loc. 3694-96 | Added on Saturday, August 11, 2012, 06:14 PM Be brave, child. The gyptians are coming as fast as they can. I must help these poor dæmons to find their people....” He came closer and said quietly, “But they’ll never be one again. They’re sundered forever. This is the most wicked thing I have ever seen....Leave the footprints you’ve made; I’ll cover them up. Hurry now....” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 248 | Loc. 3790-91 | Added on Saturday, August 11, 2012, 09:37 PM It was quite common for struggles between children to be settled by their dæmons in this way, with one accepting the dominance of the other. Their humans accepted the outcome without resentment, on the whole, so Lyra knew that Annie would do as she asked. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 251 | Loc. 3847-50 | Added on Saturday, August 11, 2012, 09:42 PM “But simply tearing was the only option for some time,” said the main speaker, “however distressing that was to the adult operators. If you remember, we had to discharge quite a number for reasons of stress-related anxiety. But the first big breakthrough was the use of anesthesia combined with the Maystadt anbaric scalpel. We were able to reduce death from operative shock to below five percent.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 253 | Loc. 3871-75 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:02 AM “Her attitude worries me....” “Not philosophical, you mean?” “Exactly. A personal interest. I don’t like to use the word, but it’s almost ghoulish.” “That’s a bit strong.” “But do you remember the first experiments, when she was so keen to see them pulled apart—” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 259 | Loc. 3965-68 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:06 AM And now that she was doing something difficult and familiar and never quite predictable, namely lying, she felt a sort of mastery again, the same sense of complexity and control that the alethiometer gave her. She had to be careful not to say anything obviously impossible; she had to be vague in some places and invent plausible details in others; she had to be an artist, in short. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 4169-71 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:17 AM Lyra encouraged, bullied, hit, half-carried, swore at, pushed, dragged, lifted tenderly, wherever it was needed, and Pantalaimon (by the state of each child’s dæmon) told her what was needed in each case. I’ll get them there, she kept saying to herself. I come here to get ’em and I’ll bloody get ’em. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 278 | Loc. 4258-59 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:23 AM “The gyptians have laid waste to Bolvangar,” said Serafina Pekkala. “They have killed twenty-two guards and nine of the staff, and they’ve set light to every part of the buildings that still stood. They are going to destroy it completely.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 281 | Loc. 4301-5 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:26 AM “Mr. Scoresby,” said the witch, “I wish I could answer your question. All I can say is that all of us, humans, witches, bears, are engaged in a war already, although not all of us know it. Whether you find danger on Svalbard or whether you fly off unharmed, you are a recruit, under arms, a soldier.” “Well, that seems kinda precipitate. Seems to me a man should have a choice whether to take up arms or not.” “We have no more choice in that than in whether or not to be born.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 282 | Loc. 4312-14 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:26 AM Nor do we have any notion of honor, as bears do, for instance. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us... inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 282 | Loc. 4320 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:28 AM A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 286 | Loc. 4381-83 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:32 AM “We feel cold, but we don’t mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn’t feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the Aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It’s worth being cold for that.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 287 | Loc. 4390-93 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:33 AM men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 290 | Loc. 4439-41 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:39 AM “When bears act like people, perhaps they can be tricked,” said Serafina Pekkala. “When bears act like bears, perhaps they can’t. No bear would normally drink spirits. Iorek Byrnison drank to forget the shame of exile, and it was only that which let the Trollesund people trick him.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 290 | Loc. 4447 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 12:40 AM “Witches have never worried about Dust. All I can tell you is that where there are priests, there is fear of Dust. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 304 | Loc. 4648-53 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 01:10 PM He’s done what they both want. He’s kept Lord Asriel isolated, to please Mrs. Coulter; and he’s let Lord Asriel have all the equipment he wants, to please him. Can’t last, this equilibrium. Unstable. Pleasing both sides. Eh? The wave function of this situation is going to collapse quite soon. I have it on good authority.” “Really?” said Lyra, her mind elsewhere, furiously thinking about what he’d just said. “Yes. My dæmon’s tongue can taste probability, you know.” “Yeah. Mine too. When do they feed us, Professor?” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 306 | Loc. 4686-87 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 01:37 PM Lyra was sure her interpretation of things was right: Iofur Raknison was introducing so many new ways that none of the bears was certain yet how to behave, and she could exploit this uncertainty in order to get to Iofur. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 319 | Loc. 4883-87 | Added on Sunday, August 12, 2012, 02:11 PM Lyra looked at the two of them, so utterly different: Iofur so glossy and powerful, immense in his strength and health, splendidly armored, proud and kinglike; and Iorek smaller, though she had never thought he would look small, and poorly equipped, his armor rusty and dented. But his armor was his soul. He had made it and it fitted him. They were one. Iofur was not content with his armor; he wanted another soul as well. He was restless while Iorek was still. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 339 | Loc. 5192-93 | Added on Thursday, August 16, 2012, 10:18 AM The Magisterium decided that Dust was the physical evidence for original sin. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 345 | Loc. 5284-87 | Added on Thursday, August 16, 2012, 10:31 AM If light can cross the barrier between the universes, if Dust can, if we can see that city, then we can build a bridge and cross. It needs a phenomenal burst of energy. But I can do it. Somewhere out there is the origin of all the Dust, all the death, the sin, the misery, the destructiveness in the world. Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it, Lyra. That’s original sin. And I’m going to destroy it. Death is going to die.” ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 347 | Loc. 5310-16 | Added on Thursday, August 16, 2012, 10:33 AM Now Lyra’s head was full of a roar, as if she were trying to stifle some knowledge from her own consciousness. She had got out of bed, and was reaching for her clothes, and then she suddenly collapsed, and a fierce cry of despair enveloped her. She was uttering it, but it was bigger than she was; it felt as if the despair were uttering her. For she remembered his words: the energy that links body and dæmon is immensely powerful; and to bridge the gap between worlds needed a phenomenal burst of energy.... She had just realized what she’d done. She had struggled all this way to bring something to Lord Asriel, thinking she knew what he wanted; and it wasn’t the alethiometer at all. What he wanted was a child. ========== HDM - 01.0 - The Golden Compass - His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - Highlight on Page 365 | Loc. 5583-84 | Added on Thursday, August 16, 2012, 10:52 AM So Lyra and her dæmon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2719-20 | Added on Thursday, August 16, 2012, 08:32 PM Since Einstein's general relativ­ity, a truism of cosmology is that space-time is bent or curved through a higher physical dimension. Kaluza-Klein theory posits an eleven-dimensional universe. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2728-31 | Added on Thursday, August 16, 2012, 08:34 PM What Mack really means when he talks about beings from other dimensions is that, despite his patients' occasional descriptions of their experiences as dreams and hallucinations, he hasn't the foggiest notion of what they are. But, tellingly, when he tries to describe them, he reaches for physics and mathematics. He wants it both ways - the language and credibility of science, but without being bound by its method and rules. He seems not to realize that the credibility is a consequence of the method. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2732-35 | Added on Thursday, August 16, 2012, 08:34 PM The main challenge posed by Mack's cases is the old one of how to teach critical thinking more broadly and more deeply in a society - conceivably even including Harvard professors of psychiatry - awash in gullibility. The idea that critical thinking is the latest western fad is silly. If you're buying a used car in Singapore or Bangkok, or a used chariot in ancient Susa or Rome, the same precautions will be useful as in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2735-42 | Added on Thursday, August 16, 2012, 08:40 PM When you buy a used car, you might very much want to believe what the salesman is saying: 'So much car for so little money!' And anyway, it takes work to be sceptical; you have to know something about cars, and it's unpleasant to make the salesman angry at you. Despite all that, though, you recognize that the salesman might have a motive to shade the truth, and you've heard of other people in similar situations being taken. So you kick the tyres, look under the hood, go for a test drive, ask searching questions. You might even bring along a mechanically inclined friend. You know that some scepticism is required and you understand why. There is usually at least a small degree of hostile confrontation involved in the purchase of a used car and nobody claims it's an especially cheering experience. But if you don't exercise some minimal scepticism, if you have an absolutely untrammelled gullibility, there's a price you'll have to pay later. Then you'll wish you had made a small investment of scepticism early on. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 2788-90 | Added on Thursday, August 16, 2012, 08:44 PM Keeping an open mind is a virtue - but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out. Of course we must be willing to change our minds when warranted by new evidence. But the evidence must be strong. Not all claims to knowledge have equal merit. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 184 | Loc. 2817-23 | Added on Monday, August 20, 2012, 10:50 PM The article was also widely misunderstood. A television talk-show host, Geraldo Rivera, held up a copy of Parade and announced I thought we were being visited. A Washington Post video cassette reviewer quoted me as saying there's an abduction every few seconds, missing the ironical tone and the following sentence ('It's surprising more of the neighbours haven't noticed'). My description (Chapter 6) of on rare occasions seem­ing to hear the voices of my dead parents - what I described as 'a lucid recollection' - were keynoted by Raymond Moody, in the New Age Journal and in the Introduction of his book Reunions, as evidence that we 'survive' death. Dr Moody has spent his life trying to find evidence of life after death. If my testimony is worth quoting, it seems clear he hasn't found much. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2970-73 | Added on Tuesday, August 28, 2012, 03:19 PM The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences as one would'. For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2973-75 | Added on Tuesday, August 28, 2012, 03:19 PM Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding. Francis Bacon, Novum Organon (1620) ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 121 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:17 AM Mediæval history cannot be understood if monasticism is ignored, and at the base of all Western monasticism lies the Rule of St. Benedict. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 133-35 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:18 AM Poverty, chastity, and obedience the modern world may understand—with an effort. But stability—the monk’s vow to continue in the monastery of his choice unto his life’s end—is indeed alien to us. Stabilitas is virtually enclosure, a downright terrifying idea. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 162-66 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:25 AM “To the monk heaven was next door; he formed no plans, he had no cares; the ravens of his father Benedict were ever at his side. He ‘went forth’ in his youth ‘to his work and to his labour’ until the evening of life; if he lived a day longer, he did a day’s work more. Whether he lived many days or few, he laboured on to the end of them. He had no wish to see further in advance of his journey than where he was to make his next stage. He ploughed and sowed, he prayed, he meditated, he studied, he wrote, he taught, and then he died and went to heaven.” ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 171-75 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:25 AM The reader is referred to The Cambridge Medieval History * for a brief but comprehensive survey of early monasticism, together with a suggestive explanation of how and why St. Benedict became the father of Western monasticism; and for a bibliography † that would prove a useful guide to a comprehensive study of the life of St. Benedict and of the circumstances in which he compiled the holy rule. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 214-17 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:38 AM IV. WHAT ARE THE INSTRUMENTS OF GOOD WORKS - - - - 15 V. CONCERNING OBEDIENCE - - 19 VI. CONCERNING SILENCE - - - 21 VII. CONCERNING HUMILITY - - 22 ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 235-36 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:39 AM XXVI. CONCERNING THOSE WHO WITHOUT THE ORDERS OF THE ABBOT CONSORT WITH THE EXCOMMUNICATE - - 47 ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 244-45 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:39 AM XXXIII. WHETHER MONKS OUGHT TO HAVE ANYTHING OF THEIR OWN - - 53 XXXIV. WHETHER ALL OUGHT TO RECEIVE NECESSARIES EQUALLY - - - 54 ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 270 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:40 AM LIX. CONCERNING NOBLEMEN’S SONS AND POOR MEN’S SONS WHO ARE OFFERED - 86 ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 271-72 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:40 AM LX. CONCERNING PRIESTS WHO BY CHANCE SHALL WISH TO LIVE IN THE MONASTERY 87 ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 277-78 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:41 AM LXVI. CONCERNING THE PORTER OF THE MONASTERY - - - - 99 ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 289-90 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:42 AM To this end I now address a word of exhortation to thee, whosoever thou art, who, renouncing thine own will and taking up the bright and all-conquering weapons of obedience, dost enter upon the service of thy true king, Christ the Lord. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 309-11 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:45 AM “He who lives blamelessly and does justice; he who speaks truth from his heart; he who has kept his tongue from guile; he who has done his neighbour no evil and has accepted no slander against his neighbour”: ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 320-21 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:53 AM “I will not the death of a sinner, but that he may be converted and live.” ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 332 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:54 AM HERE BEGINNETH THE TEXT OF THE RULE ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 337 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:55 AM the solace that being one of many affords; ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 337-39 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:56 AM being well established for the lonely battle of the desert, beyond the fighting line of their brethren and already brave apart from the consolation of companionship, are competent to fight single-handed, God helping them, against the vices of flesh and mind. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 339-41 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:56 AM And the third kind of monks is that very disgraceful kind of the Sarabites, who have not been brought under discipline by any rule dictated by experience so as to become as gold refined by the heat of the furnace, but who, as soft as lead, while still by their works keeping faith with the world, are known by their tonsure to be lying to God. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 340-41 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:56 AM by their works keeping faith with the world, ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 339-41 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:57 AM And the third kind of monks is that very disgraceful kind of the Sarabites, who have not been brought under discipline by any rule dictated by experience so as to become as gold refined by the heat of the furnace, but who, as soft as lead, while still by their works keeping faith with the world, are known by their tonsure to be lying to God. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 342-43 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:57 AM enclosed not in the Lord’s but in their own sheepfolds, take for law their own whims, since whatever they think and choose they say is holy and whatever they dislike they esteem unlawful. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 343-45 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:58 AM And the fourth kind is that of the monks called Girovagi, who are all their lives guests for three or four days at a time in the different groups of cells through the various provinces. Always wanderers and never settled, they are slaves to their own pleasures and the snares of gluttony and in every respect worse than the Sarabites. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 347 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:58 AM Cœnobites. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Note Loc. 347 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 12:58 AM gryphindor ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 348-49 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:02 AM AN abbot who is worthy to preside over a monastery ought always to remember what he is called and to justify his title by his deeds. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Note Loc. 349 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:02 AM good rule for any office or profession ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 364-65 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:06 AM “Thou who hast been in the habit of seeing a mote in thy brother’s eye, why hast thou not seen the beam in thine own?” ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 366-67 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:07 AM Let not one of gentle birth be placed higher than one who was recently a serf, unless there be some other and reasonable cause. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 372-74 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:08 AM “Convince, entreat, rebuke”: that is to say, mingling according to circumstances gentleness with severity, let him show the sternness of a master, the affection of a father: that is to say, he ought to convince the undisciplined and restless almost harshly: but to entreat the obedient, the meek and the patient, that they progress still better. But the negligent and the haughty we admonish him to rebuke and correct. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 376-79 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:09 AM The more dignified and the intellectually minded let him correct by word at their first and second admonition; but the froward, the hard, the proud and the disobedient, let him coerce at the very first offence by the stripes of corporal punishment, knowing it is written: “A fool is not corrected by words”; and again: “Strike thy son with the rod and thou wilt free his soul from death.” ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 379-80 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:09 AM to whom more is committed from him is more required; ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 380-83 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:10 AM and let him know how difficult and arduous a matter he has undertaken, namely, to govern souls and to adapt himself to many dispositions. One with gentleness, another with rebukes, another with persuasion, so let him, according to the character and intelligence of each, mould and adapt himself, that not only may no injury accrue to the flock entrusted to him, but that he may actually have occasion to rejoice in the increase of his flock’s welfare. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Note Loc. 383 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:10 AM psychology - building loyalty ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 384-85 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:11 AM let him always have in mind that because he has undertaken to govern souls, he must one day render an account of them. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 391 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:12 AM while by his admonitions he affords correction to others, he is also himself freed from his faults. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Note Loc. 391 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:12 AM nice aspiration ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 399-401 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:19 AM Let no one in the monastery follow the desires of his own heart, neither let anyone presume insolently to contend with his abbot either within or without the monastery. But if anyone shall have so presumed, let him be subject to the rule’s discipline. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 405-6 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:20 AM WHAT ARE THE INSTRUMENTS OF GOOD WORKS IN the first place, to love the Lord God with the whole heart, the whole soul and the whole strength. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Note Loc. 406 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:20 AM doesn't help anybody... ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 406-7 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:21 AM one’s neighbour as if oneself. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Note Loc. 407 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:21 AM in time as well as space, future generations ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 407-8 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:21 AM Then, not to kill. Not to commit adultery. Not to steal. Not to covet. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 410-14 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:22 AM To deny oneself that one may follow Christ. To chastise the body. Not to embrace delights. To love fasting. To relieve the poor. To clothe the naked. To visit the sick. To bury the dead. To help in tribulation. To console the sorrowing. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 416-18 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:34 AM Not to carry anger into effect. Not to prolong the duration of one’s wrath. Not to retain guile in one’s heart. Not to make a false peace. Not to abandon charity. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 419-25 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:34 AM To utter only truth from heart and mouth. Not to return evil for evil. Not to do injury, but to suffer it patiently. To love enemies. Not to curse in return those who curse one, but rather to bless them. To bear persecution for righteousness. Not to be proud. Not to be given to much wine. Not to be gluttonous. Not given to much sleep. Not to be sluggish. Not to be given to grumbling. Not to be a detractor. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 427 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 01:35 AM recognize that evil always comes from self and to refer it to self. ========== Instapaper: Sunday, Sep. 2 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 278-82 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 06:29 PM Modern universities have also attempted to emulate Christian monasticism. Even in the Americas, universities are built in the gothic style of twelfth century monasteries. Communal meals, dormitory residences, elaborate rituals and dress all borrow heavily from the monastic tradition. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 210 | Loc. 3219-25 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 06:43 PM Weasel words (e.g., the separation of powers of the US Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting them­selves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may there­fore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else - 'police actions', 'armed incursions', 'protective reaction strikes', 'pacification', 'safe­guarding American interests', and a wide variety of 'opera­tions', such as 'Operation Just Cause'. Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, 'An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public'). ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 3266-77 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 06:47 PM A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms, that it was idle to suppose that she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance money when she went down in mid ocean and told no tales. What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts . . . ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 214 | Loc. 3277-78 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 06:47 PM William K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief (1874) ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 3400-3403 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 06:56 PM Unlike Franklin, most scientists feel it's not their job to expose pseudoscientific bamboozles, much less, passionately held self-deceptions. They tend not to be very good at it either. Scientists are used to struggling with Nature, who may surrender her secrets reluctantly but who fights fair. Often they are unprepared for those unscrupulous practitioners of the 'paranormal' who play by different rules. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 3438-39 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 07:00 PM A placebo works only if the patient believes it's an effective medicine. ========== The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Note on Page 225 | Loc. 3439 | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 07:00 PM not true - even known placebos can have an effect ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 473-75 | Added on Monday, September 03, 2012, 12:29 PM For to speak and to teach becomes the master, to be silent and to listen beseems the disciple. And so if anything has to be asked of the superior let it be asked with all humility and with reverent subjection. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Note Loc. 475 | Added on Monday, September 03, 2012, 12:29 PM socratic method inverted ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 6-7 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:59 AM what is important for the purpose of this study is the capacity that this affluence gives the affluent to assist those in extreme need. ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 18-23 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:44 PM The first assumption I consider in detail is that humanist belief does indeed mandate action on the part of the affluent vis-à-vis people in extreme need. In the event that no such obligations can be held to exist, or that these obligations are already fulfilled by actions taken, the claim of incongruence between belief and practice could not be sustained. However, finding that minimum does ground duties that remain unfulfilled in practice, I then focus on the second assumption upon which this problematique is predicated: the claim about capacity. Specifically, the second part of this thesis considers the possibility that though affluent members of liberal democratic societies have the external capacity to assist people threatened by death from starvation and disease they lack the internal capacity to realise humanist ends. ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 27-28 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:44 PM Whereas the humanist premise yields a cosmopolitan account of obligation, the ideology of the state and the ideology of the market yield more restrictive interpretations of moral responsibility. ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 38-40 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:45 PM In the remaining part of the introduction I describe, in brief, the relationship between international relations and political theory, drawing attention to the impetus this investigation derives from both fields. ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 41-44 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:53 PM The bifurcation of international relations theory and political theory into distinct and sometimes exclusive subject areas can be attributed to many factors. Indeed, Samuel Scheffler notes that political theorists have tended to ‘treat the individual society as the appropriate unit of justification, while tacitly assuming a one4 ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 45-50 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:54 PM to-one correlation between individual societies and sovereign states.’5 Political theorists have, therefore, failed to consider both the external consequences of their state-centric theories and the normative dimensions of the international arena as a subject matter in its own right. Equally, RBJ Walker has argued that international relations scholars have draw a distinction between the ‘existence of a locus of authentic political relationships within states and a mere space of relationships between states.’6 This tendency has, he argues, been augmented by the positivist methodological assumptions of neo-realist and neo-liberal institutionalist theory. ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 44-45 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:54 PM In this regard my approach builds upon Hedley Bull’s insight that the field of international relations is unified by the ‘questions it asks, rather the means used to answer them.’ (Bull, 2000, 246) ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 55-58 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:55 PM there has been a movement towards heightened consideration of the role played by individuals and institutions in the international arena. This movement has been spurred on by the failure of state-centric theories to capture and explain many of the most salient aspects of globalisation and interdependence.8 ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 62-63 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:55 PM Wendt argued that states create, and are constituted by, cultures of anarchy that arise from processes of social interaction.10 ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 63-65 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:55 PM Although Wendt’s theory has itself been criticised for retaining the state-centric bias of more traditional theories, theorists such as Finnemore and Sikkink have drawn attention to the role played by individuals in the process by which international norms emerge.11 ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 76-77 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:56 PM Marysia Zalewski suggests this insight may require a ‘radical extension’ of what counts as international relations theory and who the theorists are.16 ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 86 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:57 PM In this thesis I do not tackle the question of moral foundationalism. ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 86 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:57 PM what is this question? ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 88-89 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:58 PM This investigation is also, in part, animated by the concern among humanist theorists that by letting so ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 90-91 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:59 PM many people die from famine and disease the members of the affluent liberal democratic societies are partaking in a very great moral wrong.17 ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 91 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 10:59 PM similar issues at stake with CC ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 96-97 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:00 PM Applied to current global circumstances I argue that a commitment to humanism does indeed demand more from the majority citizens of liberal democratic societies than they currently provide. ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 108-10 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:01 PM the question asked is whether, given that some people in liberal democratic societies adhere to the minimal humanist contention, it is in fact the case that these people fail to live up to their own moral standard. I do not address the question of whether all people should be humanists, but rather what the minimal humanist premise, understood as a component of ideology, entails for its adherents. ========== GabrielThesis2007 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 114-18 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:01 PM Samuel Scheffler’s argument that common-sense restrictive notions of responsibility are underwritten by a particular phenomenological experience of agency. Although Scheffler’s model explains why certain conceptions of responsibility might prevail over alternative alternatives without relying on essentialist claims, I suggest that it fails to explain the content and reproduction of restrictive paradigms of responsibility prevalent in the common-sense morality of liberal democratic societies today. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 120-21 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:11 PM ‘Then let us lay him in a boat with his weapons, and the weapons of his vanquished foes,’ said Aragorn. ‘We will send him to the Falls of Rauros and give him to Anduin. The River of Gondor will take care at least that no evil creature dishonours his bones.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 141-43 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:18 PM ‘Well, we have no time to ponder riddles,’ said Gimli. ‘Let us bear Boromir away!’ ‘But after that we must guess the riddles, if we are to choose our course rightly,’ answered Aragorn. ‘Maybe there is no right choice,’ said Gimli. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 10 | Loc. 143 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:18 PM challenge of difficult choices ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 190-91 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:22 PM ‘You left the East Wind to me,’ said Gimli, ‘but I will say naught of it.’ ‘That is as it should be,’ said Aragorn. ‘In Minas Tirith they endure the East Wind, but they do not ask it for tidings. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 200-203 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:23 PM ‘But why should he leave us behind, and without a word?’ said Gimli. ‘That was a strange deed!’ ‘And a brave deed,’ said Aragorn. ‘Sam was right, I think. Frodo did not wish to lead any friend to death with him in Mordor. But he knew that he must go himself. Something happened after he left us that overcame his fear and doubt.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 208-13 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:24 PM ‘Let me think!’ said Aragorn. ‘And now may I make a right choice, and change the evil fate of this unhappy day!’ He stood silent for a moment. ‘I will follow the Orcs,’ he said at last. ‘I would have guided Frodo to Mordor and gone with him to the end; but if I seek him now in the wilderness, I must abandon the captives to torment and death. My heart speaks clearly at last: the fate of the Bearer is in my hands no longer. The Company has played its part. Yet we that remain cannot forsake our companions while we have strength left. Come! We will go now. Leave all that can be spared behind! We will press on by day and dark!’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 14 | Loc. 213 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:24 PM heroism ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 257-61 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:29 PM Turning back they saw across the River the far hills kindled. Day leaped into the sky. The red rim of the sun rose over the shoulders of the dark land. Before them in the West the world lay still, formless and grey; but even as they looked, the shadows of night melted, the colours of the waking earth returned: green flowed over the wide meads of Rohan; the white mists shimmered in the water-vales; and far off to the left, thirty leagues or more, blue and purple stood the White Mountains, rising into peaks of jet, tipped with glimmering snows, flushed with the rose of morning. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 329-31 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:38 PM ‘With him lies the true Quest. Ours is but a small matter in the great deeds of this time. A vain pursuit from its beginning, maybe, which no choice of mine can mar or mend. Well, I have chosen. So let us use the time as best we may!’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 362-65 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:42 PM ‘There is something strange at work in this land. I distrust the silence. I distrust even the pale Moon. The stars are faint; and I am weary as I have seldom been before, weary as no Ranger should be with a clear trail to follow. There is some will that lends speed to our foes and sets an unseen barrier before us: a weariness that is in the heart more than in the limb.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 384-86 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:44 PM Only Legolas still stepped as lightly as ever, his feet hardly seeming to press the grass, leaving no footprints as he passed; but in the waybread of the Elves he found all the sustenance that he needed, and he could sleep, if sleep it could be called by Men, resting his mind in the strange paths of Elvish dreams, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of this world. ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 83-84 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:04 PM Son of man, 20 You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 85-87 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:04 PM (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 114 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:12 PM I think we are in rats' alley Where the dead men lost their bones. ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 134-37 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:15 PM The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; 180 Departed, have left no addresses. ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 173-77 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:26 PM Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss.                                          A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool.                                        Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, 320 Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Note Loc. 177 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:26 PM mortality ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 192 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:32 PM Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 195-96 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:33 PM In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home. It has no windows, and the door swings, ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Note Loc. 196 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:34 PM no solace in religion ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 211-12 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:38 PM Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Note Loc. 212 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:39 PM metacriticsm - metatext self-aware writing ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 3-4 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:42 PM We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an electronic path open for the next readers. Do not remove this. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 10-12 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:43 PM Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions, all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a copyright notice is included. Therefore, we do NOT keep these books in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 85-87 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:46 PM in another passage, on the testimony of Hermogenes, the friend of Socrates, that he had no wish to live; and that the divine sign refused to allow him to prepare a defence, and also that Socrates himself declared this to be unnecessary, on the ground that all his life long he had been preparing against that hour. ========== Apology - Note Loc. 87 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:46 PM exonerating evidence for my inevitable trial ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 90-94 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:46 PM But in the main it must be regarded as the ideal of Socrates, according to Plato's conception of him, appearing in the greatest and most public scene of his life, and in the height of his triumph, when he is weakest, and yet his mastery over mankind is greatest, and his habitual irony acquires a new meaning and a sort of tragic pathos in the face of death. The facts of his life are summed up, and the features of his character are brought out as if by accident in the course of the defence. The conversational manner, the seeming want of arrangement, the ironical simplicity, are found to result in a perfect work of art, which is the portrait of Socrates. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 122-23 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:50 PM 'Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven; ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 138-39 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:51 PM the little advantage which in some cases they possessed was more than counter-balanced by their conceit of knowledge. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 139 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:52 PM He knew nothing, and knew that he knew nothing: they knew little or nothing, and imagined that they knew all things. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 179-82 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:53 PM He is an old man already, and the Athenians will gain nothing but disgrace by depriving him of a few years of life. Perhaps he could have escaped, if he had chosen to throw down his arms and entreat for his life. But he does not at all repent of the manner of his defence; he would rather die in his own fashion than live in theirs. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 183-85 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:53 PM They have put him to death in order to escape the necessity of giving an account of their lives. But his death 'will be the seed' of many disciples who will convince them of their evil ways, and will come forth to reprove them in harsher terms, because they are younger and more inconsiderate. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 191-92 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:54 PM He has a last request to make to them--that they will trouble his sons as he has troubled them, if they appear to prefer riches to virtue, or to think themselves something when they are nothing. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 261-62 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 09:01 PM How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that they almost made me forget who I was--so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth. ========== Apology - Note Loc. 262 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 09:01 PM good opening to a defence ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 266-68 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 09:01 PM from me you shall hear the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner in a set oration duly ornamented with words and phrases. No, by heaven! but I shall use the words and arguments which occur to me at the moment; for I am confident in the justice of my cause ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 290-92 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 09:04 PM Well, what do the slanderers say? They shall be my prosecutors, and I will sum up their words in an affidavit: 'Socrates is an evil-doer, and a curious person, who searches into things under the earth and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the better cause; and he teaches the aforesaid doctrines to others.' ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 338-39 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 09:09 PM I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and better. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 344-45 | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 09:10 PM Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 156-58 | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 10:34 AM (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 356 | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 10:43 AM He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 444-45 | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 10:52 AM a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong--acting ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 444-46 | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 10:52 AM a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong--acting the part of a good man or of a bad. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 466-67 | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 10:56 AM I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 485-88 | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 10:59 AM For if you kill me you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 501-3 | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 01:49 PM for the truth is, that no man who goes to war with you or any other multitude, honestly striving against the many lawless and unrighteous deeds which are done in a state, will save his life; he who will fight for the right, if he would live even for a brief space, must have a private station and not a public one. ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Bookmark Loc. 74 | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 01:54 PM ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 552-55 | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 02:00 PM I have seen men of reputation, when they have been condemned, behaving in the strangest manner: they seemed to fancy that they were going to suffer something dreadful if they died, and that they could be immortal if you only allowed them to live; and I think that such are a dishonour to the state, and that any stranger coming in would have said of them that the most eminent men of Athens, to whom the Athenians themselves give honour and command, are no better than women. ========== Apology - Note Loc. 555 | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 02:00 PM sexist ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 467-70 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:47 PM ‘I serve only the Lord of the Mark, Théoden King son of Thengel,’ answered Éomer. ‘We do not serve the Power of the Black Land far away, but neither are we yet at open war with him; and if you are fleeing from him, then you had best leave this land. There is trouble now on all our borders, and we are threatened; but we desire only to be free, and to live as we have lived, keeping our own, and serving no foreign lord, good or evil. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 31 | Loc. 470 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:47 PM trying to maintain sovereignty ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 472-75 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:49 PM ‘I serve no man,’ said Aragorn; ‘but the servants of Sauron I pursue into whatever land they may go. There are few among mortal Men who know more of Orcs; and I do not hunt them in this fashion out of choice. The Orcs whom we pursued took captive two of my friends. In such need a man that has no horse will go on foot, and he will not ask for leave to follow the trail. Nor will he count the heads of the enemy save with a sword. I am not weaponless.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 475-78 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:49 PM Aragorn threw back his cloak. The elven-sheath glittered as he grasped it, and the bright blade of Andúril shone like a sudden flame as he swept it out. ‘Elendil!’ he cried. ‘I am Aragorn son of Arathorn, and am called Elessar, the Elfstone, Dúnadan, the heir of Isildur Elendil’s son of Gondor. Here is the Sword that was Broken and is forged again! Will you aid me or thwart me? Choose swiftly!’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 484-86 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:50 PM What doom do you bring out of the North?’ ‘The doom of choice,’ said Aragorn. ‘You may say this to Théoden son of Thengel: open war lies before him, with Sauron or against him. None may live now as they have lived, and few shall keep what they call their own. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 32 | Loc. 486 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:50 PM decisive times ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 12-15 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:54 PM Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 21-23 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:55 PM In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 24-27 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:56 PM The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 27 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:56 PM akin to smartphones? ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 27-28 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:56 PM It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 28-29 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:56 PM habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 36-37 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:57 PM nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 46-48 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:58 PM The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 49-50 | Added on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:58 PM He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 71-73 | Added on Thursday, September 20, 2012, 12:01 AM The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forcedlabour camp. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 80-81 | Added on Thursday, September 20, 2012, 12:01 AM was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 37 | Loc. 567-71 | Added on Friday, September 21, 2012, 10:28 AM The world is all grown strange. Elf and Dwarf in company walk in our daily fields; and folk speak with the Lady of the Wood and yet live; and the Sword comes back to war that was broken in the long ages ere the fathers of our fathers rode into the Mark! How shall a man judge what to do in such times?’ ‘As he ever has judged,’ said Aragorn. ‘Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 713-14 | Added on Friday, September 21, 2012, 06:09 PM ‘Orders,’ said a third voice in a deep growl. ‘Kill all but NOT the Halflings; they are to be brought back ALIVE as quickly as possible. That’s my orders.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 729-31 | Added on Friday, September 21, 2012, 06:14 PM We are the fighting Uruk-hai! We slew the great warrior. We took the prisoners. We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand that gives us man’s-flesh to eat. We came out of Isengard, and led you here, and we shall lead you back by the way we choose. I am Uglúk. I have spoken.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 53 | Loc. 811-14 | Added on Friday, September 21, 2012, 06:20 PM There he lay for a while, fighting with despair. His head swam, but from the heat in his body he guessed that he had been given another draught. An Orc stooped over him, and flung him some bread and a strip of raw dried flesh. He ate the stale grey bread hungrily, but not the meat. He was famished but not yet so famished as to eat flesh flung to him by an Orc, the flesh of he dared not guess what creature. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1231-32 | Added on Sunday, September 23, 2012, 03:43 PM ‘Hoom, hm, I have not troubled about the Great Wars,’ said Treebeard; ‘they mostly concern Elves and Men. That is the business of Wizards: Wizards are always troubled about the future. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 570-71 | Added on Sunday, September 23, 2012, 04:00 PM And what is my due? What return shall be made to the man who has never had the wit to be idle during his whole life; but has been careless of what the many care for-- wealth, and family interests, and military offices, and speaking in the assembly, and magistracies, and plots, and parties. ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 597 | Added on Sunday, September 23, 2012, 04:03 PM the unexamined life is not worth living, ========== Apology - Highlight Loc. 609-10 | Added on Sunday, September 23, 2012, 04:04 PM nor do I now repent of the style of my defence; I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 742-46 | Added on Sunday, September 23, 2012, 04:15 PM let not anyone presume to give or accept anything without the abbot’s orders, nor to have anything as his own, not anything whatsoever, neither book, nor writing-tablet, nor pen; no, nothing at all, since indeed it is not allowed them to keep either body or will in their own power, but to look to receive everything necessary from their monastic father; and let not any be allowed to have what the abbot has not either given or permitted. And let all things be common to all, as it is written: “Neither did any one of them say or presume that anything was his own.” ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1510-14 | Added on Sunday, September 23, 2012, 04:37 PM You do not know, perhaps, how strong we are. Maybe you have heard of Trolls? They are mighty strong. But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves. We are stronger than Trolls. We are made of the bones of the earth. We can split stone like the roots of trees, only quicker, far quicker, if our minds are roused! If we are not hewn down, or destroyed by fire or blast of sorcery, we could split Isengard into splinters and crack its walls into rubble.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 1600-1601 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 12:26 AM ‘It is old, very old,’ said the Elf. ‘So old that almost I feel young again, as I have not felt since I journeyed with you children. It is old and full of memory. I could have been happy here, if I had come in days of peace.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 1630-35 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 12:28 AM Gimli gazed with wide eyes for a while, as step by step the figure drew nearer. Then suddenly, unable to contain himself longer, he burst out: ‘Your bow, Legolas! Bend it! Get ready! It is Saruman. Do not let him speak, or put a spell upon us! Shoot first!’ Legolas took his bow and bent it, slowly and as if some other will resisted him. He held an arrow loosely in his hand but did not fit it to the string. Aragorn stood silent, his face was watchful and intent. ‘Why are you waiting? What is the matter with you?’ said Gimli in a hissing whisper. ‘Legolas is right,’ said Aragorn quietly. ‘We may not shoot an old man so, at unawares and unchallenged, whatever fear or doubt be on us. Watch and wait!’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1645-47 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 12:29 AM As he stepped up on to the shelf there was a gleam, too brief for certainty, a quick glint of white, as if some garment shrouded by the grey rags had been for an instant revealed. The intake of Gimli’s breath could be heard as a loud hiss in the silence. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1679-80 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 12:31 AM Indeed my friends, none of you have any weapon that could hurt me. Be merry! We meet again. At the turn of the tide. The great storm is coming, but the tide has turned.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1713-16 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 10:40 PM Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind. That we should try to destroy the Ring itself has not yet entered into his darkest dream. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 1728-29 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 10:42 PM So between them our enemies have contrived only to bring Merry and Pippin with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all! ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 1763-64 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 10:45 PM Treebeard is Fangorn, the guardian of the forest; he is the oldest of the Ents, the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1786-88 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 10:49 PM ‘Come, Aragorn son of Arathorn!’ he said. ‘Do not regret your choice in the valley of the Emyn Muil, nor call it a vain pursuit. You chose amid doubts the path that seemed right: the choice was just, and it has been rewarded. For so we have met in time, who otherwise might have met too late. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 117 | Loc. 1788 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 10:49 PM rightly chosen ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1812 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 10:51 PM Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1823-25 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 10:53 PM I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin. Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1825-26 | Added on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 10:53 PM ‘Naked I was sent back – for a brief time, until my task is done. And naked I lay upon the mountain-top. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 2337-38 | Added on Sunday, September 30, 2012, 09:58 PM There in the Hornburg at Helm’s Gate Erkenbrand, master of Westfold on the borders of the Mark, now dwelt. As the days darkened with threat of war, being wise, he had repaired the wall and made the fastness strong. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2414-16 | Added on Sunday, October 07, 2012, 10:20 PM Then the Orcs screamed, waving spear and sword, and shooting a cloud of arrows at any that stood revealed upon the battlements; and the men of the Mark amazed looked out, as it seemed to them, upon a great field of dark corn, tossed by a tempest of war, and every ear glinted with barbed light. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 161 | Loc. 2459-60 | Added on Sunday, October 07, 2012, 10:27 PM Before the wall’s foot the dead and broken were piled like shingle in a storm; ever higher rose the hideous mounds, and still the enemy came on. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 163 | Loc. 2489-92 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 12:15 AM ‘Yet there are many that cry in the Dunland tongue,’ said Gamling. ‘I know that tongue. It is an ancient speech of men, and once was spoken in many western valleys of the Mark. Hark! They hate us, and they are glad; for our doom seems certain to them. ‘‘The king, the king!’’ they cry. ‘‘We will take their king. Death to the Forgoil! Death to the Strawheads! Death to the robbers of the North!’’ Such names they have for us. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 163 | Loc. 2492 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 12:15 AM hatred ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 2553-54 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 02:26 AM ‘I have still this to say,’ answered Aragorn. ‘No enemy has yet taken the Hornburg. Depart, or not one of you will be spared. Not one will be left alive to take back tidings to the North. You do not know your peril.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 167 | Loc. 2554 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 02:26 AM pure bravado? ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2565-67 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 02:28 AM ‘Helm! Helm!’ the Riders shouted. ‘Helm is arisen and comes back to war. Helm for Théoden King!’ And with that shout the king came. His horse was white as snow, golden was his shield, and his spear was long. At his right hand was Aragorn, Elendil’s heir, behind him rode the lords of the House of Eorl the Young. Light sprang in the sky. Night departed. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 168 | Loc. 2567 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 02:28 AM mythic language ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 169 | Loc. 2588-90 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 02:32 AM The White Rider was upon them, and the terror of his coming filled the enemy with madness. The wild men fell on their faces before him. The Orcs reeled and screamed and cast aside both sword and spear. Like a black smoke driven by a mounting wind they fled. Wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees; and from that shadow none ever came again. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 2627-28 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 02:34 AM it is my counsel that all our comings and goings should be as secret as may be, henceforth. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 2637-42 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 02:36 AM No Orcs remained alive; their bodies were uncounted. But a great many of the hillmen had given themselves up; and they were afraid, and cried for mercy. The Men of the Mark took their weapons from them, and set them to work. ‘Help now to repair the evil in which you have joined,’ said Erkenbrand; ‘and afterwards you shall take an oath never again to pass the Fords of Isen in arms, nor to march with the enemies of Men; and then you shall go free back to your land. For you have been deluded by Saruman. Many of you have got death as the reward of your trust in him; but had you conquered, little better would your wages have been.’ The men of Dunland were amazed; for Saruman had told them that the men of Rohan were cruel and burned their captives alive. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 173 | Loc. 2642 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 02:36 AM civil treatment for POWs ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 185 | Loc. 2837-42 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 10:12 PM A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long it had been beautiful; and there great lords had dwelt, the wardens of Gondor upon the West, and wise men that watched the stars. But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived – for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 2996-99 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 10:24 PM ‘And here also is your brooch, Pippin,’ said Aragorn. ‘I have kept it safe, for it is a very precious thing.’ ‘I know,’ said Pippin. ‘It was a wrench to let it go; but what else could I do?’ ‘Nothing else,’ answered Aragorn. ‘One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters. You did rightly.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3043-44 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 10:28 PM It is difficult with these evil folk to know when they are in league, and when they are cheating one another.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 221 | Loc. 3376-79 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 11:00 PM Saruman!’ he cried, and his voice grew in power and authority. ‘Behold, I am not Gandalf the Grey, whom you betrayed. I am Gandalf the White, who has returned from death. You have no colour now, and I cast you from the order and from the Council.’ He raised his hand, and spoke slowly in a clear cold voice. ‘Saruman, your staff is broken.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 3444-47 | Added on Monday, October 08, 2012, 11:05 PM ‘Leave it to the Ents!’ said Treebeard. ‘We shall search the valley from head to foot and peer under every pebble. Trees are coming back to live here, old trees, wild trees. The Watchwood we will call it. Not a squirrel will go here, but I shall know of it. Leave it to Ents! Until seven times the years in which he tormented us have passed, we shall not tire of watching him.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 236 | Loc. 3607-8 | Added on Wednesday, October 10, 2012, 12:04 AM ‘Nazgûl!’ he cried. ‘The messenger of Mordor. The storm is coming. The Nazgûl have crossed the River! Ride, ride! Wait not for the dawn! Let not the swift wait for the slow! Ride!’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 240 | Loc. 3678-79 | Added on Wednesday, October 10, 2012, 12:10 AM ‘It is two hundred leagues or more in straight flight from Barad-dûr to Orthanc, and even a Nazgûl would take a few hours to fly between them. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 259 | Loc. 3960-63 | Added on Sunday, October 14, 2012, 12:11 AM ‘Yess, wretched we are, precious,’ he whined. ‘Misery misery! Hobbits won’t kill us, nice hobbits.’ ‘No, we won’t,’ said Frodo. ‘But we won’t let you go, either. You’re full of wickedness and mischief, Gollum. You will have to come with us, that’s all, while we keep an eye on you. But you must help us, if you can. One good turn deserves another.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 4006 | Added on Sunday, October 14, 2012, 12:15 AM Sam was gentler than his words. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 4009-22 | Added on Sunday, October 14, 2012, 12:16 AM ‘No, I will not take it off you,’ said Frodo, ‘not unless’ – he paused a moment in thought – ‘not unless there is any promise you can make that I can trust.’ ‘We will swear to do what he wants, yes, yess,’ said Gollum, still twisting and grabbling at his ankle. ‘It hurts us.’ ‘Swear?’ said Frodo. ‘Sméagol,’ said Gollum suddenly and clearly, opening his eyes wide and staring at Frodo with a strange light. ‘Sméagol will swear on the Precious.’ Frodo drew himself up, and again Sam was startled by his words and his stern voice. ‘On the Precious? How dare you?’ he said. ‘Think! One Ring to rule them all and in the Darkness bind them. Would you commit your promise to that, Sméagol? It will hold you. But it is more treacherous than you are. It may twist your words. Beware!’ Gollum cowered. ‘On the Precious, on the Precious!’ he repeated. ‘And what would you swear?’ asked Frodo. ‘To be very very good,’ said Gollum. Then crawling to Frodo’s feet he grovelled before him, whispering hoarsely: a shudder ran over him, as if the words shook his very bones with fear. ‘Sméagol will swear never, never, to let Him have it. Never! Sméagol will save it. But he must swear on the Precious.’ ‘No! not on it,’ said Frodo, looking down at him with stern pity. ‘All you wish is to see it and touch it, if you can, though you know it would drive you mad. Not on it. Swear by it, if you will. For you know where it is. Yes, you know, Sméagol. It is before you.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 4022-27 | Added on Sunday, October 14, 2012, 12:17 AM For a moment it appeared to Sam that his master had grown and Gollum had shrunk: a tall stern shadow, a mighty lord who hid his brightness in grey cloud, and at his feet a little whining dog. Yet the two were in some way akin and not alien: they could reach one another’s minds. Gollum raised himself and began pawing at Frodo, fawning at his knees. ‘Down! down!’ said Frodo. ‘Now speak your promise!’ ‘We promises, yes I promise!’ said Gollum. ‘I will serve the master of the Precious. Good master, good Sméagol, gollum, gollum!’ Suddenly he began to weep and bite at his ankle again. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 4133-37 | Added on Sunday, October 14, 2012, 06:17 PM ‘I don’t know how long we shall take to – to finish,’ said Frodo. ‘We were miserably delayed in the hills. But Samwise Gamgee, my dear hobbit – indeed, Sam my dearest hobbit, friend of friends – I do not think we need give thought to what comes after that. To do the job as you put it – what hope is there that we ever shall? And if we do, who knows what will come of that? If the One goes into the Fire, and we are at hand? I ask you, Sam, are we ever likely to need bread again? I think not. If we can nurse our limbs to bring us to Mount Doom, that is all we can do. More than I can, I begin to feel.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 278 | Loc. 4258-60 | Added on Sunday, October 14, 2012, 06:28 PM The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable. So thin, so frail and thin, the veils were become that still warded it off. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 290 | Loc. 4434-39 | Added on Sunday, October 14, 2012, 09:00 PM ‘I did not mean the danger that we all share,’ said Frodo. ‘I mean a danger to yourself alone. You swore a promise by what you call the Precious. Remember that! It will hold you to it; but it will seek a way to twist it to your own undoing. Already you are being twisted. You revealed yourself to me just now, foolishly. Give it back to Sméagol you said. Do not say that again! Do not let that thought grow in you! You will never get it back. But the desire of it may betray you to a bitter end. You will never get it back. In the last need, Sméagol, I should put on the Precious; and the Precious mastered you long ago. If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire. And such would be my command. So have a care, Sméagol!’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 307 | Loc. 4699-4707 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 02:51 PM South and west it looked towards the warm lower vales of Anduin, shielded from the east by the Ephel Dúath and yet not under the mountain-shadow, protected from the north by the Emyn Muil, open to the southern airs and the moist winds from the Sea far away. Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass: deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 307 | Loc. 4707 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 02:51 PM landscape and botanical detail ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 309 | Loc. 4737-44 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:04 PM Frodo after a few mouthfuls of lembas settled deep into the brown fern and went to sleep. Sam looked at him. The early daylight was only just creeping down into the shadows under the trees, but he saw his master’s face very clearly, and his hands, too, lying at rest on the ground beside him. He was reminded suddenly of Frodo as he had lain, asleep in the house of Elrond, after his deadly wound. Then as he had kept watch Sam had noticed that at times a light seemed to be shining faintly within; but now the light was even clearer and stronger. Frodo’s face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: ‘I love him. He’s like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 310 | Loc. 4749 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:05 PM All hobbits, of course, can cook, for they begin to learn the art before their letters (which many never reach); ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 311 | Loc. 4760-63 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:09 PM Sam gathered a pile of the driest fern, and then scrambled up the bank collecting a bundle of twigs and broken wood; the fallen branch of a cedar at the top gave him a good supply. He cut out some turves at the foot of the bank just outside the fern-brake, and made a shallow hole and laid his fuel in it. Being handy with flint and tinder he soon had a small blaze going. It made little or no smoke but gave off an aromatic scent. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 311 | Loc. 4763 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:09 PM hobbits are not without useful skills ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 313 | Loc. 4791-93 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:18 PM For a while Sam sat musing, and tending the fire till the water boiled. The daylight grew and the air became warm; the dew faded off turf and leaf. Soon the rabbits cut up lay simmering in their pans with the bunched herbs. Almost Sam fell asleep as the time went by. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 313 | Loc. 4793 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:18 PM sentence structure ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 314 | Loc. 4806-9 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:21 PM ‘Don’t you drop off, while I’m nodding, Mr. Frodo. I don’t feel too sure of him. There’s a good deal of Stinker – the bad Gollum, if you understand me – in him still, and it’s getting stronger again. Not but what I think he’d try to throttle me first now. We don’t see eye to eye, and he’s not pleased with Sam, O no precious, not pleased at all.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 314 | Loc. 4809 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:21 PM Sam uses the word 'precious' ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 316 | Loc. 4841-49 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:28 PM Where is the third of your company?’ ‘The third?’ ‘Yes, the skulking fellow that we saw with his nose in the pool down yonder. He had an ill-favoured look. Some spying breed of Orc, I guess, or a creature of theirs. But he gave us the slip by some fox-trick.’ ‘I do not know where he is,’ said Frodo. ‘He is only a chance companion met upon our road, and I am not answerable for him. If you come on him, spare him. Bring him or send him to us. He is only a wretched gangrel creature, but I have him under my care for a while. But as for us, we are Hobbits of the Shire, far to the North and West, beyond many rivers. Frodo son of Drogo is my name, and with me is Samwise son of Hamfast, a worthy hobbit in my service. We have come by long ways – out of Rivendell, or Imladris as some call it.’ Here Faramir started and grew intent. ‘Seven companions we had: one we lost at Moria, the others we left at Parth Galen above Rauros: two of my kin; a Dwarf there was also, and an Elf, and two Men. They were Aragorn; and Boromir, who said that he came out of Minas Tirith, a city in the South.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 317 | Loc. 4849 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:28 PM Frodo tells the truth ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 317 | Loc. 4859-65 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:32 PM ‘We must learn more of this,’ said Faramir, ‘and know what brings you so far east under the shadow of yonder—,’ he pointed and said no name. ‘But not now. We have business in hand. You are in peril, and you would not have gone far by field or road this day. There will be hard handstrokes nigh at hand ere the day is full. Then death, or swift flight back to Anduin. I will leave two to guard you, for your good and for mine. Wise man trusts not to chance-meeting on the road in this land. If I return, I will speak more with you.’ ‘Farewell!’ said Frodo, bowing low. ‘Think what you will, I am a friend of all enemies of the One Enemy. We would go with you, if we halfling folk could hope to serve you, such doughty men and strong as you seem, and if my errand permitted it. May the light shine on your swords!’ ‘The Halflings are courteous folk, whatever else they be,’ said Faramir. ‘Farewell!’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 318 | Loc. 4865 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:32 PM Faramir doesn't detain them at all ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 318 | Loc. 4871-74 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:33 PM After a while he spoke to them; but they were slow and cautious in answering. They named themselves Mablung and Damrod, soldiers of Gondor, and they were Rangers of Ithilien; for they were descended from folk who lived in Ithilien at one time, before it was overrun. From such men the Lord Denethor chose his forayers, who crossed the Anduin secretly (how or where, they would not say) to harry the Orcs and other enemies that roamed between the Ephel Dúath and the River. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 318 | Loc. 4874 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:33 PM soldiers ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 319 | Loc. 4880-81 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:35 PM I doubt not that the days of Gondor are numbered, and the walls of Minas Tirith are doomed, so great is His strength and malice.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 319 | Loc. 4881 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:35 PM not confident ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 319 | Loc. 4881-84 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:41 PM ‘These cursed Southrons come now marching up the ancient roads to swell the hosts of the Dark Tower. Yea, up the very roads that craft of Gondor made. And they go ever more heedlessly, we learn, thinking that the power of their new master is great enough, so that the mere shadow of His hills will protect them. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 319 | Loc. 4884 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 03:41 PM mordor is a fortress too ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 323 | Loc. 4943-49 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 06:58 PM An orc-arrow slew Isildur, so far as old tales tell. But orc-arrows are plenty, and the sight of one would not be taken as a sign of Doom by Boromir of Gondor. Had you this thing in keeping? It is hidden, you say; but is not that because you choose to hide it?’ ‘No, not because I choose,’ answered Frodo. ‘It does not belong to me. It does not belong to any mortal, great or small; though if any could claim it, it would be Aragorn son of Arathorn, whom I named, the leader of our Company from Moria to Rauros.’ ‘Why so, and not Boromir, prince of the City that the sons of Elendil founded?’ ‘Because Aragorn is descended in direct lineage, father to father, from Isildur Elendil’s son himself. And the sword that he bears was Elendil’s sword.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 323 | Loc. 4949 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 06:58 PM aragorn is a herditary monarch - bloodline king ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 7-9 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:00 PM “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” —GEORGE ORWELL, ANIMAL FARM ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 9-57 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:02 PM First, I would like to thank L. Jean Camp, who selflessly put herself at risk in order to save me from two extremely unpleasant encounters with the FBI. I will be indebted to her forever. I would also like to thank Stephen Braga and Jennifer Granick, two stellar attorneys who came to my defense in 2006 after the FBI took an interest in my work, raiding my home at 2AM and seizing my personal documents and computers. Their expert assistance led to the return of my possessions in just three weeks and the closing of the FBI’s criminal and TSA’s civil investigations without any charges filed. Jennifer Granick came to my assistance a second time (and was joined by Steve Leckar) in 2010 after the Federal Trade Commission’s Inspector General investigated me for using my government badge to attend a closed-door surveillance industry conference. It was at that event where I recorded an executive from wireless carrier Sprint bragging about the eight million times his company had obtained GPS data on its customers for law enforcement agencies in the previous years. I am immensely indebted to Al Gidari, who knows more about law enforcement surveillance than anyone else outside of the government. The breadcrumbs he has left behind have been more useful than any other single source of data. I would also like to thank Kevin Bankston, David Sobel, Marcia Hoffmann and Catherine Crump, who were exposing and fighting government surveillance long before I took an interest in the topic. They helped me to learn the obscure art of the FOIA request, and inspired a number of my own requests, several of which have borne useful fruit. Nabiha Syed has also been extremely generous with her time, helping me with my clumsy efforts v to engage in pro se FOIA litigation. I am, of course, not the only researcher or activist interested in Internet surveillance. Caspar Bowden, Ian Brown, Duncan Campbell, Eric King, Christopher Parsons, Aaron Martin, Julian Sanchez and Marcy Wheeler have done their own share of muckraking and expert analysis, pointing me to resources and critiquing my own theories. Tim Sparapani, during his time working as a Washington lobbyist for Facebook, unintentionally taught me how to stand up to bogus legal threats from a large corporation. For this lesson, I thank him. I suspect that it will be a skill that will pay dividends in the future. The stimulating conversations I’ve had with Paul Ohm have forced me to rethink my previously black and white view of the world, in which I demonized anyone who had at one point chosen to work for the Department of Justice, particularly in the area of computer crime. Likewise, my friendship and collaboration with Stephanie Pell has been a wonderful surprise. I would have never expected to befriend a former national security prosecutor, let alone be repeatedly welcomed into her home. Stephanie has helped me to better understand the law enforcement perspective and forced me to be far more pragmatic in my interactions with people in Washington. Jim Green introduced me to the Washington handshake, opened doors that I never knew existed and has been an absolutely fantastic mentor in the ways of Washington. I would have never predicted that I’d be able to find common ground with a telecom industry lobbyist, let alone be able to honestly describe him as a friend. This city can bring people together in strange ways. I spent one year at the Federal Trade Commission, and thus have several people to thank there. While the agency’s powers are often limited, Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour was willing to use her bully pulpit to pressure companies to put privacy first. She taught me that a single speech can be an extremely effective way to nudge industry to protect consumers, particularly when regulators have limited powers. I would also like to thank David Vladeck, Chris Olsen and the entire Division of Privacy and Identity Protection. My time at the FTC was by far the most rewarding, yet most frustrating year of my life thus far. I created constant headaches for management, and no doubt annoyed many people with my habitual lateness, my refusal to submit to the background check required of all federal employees, my shorts and sandals, and the flood of new cases I proposed. I greatly appreciate the patience and goodwill that everyone at the FTC showed me. My research into government surveillance first began during a one-year fellowship at the Berkman Center, during which they gave me the impossible task of trying to measure the scale of government surveillance. Thankfully, they were not upset when I failed. As a member of the Berkman community, numerous doors have opened for me. For this, and the countless stimulating conversations I had during my year in Cambridge, I am very thankful. I am immensely indebted to Paul Syverson, who, during an evening chat in Bloomington, gave me the best advice of my entire academic career. Had I not followed it, I am certain that I would not have lasted this long in academia. Marc Rotenberg first introduced me to writing FTC complaints and using them to frame the policy debate. The path I now follow as a privacy activist in Washington DC is one that Marc played a major role in establishing and legitimizing. Watching him in action has been highly educational. At the beginning of my graduate studies in Indiana, Fred Cate was critical, and reasonably so, of my reckless approach to activism and the lack of focus in my academic research. In the years since, he has become one of my strongest supporters, and, quite amusingly, has also become a vocal opponent of security theatre, long after I stopped harassing the vii Transportation Security Administration. Markus Jakobsson has been a fantastic academic advisor, who has been there for advice when I needed it, but hands off enough to let me find my own direction. Most surprising, he willingly remained my advisor long after my focus strayed away from our shared interest in phishing and fraud. Were it not for his support, and repeated prodding, I would never have finished. Geoffrey Fox kindly volunteered to chair my dissertation committee after university rules prohibited Markus from continuing to formally occupy the role. In doing so, Geoffrey freed me from a nightmare of red tape, frustration, and numerous arguments with university officials. Over the past several years, my activism and research have not been entirely focused on the issue of government surveillance. Derek Bambauer, Kelly Caine, Allan Friedman, Ashkan Soltani, Sid Stamm and Harlan Yu have helped me out countless times with many other privacy and security related projects. Finally, over the last few years, a large number of individuals have leaked information to me. In some cases, these leaks were to score political points, to harm their competitors, or in a few cases, because they are alarmed by the government’s actions or surveillance powers. Whatever the reasons, these leaks have been extremely helpful, and so while I cannot for obvious reasons name my sources, I would like to thank them here. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 58-64 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:03 PM Telecommunications carriers and service providers now play an essential role in facilitating modern surveillance by law enforcement agencies. The police merely select the individuals to be monitored, while the actual surveillance is performed by third parties: often the same email providers, search engines and telephone companies to whom consumers have entrusted their private data. Assisting Big Brother has become a routine part of business. While communications surveillance is widespread, the official government reports barely scratch the surface. As such, the true scale of law enforcement surveillance has long been shielded from the general public, Congress, and the courts. However, recent disclosures by wireless communications carriers reveal that the companies now receive approximately one and a half million requests from U.S. law enforcement agencies per year. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 64-70 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:03 PM In addition to forcing companies to disclose the user data they already have, companies are also regularly compelled to modify their products in order to facilitate government surveillance. Some have been required to build surveillance capabilities directly into their products, while others have been forced to repurpose existing features in commercial products for surveillance. In spite of the government’s ability to compel assistance, many companies have a surprising amount of freedom to design privacy enhancing features into their products, including minimal data retention policies and data encryption. Likewise, where the law is vague, companies can adopt strict, pro-privacy legal positions, forcing the government to obtain a warrant and providing users with notice when their data is disclosed to the police. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 70-73 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:04 PM Although companies are able to build privacy protections into their products and embrace pro-privacy legal theories, few do so, and those that do, rarely discuss it. Significant differences exist regarding the extent to which service providers protect the privacy of their customers, yet there is no real way for consumers to learn these differences and compare providers. The market for privacy, at least with regard to government access, simply does not exist. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 104-7 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:04 PM “Under ordinary and normal circumstances wiretapping by Government agents should not be carried on for the excellent reason that it is almost bound to lead to abuse of civil rights” [1]. —PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, MEMORANDUM FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL, 1940 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 116-18 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:12 PM The police no longer have to scale telephone poles in order to tap lines. Instead, most modern surveillance can be performed with a few clicks of a mouse, a fax, or a phone call to a service provider, all from the comfort and safety of the officer’s desk [4]. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 118-20 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:12 PM The police merely select the individuals to be monitored, while the actual surveillance is performed by third parties: often the same email providers, search engines and telephone companies to whom consumers have entrusted their private data. Collectively, these companies now receive approximately one and a half million requests from U.S. law enforcement agencies per year,1 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 137-38 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:14 PM law enforcement agencies do not want the general public (including criminals) to understand the true extent of their surveillance capabilities and limits. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 152-55 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:15 PM 4Intelligence agencies can and do regularly obtain user data from service providers. However, this dissertation is focused solely on the electronic surveillance conducted by law enforcement agencies. While I am also interested in the intelligence agencies, it is largely impossible to learn much useful information about that topic due to its classified nature. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 155-63 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:17 PM “The telephone has become part and parcel of the social and business intercourse of the people of the United States, and the telephone system offers a means of espionage compared to which general warrants and writs of assistance were the puniest instruments of tyranny and oppression.” —BRIEF FOR PACIFIC TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY ET AL. OLMSTEAD V. UNITED STATES, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) “The progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.” —JUSTICE LOUIS BRANDEIS, DISSENT IN OLMSTEAD V. UNITED STATES ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 23-24 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 08:43 PM Museums don’t like things to be thrown away, in case they turn out to be very important later on. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 3 | Loc. 35-37 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 08:44 PM Lectrology, the study of the bed and its associated surroundings, can be extremely useful and tell you a great deal about the owner, even if it’s only that they are a very knowing and savvy installations artist. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 3 | Loc. 41-44 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 08:46 PM The bed of Trevor Likely is anywhere: a friend’s floor, in the hayloft of any stable that has been left unlocked (which is usually a much more fragrant option), or in a room of an empty house (though there are precious few of those these days); or he sleeps at work (but he is always careful about that, because old man Smeems never seems to sleep at all and might catch him at any time). Trev can sleep anywhere, and does. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 101-2 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 10:46 PM Around a thousand years ago, the university had had a large hole made in the ceiling of the corridor below, and already the Emperor was seventeen feet high up here. There was thirty-eight feet in total of pure, natural, dribbled candle. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Note on Page 7 | Loc. 102 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 10:46 PM corium ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 144-45 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 10:58 PM Off in the distance was one last cry: ‘The Megapode is catched!’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 172-73 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:01 PM ‘One of the scullery boys told me that all the toilets on the Tesseractical floor turned into sheep yesterday,’ said Nutt. ‘I should like to see that.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 179-83 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:02 PM ‘Well, that was fun,’ said Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of the university, throwing himself into a huge armchair in the faculty’s Uncommon Room with such force that it nearly threw him out again. ‘We must do it again some time.’ ‘Yes, sir. We will. In one hundred years,’ said the new Master of The Traditions smugly, turning over the pages in his huge book. He reached the crackling leaf headed Hunting the Megapode, wrote down the date and the amount of time it had taken to find the aforesaid Megapode, and signed his name with a flourish: Ponder Stibbons. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 183-87 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:03 PM ‘What is a Megapode, anyway?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, helping himself to the port. ‘A type of bird, I believe,’ said the Archchancellor, waving a hand towards the drinks trolley. ‘After me.’ ‘The original Megapode was found in the under-butler’s pantry,’ said the Master of The Traditions. ‘It escaped in the middle of dinner and caused what my predecessor eleven hundred years ago called…’ he referred to the book, ‘“a veritable heyhoe-rumbelow as all the Fellows pursued it through the college buildings with much mirth and good spirits”.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 189-90 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:03 PM ‘Oh, you can’t have a Megapode running around loose, Doctor Hix,’ said Ridcully. ‘Anyone’ll tell you that.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 218-20 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:06 PM ‘I was just remarking that tonight’s Megapode was undoubtedly the finest on record, Archchancellor. It was Rincewind. The official Megapode headdress suited him very well, all things considered. I think he’s gone for a lie down.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 226-28 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:09 PM It had been tricky since the Dean had left, very tricky indeed. Whoever heard of a man resigning from UU? It was something that simply did not happen! Sometimes people left in disgrace, in a box or, in a few cases, in bits, but there was no tradition of resigning at all. Tenure at Unseen University was for life, and often a long way beyond. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 234-38 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:10 PM A wizard could do what he liked in his own study, and in the old days that had largely meant smoking anything he fancied and farting hugely without apologizing. These days it meant building out into a congruent set of dimensions. Even the Archchancellor was doing it, which made it hard for Ponder to protest: he had half a mile of trout stream in his bathroom, and claimed that messin’ about in his study was what kept a wizard out of mischief. And, as everyone knew, it did. It generally got him into trouble instead. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Note on Page 16 | Loc. 238 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:10 PM great quote ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 256 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:13 PM ‘Remuneration? Since when did a wizard work for wages? We are pure academics, Mister Stibbons! We do not care for mere money!’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 257-58 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:13 PM Unfortunately, Ponder was a clear logical thinker who, in times of mental confusion, fell back on reason and honesty, which, when dealing with an angry Archchancellor, were, to use the proper academic term, unhelpful. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 283-85 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:16 PM It is a well-known fact in any organization that, if you want a job done, you should give it to someone who is already very busy. It has been the cause of a number of homicides, and in one case the death of a senior director from having his head shut repeatedly in quite a small filing cabinet. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 287-88 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:17 PM his system for writing the minutes of meetings, which he had devised with the help of Hex, the university’s increasingly useful thinking engine. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 315 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:22 PM Nothing cleans stubborn stains like suppressed anger. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 329 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:24 PM ‘If we can make a tradition of not observing another tradition, then that’s doubly traditional, eh? What’s the problem?’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 361-67 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:32 PM ‘But it’s banned, man!’ the Archchancellor insisted. ‘Er, not as such. It’s common knowledge that Lord Vetinari doesn’t like it, but I understand that if the games are outside the city centre and confined to the back streets, the Watch turns a blind eye. Since I would imagine that the supporters and players easily outnumber the entire Watch payroll, I suppose it is better than having to turn a broken nose.’ ‘That’s quite a neat turn of phrase there, Mister Stibbons,’ said Ridcully. ‘I’m quite surprised at you.’ ‘Thank you, Archchancellor,’ said Ponder. He had in fact got it from a leader in the Times, which the wizards did not like much because it either did not print what they said or printed what they said with embarrassing accuracy. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 367-68 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:33 PM ‘I should point out, though, that under UU law, Archchancellor, a ban doesn’t matter. Wizards are not supposed to take notice of such a ban. We are not subject to mundane law.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 390-94 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:37 PM if you worked in the vats it meant that, as far as the job market was concerned, you had been still accelerating when you’d hit the bottom of the barrel and had been drilled into the bedrock. It meant that you no longer had enough charisma to be a beggar. It meant that you were on the run from something, possibly the gods themselves, or the demons inside you. It meant that if you dared to look up you would see, high above you, the dregs of society. Best, then, to stay down here in the warm gloom, with enough to eat and no inconvenient encounters and, Nutt added in his head, no beatings. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 397-99 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:39 PM Goblin. It was a word with an ox-train-load of baggage. It didn’t matter what you said or did, or made, the train ran right over you. He’d shown them the things he’d built, and the stones had smashed them while the villagers screamed at him like hunting hawks and shouted more words. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 430-31 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:46 PM When you clearly liked people, they were slightly more inclined to like you. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 461-63 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:49 PM But he recognized it as a kind of residual glare; she’d said her piece, and now it was just a bit of play-acting, to show she was the boss here. And bosses can afford to be generous, especially when you look a little fearful and suitably impressed. It worked. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Note on Page 31 | Loc. 463 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:49 PM perceptive ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 778925-32 | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 11:51 PM Slav  n. a member of a group of peoples in central and eastern Europe speaking Slavic languages.  adj. another term for SLAVIC.  from medieval Latin Sclavus, late Greek Sklabos, later also from medieval Latin Slavus. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 495-96 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2012, 12:03 AM Such sudden devotion to a printed page worried Glenda. The last thing she wanted was to see her friend getting ideas in her head. There was such a lot of room in there for them to bounce around and do damage. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 498-500 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2012, 12:04 AM Personally, she hated the violence of the football, but it was important to belong. Not belonging, especially after a big game, could be dangerous to your health. It was important to show the right colours on your home turf. It was important to fit in. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 536-38 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2012, 12:15 AM ‘Then who is dealing with our financial affairs?’ said Ridcully. ‘Since last month? Me,’ said Ponder, ‘but I would be happy to hand the responsibility over to the first volunteer.’ This worked. Regrettably, it always did. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 547-51 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2012, 12:17 AM ‘What makes a wizard, gentlemen? A facility with magic? Yes, of course, but around this table we know this is not, for the right kind of mind, hard to obtain. It does not, as it were, happen like magic. Good heavens, witches manage it. But what makes a magic user is a certain cast of mind which looks a little deeper into the world and the way it works, the way its currents twist the fortunes of mankind, et cetera, et cetera. In short, they should be the kind of person who might calculate that a guaranteed double first is worth the occasional inconvenience of sliding down the street on their teeth.’ ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 566572-82 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2012, 12:48 AM non·cha·lant  adj. (of a person or manner) feeling or appearing casually calm and relaxed; not displaying anxiety, interest, or enthusiasm: she gave a nonchalant shrug.   non·cha·lance n. non·cha·lant·ly adv.  mid 18th cent.: from French, literally 'not being concerned', from the verb nonchaloir. ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 566583-89 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2012, 12:48 AM non·cit·i·zen  n. a person who is not an inhabitant or national of a particular country or town. ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 566606-12 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2012, 12:50 AM non·com  n. INFORMAL [MILITARY] a noncommissioned officer. ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 566631-39 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2012, 12:50 AM non·com·mis·sioned  adj. [MILITARY] (of an officer in the armed forces) ranking below warrant officer, as sergeant or petty officer. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 859-60 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2012, 11:54 PM More important right now was what kind of truth he was going to have to impart to his colleagues, and he decided not on the whole truth, but instead on nothing but the truth, which dispensed with the need for honesty. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1157-60 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 12:16 AM The progress of the wizards astonished Ottomy and Nobbs, who had hitherto seen them as fluffy plump creatures quite divorced from real life. But to get to be a senior wizard and stay there called for deep reserves of determination, viciousness and the sugared arrogance that is the mark of every true gentleman, as in ‘Oh, was that your foot? I’m so terribly sorry.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1299 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 03:08 PM I suppose it was a history. I wanted it to be more of a geography, but she kept slappin’ my hand.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1396-97 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 03:30 PM The unofficial motto of the Lady Sybil Free Hospital was ‘Not everybody dies’. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1534-35 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 04:32 PM It has been said that crowds are stupid, but mostly they are simply confused, since as an eyewitness the average person is as reliable as a meringue lifejacket. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 1718-22 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 08:42 PM If he was a fool, then any man who has ever climbed a mountain or swum a torrent is a fool. If he was a fool then so was the man who first tried to tame fire. If he was a fool then so was the man who tried the first oyster, he was a fool, too–although I’m bound to remark that, given the division of labour in early hunter-gatherer cultures, he was probably a woman as well. Perhaps only a fool gets out of bed. But, after death, some fools shine like stars, and your father is such a one. After death, people forget the foolishness, but they do remember the shine. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1748-51 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 08:44 PM ‘It’s a kind of medicine with words,’ said Nutt, carefully. ‘Sometimes people fool themselves into believing things that aren’t true. Sometimes that can be quite dangerous for the person. They see the world in a wrong way. They won’t let themselves see that what they believe is wrong. But often there is a part of the mind that does know, and the right words can let it out.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 1761-63 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 08:46 PM ‘Trev tells me that despite your more mature appearance you are the same age as her,’ said Nutt. ‘You really don’t talk to many ladies, do you, Mister Nutt?’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 1775-77 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 08:47 PM ‘I do not know. There are many things I don’t know. There is a door.’ ‘What?’ ‘A door in my head. Some things are behind the door and I don’t know them. But that is all right, Ladyship says.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 118 | Loc. 1801-4 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 10:47 PM Nutt was technically an expert on love poetry throughout the ages and had discussed it at length with Miss Healstether, the castle librarian. He had also tried to discuss it with Ladyship, but she had laughed and said it was frivolity, although quite helpful as a tutorial on the use of vocabulary, scansion, rhythm and affect as a means to an end, to wit getting a young lady to take all her clothes off. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 1884-87 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 10:56 PM But broadly speaking, sir, it carries the message you have asked for, which is to say “I think you’re really fit. I really fancy you. Can we have a date? No hanky panky, I promise.” However, sir, since it is a love poem, I have taken the liberty of altering it slightly to carry the suggestion that if hanky or panky should appear to be welcomed by the young lady she will not find you wanting in either department.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1891-96 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 11:03 PM ‘Of course, they have tons of stuff in there that’s never really been looked at properly and the city was going through a prudish period then and didn’t care to know about that sort of thing.’ ‘What, that men have tonkers?’ said Dr Hix. ‘That sort of news gets out sooner or later.’ He looked around at the disapproving faces and added, ‘Skull ring, remember? Under college statute the head of the Department of Post-Mortem Communications is entitled, nay, required to make tasteless, divisive and moderately evil remarks. I’m sorry, but these are your rules.’ ‘Thank you, Doctor Hix. Your uncalled-for remarks are duly noted and appreciated.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 1934-35 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 11:10 PM ‘Naiads?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘They’re water nymphs, aren’t they? Young women with very thin damp clothing? Why would anyone want them around? ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 2064-68 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 11:26 PM The laws of favours are amongst the most fundamental in the multiverse. The first law is: nobody asks for just one favour; the second request (after the granting of the first favour), prefaced by ‘and can I be really cheeky…?’ is the asking of the second favour. If the aforesaid second request is not granted, the second law ensures that the need for any gratitude for the first favour is nullified, and in accordance with the third law the favour giver has not done any favours at all, and the favour field collapses. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2227-28 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2012, 11:38 PM Wizards were competitive. It was a part of wizardry. Wizards have no more idea of a friendly game than cats have of a friendly mouse. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 2548-53 | Added on Thursday, October 25, 2012, 08:34 PM Nutt took it out of his hands and bounced it on the tiles a couple of times. Gloing! Gloing! ‘Yes. It appears to be a simple sphere, although technically I believe it to be, in actual fact, a truncated icosahedron, made by stitching together a number of pentagons and hexagons of tough leather, and stitching means holes and holes let the air leak…Ah, there is lacing just here, you see? There must be some internal bladder–animal, probably. A balloon, as it were, for lightness and elasticity, encapsulated by leather, simple and elegant.’ He handed the ball back to Ponder, who was open-mouthed. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2563-64 | Added on Thursday, October 25, 2012, 08:34 PM a wizard could trust you because of the hellish future he could unleash on you if his trust was betrayed. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 169 | Loc. 2580-82 | Added on Thursday, October 25, 2012, 08:36 PM Mr Stollop commanded that all family earnings were pooled, with him holding the pool, which was then pooled with his friends in the bar of the Turkey & Vegetables, and ultimately pooled again in the reeking alley behind it. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 170 | Loc. 2596-98 | Added on Thursday, October 25, 2012, 08:40 PM ‘I believe I could squeeze with enough pressure, Andy, to make your bones grind and flow. There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand. I truly believe that I could make every one of them useless with the slightest extra pressure. However, I would like to give you a chance to revise your current intentions.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 2634-36 | Added on Thursday, October 25, 2012, 08:45 PM ‘Because King Rhys of the dwarfs presented a dress of brimstoned rubber and leather to Lady Margolotta six months ago, and I’m pretty sure I understand the principle.’ ‘Her? The Dark Lady? She can kill people with a thought!’ ‘She is my friend,’ said Nutt calmly, ‘and I will help you.’ ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 110-14 | Added on Thursday, October 25, 2012, 08:55 PM One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty- seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 116-17 | Added on Thursday, October 25, 2012, 08:56 PM It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 119 | Added on Thursday, October 25, 2012, 08:56 PM The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 119 | Added on Thursday, October 25, 2012, 08:56 PM paranoia ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 129-30 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 12:59 AM he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 172-82 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 01:03 AM The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization. It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 201-2 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 01:06 AM Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 227-32 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 01:09 AM Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you. It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 261-63 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 01:13 AM Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms -- one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 321 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 01:20 AM The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 325-26 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 01:21 AM Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed -- no escape. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 334-35 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 01:22 AM It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 344-47 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 01:24 AM He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 347 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 01:24 AM counterintelligence ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 359-61 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 01:25 AM It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 459-64 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 02:16 PM within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 469-71 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 02:19 PM Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 502-8 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 02:23 PM Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fiftyseven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 517-20 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 02:24 PM And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions -- definitive texts, they were called -- of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 610 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 08:11 PM executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 627-28 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 08:13 PM You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 644-45 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 08:15 PM 'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 658 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 08:16 PM Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.' ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 667-69 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 08:29 PM What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston caught a phrase-'complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism'- jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 716-21 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 08:34 PM a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. 'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 732-34 | Added on Friday, October 26, 2012, 08:36 PM The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking- pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 770-71 | Added on Saturday, October 27, 2012, 08:07 PM probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 889-90 | Added on Saturday, October 27, 2012, 08:19 PM It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 890-92 | Added on Saturday, October 27, 2012, 08:20 PM And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 897 | Added on Saturday, October 27, 2012, 08:20 PM As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals are free.' ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 983-84 | Added on Saturday, October 27, 2012, 10:46 PM To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1013-14 | Added on Sunday, October 28, 2012, 09:48 AM Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Bookmark Loc. 1072 | Added on Sunday, October 28, 2012, 11:57 AM ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 1044-47 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 10:34 PM 'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound. ========== George Orwell - 1984 (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Note Loc. 1047 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2012, 10:34 PM crapworld ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 175 | Loc. 2681 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 05:01 PM Weapons got you killed, often because you were holding one. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 2786-87 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 05:23 PM he shuffled and stubbed his way to the shop’s door, checking every bottle along the way for evidence of liquid content. Remarkably, a bottle of port had survived with fifty per cent remaining capacity. Any port in a storm, he thought, and drank his breakfast. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 184 | Loc. 2814-16 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 05:27 PM ‘We believe the beard to be a false one,’ said one of the grags. ‘That is perfectly acceptable,’ said the King. ‘There is absolutely nothing in any precedent that bans false beards. They are a great salvation to those who find beards hard to grow.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 185 | Loc. 2835-37 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 05:31 PM huge black-and-white slabs of the floor, worn smooth by the footfalls of millennia, were polished still further as today’s faculty and students took a short cut to various concerns, destinations and, very occasionally, when no viable excuse presented itself, to lectures. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 2859-61 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 05:33 PM ‘Don’t just mess about like kids kicking a tin! Play football! I am the Archchancellor of this university, by Io, and I will rusticate, or otherwise expel, any man who skives off without a note from his mother, hah!’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 2944-46 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 08:08 PM But authority must back up authority, in public at least, otherwise there is no authority, and therefore the senior authority is forced to back up the junior authority, even if he, the senior authority, believes that the junior authority is a tiresome little tit. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3023-24 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 08:41 PM Senior wizards never rowed in public. The damage was apt to be appalling. No, politeness ruled, but with sharpened edges. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 3089-91 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 08:49 PM There followed the menacing silence of a clash of wills, but Ponder Stibbons decided that as he was, technically, twelve important people at the university, he formed, all by himself, a committee, and since he was therefore, de facto, very wise, he should intervene. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3098-3106 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 08:51 PM ‘Didn’t anyone notice that you were getting all this power?’ said Ridcully. ‘Yes, sir, me. Only I thought it was responsibility and hard work. None of you ever bother with details, you see. Technically, I have to report to other people, but usually the other people are me. You have no idea, sirs. I’m even the Camerlengo, which means that if you drop dead, Archchancellor, from any cause other than legitimate succession under the Dead Man’s Pointy Shoes tradition, I run this place until a successor is elected which, given the nature of wizardry, will mean a job for life, in which case the Librarian, as an identifiable and competent member of the senior staff, will try to discharge his duties, and if he fails, the official procedure is for wizards everywhere to fight among themselves for the Hat, causing fire, destruction, doves, rabbits and billiard balls to appear from every orifice and much loss of life.’ After a short pause he continued. ‘Again. Which is why some of us get a little worried when we see powerful wizards squabbling like this. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 3202-7 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 09:49 PM ‘I thought it was when early blokes kicked a dead enemy’s head around,’ Bledlow Nobbs (no relation) volunteered. A throat was cleared. ‘Unlikely in my opinion,’ said Hix. ‘Unless it’s in a bag or some sort of metal brace, and then you have the problem of weight, because a human head comes in at around ten pounds, which is a pain in the foot, I should think. Scooping it out would work for a while, of course, but mind you wire the jaw, because no one wants to be bitten in the foot. I do have some heads on ice if anyone wants to experiment. It’s amazing, but there are still those who leave their bodies to necromancy. There’s some strange people out there.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 3253-55 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 09:53 PM Ponder’s office always puzzled Mustrum Ridcully. The man used filing cabinets for heavens’ sake. Ridcully worked on the basis that anything you couldn’t remember wasn’t important and had developed the floor-heap method of document storage to a fine art. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 3352 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 10:05 PM there was the kind of respect you give to an equal who is, crucially, no threat to your own position. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 3357-59 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 10:07 PM ‘Oh, that’s crabs for you,’ said Verity, disentangling the ones who had hitched a ride. ‘Thick as planks, the lot of them. That’s why you can keep them in a bucket without a lid. Any that tries to get out gets pulled back. Yes, as thick as planks.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 3364-68 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 10:08 PM Crab bucket, thought Glenda as they hurried towards the Night Kitchen. That’s how it works. People from the Sisters disapproving when a girl takes the trolley bus. That’s crab bucket. Practically everything my mum ever told me, that’s crab bucket. Practically everything I’ve ever told Juliet, that’s crab bucket, too. Maybe it’s just another word for the Shove. It’s so nice and warm on the inside that you forget that there’s an outside. The worst of it is, the crab that mostly keeps you down is you…The realization had her mind on fire. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 3397-98 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 10:11 PM She could read it all at a glance, his possessive stance, her modestly downcast eyes: not hanky panky, as such, but certainly overture and beginners to hanky panky. Oh, the power of words… ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 224 | Loc. 3422-24 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 10:13 PM ‘When they hunt, every dog knows the position of every other dog. I wanted them to understand the duality of team and player. The strength of the player is the team and the strength of the team is the player.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 3442-45 | Added on Thursday, November 01, 2012, 10:15 PM ‘So have you read Trev’s everything? Bet that was a dirty book!’ ‘Er, no, miss. He is worried and confused. I would say he is trying to see what kind of man he is going to be.’ ‘Really? He’s always been a scallywag.’ ‘He is thinking of his future.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 3497-99 | Added on Wednesday, November 07, 2012, 12:55 AM ‘Is this worth the argument, I ask you?’ said Vetinari. ‘What we have here, gentlemen, is but a spat between the heads of a venerable and respected institution and an ambitious, relatively inexperienced, and importunate new school of learning.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 3500-3501 | Added on Wednesday, November 07, 2012, 12:56 AM Vetinari raised a finger. ‘I hadn’t finished, Archchancellor. Let me see now. I said that what we have here is a spat between an antique and somewhat fossilized, elderly and rather hidebound institution and a college of vibrant newcomers full of fresh and exciting ideas.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 231 | Loc. 3534-40 | Added on Friday, November 09, 2012, 07:07 PM one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 245 | Loc. 3757-59 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2012, 03:19 PM ‘It would appear that a young woman has got in via the back gate by bribing the guards, sir. They accepted the bribes, as per your standing orders, and she has been shown into the anteroom, which she will soon find is locked. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 249 | Loc. 3806 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2012, 03:24 PM You want spaces you can control, beyond the immediate reach of fools.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 249 | Loc. 3814-17 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2012, 03:25 PM ‘All right, but you tricked them!’ ‘Really? They did not have to drink to excess, did they?’ ‘You knew they would!’ ‘No. I suspected they might. They could have been more cautious. They should have been more cautious. I’d prefer to say that I led them along the correct path with a little guile rather than drove them along it with sticks. I possess many types of stick, Miss Sugarbean.’ ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 640474-80 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2012, 03:27 PM ple·o·nasm  n. the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning (e.g., see with one's eyes), either as a fault of style or for emphasis. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 252 | Loc. 3850-60 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2012, 03:30 PM Vetinari put down his pen. ‘Drumknott, if you saw a ball lying invitingly on the ground, would you kick it?’ The secretary’s forehead wrinkled. ‘How would the invitation be couched, sir?’ ‘I’m sorry?’ ‘Would it be, for example, a written note attached to the ball by person or persons unknown?’ ‘I was rather inclining to the idea that you might perhaps feel simply that the whole world was silently willing you to give said ball a hearty kick?’ ‘No, sir. There are too many variables. Possibly an enemy or japester might have assumed that I would take some action of the kind and made the ball out of concrete or similar material, in the hope I might do myself a serious or humorous injury. So, I would check first.’ ‘And then, if all was in order, you would kick the ball?’ ‘To what purpose or profit, sir?’ ‘Interesting question. I suppose for the joy of seeing it fly.’ Drumknott seemed to consider this for a while, and then shook his head. ‘I am sorry, sir, but you have lost me at this point.’ ‘Ah, you are a pillar of rock in a world of changes, Drumknott. Well done.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 256 | Loc. 3916 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2012, 03:56 PM the mystery cook had yet to master the second most important rule of cooking, which was to tidy things up afterwards. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 257 | Loc. 3939-40 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2012, 03:58 PM never, ever apologize for anything that doesn’t need apologizing for,’ said Glenda. ‘And especially never apologize for just being yourself.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 258 | Loc. 3945 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2012, 03:59 PM ‘Only people who are very trustworthy would dare to look as untrustworthy as me and Madame.’ ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 44-46 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 10:51 PM It was the al-Qaeda leader’s sixth spring of confinement in Abbottabad. His hair and beard had grown white. Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden’s life had shrunk to the cramped and crowded space of the upper two floors of a house behind high walls. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 66-68 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 10:53 PM While looking for an al-Qaeda figure who went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—a man known to have once been a trusted aide and courier for bin Laden—intelligence analysts had become aware of a curious compound just outside Abbottabad, a prosperous city about 30 miles northeast of Islamabad. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 68 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 10:53 PM true explanation? ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 72-79 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 10:55 PM What had first intrigued them was the compound itself. Unlike most homes in that affluent neighborhood, it did not have Internet or phone connections. The walls were unusually high, topped by two feet of barbed wire. There was no way to see inside the house itself, from the ground or from above. The agency had learned that the compound was home not only to Ibrahim Ahmed’s family but to his brother Abrar’s family as well. They went by assumed names: Ahmed called himself Arshad Khan, and the brother went by Tariq Khan. They had never been wealthy, but their accommodations were expensive. The brothers were also wary. They burned their trash on-site. None of their children attended school. In telephone calls to distant family members, always made from locations away from the compound itself, they lied about where they were living. The C.I.A. has been known to misinterpret many things, but one thing it recognizes is high operational security. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 79 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 10:55 PM note: good OPSEC itself can draw attention to you ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 83-87 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 10:57 PM in a telephone conversation with an old friend that summer, a call the C.I.A. monitored, Ahmed was peppered with the standard questions, “What are you doing now? What are you up to?” Ahmed at first didn’t answer. But his friend was insistent, and so he finally gave in, albeit cryptically, explaining, “I’m with the same ones as before.” His friend said, “May Allah be with you,” and quickly dropped the subject. That suggested that whoever Ahmed and his brother were minding in that house was a top al-Qaeda figure. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 94-96 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 10:58 PM the figure who came to be known as The Pacer, a man in traditional Pakistani attire and prayer cap who regularly took walks around the vegetable garden, part of which had a tarp stretched above to shield it from the sun. Images of The Pacer from overhead cameras were very good, but the angle made it impossible to get a clear look at the man’s face. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 97-98 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 10:59 PM Brennan, a former C.I.A. officer, had seen Predator imagery of bin Laden back in 2000. He felt he recognized the man, recognized the walk. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 101-2 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 10:59 PM They counted the pieces of laundry that were hung out to dry. They determined that the hidden family was large: three wives, a young man, and 10 or more children. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 118-20 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 11:01 PM Admiral Bill McRaven, a navy SEAL who now led the Joint Special Operations Command, an army within an army that during the past decade had conducted thousands of operations around the world, mostly in secret. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 126-30 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 11:02 PM McRaven could see at a glance that there was really only one way to do it. The admiral ruled out the bombing option immediately. Whatever the advantages in simplicity and reduced American risk, his educated guess was that it would take upwards of 50,000 pounds of ordnance to destroy a compound of that size and make sure bin Laden, if he was there, did not survive. You had to consider the possibility of tunnels or an underground bunker. That explosive power would kill everyone inside the compound and quite a few people nearby. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 151-53 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 11:05 PM The assessment would ultimately be “red-teamed”—worked over by analysts assigned to poke holes in it—three times: by the Counterterrorism Center, by Brennan’s staff, and by another group within the C.I.A. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 153 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 11:05 PM smart procedure - a form of peer review ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 155-59 | Added on Saturday, December 01, 2012, 11:59 PM The director explained that following the agency’s erroneous conviction, a decade earlier, that Saddam Hussein had been hiding weapons of mass destruction—a finding that was used to justify a long and costly war—the C.I.A. had instituted an almost comically elaborate process for weighing certainty. It was like trying to craft a precise formula for good judgment. Analysts up and down the chain were now asked not only to give their opinion but also to place a confidence level on it—high, medium, or low. Then they were required to explain why they had assigned that level. What you ended up with, as the president was discovering, was more confusion. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 162-63 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 12:00 AM “People don’t have differences because they have different intel,” he said. “We are all looking at the same things. I think it depends more on your past experience.” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 163 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 12:00 AM insightful ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 167-70 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:17 AM “Mr. President,” he said, “if we had a human source who had told us directly that bin Laden was living in that compound, I still wouldn’t be above 60 percent.” Morell said he had spent a lot of time on both questions, W.M.D. and Abbottabad. He had seen no fewer than 13 analytical drafts on the former and at least as many on the latter. “And I’m telling you, the case for W.M.D. wasn’t just stronger—it was much stronger.” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 170-73 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:18 AM The president listened, but he had already pretty much made up his mind. “One of the things you learn as president is you’re always dealing with probabilities,” he told me. “No issue comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. No issue comes to my desk where there’s 100 percent confidence that this is the right thing to do. Because if people were absolutely certain then it would have been decided by someone else. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 179-82 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:19 AM The simplest, and the one that posed the least risk to American forces, was to reduce the compound to dust, along with everyone and everything in and around it. As Peter L. Bergen recounted in Manhunt, the air force calculated that to do the job right would mean dropping upwards of 30 precision bombs, or launching a comparable number of missiles. This would be enough to guarantee that anything on, in, or near that plot of earth would be killed. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 183-85 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:19 AM Obama asked how many people were living at the compound, and was told that there were four adult males, five or six adult women, and nearly 20 children. He asked about the houses that were close to the compound in the neighborhood. Those, too, would be destroyed. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 185-86 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:19 AM As McRaven had done earlier, Obama scrapped that plan immediately. He said the only way he would even consider attacking the compound from the air was if the blast area could be drastically reduced. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 186-88 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:20 AM McRaven explained the raid option. He had not yet brought on a full team to scope out the mission completely. The one thing he could tell the president for sure was that if his team could be delivered to the compound they could clear it and kill or capture bin Laden with minimal loss of life. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 189-91 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:21 AM “I can tell you that we can succeed on the raid. What I can’t tell you yet is how I get in and how I get out. To do that requires detailed planning by air planners who do this for a living Getting out could be a little sporty. I can’t recommend a raid until I do the homework.” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 194-99 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:22 AM In the aftermath of the raid, the term “air option” has come to be synonymous with “bombing.” In fact, there was a very different air option, not widely known, and this different option was the one that was ultimately taken seriously. The idea had been put forward by General James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs: wait for the tall man in the prayer cap to go for his daily walk and take a shot at him with a small missile fired from a drone. It would require great precision, but the drones had delivered that in the past. There would be no dead wives and children, no collateral damage at all. But it was strictly a one-shot deal. If the drone missed, The Pacer and his entourage would vanish. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 199 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:22 AM drone attack seriously considered ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 209-14 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:26 AM In the unlikely event that bin Laden surrendered, Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial. He was ready to bring him back and put him on trial in a federal court. “We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III,” the president told me. “I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was, if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 214-16 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:27 AM McRaven’s men undertook their first rehearsal on April 7. They worked on an isolated acre deep inside the sprawling, wooded grounds of Fort Bragg, where a mock-up of the three-story Abbottabad house had been built. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 216 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:27 AM site-specific preparation ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 220-21 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:29 AM For the most part the group consisted of SEAL Team Six, but McRaven had also grabbed men from other units. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 221-25 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:29 AM SEAL Team Six had rotated home not long before. The men on these elite special-operations teams went to war in shifts. For most of the past 10 years they had been deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan for three-to-four-month tours, where they maintained a very high op tempo, going out on missions sometimes two or three times a night. When deployed, they lived for the most part sequestered from conventional troops, either at their own forward operating bases or on a portion of a larger base that was sealed off. It was a deeply satisfying business. The men in these units tended to stay. Many found it hard to adjust to anything else. The skills required were not readily applicable to other kinds of work. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 225-28 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:30 AM When you have been part of such operations—adrenaline-pumping missions in which you risk your life and good friends die; and when you enjoy the silent admiration of everyone you meet; and when you believe your work is vital to the nation’s security—it is hard to find anything else that compares. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 228-32 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:31 AM The team re-assembled for a second rehearsal a week later in Nevada, where the heat and the altitude (about 4,000 feet) were similar to Abbottabad’s. This time the rehearsal was designed to duplicate the conditions flying to the target. On the real mission, the helicopters would have to travel 90 minutes before arriving over Abbottabad. They would be flying very low and very fast to avoid Pakistani radar. Mission planners had to work out precisely what the choppers could do at that altitude, and in the anticipated air temperatures. How much of a load could the choppers carry and still perform? ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 234-41 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:35 AM Meanwhile, another option was being tested—Vice-Chairman Cartwright’s magic bullet, in the form of a small guided munition that could be fired from a tiny drone. No one involved with planning the mission will discuss its particulars, but the weapon may well have been a newly designed Raytheon G.P.S.-guided missile, about the length and width of a strong man’s forearm. The missile can strike an individual or a vehicle without harming anything nearby. Called simply an S.T.M. (Small Tactical Munition), it weighs just 13 pounds, carries a 5-pound warhead, and can be fired from under the wing of a small drone. It was a “fire-and-forget” missile, which meant you could not guide it once it was released. It would find and explode on the precise coordinates it had been given. Since The Pacer tended to walk in the same place every day, Cartwright believed the missile would kill him, and likely him alone. It placed no American forces at risk. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 243-44 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:35 AM And if you hit him, how would you know that you had? If there was no proof that bin Laden was dead, al-Qaeda could theoretically keep him alive for years, raising money and planning attacks in his name. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 244-48 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:37 AM The final meeting before the raid was held in the Situation Room on Thursday, April 28. Filling the black leather chairs were Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, Vice-Chairman Cartwright, Brennan, Donilon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and C.I.A. Director Leon Panetta and his deputy, Michael Morell. Top staffers ringed the room. Admiral McRaven did not participate: he and the SEAL team were now in Afghanistan. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 254-55 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:40 AM As far as Obama was concerned, the level of certainty was the same as it had been for months: 50–50. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 255 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:40 AM prepared to face either set of consequences - lauded as a hero or made to eat crow by everyone for invading pakistan ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 264-69 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:44 AM Gates favored taking the shot from the drone. He spoke quietly but forcefully. He acknowledged that it was a difficult call, and that striking from the air would leave them not knowing whether they had gotten bin Laden, but he had been working at the C.I.A. as an analyst in 1980 when the Desert One mission to rescue the hostages in Iran failed. He had, in fact, been in this very Situation Room when the chopper collided with the C-130 at the staging area in the desert and turned that rescue mission into a fireball. It was an experience he did not wish to revisit. He had visibly blanched the first time he had heard that McRaven was planning a helicopter-refueling stop in a remote area outside Abbottabad, similar to what had been done in Iran in 1980. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 273-76 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:45 AM Everyone else favored sending in the SEALs. Clinton, who had faulted Obama during the primary campaign for asserting that he would send forces to Pakistan unilaterally if there was a good chance of getting bin Laden, now said that she favored the raid. She delivered this opinion after a typically lengthy review of the pros and cons. She noted that the raid would pose a diplomatic nightmare for the State Department. But because the U.S.-Pakistani relationship was built more on mutual dependence than friendship and trust, it would likely survive the crisis. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 277-78 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:45 AM Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave a detailed PowerPoint presentation before delivering his endorsement. Mullen had witnessed McRaven’s rehearsals at Fort Bragg and in Nevada. He had high confidence in the SEAL team ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 278-81 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:46 AM Brennan, Donilon, Clapper, Panetta, and Morell all agreed. The C.I.A. director felt strongly about it, which was not surprising. This had been his project all along, and the analysts who worked for him would have felt betrayed if their boss had changed his mind. Panetta told Obama that he ought to ask himself this question: “What would the average American say if he knew we had the best chance of getting bin Laden since Tora Bora and we didn’t take a shot?” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 286-91 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:47 AM Both had been terrifically impressed by the special-ops commander. They were used to dealing with generals and admirals, and few of them liked being challenged. McRaven had understood from the start that he would have people looking over his shoulder. Flournoy was particularly impressed by McRaven’s willingness to admit that he didn’t have all the answers. “You know, I haven’t thought about that, but I need to,” he would say. He was open to suggestions and made substantial revisions based on the input he was given. They had seen how carefully McRaven picked the members of the team, choosing men who had honed their skills night after night for months. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 290 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:47 AM intelligent leadership ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 296-99 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:50 AM In truth, the president had all but made up his mind to launch the raid when he left the meeting that Thursday afternoon. He had been thinking about it for months. He delayed making the final decision in order to take one last breath. He had been inclined to hit the target for a long time now. He had made his peace with “50–50” months ago. He had been tempted by the air option, but believed that the importance of certainty was too great. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 299 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:50 AM ruthless calculus - ignoring civilian casualties? ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 299-306 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:50 AM Still, he turned it over in his mind until the small hours. His habit was to stay up much later than Michelle and the girls. That night he was preoccupied not so much with making a decision, but with whether he had considered every element carefully enough. “It was a matter of taking one last breath and just making sure, asking is there something that I haven’t thought of?” Obama explained to me. “Is there something that we need to do? … At that point my estimation was that we weren’t going to be able to do it better a month or two months or three months from now. We weren’t going to have better certainty about whether bin Laden was there, and so it was just a matter of pulling the trigger.” Alone in the Treaty Room, he considered the matter for three or four hours. He woke up several times that night, still mulling it over. In the end, he would recall, the decision would boil down to Obama’s deep confidence in McRaven: “He just never looks like he’s surprised by anything.” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 307-8 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:51 AM The two stealth Black Hawks lifted off from the airfield at Jalalabad at 11 P.M. local time. They were blacked out and, together, carried a full, minutely calculated load: 23 SEALs, a Pashto translator, and a dog—a Belgian Malinois named Cairo. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 308 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:51 AM funny closing detail adds to sense of authenticity ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 310-11 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:57 AM The Chinooks carried the Rapid Reaction Force, to be mobilized in case of trouble. Some have credited Obama for insisting that this force be deployed; if the Pakistanis made trouble, the U.S. would make trouble for them. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 311 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:57 AM willing to attack an ally under the right circumstances ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 311-12 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:58 AM But McRaven would have deployed it anyway—it was standard procedure. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 315-17 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:59 AM Approaching the compound from the northwest, the Black Hawks were now visible in the grainy overhead feed from the Sentinel drone to those gazing at screens in the White House and at the C.I.A. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 316 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 01:59 AM drone support for helicopter mission ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 317-18 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:01 AM After that, things happened very fast. The reconstruction that follows comes chiefly from civilian and military personnel who participated in the planning and execution of the raid. Some information derives from published accounts. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 318 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:01 AM vague journalistic methodology ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 318-23 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:02 AM Biden, Gates, and General Brad Webb, in a conference room in the White House basement, across from the Situation Room, watched with horror as the first chopper, instead of hovering over the compound yard for a few moments to drop the SEAL team, as planned, abruptly wheeled around, clipped the compound wall, and hit the ground. The chopper hadn’t been able to hover—it had “mushed,” or begun to skid uncontrollably. An after-action analysis would conclude that because the compound was encircled by stone walls, whereas the mock target in Nevada had only a chain-link fence, the air beneath the Black Hawk was warmer and less dense than anticipated, and insufficient to bear the helicopter’s weight. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 323 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:02 AM highly detailed and specifc explanation ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 334-36 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:04 AM The admiral didn’t have time to explain things to Washington. He quickly ascertained that no one on the chopper had been hurt. They were already adjusting their approach to the target house. All of these men had long ago proved their talent for adapting quickly. McRaven had lost helicopters before. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 337-40 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:07 AM A White House photographer snapped a picture at precisely this moment, with Webb at the center in his blue uniform, head down, intently monitoring the video feed and chat line on his laptop screen; Obama seated in the corner with furrowed brow; Donilon standing behind Webb with his arms crossed, flanked by Mullen and Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Clinton with her hand to her mouth; Gates and Biden looking glum; all fixated on an off-camera screen. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 340 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:07 AM what kind of clearance do these photograhers have? ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 348-50 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:09 AM Bin Laden instructed his wife Amal to leave the lights off, though they would not have been able to turn them on anyway: C.I.A. operatives had cut the electricity to the entire neighborhood. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 350 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:09 AM how is this known? ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 350-53 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:16 AM One group of SEALs entered the garage area of the guesthouse. Teams like this had hit houses that were wired to explode, and had encountered human targets wired to blow themselves up, so they moved very fast, and with adult males in particular they were inclined to shoot on sight. The courier Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed sprayed a wild burst of AK-47 rounds at the SEALs, who returned fire and killed him. His wife, behind him, was hit in the shoulder. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 353-58 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:17 AM Another part of the team moved on the main house, clearing it methodically, room by room. Abrar Ahmed, the courier’s brother, was in a first-floor bedroom with his wife Bushra. Both were shot dead. The team then cleared the first floor, room by room. When they encountered a locked metal door in the rear, sealing off a stairway to the upper floors, they slapped on a small C-4 charge, blew it off its hinges, and moved up the stairs. Bin Laden’s 23-year-old son, Khalid, a slender bearded man in a white T-shirt, was shot dead at the top of the stairs. There were wailing women and children on this floor, none of whom posed a threat. The team didn’t know it yet, but there was only one adult male left in the compound, and he was in the third-floor bedroom. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 367-69 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:18 AM As the first SEAL entered the bedroom, he saw bin Laden on the floor, but first had to contend with Amal, who shouted and moved in front of her husband. The SEAL knocked her aside as his teammates stood over the mortally wounded bin Laden and fired killing shots into his chest. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 370-73 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:19 AM His identity was unmistakable, even with the grotesque hole through his right forehead. When he was shot he had not been surrendering, but neither had he been resisting. It is impossible to second-guess men in a firefight, but the available evidence suggests that if the SEALs’ first priority had been to take bin Laden alive he would be in U.S. custody today. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 373-76 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:19 AM What is more likely is that the SEALs had no intention of taking bin Laden alive, even though no one in the White House or chain of command had issued such an order. It would have taken a strong directive to capture him alive to preempt the instinct to kill him. The men who conducted the raid were hardened to violence and death. Their inclination would have been to shoot bin Laden on sight, just as they shot the other men they encountered in the compound. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 381-83 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:20 AM If the United States was going to have to defend the raiders on their way out—and there was a force ready to do so—it meant the worst might still lie ahead. Hearing the report, the president thought, Get the hell out of there now! ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 386-87 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:20 AM The finding and the shooting had together taken place within seconds. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 391-93 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:21 AM Some of the men emerged carrying a bag—bin Laden’s body had been zipped into a nylon body bag after being dragged down the stairs. One of bin Laden’s daughters would later say that she heard her father’s head banging on each step, leaving a bloody trail. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 394-97 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:22 AM But the commotion at the compound had, in fact, attracted little interest in the neighborhood or the country. The translator, wearing a Kevlar vest under his traditional long Pakistani shirt, shooed away the few residents who came out for a look. He told them in Pashto to go back to their houses—a “security operation” was under way. There was also the matter of the dog. People retreated. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 398-402 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:23 AM A medic from the Chinook unzipped bin Laden’s body bag, took swabs of blood, and inserted needles to extract bone marrow for DNA testing. Twenty minutes elapsed before the body bag was carried out to the working Black Hawk. One of the bone-marrow samples was placed on the Chinook. The intelligence haul from bin Laden’s computers was likewise distributed between the two choppers. Finally, the White House audience saw the downed Black Hawk explode. The demolition team scurried to the Chinook, and the choppers lifted off. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 402-3 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:23 AM When Pakistan’s air force finally scrambled two F-16s, the American force was safely across the border. The choppers landed back in Jalalabad. It was three A.M. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 408-13 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:24 AM Twenty-four hours later, McRaven supervised the disposal of bin Laden’s body. They had decided weeks earlier that the best option would be burial at sea; that way there would be no shrine for the martyr’s followers. So the body was cleaned, photographed from every conceivable angle, and then flown on a V-22 Osprey to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson cruising in the Arabian Sea. As a formality, the State Department contacted Saudi Arabia’s government and offered to deliver the body to his home country, but bin Laden was as unwanted there in death as he had been in life. Told that the alternative was burial at sea, the Saudi official said, “We like your plan.” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 413-16 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:25 AM Procedures for a simple Muslim burial were performed on the carrier, with bin Laden’s body being washed again and wrapped in a white shroud. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight, Monday morning, May 2. One frame shows the body wrapped in a weighted shroud. The next shows it lying diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water. In the next it is visible just below the surface, ripples spreading outward. In the last frame there are only circular ripples on the surface. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 416 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:25 AM cathartic? ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 417-18 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:26 AM On May 6, 2011, President Obama flew to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to meet with the SEAL team and the chopper pilots. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 418-21 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:27 AM With only one or two exceptions, the men did not resemble the bulked-up heroes of Hollywood but rather a group of ordinary, fit-looking men. They ranged in age from their late 20s to their early 40s. Some had gray hair. Dressed differently, Obama thought, they could have been bankers or lawyers. It wasn’t physical prowess that distinguished them, he decided. It was savvy and skill. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 426-27 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:28 AM “Was the weather a factor?” Obama asked. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 427 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:28 AM ask an intelligent question which you alread know something about the anwer to ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 431-34 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:29 AM Their skills and tactics had been purchased with the lives of others. He mentioned the operating bases in Afghanistan that were named in honor of these men. Then he explained that the success of the mission had depended on every member of the team, and gave examples. He cited the skill of the pilot settling down the chopper upright. He mentioned many others. He cited the Pashto translator, who was able to turn away the curious onlookers outside the compound. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 436-37 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:30 AM “You had a dog?” the president asked, surprised. “Yes, sir, we always have a dog with us,” the commander said. “Well,” said Obama, “I would like to meet that dog.” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 437 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:30 AM a bit triumphant for a mn who just presided over a murder ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 458-59 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:31 AM For some of us, the question ‘Am I ill or well?’ is not at all straightforward, but contentious and guilt-ridden. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 461-62 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:31 AM Is it a respectable illness? Does it stand up to scientific scrutiny? Or is it just one of my body’s weasel stratagems, to get attention, to get a rest, to avoid doing something it doesn’t want to do? ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 463-64 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:32 AM When a hypochondriac asks ‘How are you?’ he really wants to know, and he wants to know what you think about how you are; his problem is that, before the conversation is over, he may well have developed your symptoms himself. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 464-65 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:32 AM Hypochondria is not – or not only – a form of self-indulgence. It is also a form of pathological empathy. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 466-67 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:33 AM nurses and doctors are an elite, self-selected as sufficiently insensitive to get on with the job. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 467 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:33 AM they can handle the blood and guts ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 470-71 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:34 AM In engravings, its languishing victims, head resting on palm, surrounded themselves with the pots and jars of the apothecary, but he could do little to cure their gripings, rumblings, belchings, vertigo and bad dreams; nor could he cure the accompanying emotions of anxiety and grief. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 475-79 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:35 AM For Freud it was merely ‘the state of being in love with one’s own illness’. But it seems to be more complicated than that. There are diseases that are artefacts of treatment, produced by doctors; there are diseases that are produced by thinking about doctors. In hypochondria, the whole imagination is medicalised; on the one hand, the state is sordid and comic, on the other hand, perfectly comprehensible. It is the dismaying opaqueness of human flesh that drives us to anxiety and despair. What in God’s name is going on in there? ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 484-86 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:36 AM The hypochondriac is not a healthy person with a delusion, so much as a person who is pre-ill; the anticipation creates the very condition he fears. A pattern of suspicion becomes a way of life. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 487-88 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:36 AM The condition exists on a continuum, with fraud at one end, delusion in the middle and medical incompetence at the other end; ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 488 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:36 AM he is a benefits cheat, you are a hypochondriac, I am as yet undiagnosed. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 488-92 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:37 AM Some of us, mostly men, regard their bodies as machines, and service them when they begin to grate and creak, or when they sputter to a halt by the roadside. Some treat their bodies like lovers, to be flattered and indulged, second-guessed and placated in the hope that they will thrive. All of us treat them as other; they are not our essential selves, they are what we drag around with us, a suitcase or steamer trunk with dubious, ever shifting contents, a piece of luggage we didn’t pack ourselves. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Nov. 9 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 492-94 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:37 AM Many people are simply hyper-aware of bodily sensations, and so are driven continually to check in with themselves, examining visceral events as a man about to confess to a priest examines his conscience; like the believer scrutinising himself for sin, they expect to find something bad, perhaps something mortal. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 43-45 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:46 AM For more than 260 years, the contents of that page—and the details of this ritual—remained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 46-48 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:47 AM Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 66-67 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:49 AM Only two phrases were left unencoded: “Philipp 1866,” written at the start of the manuscript, and “Copiales 3″ at the end. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 67-68 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:50 AM Copiales looked like a variation of the Latin word for “to copy.” ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 68 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:50 AM chain letter! ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 76-77 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:53 AM He built an algorithm that would translate Dante’s Inferno based on the user’s choice of meter and rhyme scheme. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 77-79 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:54 AM Knight was part of an extremely small group of machine-translation researchers who treated foreign languages like ciphers—as if Russian, for example, were just a series of cryptological symbols representing English words. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 98 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:56 AM alleged ciphers often turned out to be hoaxes. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 101-2 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:58 AM For the next two weeks, he went through the cipher, developing a scheme to transcribe the coded script into easy-to-type, machine-readable text. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 106-8 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 02:58 AM The only way groups of letters would look and act largely the same was if this was a genuine cipher—one he could break. “This is not a hoax; this is not random. I can solve this one,” he told himself. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 126 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:00 AM digram or trigram cipher ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 145-46 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:02 AM She and Knight started emailing multiple times a day about the cipher—and signing their emails in Copiale cipher text. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 157-58 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:04 AM And they performed surgery on the eye. “We exceed all other [healers] by being able to pierce all cataracts, whether they’re fully developed or not,” the group boasted in its public—and uncoded—bylaws. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 158-59 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:04 AM Centered in the town of Wolfenbüttel, Germany, the Oculists, it was believed, played the role of gatekeepers to the burgeoning field of ophthalmology. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 172-76 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:05 AM Officially, Andreas Önnerfors is a historian of ideas. But he spends a lot of his time as one of 50 or so university researchers in the world seriously examining the historical and cultural impact of secret societies. When Megyesi contacted him, Önnerfors readily agreed to read this newly decoded document from a clandestine order. “Like the kid who sees candies, I could not resist,” he says, tugging gently at his ascot. “Plus, my boss wasn’t there.” ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 180-82 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:07 AM Many welcomed noblemen and merchants alike—a rare egalitarian practice in an era of strict social hierarchies. That made the orders dangerous to the state. They also frequently didn’t care about their adherents’ Christian denomination, making these orders—especially the biggest of them, Freemasonry—an implicit threat to the authority of the Catholic Church. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 186-87 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:08 AM just like today’s networked radicals, much of their power was wrapped up in their ability to stay anonymous and keep their communications secret. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 187-91 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:08 AM After reading the Oculists’ cipher, Önnerfors suggested that it described one of the more extreme groups. Forget the implicit threats to the state or church. In part of the Copiale, there’s explicit talk about slaying the tyrannical “three-headed monster” who “deprive[s] man of his natural freedom.” There’s even a call for a “general revolt.” Remember, Önnerfors told the code-breakers, this book was written in the 1740s—30 years before the Declaration of Independence. “To someone at the time,” he added, “this would be like reading a manifesto from a terrorist organization.” ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 206 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:10 AM Frequently we want to know something only because it needs to be kept secret. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 206 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:10 AM he who wisheth to keep a secret must keep it a secret that he hath a secret to keep ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 209-10 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:11 AM The Copiale’s more unusual symbols denote words, not letters—in this case, “Oculist” and “society.” ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 210 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:11 AM code in the cipher ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 227-29 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:13 AM The Oculists were a secret society that had burrowed deep into another secret society. Önnerfors noted that the cats on the Oculists’ insignia were watching over mice. It could be another Oculist joke — or a sign that they were spies. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 249-52 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:16 AM The Catholic Church has outlawed your order—and every other secret society. You don’t want to give up your Freemasonry, but you don’t want to be accused of sodomy. Even in a largely Protestant country like Germany, that was a withering accusation at the time. So “you hide it in a veil,” Snoek said. You start a new set of rituals, to layer on top of the old—and make it impregnable to Vatican attacks. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 252 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:16 AM counterintelligence technique ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 256-57 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:17 AM The Oculists guarded and transmitted the Masons’ deepest secrets, Snoek believes, using a mixture of ritual, misdirection, and cryptography. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 257 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:17 AM second foundation strategy ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 284 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:18 AM In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital incubator of the Central Intelligence Agency, ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 290-94 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:20 AM In the decade following September 11, 2001, the national-security establishment in this country devised a surveillance apparatus of genuinely diabolical creativity—a cross-hatch of legal and technical innovations that (in theory, at any rate) could furnish law enforcement and intelligence with a high-definition early-warning system on potential terror events. What it’s delivered, instead, is the tawdry, dismaying, and wildly entertaining spectacle that ensues when the national-security establishment inadvertently turns that surveillance apparatus on itself. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 298-300 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:21 AM that is the nature of private affairs in a digital age. Eventually, they out—or, as Petraeus observed at the In-Q-Tel summit, “Every byte left behind reveals information.” ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 302-3 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:23 AM have borrowed a bit of tradecraft from the Al Qaeda playbook—sharing an e-mail account, and saving messages for one another in a Draft folder, rather than running the risk of sending bytes across the ether. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 303 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:23 AM how do you think webmail works? surely these two not so stupid? ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 304-5 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:24 AM But if we know that kind of subterfuge is being used by terrorists, then it’s almost axiomatically an inadequate counter-surveillance option. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 305-6 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:24 AM It’s not yet clear on precisely what legal authority the F.B.I. obtained access to Broadwell’s e-mail, but under the relevant federal statute, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the government need do little more than ask. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 306-8 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:25 AM Originally passed in 1986, the law is notoriously outdated, and considers any e-mail that is over a hundred and eighty days old to be “abandoned,” meaning that the author of the e-mail no longer has any reasonable expectation that it would remain private. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 308-10 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:25 AM So to obtain access to this e-mail, the F.B.I. doesn’t need a court order; it just needs to ask your e-mail provider. (To obtain more recent e-mail, authorities do need a warrant from a judge.) ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 313-16 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:26 AM The picture of the F.B.I.’s investigation that emerges is one of a potential abuse of authority and conflict of interest, but also of a concept that would be quite familiar to Petraeus—mission creep. What began as a cyber-crime investigation, initiated at the behest of an F.B.I. agent who was a friend of Jill Kelley, morphs into a national-security investigation when it is discovered that Broadwell is the one sending menacing e-mails, and that she also happens to be consorting, sub-rosa, with America’s top spy. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 318-21 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:27 AM Meanwhile, just as the all-seeing eye of the national-security bureaucracy bore into Petraeus’s private affairs and turned up tawdry material, that same eye turns back on the F.B.I. agent who initiated the investigation and finds that he, too, is not without sin; that he has been sending photos of himself to Kelley; that he is reportedly “infatuated” with her, and “obsessed” with the case. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 321 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:27 AM farce! hollywood! ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 333 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:28 AM Vow of Monogamy enshrined in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 333-35 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:29 AM But our spymasters should give some thought as well to how it feels to be thoroughly and mercilessly laid bare at the hands of a legal and technological surveillance apparatus that is their own creation. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 347-48 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:30 AM It’s the dark romance of the French Foreign Legion: haunted men from everywhere, fighting anywhere, dying for causes not their own. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 362-65 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:31 AM The real lesson here was not about combat tactics. It was about do not ask questions, do not make suggestions, do not even think of that. Forget your civilian reflexes. War has its own logic. Be smart. For you the fighting does not require a purpose. It does not require your allegiance to France. The motto of the Legion is Legio Patria Nostra. The Legion is our fatherland. This means we will accept you. We will shelter you. We may send you out to die. Women are not admitted. Service to the Legion is about simplifying men’s lives. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 366-67 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:32 AM Currently it employs 7,286 enlisted men, including non-commissioned officers. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 369-71 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:32 AM A significant number of the men are fugitives from the law, living under assumed names, with their actual identities closely protected by the Legion. People are driven to join the Legion as much as they are drawn to it. That went for every recruit I met on the farm. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 378-80 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:33 AM They rushed to it, carrying the chairs. The farm is one of four such properties used by the Legion for the first month of basic training, all chosen for their isolation. The recruits lived there semi-autonomously, cut off from outside contact, subject to the whims of the instructors, and doing all the chores. They were getting little sleep. Mentally they were having a hard time. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 383 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:34 AM Seven actually came from France, but had been given new identities as “French Canadian.” ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 386-87 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:35 AM Men who have been through winters on the farms insist as a result that you should never join the Legion then. You should go to Morocco, sleep under a bridge, do anything, and wait for spring. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 393-94 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:42 AM He answered that the boat was sinking normally. It was a figure of speech. He knew from experience that the recruits were doing well enough. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 394 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:42 AM like undergrad tutorials? ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 395-96 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:44 AM He had been barred from the regular French Army because of troubles with the law when he was a teenager, and so had joined the Foreign Legion under the identity, initially, of a Francophone Swiss. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 401-3 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:44 AM On the one hand, he needed to make legionnaires of them. On the other, he had already lost five to desertion. Not too soft, not too hard—that was the pressure he felt, and with a sense that his own future was on the line. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 421-22 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:49 AM These were not men who had excelled in school. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 428-29 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:50 AM There were parade-ground exercises during which they learned the strange, slow cadence of the Legion’s ceremonial march, and the lyrics to meaningless Legion songs. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 435-36 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:51 AM The program called for the platoon to walk out carrying full patrol gear and to make a roundabout, two-day, 50-mile march back to the Legion’s headquarters, at Castelnaudary, near Carcassonne, for the final three months of basic training. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 436-38 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:52 AM The march to Castelnaudary is a rite of passage. Once it is completed, recruits become true legionnaires and during an initiation ceremony are given permission by the regimental commander to put on their kepis for the first time. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 438-40 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:52 AM Kepis are the stiff, round, flat-topped garrison caps worn in the French Army as part of the traditional dress uniform. Charles de Gaulle wears one in famous pictures. Those worn by legionnaires are white—a color that is exclusive to the Legion and gives rise to the term képi blanc, often used to signify the soldiers themselves. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 442-46 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:53 AM Again and again, to the order of “Platoon, cover your heads!,” the recruits had to shout, “Legio!” (and hold the kepis over their hearts), “Patria!” (and hold the kepis straight out), “Nostra!” (and put the kepis on their heads, wait two seconds, and slap their hands to their thighs). Then they had to shout in unison, with pauses, “We promise! To serve! With honor! And loyalty!” ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 450-54 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:54 AM I had thought that people might come out to encourage them, and even warm them with offers of coffee, but rather the opposite occurred when some of the residents closed their shutters as if to wish the legionnaires gone. This fit a pattern I had seen all day, of drivers barely bothering to slow as they passed the line of exhausted troops. When I mentioned my surprise to Boulanger he said that the French love their army once a year, on Bastille Day, but only if the sky is blue. As for the foreigners of the Foreign Legion, by definition they have always been expendable. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 456-58 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:57 AM The Legion was created primarily to gather up some of the foreign deserters and criminals who had drifted to France in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. It was discovered that these men, who were said to threaten civil society, could be induced to become professional soldiers at minimal cost, then exiled to North Africa to help with the conquest of Algeria. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 459-63 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:58 AM During the pacification of Algeria, 844 legionnaires died. During a foolish intervention in Spain in the 1830s, nearly 9,000 died or deserted. During the Crimean War, in the 1850s, 444 died. Then came the French invasion of Mexico of 1861–65, whose purpose was to overthrow the reformist government of Benito Juárez and create a European puppet state, to be lorded over by an Austrian prince named Maximilian. It did not work out. Mexico won, France lost, and Maximilian was shot. Of the 4,000 legionnaires sent off to help with the war, roughly half did not return. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 467-69 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 03:59 AM After the war ended, the Legion stayed on and helped with the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune—a civilian revolt during which legionnaires dutifully killed French citizens on French streets, often by summary execution. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 481-83 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 04:01 AM “It’s like this. There is no point in trying to understand. Time is unimportant. We are dust from the stars. We are nothing at all. Whether you die at age 15 or 79, in a thousand years there is no significance to it. So fuck off with your worries about war.” ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 488-97 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 04:03 AM Near the end, just when the army believed it had prevailed on the battlefield, wiser heads in France—Charles de Gaulle and the French people themselves—realized that Algeria could no longer be held. After negotiations began for a complete French withdrawal, a group of French officers hatched a plan to reverse the tide by seizing cities in Algeria, killing Charles de Gaulle, and installing a military junta in Paris. They made their move on April 21, 1961, starting with the seizure of Algiers by a regiment of Legion paratroopers under the command of Major Hélie de Saint Marc, an officer who, tellingly, is revered within the army today, for having stuck to his principles. Two additional Legion regiments joined the rebellion, as did a number of elite units of the regular French Army. The situation seemed serious enough to the government in Paris that it ordered the detonation of an atomic bomb at a Saharan test site to keep it from falling into the hands of rogue forces. But the conspiracy was hopelessly ill-conceived. On the second day, after de Gaulle appealed for support, the conscripted citizen-soldiers who made up the overwhelming majority of men in the armed forces took matters into their own hands and mutinied against the conspirators. The coup failed. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Nov. 24 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 501-5 | Added on Sunday, December 02, 2012, 04:04 AM This is a sensitive subject, and officially denied, but the history of defeat encouraged a reactionary culture in the Legion, where, beneath an appearance of neutral professionalism, the officer corps today harbors virulent right-wing views. It is common at closed social gatherings to hear even young officers regretting the loss of Algeria, disparaging Communists, insulting homosexuals, and seething at what they perceive as the decadence and self-indulgence of modern French society. ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 20 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 187-88 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 04:09 PM Shielding his eyes with his hand, he fired the full clip in his automatic toward the sound of the Laughing Man’s heavy, sibilant breathing. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 7 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 190-95 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 06:34 PM Most people associate HTTPS with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) which was created by Netscape in the mid 90’s. This is becoming less true over time. As Netscape lost market share, SSL’s maintenance moved to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The first post-Netscape version was re-branded as Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 which was released in January 1999. It’s rare to see true “SSL” traffic given that TLS has been around for 10 years. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 7 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 265-69 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 06:39 PM magic of RSA works because you can calculate/encrypt C ≡ Me (mod n) very quickly, but it is really hard to calculate/decrypt Cd ≡ M (mod n) without knowing “d.” As we saw earlier, “d” is derived from factoring “n” back to its “p” and “q”, which is a tough problem. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 7 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 305-8 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 06:41 PM The top “VeriSign Class 3 Public Primary Certification Authority” was signed by itself. This certificate has been built into Mozilla products as an implicitly trusted good certificate since version 1.4 of certdata.txt in the Network Security Services (NSS) library. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 7 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 344-49 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 06:44 PM On Windows, random numbers used for cryptographic purposes are generated by calling the CryptGenRandom function that hashes bits sampled from over 125 sources. Firefox uses this function along with some bits derived from its own function to seed its pseudo-random number generator. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 7 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 457-59 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 06:52 PM TLS is just below the application layer. The HTTP server software can act as if it’s sending unencrypted traffic. The only change is that it writes to a library that does all the encryption. OpenSSL is a popular open-source library for TLS. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 14 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1285-88 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 07:18 PM Cannabis in the wild will flower only once a year, early in the fall, but it can be tricked. Indoors, artificial light can be timed to mimic the patterns of the early sunsets of autumn, seducing the plant to bud; outside, the same effect is achieved by laying parabolic tarps, each shaped like the St. Louis arch, over the crop to obscure the sun. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 14 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1349-50 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 07:22 PM Colorado’s law has an extra provision that permits anyone to grow up to six marijuana plants at home and give away an ounce to friends. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 14 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1388-90 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 07:25 PM “There’s now no question,” says Mark Kleiman of UCLA, an influential drug-policy scholar, “that the costs of the drug war itself exceed the costs of drug use. It’s not even close.” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 14 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1406-7 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 07:27 PM In the city’s most dystopian year, 2005, Baltimore arrested 108,000 people, out of a total population of 660,000 men, women, and children. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Dec. 18 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 662-68 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 09:08 PM Sugar Grove is an American government communications site located in Pendleton County, West Virginia operated by the National Security Agency. According to a December 25, 2005 article in the New York Times, the site intercepts all international communications entering the Eastern United States. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Nov. 13 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1251-52 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 09:25 PM “As is often the case in war, the question is not whether the troops can adapt, but whether the leaders can. The troops, as always, paid the price of educating their leaders.” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Nov. 13 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1300-1302 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 09:51 PM Franks and his staff devoted almost all of their energies to the mission of removing a weak regime and almost none to the more difficult task of replacing it. This omission became disastrous, because no one in the Bush administration was focusing on the problem either. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Nov. 13 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1465-67 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 10:02 PM Kindness and patience seem to have a clear moral dimension. They are forms of what we might call ‘concern’ — emotional states that have as their focus the wellbeing of another — and concern for the welfare of others lies at the heart of morality. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Nov. 13 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1508-11 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 10:04 PM As long ago as 1959, the experimental psychologist Russell Church, now professor at Brown University, Rhode Island, demonstrated that rats wouldn’t push a lever that delivered food if doing so caused other rats to receive an electric shock. Likewise, in 1964, Stanley Wechkin and colleagues at the Northwestern University in Chicago demonstrated that hungry rhesus monkeys refused to pull a chain that delivered them food if doing so gave a painful shock to another monkey. One monkey persisted in this refusal for 12 days. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Nov. 13 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1526-29 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 10:06 PM In other cases, alternative, non-moral explanations appear more plausible. In the case of Russell Church’s rat experiment, for example, a rat’s failure to push the food bar might be explained not in terms of moral concern for its fellow rat but as an aversion to the noise made by a rat when it receives an electric shock. Indeed, this ‘aversive stimulus’ explanation is supported by the fact that white noise will have a similar affect on mice — they will refuse to push the food bar if doing so results in a loud blast of white noise. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Nov. 13 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1784-85 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 10:37 PM If you’re an artist, you should not have children. BLVR: Because they’ll come second? MS: Of course. Or if they come first, your art will come second. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Nov. 13 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1785-89 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 10:37 PM There’s a young artist in this town who’s remarkably gifted, and I’ve been tutoring him on the side. And he had this marvelous girlfriend, and I saw what was happening. And I said, “Look, don’t marry. Happily you can live together without any stench.” And they married and within eight minutes she was pregnant. And now they have a child, and all they do is complain about not having time and having to get a job. Fuck you! Why didn’t you listen to me? We don’t need that baby. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Nov. 13 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1883-85 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 11:45 PM He had a happy childhood, at least for the first decade of his life. But in 1974, when he was 10 years old, his father, Dr. James Colbert, and his two brothers closest to him in age—Peter, 15, and Paul, 18—were killed in an airliner crash. Colbert found solace in science fiction and acting. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Nov. 13 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1963-67 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2012, 11:51 PM COLBERT: Not only did they get it, they were willing to play along. I’m constantly awed by their willingness to play along with almost anything. They actually cheer things they don’t believe in because my character says it. You know what I mean? I have a generally liberal audience, but they will applaud when I nail a liberal lion because they want my character to win. It’s a strange relationship that seems natural now, but every so often I have to remind myself that this is not normal. This is not common. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 324 | Loc. 4963 | Added on Wednesday, December 26, 2012, 12:29 AM You have been trying to trap me in words, playing with me? ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 325 | Loc. 4976-78 | Added on Wednesday, December 26, 2012, 12:31 AM If you think my master murdered this Boromir and then ran away, you’ve got no sense; but say it, and have done! And then let us know what you mean to do about it. But it’s a pity that folk as talk about fighting the Enemy can’t let others do their bit in their own way without interfering. He’d be mighty pleased, if he could see you now. Think he’d got a new friend, he would.’ ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 27 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 52-55 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 05:04 PM Ketchum’s specialty was a family of molecules that block a key neurotransmitter, causing delirium. The drugs were known mainly by Army codes, with their true formulas classified. The soldiers were never told what they were given, or what the specific effects might be, and the Army made no effort to track how they did afterward. Edgewood’s most extreme critics raise the spectre of mass injury—a hidden American tragedy. ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 27 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 148-52 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 05:12 PM After the Second World War, intelligence reports emerged from Germany of chemical weapons far deadlier than mustard or chlorine. The new compounds, which had evolved out of research into insecticides, were called nerve gases, because they created a body-wide overflow of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, often triggering organ failure and near-sudden death. The Reich had invested primarily in three—tabun, soman, and sarin—and the victorious powers rushed to obtain them. ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 27 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 154-55 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 05:13 PM The Army decided to pursue sarin. The chemical was about twenty-five times as deadly as cyanide, and readily made into an aerosol. It was virtually impossible to handle without casualties; in one year, seven technicians required immediate treatment following accidental exposure. ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 27 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 229-30 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 05:18 PM Edgewood was a citadel of secrets. A sign on a door in the Medical Research Laboratories read, “What you see here, hear here—when you leave here, leave it here!” ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 27 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 235-39 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 05:19 PM Once, Ketchum walked into his office and found a barrel the size of an oil drum standing in a corner. No one explained why it was in his office, or who had put it there. After a couple of days, he waited until evening and opened it. Inside, he found dozens of small glass vials, each containing a precisely measured amount of pure LSD; he figured there was enough to make several hundred million people go bonkers—and later calculated the street value of the barrel to be roughly a billion dollars. At the end of the week, the barrel vanished just as mysteriously as it had appeared. No one spoke about it. He never learned what it was for. ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 27 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 266-68 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 05:22 PM “I was going to New York, and Colonel Lindsey tells me, ‘How about taking a vial of nerve gas to New York to make a demonstration.’ And I am looking at the guy and thinking, If I have an accident on the Thruway, I could kill thousands of people—thousands of people. I said, ‘No. It’s that simple.’ ” ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 27 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 444-46 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 05:35 PM Vil Mirzayanov, a chemist who conducted secret weapons research for the Soviet Union, told me that Moscow never had more than a halfhearted interest in LSD, and that its interest in BZ was strictly to keep up with Ketchum’s program. ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 27 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 446 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 05:35 PM security dilemma ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 27 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 582-84 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 05:46 PM Perhaps, in the moral calculus of the Edgewood legacy, such ambiguity must be considered: to take a powerful drug, and then spend decades not knowing what it might have done to you, may be its own form of psychological trauma. ========== Instapaper: Thursday, Dec. 27 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 759-61 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 06:18 PM ‘the experience of romantic love is related to an economy of scarcity, which in turn enables novelty and excitement.’ In contrast, ‘the spirit presiding over the internet is that of an economy of abundance, where the self must choose and maximise its options and is forced to use techniques of cost-benefit and efficiency.’ ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 27-28 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 12:16 AM Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O'Hara drifted away, till he came across the woman who took opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in India. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 35-36 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 12:17 AM So it came about after his death that the woman sewed parchment, paper, and birth-certificate into a leather amulet-case which she strung round Kim's neck. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 44-45 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 12:18 AM he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights, but missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies could not see the beauty of it. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 47-49 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 12:18 AM what he loved was the game for its own sake—the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes, the crawl up a waterpipe, the sights and sounds of the women's world on the flat roofs, and the headlong flight from housetop to housetop under cover of the hot dark. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 78-79 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 12:30 AM 'It is written above the door—all can enter.' 'Without payment?' 'I go in and out. I am no banker,' laughed Kim. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 87 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 12:34 AM The boys nodded. All priests of their acquaintance begged. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 466-69 | Added on Wednesday, January 02, 2013, 11:10 PM He began in Urdu the tale of the Lord Buddha, but, borne by his own thoughts, slid into Tibetan and long-droned texts from a Chinese book of the Buddha's life. The gentle, tolerant folk looked on reverently. All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 556-59 | Added on Wednesday, January 02, 2013, 11:20 PM 'And all that trouble,' said he to himself, thinking as usual in Hindustani, 'for a horse's pedigree! Mahbub Ali should have come to me to learn a little lying. Every time before that I have borne a message it concerned a woman. Now it is men. Better. The tall man said that they will loose a great army to punish someone—somewhere—the news goes to Pindi and Peshawur. There are also guns. Would I had crept nearer. It is big news!' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 651-52 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:07 AM the virtue of thy River lies neither in one pool nor place, but throughout its length. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 675 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:12 AM There will rise a war—a war of eight thousand redcoats. From Pindi and Peshawur they will be drawn. This is sure.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 675 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:12 AM rudiments of an order of battle ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 679-80 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:12 AM Kim warmed to the game, for it reminded him of experiences in the letter-carrying line, when, for the sake of a few pice, he pretended to know more than he knew. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 717-18 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:18 AM 'Be it so—be it so.' The old man nodded his head. 'This is a great and terrible world. I never knew there were so many men alive in it.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 727 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:19 AM not encouraging ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 726-27 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:21 AM 'Holy One, hast thou ever taken the Road alone?' Kim looked up sharply, like the Indian crows so busy about the fields. 'Surely, child: from Kulu to Pathankot—from Kulu, where my first chela died. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 727 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:21 AM not encouraging ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 74-76 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:28 AM People never trust an accommodating man with important things. That may sound harsh and cynical, but check it up in your own experience. If you have a severe illness, for example, you turn to the busiest, most exacting doctor in town. The fact that he is busy and can’t be bothered by little things gives you confidence in his ability and judgment. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 147-49 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:34 AM He’s the nicest fellow in the world, and when you have said that you have praised him and condemned him in the same breath. He is everybody’s friend to such an extent that he is a very poor friend to himself. It was written a long time ago that no man can serve two masters. Bert, in his good-natured way, is trying to serve a thousand.’” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 157-60 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:35 AM I control my charities now; they do not control me. I am master of my time; it is not wasted wantonly among a thousand thoughtless folks. And while I find ways to do more than ever for those who really deserve help — the young, the sick, and the bereaved — I no longer allow myself to be sacrificed by the selfish demands of those who are perfectly able to take care of themselves. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 174-77 | Added on Thursday, January 03, 2013, 01:37 AM Read the life of a great scientist like Agassiz. Was he forever at the world’s beck and call? Not for a single day. To letters inviting him to write, or to lecture for money, he replied that he had no time for those things. He was the custodian of a certain number of days — a number far too small for the great task he had laid out for himself — and he would not be diverted even for an instant. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 289-93 | Added on Sunday, January 06, 2013, 01:58 PM At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 330-32 | Added on Sunday, January 06, 2013, 02:02 PM Ideally, the doctor would have access to a cardiopulmonary bypass machine, with which he could pump out the victim’s blood, rewarm and oxygenate it, and pump it back in again, safely raising the core temperature as much as one degree every three minutes. But such machines are rarely available outside major urban hospitals. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1330-33 | Added on Sunday, January 06, 2013, 02:06 PM As the doctor made his rounds in Abbottabad, back in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama and a small circle of senior advisers were fixated on a single question: Was Osama bin Laden concealed inside that three-story house? For months, in planning a raid on the compound, the CIA and the military had conducted intensive surveillance without coming to a definitive answer. President Obama himself put the odds of finding Bin Laden there at “fifty-fifty.” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1357-60 | Added on Sunday, January 06, 2013, 02:09 PM According to journalists and officials I spoke to, anyone leaving the compound was likely to be tailed by plainclothes Pakistani intelligence agents, who suspected the consulate of being a hotbed of spies; what else would they be doing in a city like Peshawar? “The consulate has a lot of suspicious types with bulging biceps, wearing Oakleys,” one ISI official told me. “It’s just like Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Every agency worth their name has people here.” ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1528-32 | Added on Sunday, January 06, 2013, 02:22 PM And so I drove, as Afridi did, from Peshawar toward the verdant foothills of the Himalayas, where the city of about half a million lies at the start of the famous Karakoram Highway, which crosses over some of the highest passes in the world into China. It’s part of the belt of military towns in northern Pakistan that are full of bases, training academies, ammunition factories, and retirement colonies for officers—sort of like certain stretches of Virginia near D.C.  ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1561-64 | Added on Sunday, January 06, 2013, 04:40 PM The day before Obama and his team met, if Nader and the court documents are to be believed, Afridi had delivered the used vaccination kits to the CIA in Islamabad. Rapid DNA testing takes at least a day, once the samples were out of Pakistan, and so the results would have arrived, at the earliest, on the president’s desk the very evening before he made his final decision. ========== Instapaper: Friday, Dec. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1737-40 | Added on Sunday, January 06, 2013, 04:51 PM Mayumi: The biggest challenge is that when you get down to it, the relationship between a hostess and her customer is fundamentally a relationship between a man and a woman. No matter how long you’ve known each other, it inevitably comes down to a moment of truth: will you become a couple? Will you become his wife or his mistress? Will you sleep together? As a hostess, you’re constantly trying to delay that moment of truth. It’s a kind of dance, and it can be exhausting. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 50-54 | Added on Tuesday, January 15, 2013, 11:51 PM Should any of the nukes go missing, an “Abbottabad redux” would likely occur, Ambinder and Goldberg report. An anonymous military official tells the pair that the Joint Special Operations Command “has units and aircraft and parachutes on alert in the region for nuclear issues, and regularly inserts units and equipment for prep.” Seizing Pakistani nukes during or after a military coup is a much harder mission, but the reporters consider it doable. “[I]t’s wise for the U.S. to try to design a plan for seizing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in a low-risk manner,” Goldberg and Ambinder advise, placing a lot of rhetorical freight on the words “low-risk.” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 91-92 | Added on Tuesday, January 15, 2013, 11:55 PM Like a lot of apprentice work, it’s too respectful of convention and literal truth to strike a distinctive note. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 104-14 | Added on Tuesday, January 15, 2013, 11:57 PM The dead-parrot sketch debuted on episode eight of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which aired in Britain on December 7, 1969. The sketch epitomized everything that was striking about the new show: its impatience with the old formal rules, its ability to take good ideas and compress them into diamonds. The car-salesman sketch had been about the absurdity of bad service, but it had attacked that absurdity in a naturalistic way: it started with a plausible situation, and gradually made it sillier. The parrot sketch inverts that approach. It is absurd from the start, but its absurdity represents a compact, dreamlike way of telling the truth. This time the role of the aggrieved customer is taken by Cleese—who plays him not as a straight man but as a Brylcreemed, raincoated weirdo. In the world of Monty Python, even a guy with a valid beef is a lunatic. As for Palin’s salesman, this time his denials of the undeniable have an existential audacity: he is ready to claim, and keep claiming, that the palpably dead parrot is just resting. Cleese, indignantly brandishing the bird’s corpse, is the victim of the ultimate—the archetypal—rip-off; but he remains an Englishman. Nutty as he is, he declines to vault over the desk and punch Palin’s lights out. Language is the only weapon available to him. So his tamped-down rage becomes a torrent of increasingly baroque synonyms for death, which Cleese and Chapman composed with the aid of a thesaurus. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 114-15 | Added on Tuesday, January 15, 2013, 11:57 PM Monty Python’s signature move was to thrust something very salient into the wrong context. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 126-27 | Added on Tuesday, January 15, 2013, 11:58 PM The Pythons have done no new comedy as a team since 1983, when they released the movie The Meaning of Life. The prospect of a full reunion was nixed conclusively in 1989, when Graham Chapman died of cancer. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 159 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:01 AM Python’s silliness was extreme, but it was balanced by wit and education. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 206-9 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:05 AM It’s a pity that the word irreverent has lost its weight, so that it’s come to seem a mere synonym for cheeky. The Pythons were irreverent in the deepest sense. They had automatic respect for nothing. Everything was fit matter for comedy: religion, national differences, cannibalism, Hitler, torture, death, crucifixion. They created a parallel world in which nothing was serious. They were like boys: they not only weren’t afraid; they didn’t know they should be afraid. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 233-36 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:12 AM The undertaker sketch was a deliberate assault on a universal taboo. It was therefore appropriate that the audience members were seen looking offended—if they hadn’t been offended, there would have been something wrong with them. A lot of them were laughing, too: proof that being offended isn’t the end of the world, and might even be a healthy thing. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 255-56 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:14 AM This is bold comedy: it gets right down into the roots of what we venerate and fear. When comedy like this works, the payoff is huge. You feel lifted, part of an intelligent species. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 457-59 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:19 AM When JSOC officers are working in civilian government agencies or U.S. embassies abroad, which they do often, they dispense with uniforms, unlike their other military comrades. In combat, they wear no name or rank identifiers. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 467-68 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:22 AM JSOC’s first overseas mission in 1980, Operation Eagle Claw, was an attempted rescue of diplomats held hostage by Iranian students at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It ended in a helicopter collision in the desert and the death of eight team members. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 471-72 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:22 AM JSOC’s core includes the Army’s Delta Force, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Air Force’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron, and the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and 75th Ranger Regiment. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 485-86 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:23 AM In Iraq and Afghanistan, lethal action against al-Qaeda was granted without additional approval. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 518 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:26 AM The NSA learned to locate all electronic signals in Iraq. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 519-21 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:26 AM One innovation was called the Electronic Divining Rod, a sensor worn by commandos that could detect the location of a particular cellphone. The beeping grew louder as a soldier with the device got closer to the person carrying a targeted phone. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 564-66 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:30 AM JSOC’s lethality was evident in its body counts: In 2008, in Afghanistan alone, JSOC commandos struck 550 targets and killed roughly a thousand people, officials said. In 2009, they executed 464 operations and killed 400 to 500 enemy forces. As Iraq descended into chaos in the summer of 2005, JSOC conducted 300 raids a month. More than 50 percent of JSOC Army Delta Force commandos now have Purple Hearts. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 572-73 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:31 AM JSOC’s success in targeting the right homes, businesses and individuals was only ever about 50 percent, according to two senior commanders. They considered this rate a good one. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Jan. 15 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1014-16 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:54 AM Through behavior like this, the government has turned the entire financial system into a kind of vast confidence game – a Ponzi-like scam in which the value of just about everything in the system is inflated because of the widespread belief that the government will step in to prevent losses. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 750 | Added on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 01:17 AM if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 777-78 | Added on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 01:24 AM 'And they likewise, bound upon the Wheel, go forth from life to life—from despair to despair,' said the lama below his breath, 'hot, uneasy, snatching.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 781-83 | Added on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 01:25 AM I grow angry and I curse them, and they feign penitence, but behind my back I know they call me a toothless old ape.' 'Hast thou never desired any other thing?' 'Yes—yes—a thousand times! A straight back and a close-clinging knee once more; a quick wrist and a keen eye; and the marrow that makes a man. Oh, the old days—the good days of my strength!' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 821-22 | Added on Wednesday, January 30, 2013, 05:28 PM A man goes in safety here for at every few koss is a police-station. The police are thieves and extortioners (I myself would patrol it with cavalry—young recruits under a strong captain), but at least they do not suffer any rivals. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 842 | Added on Wednesday, February 06, 2013, 09:53 PM The old man was off his pony in an instant, and they embraced as do father and son in the East. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 842 | Added on Wednesday, February 06, 2013, 09:53 PM orientalism? ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 843-44 | Added on Thursday, February 07, 2013, 02:03 AM Good Luck, she is never a lady, But the cursedest quean alive, Tricksy, wincing, and jady— Kittle to lead or drive. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 870-71 | Added on Thursday, February 07, 2013, 02:07 AM 'Was there ever such a disciple as I?' he cried merrily to the lama. 'All earth would have picked thy bones within ten mile of Lahore city if I had not guarded thee.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 871 | Added on Thursday, February 07, 2013, 02:07 AM personal protective detail ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 950 | Added on Thursday, February 07, 2013, 02:15 AM The lama would give him no help, but, as a conscientious chela, Kim was delighted to beg for two. ========== Instapaper: Monday, Jan. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 99-101 | Added on Friday, February 15, 2013, 01:18 PM Despite that, Whiting says facial recognition software hasn’t been of much use to him. It’s simply too unreliable when it comes to spotting people on the move, in crowds, and under variable lighting. Instead, he and his team rely on pictures shared from other casinos, as well as through the Biometrica and Griffin databases. ========== Instapaper: Monday, Jan. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 197-99 | Added on Friday, February 15, 2013, 01:34 PM “Climate change has gone from something that happens in a computer model to something that people can see in their own backyards,” says Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It is a global crisis playing out before our very eyes. And it’s not happening in slow motion.” ========== Instapaper: Monday, Jan. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 214-15 | Added on Friday, February 15, 2013, 01:35 PM Under Obama, in fact, oil and gas production have soared: Last year, U.S. oil production grew by 766,000 barrels a day, the largest jump ever, and domestic oil production is at its highest level in 15 years. ========== Instapaper: Monday, Jan. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 390-93 | Added on Wednesday, February 20, 2013, 02:54 AM As he expanded the scope of analytics, he defined his purview as “the study and practice of resource optimization for the purpose of improving programs and earning votes more efficiently.” That usually meant calculating, for any campaign activity, the number of votes gained through a given amount of contact at a given cost. ========== Instapaper: Monday, Jan. 28 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 401-3 | Added on Wednesday, February 20, 2013, 02:55 AM Under a $350,000 deal she worked out with one company, Rentrak, the campaign provided a list of persuadable voters and their addresses, derived from its microtargeting models, and the company looked for them in the cable providers’ billing files. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1014-16 | Added on Thursday, February 28, 2013, 09:31 PM 'A blessing on thee.' The lama inclined his solemn head. 'I have known many men in my so long life, and disciples not a few. But to none among men, if so be thou art woman-born, has my heart gone out as it has to thee—thoughtful, wise, and courteous; but something of a small imp.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 1016 | Added on Thursday, February 28, 2013, 09:31 PM The Lama blesses Kim ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1017-19 | Added on Thursday, February 28, 2013, 09:37 PM 'Perhaps in a former life it was permitted that I should have rendered thee some service. Maybe'—he smiled—'I freed thee from a trap; or, having caught thee on a hook in the days when I was not enlightened, cast thee back into the river.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 1019 | Added on Thursday, February 28, 2013, 09:37 PM karma ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 12 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1194-97 | Added on Friday, March 01, 2013, 04:15 PM Revir/IMULER Malware One of the APT malware attacks Hardy has seen over the past year is the Revir/IMULER attack, which involves a zip file with content relevant to the receiving organization. Hardy noted that the file contained legitimate information with a link to a real website. It also had an application in it that showed an image of a t-shirt. When clicked, the image contacts a command and control server and drops a malicious payload. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 167-71 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:22 AM Now widely believed to have been a project of U.S. and Israeli intelligence (U.S. officials have yet to publicly acknowledge a role but have done so anonymously to the New York Times and NPR), Stuxnet was carefully designed to infect multiple systems needed to access and control industrial equipment used in Iran’s nuclear program. The payload was clearly the work of a group with access to government-scale resources and intelligence, but it was made possible by four zero-day exploits for Windows that allowed it to silently infect target computers. That so many precious zero-days were used at once was just one of Stuxnet’s many striking features. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 174-76 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:22 AM governments and companies in the United States and around the world have begun paying more and more for the exploits needed to make such weapons work, says Christopher Soghoian, a principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 190-94 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:24 AM The French security company VUPEN states on its website that it “provides government-grade exploits specifically designed for the Intelligence community and national security agencies to help them achieve their offensive cyber security and lawful intercept missions.” Last year, employees of the company publicly demonstrated a zero-day flaw that compromised Google’s Chrome browser, but they turned down Google’s offer of a $60,000 reward if they would share how it worked. What happened to the exploit is unknown. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 214-18 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:27 AM Last year, Northrop Grumman posted ads seeking people to “plan, execute and assess an Offensive Cyberspace Operation (OCO) mission,” and many current positions at Northrop ask for “hands-on experience of offensive cyber operations.” Raytheon prefaces its ads for security-related jobs with language designed to appeal to stereotypical computer hackers: “Surfboards, pirate flags, and DEFCON black badges decorate our offices, and our Nerf collection dwarfs that of most toy stores. Our research and development projects cover the spectrum of offensive and defensive security technologies.” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 231-32 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:28 AM “The parallel is dropping the atomic bomb but also leaflets with the design of it,” says Singer. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 272-75 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:30 AM The DEA estimates that 80 percent of the heroin and cocaine sold in Chicago originates with the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. Distributors here extend the cartel’s reach by connecting with street gangs. The gangs, in turn, hasten the decline of distressed communities into open-air drug markets through their skillful use of product promotion, their ability to offer job opportunities where there are few, and their willingness, when necessary, to use violence to stay in business. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 290-93 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:32 AM Maurice Davis, a fellow member of the New Breeds who’d grown up with Bostic and his brother. Davis was a tough character. Nicknamed Capone, he was 6’4” and weighed 235 pounds. He was 22 at the time and had been selling drugs since he was 14, typically while high, since he smoked marijuana and used ecstasy every day. He’d been incarcerated for heroin possession and domestic battery, and had a girlfriend who was just 16. He was also a loyal soldier who was known to carry a gun. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 411-17 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:42 AM “Confidential Informant 1.” The informant laid out the structure of the organization for the police. No one had formal titles, he said, but the hierarchy, production process, and compensation system were well established. Several times a week, he would join Bostic and sometimes Richards in driving a rental car to buy 100 or 200 grams of heroin from a supplier. Then they’d take the haul to an apartment and prepare it to be sold: they’d mix it with over-the-counter pharmaceuticals like Dormin and other antihistamines to increase its bulk (and decrease its purity); wrap one-tenth-gram portions in tinfoil; and place the packets into small plastic baggies, often blue or pink to distinguish their product from competitors’. The baggies were bundled with plastic strips in groups of 14 known as packs or “jabs.” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 417-20 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:44 AM The informant said he would then get in touch with another member of the organization, whose job was to pick up the packaged heroin and connect with other street managers, known as runners. The runners would distribute jabs to street dealers. Each baggie sold for $10. The dealers were responsible for turning $120 over to the runners for each pack, meaning they could keep two baggies or $20 for themselves every time they sold a dozen. The runners kept another $20 and turned $100 over to Richards. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 420-22 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:44 AM “CI-1 said that most members of the New Breeds’ clique have their own customer base,” authorities later reported, “but all of the members of the clique go through CI-1 and Bostic to purchase heroin.” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 422-25 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:44 AM He said their home base was the apartment on Van Buren. On average days, the operation brought in $4,000 to $6,000; on good days, such as the first of the month, they could haul in $10,000, the informant said. In other words, they were selling between 400 and a thousand dime bags of heroin a day, much of it to buyers who appeared to be from the suburbs or out of state. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 432-34 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:46 AM Just after 6 AM on October 24, 2009, a potential drug customer called a cell phone number used to make heroin buys from Bostic’s crew. The buyer asked for $100 worth and the person on the other end agreed to meet in the parking lot of a grocery store at Pulaski and Congress. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 434 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:46 AM SIGINT ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 438-39 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:46 AM “Mike” didn’t realize that he’d just sold to an undercover cop. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 439 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:46 AM sources and methods ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 455-57 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:49 AM The authorities weren’t surprised—at the highest levels, they say, gang identification is often far less important than business relationships. “You see how the leaders of different gangs are working together through a common source,” says Gorman, the former CPD antigang commander. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 487-88 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:54 AM Guevara drove to a house in Berwyn and switched cars before heading to his home in the city. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Note Loc. 488 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 01:54 AM opsec ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 547-49 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 02:00 AM Riley, the head DEA agent in Chicago, says the feds are no longer interested in seeing how much dope they can seize—their goal is to disrupt organized-crime networks, especially those with suspected ties to Mexican cartels, and to send the message that perpetrators will spend much of their remaining lives in prison. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 555-56 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 02:01 AM the pace of drug arrests in the police beat that includes Bostic’s old territory has gone up since his crew was taken down. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 582-84 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 02:02 AM The first independent film to gross more than $200 million, Pulp Fiction was a shot of adrenaline to Hollywood’s heart, reviving John Travolta’s career, making stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, and turning Bob and Harvey Weinstein into giants. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 590-91 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 02:02 AM won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 614-17 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 02:05 AM Made for $8.5 million, it earned $214 million worldwide, making it the top-grossing independent film at the time. Roger Ebert called it “the most influential” movie of the 1990s, “so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zombie writers who take ‘screenwriting’ classes that teach them the formulas for ‘hit films.’ ” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 631-36 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 02:06 AM Surrounded by videos, which he watched incessantly, he hit upon an idea for recycling three of the oldest bromides in the book: “The ones you’ve seen a zillion times—the boxer who’s supposed to throw a fight and doesn’t, the Mob guy who’s supposed to take the boss’s wife out for the evening, the two hit men who come and kill these guys.” It would be “an omnibus thing,” a collection of three caper films, similar to stories by such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in 1920s and 1930s pulp magazines. “That is why I called it Pulp Fiction,” says Tarantino. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 676-78 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 02:11 AM With the $50,000 he’d made on Reservoir Dogs, and the promise of $900,000 from TriStar Pictures for Pulp Fiction, Tarantino, who had never really left Los Angeles County, packed a suitcase with lurid crime novels and flew off to write the screenplay in the land of legalized marijuana and prostitution. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 791-94 | Added on Wednesday, March 06, 2013, 02:20 AM Harvey Weinstein, who had told Tarantino that Jackson would be critical in promoting Pulp Fiction. (“He said, ‘I can put Sam Jackson on Arsenio Hall fucking tomorrow,’ ” says Tarantino.) Weinstein urged Jackson to fly immediately to L.A., this time to “blow [Tarantino’s] balls off.” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 829-30 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 05:40 PM The white-collar addict was Hamann, who taught Travolta how to replicate a heroin high. “He said, ‘Drink as much tequila as you can and lay in a warm pool or tub of water,’ ” the actor recalls. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 846-49 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 05:50 PM Determined to make an $8.5 million movie look as if it cost $25 million, he shot with “the slowest film Kodak made,” which required the ultra-bright lights, according to Bender. “Each one of them is like the power of the sun,” he explains. “We thought the lights were going to crack the glass in the diner, it was so hot.” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1105-7 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 06:11 PM Unlike a lock, a seal is not intended to delay or discourage unauthorized entry (except possibly in some vague psychological sense). Instead, a seal is meant to leave behind unambiguous, non erasable ev idence of unauthorized access. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1120-22 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 06:12 PM “Defeating” or “spoofing” a seal means to open the seal, then reseal the container it is used on, but without being detected by the inspectio n process in use ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 1260-63 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 06:29 PM An exception from the first group was the 17-year-old Garry Kasparov, who was participating in the World Junior Championship in Dortmund. When I showed him the games at the closing dinner he read all five simultaneously from the printout and unerringly identified the computer. All the other games, he explained, contained short-term tactical errors which a computer would never commit. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 26 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 2102-3 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 06:46 PM Anders’ lunch-box radio, a standard-issue “escape and evade” device that could connect with the embassy’s radio network. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 5 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 70-72 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 06:53 PM Someone knocked at the door of the loft, and I ran downstairs, still dressed in my pajamas, and answered the door. It was a tall man and a short woman in blazers and unmatched trousers. They had the dowdy cleanliness of law enforcement. They said they were from the Secret Service and that they wanted to ask me a few questions. Shocked and unsure of myself, I let them in to talk to me. One should never, ever do this. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 5 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 98-101 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 06:55 PM These days, I not only don’t log, I refuse to talk to anyone who does. I often refuse to communicate without encryption. But I had to continue to log during the investigation. I was told that changing my behavior while being investigated could be held against me, because in an investigation it is suspicious to learn from your mistakes. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 5 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 146-47 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 06:59 PM It was always my first rule of doing anything that power might frown upon in any way: Don’t get caught. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 5 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 177-78 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 07:02 PM It was beyond my understanding that these people could pick through his life, threaten his friends, tear through our digital history together, raid his house, surveil him, and never actually read his blog. But that seemed to be the fact of it. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 5 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 225-26 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 07:06 PM But tricks and lies are part of prosecutions, allowed, and perhaps even encouraged, by prosecutorial immunity. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 5 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 295-96 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 07:11 PM This is their normal. They would do this to anyone. We should understand that any alleged crime can become life-ruining if it catches their eyes. Innocence and goodness are only factored in as risks to their case. This is the system that we, as citizens, have agreed to. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 5 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 373-78 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 08:48 PM I am still wondering how, in all a sea of troubles, that can really be worth your time and energy, how that can be worth the awesome and sacred destructive power you’ve been given. If you can tell me how spending your precious time on that, time you will never get back, time that can never be given to so many unaddressed oppressions on the human spirit, makes the world a better place, I will rest. Even if I disagree with you, I can rest. But I think I will know if you’re lying. If the actual answer is the other things are too hard, that you might fail, then you are already part of a grand failure. A failure so great and so close to us we can barely see it, mistaking it for the sky itself. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 5 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 484-85 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 08:52 PM it’s part of the insanity of our moment that the preservation of our planet as we have known it, which should be the great conservative issue of our era, is now pure poison on the right.  ========== Instapaper: Monday, Feb. 25 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 615-20 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 09:01 PM Dopamine is indeed involved in addiction, but it isn’t a “pleasure chemical”. In fact, dopamine has lots of functions in the brain – being involved in everything from regulating movement to the control of attention. In great part, its effects depend on which of the brain’s pathways it is operating in. The wonderfully named tuberoinfundibular pathway regulates hormone release and is important in stimulating the production of breast milk. This is why an unfortunate side-effect of antipsychotic medication used to treat schizophrenia, which primarily alters the dopamine system, can be lactation, even in men. ========== Instapaper: Monday, Feb. 25 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 630-32 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 09:03 PM dopamine seems not to be signalling pleasure but indicating how close you got to the reward and encouraging another attempt. This works well when success depends on skill but falsely compels us in games of chance. ========== Instapaper: Monday, Feb. 25 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 940-41 | Added on Thursday, March 07, 2013, 09:18 PM one should never entrust a pseudonymous agent with more liquid anonymous cash than its reputation capital is worth! ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1106-8 | Added on Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 12:45 AM As a town-mouse well acquainted with the latest songs by the most fashionable composers—they are women for the most part—Kim had a distinct advantage over men from a little fruit-village behind Saharunpore, but he let that advantage be inferred. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 1108 | Added on Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 12:45 AM usually wise ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1185-89 | Added on Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 01:03 AM He knew that in all probability there would be sentries round the camp, and smiled to himself as he heard the thick boots of one. A boy who can dodge over the roofs of Lahore city on a moonlight night, using every little patch and corner of darkness to discomfit his pursuer, is not likely to be checked by a line of well-trained soldiers. He paid them the compliment of crawling between a couple, and, running and halting, crouching and dropping flat, worked his way toward the lighted Mess-tent where, close pressed behind the mango-tree, he waited till some chance word should give him a returnable lead. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1262 | Added on Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 01:16 AM the triple-ringed uninterest of the creed that lumps nine-tenths of the world under the title of 'heathen'. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1331 | Added on Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 01:23 AM All Desire is red—and evil. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1348 | Added on Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 01:24 AM 'It is no wrong to pay for learning. To help the ignorant to wisdom is always a merit.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1515-21 | Added on Friday, March 15, 2013, 01:42 AM The day dragged to its weary end. When he wished to sleep he was instructed how to fold up his clothes and set out his boots; the other boys deriding. Bugles waked him in the dawn; the schoolmaster caught him after breakfast, thrust a page of meaningless characters under his nose, gave them senseless names and whacked him without reason. Kim meditated poisoning him with opium borrowed from a barrack-sweeper, but reflected that, as they all ate at one table in public (this was peculiarly revolting to Kim, who preferred to turn his back on the world at meals), the stroke might be dangerous. Then he attempted running off to the village where the priest had tried to drug the lama—the village where the old soldier lived. But far-seeing sentries at every exit headed back the little scarlet figure. Trousers and jacket crippled body and mind alike so he abandoned the project and fell back, Oriental-fashion, on time and chance. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 1521 | Added on Friday, March 15, 2013, 01:42 AM escape / orientalism ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 286 | Loc. 4381 | Added on Saturday, March 23, 2013, 01:05 AM A certain amount of surreptitious disobedience is demanded of me. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 286 | Loc. 4383-89 | Added on Saturday, March 23, 2013, 07:22 PM ‘I just want to get something clear,’ said Glenda. ‘You can actually disobey the orders of someone like the Archchancellor?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said Hix. ‘I am under instruction to do so. It is expected of me.’ ‘But how can that possibly work?’ said Glenda. ‘What happens when he gives you an instruction that he doesn’t want you to disobey?’ ‘It works by common sense and good will on all sides,’ said Hix. ‘If, for example, the Archchancellor gives me a command that absolutely must not be disobeyed, he will add something like, “Hix, you little worm (by university statute), if you disobey this one, I’ll smack your head.” Though in reality, a word to the wise, madam, is sufficient. It’s all done on the basis of trust, really. I am trusted to be untrustworthy. I don’t know what the Archchancellor would do without me.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 292 | Loc. 4468-69 | Added on Saturday, March 23, 2013, 07:28 PM A fully working kitchen holds a great many things, not least of which is a huge collection of ways of committing horrible murder, plus multiple ways of getting rid of the evidence. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 292 | Loc. 4471 | Added on Saturday, March 23, 2013, 07:29 PM Never, ever expect gratitude from those you help. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Note on Page 292 | Loc. 4471 | Added on Saturday, March 23, 2013, 07:29 PM good life precept ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 295 | Loc. 4513-14 | Added on Sunday, March 24, 2013, 06:15 AM She very nearly half expected that he would be there and knew that he wouldn’t. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 299 | Loc. 4574-78 | Added on Sunday, March 24, 2013, 06:20 AM The bus was for people, as the driver had pointed out, who couldn’t afford speed but could afford time. In its construction, therefore, no expense had been attempted. It was really no more than a cart with double seats all the way along it from the driver’s slightly elevated bench. Tarpaulins on either side kept out the worst of the weather but fortunately still let in enough of the wind to mitigate the smell of the upholstery, which had experienced humanity in all its manifold moods and urgencies. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 329 | Loc. 5038-40 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:19 PM ‘But whatever befell on the North March, you, Frodo, I doubt no longer. If hard days have made me any judge of Men’s words and faces, then I may make a guess at Halflings! ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 330 | Loc. 5054-55 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:21 PM ‘I broke off our speech together,’ said Faramir, ‘not only because time pressed, as Master Samwise had reminded me, but also because we were drawing near to matters that were better not debated openly before many men. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 330 | Loc. 5055 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:21 PM clandestine ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 330 | Loc. 5056-57 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:22 PM You were not wholly frank with me, Frodo.’ ‘I told no lies, and of the truth all I could,’ said Frodo. ‘I do not blame you,’ said Faramir. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 330 | Loc. 5057-58 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:22 PM ‘You spoke with skill in a hard place, and wisely, it seemed to me. But I learned or guessed more from you than your words said. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 330 | Loc. 5060-61 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:23 PM I would hazard that Isildur’s Bane lay between you and was a cause of contention in your Company. Clearly it is a mighty heirloom of some sort, and such things do not breed peace among confederates, not if aught may be learned from ancient tales. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 331 | Loc. 5067-68 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:26 PM ‘But, Frodo, I pressed you hard at first about Isildur’s Bane. Forgive me! It was unwise in such an hour and place. I had not had time for thought. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 331 | Loc. 5068 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:26 PM wisdom of realizing error and giving apology ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 332 | Loc. 5083-85 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:30 PM ‘Mithrandir we called him in elf-fashion,’ said Faramir, ‘and he was content. Many are my names in many countries, he said. Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 332 | Loc. 5087-88 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:30 PM It is hard indeed to believe that one of so great wisdom, and of power – for many wonderful things he did among us – could perish, and so much lore be taken from the world. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 332 | Loc. 5087-88 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:31 PM It is hard indeed to believe that one of so great wisdom, and of power – for many wonderful things he did among us – could perish, and so much lore be taken from the world. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 332 | Loc. 5088 | Added on Sunday, April 07, 2013, 11:31 PM soldier mourning scholar ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 333 | Loc. 5106-7 | Added on Monday, April 15, 2013, 02:28 PM ‘But fear no more! I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 339 | Loc. 5184-88 | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 12:27 AM Sam struggled with himself, arguing this way and that. ‘He may be all right,’ he thought, ‘and then he may not. Fair speech may hide a foul heart.’ He yawned. ‘I could sleep for a week, and I’d be better for it. And what can I do, if I do keep awake, me all alone, and all these great Men about? Nothing, Sam Gamgee; but you’ve got to keep awake all the same.’ And somehow he managed it. The light faded from the cave door, and the grey veil of falling water grew dim and was lost in gathering shadow. Always the sound of the water went on, never changing its note, morning or evening or night. It murmured and whispered of sleep. Sam stuck his knuckles in his eyes. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 339 | Loc. 5188 | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 12:27 AM discipline, self-sacrifice, toughness ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 340 | Loc. 5205-6 | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 12:29 AM The wine coursed in their veins and tired limbs, and they felt glad and easy of heart as they had not done since they left the land of Lórien. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 342 | Loc. 5233-34 | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 12:32 AM in secret chambers withered men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 343 | Loc. 5249-52 | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 12:45 AM We are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with memory of other things. For as the Rohirrim do, we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only the craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 343 | Loc. 5252 | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 12:45 AM in the wasteland ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 344 | Loc. 5272-73 | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 12:48 AM ‘It strikes me that folk takes their peril with them into Lórien, and finds it there because they’ve brought it. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 346 | Loc. 5291-96 | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 12:51 AM ‘Alas for Boromir! It was too sore a trial!’ he said. ‘How you have increased my sorrow, you two strange wanderers from a far country, bearing the peril of Men! But you are less judges of Men than I of Halflings. We are truth-speakers, we men of Gondor. We boast seldom, and then perform, or die in the attempt. Not if I found it on the highway would I take it I said. Even if I were such a man as to desire this thing, and even though I knew not clearly what this thing was when I spoke, still I should take those words as a vow, and be held by them. ‘But I am not such a man. Or I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 347 | Loc. 5309-11 | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 12:59 AM ‘I was going to find a way into Mordor,’ he said faintly. ‘I was going to Gorgoroth. I must find the Mountain of Fire and cast the thing into the gulf of Doom. Gandalf said so. I do not think I shall ever get there.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 353 | Loc. 5401-3 | Added on Wednesday, April 17, 2013, 12:51 AM Only one true shot, and Frodo would be rid of the miserable voice for ever. But no, Gollum had a claim on him now. The servant has a claim on the master for service, even service in fear. They would have foundered in the Dead Marshes but for Gollum. Frodo knew, too, somehow, quite clearly that Gandalf would not have wished it. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 354 | Loc. 5418-22 | Added on Wednesday, April 17, 2013, 12:54 AM ‘Away up there,’ said Frodo, pointing to the waterfall. ‘I am not going without him. We must go back to him.’ His heart sank. This was too much like trickery. He did not really fear that Faramir would allow Gollum to be killed, but he would probably make him prisoner and bind him; and certainly what Frodo did would seem a treachery to the poor treacherous creature. It would probably be impossible ever to make him understand or believe that Frodo had saved his life in the only way he could. What else could he do? – to keep faith, as near as might be, with both sides. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 362 | Loc. 5542-47 | Added on Wednesday, April 17, 2013, 01:29 PM The hobbits’ packs were brought to them (a little heavier than they had been), and also two stout staves of polished wood, shod with iron, and with carven heads through which ran plaited leathern thongs. ‘I have no fitting gifts to give you at our parting,’ said Faramir; ‘but take these staves. They may be of service to those who walk or climb in the wild. The men of the White Mountains use them; though these have been cut down to your height and newly shod. They are made of the fair tree lebethron, beloved of the woodwrights of Gondor, and a virtue has been set upon them of finding and returning. May that virtue not wholly fail under the Shadow into which you go!’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 363 | Loc. 5561 | Added on Wednesday, April 17, 2013, 01:30 PM The land dreams in a false peace, and for a while all evil is withdrawn. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 371 | Loc. 5686-87 | Added on Wednesday, April 17, 2013, 10:51 PM As furtively as scouts within the campment of their enemies, they crept down on to the road, and stole along its westward edge under the stony bank, grey as the stones themselves, and soft-footed as hunting cats. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 383 | Loc. 5872-74 | Added on Wednesday, April 17, 2013, 11:08 PM ‘I don’t like anything here at all,’ said Frodo, ‘step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 388 | Loc. 5938-40 | Added on Wednesday, April 17, 2013, 11:17 PM For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 395 | Loc. 6047 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 12:57 AM two great clusters of many-windowed eyes – the coming menace was unmasked at last. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 395 | Loc. 6052-53 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 12:58 AM Then suddenly, released from the holding spell to run a little while in vain panic for the amusement of the eyes, they both turned and fled together; ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 395 | Loc. 6053 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 12:58 AM playing with your food ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 396 | Loc. 6058-59 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 12:59 AM Then holding the star aloft and the bright sword advanced, Frodo, hobbit of the Shire, walked steadily down to meet the eyes. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 396 | Loc. 6059 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 12:59 AM courage ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 398 | Loc. 6101-5 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 01:03 AM How Shelob came there, flying from ruin, no tale tells, for out of the Dark Years few tales have come. But still she was there, who was there before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr; and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness. Far and wide her lesser broods, bastards of the miserable mates, her own offspring, that she slew, spread from glen to glen, from the Ephel Dúath to the eastern hills, to Dol Guldur and the fastnesses of Mirkwood. ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 305769-78 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 01:06 AM fey  adj. giving an impression of vague unworldliness: his mother was a strange, fey woman.    having supernatural powers of clairvoyance.  CHIEFLY SCOTTISH fated to die or at the point of death: now he is fey, he sees his own death, and I see it too. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 403 | Loc. 6177-81 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 03:12 PM On the near side of him lay, gleaming on the ground, his elven-blade, where it had fallen useless from his grasp. Sam did not wait to wonder what was to be done, or whether he was brave, or loyal, or filled with rage. He sprang forward with a yell, and seized his master’s sword in his left hand. Then he charged. No onslaught more fierce was ever seen in the savage world of beasts, where some desperate small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 404 | Loc. 6181 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 03:15 PM the dreadful malice of her glance ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 405 | Loc. 6201-2 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 03:18 PM this time to crush and sting to death: no little bite of poison to still the struggling of her meat; this time to slay and then to rend. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 405 | Loc. 6202 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 03:18 PM foreshadowing ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 406 | Loc. 6215-16 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 03:21 PM She fell back beating the air with her forelegs, her sight blasted by inner lightnings, her mind in agony. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 407 | Loc. 6226-27 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:52 PM laid his head upon Frodo’s breast and to his mouth, but no stir of life could he find, nor feel the faintest flutter of the heart. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 407 | Loc. 6227-28 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:53 PM Often he chafed his master’s hands and feet, and touched his brow, but all were cold. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 407 | Loc. 6229-30 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:53 PM Then anger surged over him, and he ran about his master’s body in a rage, stabbing the air, and smiting the stones, and shouting challenges. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 407 | Loc. 6234-35 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:54 PM And then black despair came down on him, and Sam bowed to the ground, and drew his grey hood over his head, and night came into his heart, and he knew no more. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 407 | Loc. 6240-41 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:55 PM ‘But what can I do? Not leave Mr. Frodo dead, unburied on the top of the mountains, and go home? Or go on? Go on?’ he repeated, and for a moment doubt and fear shook him. ‘Go on? Is that what I’ve got to do? And leave him?’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 408 | Loc. 6242-43 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:55 PM Then at last he began to weep; and going to Frodo he composed his body, and folded his cold hands upon his breast, and wrapped his cloak about him; and he laid his own sword at one side, and the staff that Faramir had given at the other. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 408 | Loc. 6243-47 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:57 PM ‘If I’m to go on,’ he said, ‘then I must take your sword, by your leave, Mr. Frodo, but I’ll put this one to lie by you, as it lay by the old king in the barrow; and you’ve got your beautiful mithril coat from old Mr. Bilbo. And your star-glass, Mr. Frodo, you did lend it to me and I’ll need it, for I’ll be always in the dark now. It’s too good for me, and the Lady gave it to you, but maybe she’d understand. Do you understand, Mr. Frodo? I’ve got to go on.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 408 | Loc. 6252-53 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:58 PM He looked on the bright point of the sword. He thought of the places behind where there was a black brink and an empty fall into nothingness. There was no escape that way. That was to do nothing, not even to grieve. That was not what he had set out to do. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 408 | Loc. 6253 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:58 PM contemplates suicide ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 408 | Loc. 6253-54 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:58 PM ‘What am I to do then?’ he cried again, and now he seemed plainly to know the hard answer: see it through. Another lonely journey, and the worst. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 408 | Loc. 6255-61 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:59 PM ‘What? Me, alone, go to the Crack of Doom and all?’ He quailed still, but the resolve grew. ‘What? Me take the Ring from him? The Council gave it to him.’ But the answer came at once: ‘And the Council gave him companions, so that the errand should not fail. And you are the last of all the Company. The errand must not fail.’ ‘I wish I wasn’t the last,’ he groaned. ‘I wish old Gandalf was here, or somebody. Why am I left all alone to make up my mind? I’m sure to go wrong. And it’s not for me to go taking the Ring, putting myself forward.’ ‘But you haven’t put yourself forward; you’ve been put forward. And as for not being the right and proper person, why, Mr. Frodo wasn’t, as you might say, nor Mr. Bilbo. They didn’t choose themselves.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 409 | Loc. 6262-64 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:59 PM if we’re found here, or Mr. Frodo’s found, and that Thing’s on him, well, the Enemy will get it. And that’s the end of all of us, of Lórien, and Rivendell, and the Shire and all. And there’s no time to lose, or it’ll be the end anyway. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 409 | Loc. 6264 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 04:59 PM desperation of the situation ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 409 | Loc. 6265 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:00 PM it’s sit here till they come and kill me over master’s body, and gets It; or take It and go.’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 409 | Loc. 6268-69 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:00 PM No change came over the still face, and by that more than by all other tokens Sam was convinced at last that Frodo had died and laid aside the Quest. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 409 | Loc. 6269-71 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:01 PM ‘Good-bye, master, my dear!’ he murmured. ‘Forgive your Sam. He’ll come back to this spot when the job’s done – if he manages it. And then he’ll not leave you again. Rest you quiet till I come; and may no foul creature come anigh you! And if the Lady could hear me and give me one wish, I would wish to come back and find you again. Goodbye!’ ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 409 | Loc. 6271 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:01 PM suicide mission ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 409 | Loc. 6271-74 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:02 PM And then he bent his own neck and put the chain upon it, and at once his head was bowed to the ground with the weight of the Ring, as if a great stone had been strung on him. But slowly, as if the weight became less, or new strength grew in him, he raised his head, and then with a great effort got to his feet and found that he could walk and bear his burden. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 410 | Loc. 6274-77 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:02 PM And for a moment he lifted up the Phial and looked down at his master, and the light burned gently now with the soft radiance of the evening-star in summer, and in that light Frodo’s face was fair of hue again, pale but beautiful with an Elvish beauty, as of one who has long passed the shadows. And with the bitter comfort of that last sight Sam turned and hid the light and stumbled on into the growing dark. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 410 | Loc. 6277 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:03 PM ultimately he is making a serious mistake here based on a misunderstanding of Frodo's condition ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 410 | Loc. 6277 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:03 PM still, what courage and nobility of spirit ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 410 | Loc. 6284-86 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:08 PM For a moment, motionless in intolerable doubt, he looked back. He could still see, like a small blot in the gathering gloom, the mouth of the tunnel; and he thought he could see or guess where Frodo lay. He fancied there was a glimmer on the ground down there, or perhaps it was some trick of his tears, as he peered out at that high stony place where all his life had fallen in ruin. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 411 | Loc. 6293-94 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:09 PM He had taken too long in making up his mind, and now it was no good. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 411 | Loc. 6294 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:09 PM self-critical ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 411 | Loc. 6294-96 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:12 PM He simply found himself drawing out the chain and taking the Ring in his hand. The head of the orc-company appeared in the Cleft right before him. Then he put it on. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 411 | Loc. 6296-99 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:12 PM The world changed, and a single moment of time was filled with an hour of thought. At once he was aware that hearing was sharpened while sight was dimmed, but otherwise than in Shelob’s lair. All things about him now were not dark but vague; while he himself was there in a grey hazy world, alone, like a small black solid rock, and the Ring, weighing down his left hand, was like an orb of hot gold. He did not feel invisible at all, but horribly and uniquely visible; and he knew that somewhere an Eye was searching for him. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 412 | Loc. 6304-8 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:14 PM He listened. The Orcs from the tunnel and the others marching down had sighted one another, and both parties were now hurrying and shouting. He heard them both clearly, and he understood what they said. Perhaps the Ring gave understanding of tongues, or simply understanding, especially of the servants of Sauron its maker, so that if he gave heed, he understood and translated the thought to himself. Certainly the Ring had grown greatly in power as it approached the places of its forging; but one thing it did not confer, and that was courage. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 412 | Loc. 6314-17 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:15 PM With a dreadful stroke Sam was wakened from his cowering mood. They had seen his master. What would they do? He had heard tales of the Orcs to make the blood run cold. It could not be borne. He sprang up. He flung the Quest and all his decisions away, and fear and doubt with them. He knew now where his place was and had been: at his master’s side, though what he could do there was not clear. Back he ran down the steps, down the path towards Frodo. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 413 | Loc. 6318-19 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:16 PM How many can I kill before they get me? They’ll see the flame of the sword, as soon as I draw it, and they’ll get me sooner or later. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 413 | Loc. 6320-21 | Added on Friday, April 19, 2013, 05:16 PM No, no song. Of course not, for the Ring’ll be found, and there’ll be no more songs. I can’t help it. My place is by Mr. Frodo. ========== TLotR - 02.0 - The Two Towers - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 416 | Loc. 6373-74 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2013, 12:18 AM But don’t forget: the enemies don’t love us any more than they love Him, and if they get topsides on Him, we’re done too. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 195-96 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2013, 06:33 AM a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all the circles of the City save the first. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 198-99 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2013, 06:34 AM Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and there was crowned by a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 317-24 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2013, 07:12 AM ‘And you, my Lord Mithrandir, shall come too, as and when you will. None shall hinder your coming to me at any time, save only in my brief hours of sleep. Let your wrath at an old man’s folly run off, and then return to my comfort!’ ‘Folly?’ said Gandalf. ‘Nay, my lord, when you are a dotard you will die. You can use even your grief as a cloak. Do you think that I do not understand your purpose in questioning for an hour one who knows the least, while I sit by?’ ‘If you understand it, then be content,’ returned Denethor. ‘Pride would be folly that disdained help and counsel at need; but you deal out such gifts according to your own designs. Yet the Lord of Gondor is not to be made the tool of other men’s purposes, however worthy. And to him there is no purpose higher in the world as it now stands than the good of Gondor; and the rule of Gondor, my lord, is mine and no other man’s, unless the king should come again.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 326-29 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2013, 07:12 AM the rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 347-48 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2013, 07:14 AM He can perceive, if he bends his will thither, much of what is passing in the minds of men, even of those that dwell far off. It is difficult to deceive him, and dangerous to try. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 349-50 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2013, 07:15 AM I do not know what put it into your head, or your heart, to do that. But it was well done. I did not hinder it, for generous deed should not be checked by cold counsel. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 515-17 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2013, 07:31 AM they thanked him for coming among them, and hung on his words and stories of the outlands, and gave him as much food and ale as he could wish. Indeed his only trouble was to be ‘wary’ according to the counsel of Gandalf, and not to let his tongue wag freely after the manner of a hobbit among friends. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 713-15 | Added on Wednesday, April 24, 2013, 12:33 AM There was no gleam of stone or gold, nor any fair thing in all their gear and harness; nor did their riders bear any badge or token, save only that each cloak was pinned upon the left shoulder by a brooch of silver shaped like a rayed star. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 1430-31 | Added on Thursday, April 25, 2013, 09:19 PM Let us remember that a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 125 | Loc. 1916-18 | Added on Thursday, April 25, 2013, 10:19 PM ‘Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 1986-90 | Added on Thursday, April 25, 2013, 10:30 PM So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2516-19 | Added on Tuesday, May 21, 2013, 02:25 AM ‘There is some good stone-work here,’ he said as he looked at the walls; ‘but also some that is less good, and the streets could be better contrived. When Aragorn comes into his own, I shall offer him the service of stonewrights of the Mountain, and we will make this a town to be proud of.’ ‘They need more gardens,’ said Legolas. ‘The houses are dead, and there is too little here that grows and is glad. If Aragorn comes into his own, the people of the Wood shall bring him birds that sing and trees that do not die.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2530-36 | Added on Tuesday, May 21, 2013, 02:28 AM ‘That is a fair lord and a great captain of men,’ said Legolas. ‘If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising.’ ‘And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,’ said Gimli. ‘It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.’ ‘Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,’ said Legolas. ‘And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.’ ‘And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess,’ said the Dwarf. ‘To that the Elves know not the answer,’ said Legolas. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2571 | Added on Sunday, May 26, 2013, 06:18 PM But defenders and foes alike gave up the battle and fled when we came, crying out that the King of the Dead was upon them. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 170 | Loc. 2592-93 | Added on Sunday, May 26, 2013, 06:24 PM Pale swords were drawn; but I know not whether their blades would still bite, for the Dead needed no longer any weapon but fear. None would withstand them. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 170 | Loc. 2598-99 | Added on Sunday, May 26, 2013, 06:25 PM Strange and wonderful I thought it that the designs of Mordor should be overthrown by such wraiths of fear and darkness. With its own weapons was it worsted!’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 170 | Loc. 2606-9 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:04 AM “Hear now the words of the Heir of Isildur! Your oath is fulfilled. Go back and trouble not the valleys ever again! Depart and be at rest!” ‘And thereupon the King of the Dead stood out before the host and broke his spear and cast it down. Then he bowed low and turned away; and swiftly the whole grey host drew off and vanished like a mist that is driven back by a sudden wind; and it seemed to me that I awoke from a dream. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 171 | Loc. 2609 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:04 AM premature? ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 2625-26 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:19 AM ‘Follow what may, great deeds are not lessened in worth,’ said Legolas. ‘Great deed was the riding of the Paths of the Dead, and great it shall remain, though none be left in Gondor to sing of it in the days that are to come.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 2633-37 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:20 AM ‘My lords,’ said Gandalf, ‘listen to the words of the Steward of Gondor before he died: You may triumph on the fields of the Pelennor for a day, but against the Power that has now arisen there is no victory. I do not bid you despair, as he did, but to ponder the truth in these words. ‘The Stones of Seeing do not lie, and not even the Lord of Barad-dûr can make them do so. He can, maybe, by his will choose what things shall be seen by weaker minds, or cause them to mistake the meaning of what they see. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2642-46 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:35 AM ‘Then you would have us retreat to Minas Tirith, or Dol Amroth, or to Dunharrow, and there sit like children on sand-castles when the tide is flowing?’ said Imrahil. ‘That would be no new counsel,’ said Gandalf. ‘Have you not done this and little more in all the days of Denethor? But no! I said this would be prudent. I do not counsel prudence. I said victory could not be achieved by arms. I still hope for victory, but not by arms. For into the midst of all these policies comes the Ring of Power, the foundation of Barad-dûr, and the hope of Sauron. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2647-51 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:36 AM If he regains it, your valour is vain, and his victory will be swift and complete: so complete that none can foresee the end of it while this world lasts. If it is destroyed, then he will fall; and his fall will be so low that none can foresee his arising ever again. For he will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning, and all that was made or begun with that power will crumble, and he will be maimed for ever, becoming a mere spirit of malice that gnaws itself in the shadows, but cannot again grow or take shape. And so a great evil of this world will be removed. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2651-54 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:36 AM ‘Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 174 | Loc. 2654 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:37 AM ironic in a climate context ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 2662-63 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:38 AM he has not built up his power by waiting until his enemies are secure, as we have done. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 2665-66 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:39 AM ‘He is watching. He sees much and hears much. His Nazgûl are still abroad. They passed over this field ere the sunrise, though few of the weary and sleeping were aware of them. He studies the signs: ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 174 | Loc. 2666 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:39 AM intelligence ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 2668-69 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:40 AM His Eye is now straining towards us, blind almost to all else that is moving. So we must keep it. Therein lies all our hope. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 175 | Loc. 2669 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:40 AM counterimtelligence ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 175 | Loc. 2669 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:40 AM counterintelligence ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 175 | Loc. 2671 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:41 AM tenuous plan ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 175 | Loc. 2676-79 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:45 PM ‘We must walk open-eyed into that trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves. For, my lords, it may well prove that we ourselves shall perish utterly in a black battle far from the living lands; so that even if Barad-dûr be thrown down, we shall not live to see a new age. But this, I deem, is our duty. And better so than to perish nonetheless – as we surely shall, if we sit here – and know as we die that no new age shall be.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2690-91 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:49 PM Indeed the force that we lead east need not be great enough for any assault in earnest upon Mordor, so long as it be great enough to challenge battle. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 176 | Loc. 2691 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 02:49 PM feint ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 2875-79 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 11:43 PM ‘These we will take!’ said Gandalf suddenly. He cast aside his cloak and a white light shone forth like a sword in that black place. Before his upraised hand the foul Messenger recoiled, and Gandalf coming seized and took from him the tokens: coat, cloak, and sword. ‘These we will take in memory of our friend,’ he cried. ‘But as for your terms, we reject them utterly. Get you gone, for your embassy is over and death is near to you. We did not come here to waste words in treating with Sauron, faithless and accursed; still less with one of his slaves. Begone!’ ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 303428-30 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 11:44 PM fell 4  adj. POETIC/LITERARY of terrible evil or ferocity; deadly: sorcerers use spells to achieve their fell ends. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 2891 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 11:47 PM And about each hill a ring was made facing all ways, bristling with spear and sword. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 189 | Loc. 2891 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 11:47 PM last defence ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 2919-20 | Added on Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 11:53 PM BOOK SIX ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 2932-34 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 12:57 AM He wondered what the time was. Somewhere between one day and the next, he supposed; but even of the days he had quite lost count. He was in a land of darkness where the days of the world seemed forgotten, and where all who entered were forgotten too. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 2936-38 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 12:58 AM Out westward in the world it was drawing to noon upon the fourteenth day of March in the Shire-reckoning, and even now Aragorn was leading the black fleet from Pelargir, and Merry was riding with the Rohirrim down the Stonewain Valley, while in Minas Tirith flames were rising and Pippin watched the madness growing in the eyes of Denethor. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 2938-40 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 12:59 AM Yet amid all their cares and fear the thoughts of their friends turned constantly to Frodo and Sam. They were not forgotten. But they were far beyond aid, and no thought could yet bring any help to Samwise Hamfast’s son; he was utterly alone. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 2957 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 01:01 AM still at a distance he heard the bubbling of Shelob in her misery; ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2964-65 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 01:01 AM His love for Frodo rose above all other thoughts, and forgetting his peril he cried aloud: ‘I’m coming, Mr. Frodo!’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2971-77 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 01:03 AM Far beyond it, but almost straight ahead, across a wide lake of darkness dotted with tiny fires, there was a great burning glow; and from it rose in huge columns a swirling smoke, dusty red at the roots, black above where it merged into the billowing canopy that roofed in all the accursed land. Sam was looking at Orodruin, the Mountain of Fire. Ever and anon the furnaces far below its ashen cone would grow hot and with a great surging and throbbing pour forth rivers of molten rock from chasms in its sides. Some would flow blazing towards Barad-dûr down great channels; some would wind their way into the stony plain, until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth. In such an hour of labour Sam beheld Mount Doom, and the light of it, cut off by the high screen of the Ephel Dúath from those who climbed up the path from the West, now glared against the stark rock faces, so that they seemed to be drenched with blood. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 2985-89 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 01:05 AM As he gazed at it suddenly Sam understood, almost with a shock, that this stronghold had been built not to keep enemies out of Mordor, but to keep them in. It was indeed one of the works of Gondor long ago, an eastern outpost of the defences of Ithilien, made when, after the Last Alliance, Men of Westernesse kept watch on the evil land of Sauron where his creatures still lurked. But as with Narchost and Carchost, the Towers of the Teeth, so here too the vigilance had failed, and treachery had yielded up the Tower to the Lord of the Ringwraiths, and now for long years it had been held by evil things. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 2989-92 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 01:05 AM Since his return to Mordor, Sauron had found it useful; for he had few servants but many slaves of fear, and still its chief purpose as of old was to prevent escape from Mordor. Though if an enemy were so rash as to try to enter that land secretly, then it was also a last unsleeping guard against any that might pass the vigilance of Morgul and of Shelob. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 2996-99 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 01:06 AM As it drew near the great furnaces where, in the deeps of time, it had been shaped and forged, the Ring’s power grew, and it became more fell, untameable save by some mighty will. As Sam stood there, even though the Ring was not on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, a vast and ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 3005-7 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 01:42 AM deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense: he knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him. The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 3062-64 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 01:47 AM For what it saw was not a small frightened hobbit trying to hold a steady sword: it saw a great silent shape, cloaked in a grey shadow, looming against the wavering light behind; in one hand it held a sword, the very light of which was a bitter pain, the other was clutched at its breast, but held concealed some nameless menace of power and doom. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 210 | Loc. 3217-18 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 02:00 AM ‘No, no!’ cried Frodo, snatching the Ring and chain from Sam’s hands. ‘No you won’t, you thief!’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 3460-61 | Added on Saturday, July 06, 2013, 02:21 AM They soon found that it was impossible to make their way along the crest of the Morgai, or anywhere along its higher levels, pathless as they were and scored with deep ghylls. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 237 | Loc. 3630-31 | Added on Wednesday, July 10, 2013, 07:05 PM They slept a little in uneasy fits; for their sweat grew chill on them, and the hard stones bit them, and they shivered. Out of the north from the Black Gate through Cirith Gorgor there flowed whispering along the ground a thin cold air. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 238 | Loc. 3640-42 | Added on Wednesday, July 10, 2013, 07:06 PM Never for long had hope died in his staunch heart, and always until now he had taken some thought for their return. But the bitter truth came home to him at last: at best their provision would take them to their goal; and when the task was done, there they would come to an end, alone, houseless, foodless in the midst of a terrible desert. There could be no return. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 238 | Loc. 3646-49 | Added on Wednesday, July 10, 2013, 07:06 PM But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. Sam’s plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 239 | Loc. 3660-63 | Added on Saturday, July 13, 2013, 08:27 AM Neither man nor orc now moved along its flat grey stretches; for the Dark Lord had almost completed the movement of his forces, and even in the fastness of his own realm he sought the secrecy of night, fearing the winds of the world that had turned against him, tearing aside his veils, and troubled with tidings of bold spies that had passed through his fences. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 241 | Loc. 3685-88 | Added on Saturday, July 13, 2013, 08:30 AM The lembas had a virtue without which they would long ago have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam’s mind was filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats. And yet this waybread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 246 | Loc. 3767-69 | Added on Saturday, July 13, 2013, 08:38 AM His will was set, and only death would break it. He felt no longer either desire or need of sleep, but rather of watchfulness. He knew that all the hazards and perils were now drawing together to a point: the next day would be a day of doom, the day of final effort or disaster, the last gasp. ========== My Clippings - Highlight Loc. 4547 | Added on Saturday, July 13, 2013, 09:07 AM the day of final effort or ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 252 | Loc. 3854-56 | Added on Saturday, July 13, 2013, 09:58 AM It would be just to slay this treacherous, murderous creature, just and many times deserved; and also it seemed the only safe thing to do. But deep in his heart there was something that restrained him: he could not strike this thing lying in the dust, forlorn, ruinous, utterly wretched. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 255 | Loc. 3909-13 | Added on Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 01:36 AM ‘Well, this is the end, Sam Gamgee,’ said a voice by his side. And there was Frodo, pale and worn, and yet himself again; and in his eyes there was peace now, neither strain of will, nor madness, nor any fear. His burden was taken away. There was the dear master of the sweet days in the Shire. ‘Master!’ cried Sam, and fell upon his knees. In all that ruin of the world for the moment he felt only joy, great joy. The burden was gone. His master had been saved; he was himself again, he was free. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 256 | Loc. 3915-17 | Added on Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 01:36 AM ‘But do you remember Gandalf’s words: Even Gollum may have something yet to do? But for him, Sam, I could not have destroyed the Ring. The Quest would have been in vain, even at the bitter end. So let us forgive him! For the Quest is achieved, and now all is over. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 260 | Loc. 3976-78 | Added on Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 01:42 AM But even while he spoke so, to keep fear away until the very last, his eyes still strayed north, north into the eye of the wind, to where the sky far off was clear, as the cold blast, rising to a gale, drove back the darkness and the ruin of the clouds. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 4023-30 | Added on Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 01:46 AM And as the Hobbits approached swords were unsheathed, and spears were shaken, and horns and trumpets sang, and men cried with many voices and in many tongues: ‘Long live the Halflings! Praise them with great praise! Cuio i Pheriain anann! Aglar’ni Pheriannath! Praise them with great praise, Frodo and Samwise! Daur a Berhael, Conin en Annûn! Eglerio! Praise them! Eglerio! A laita te, laita te! Andave laituvalmet! Praise them! Cormacolindor, a laita tárienna! Praise them! The Ring-bearers, praise them with great praise!’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 268 | Loc. 4103-5 | Added on Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 01:57 AM Sam hoped always in some shadow of the woods or secret glade to catch, maybe, a glimpse of the great Oliphaunt. And when he learned that at the siege of Gondor there had been a great number of these beasts but that they were all destroyed, he thought it a sad loss. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 4130-33 | Added on Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 02:54 PM ‘It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two, Master Warden,’ answered Éowyn. ‘And those who have not swords can still die upon them. Would you have the folk of Gondor gather you herbs only, when the Dark Lord gathers armies? And it is not always good to be healed in body. Nor is it always evil to die in battle, even in bitter pain. Were I permitted, in this dark hour I would choose the latter.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 285 | Loc. 4360-61 | Added on Monday, September 02, 2013, 03:46 PM though all things may seem changed, as if an age of the world had gone by, yet to the trees and the grass it is less than a year since you set out.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 289 | Loc. 4430-33 | Added on Monday, September 02, 2013, 03:52 PM But the Queen Arwen said: ‘A gift I will give you. For I am the daughter of Elrond. I shall not go with him now when he departs to the Havens; for mine is the choice of Lúthien, and as she so have I chosen, both the sweet and the bitter. But in my stead you shall go, Ring-bearer, when the time comes, and if you then desire it. If your hurts grieve you still and the memory of your burden is heavy, then you may pass into the West, until all your wounds and weariness are healed. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 302 | Loc. 4622-23 | Added on Tuesday, September 03, 2013, 09:43 AM Well, it will serve you right when you come home, if you find things less good in the Southfarthing than you would like. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 303 | Loc. 4639-44 | Added on Friday, September 13, 2013, 12:33 AM They had journeyed thus far by the west-ways, for they had much to speak of with Elrond and with Gandalf, and here they lingered still in converse with their friends. Often long after the hobbits were wrapped in sleep they would sit together under the stars, recalling the ages that were gone and all their joys and labours in the world, or holding council, concerning the days to come. If any wanderer had chanced to pass, little would he have seen or heard, and it would have seemed to him only that he saw grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands. For they did not move or speak with mouth, looking from mind to mind; and only their shining eyes stirred and kindled as their thoughts went to and fro. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 308 | Loc. 4719-20 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:19 AM ‘There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 311 | Loc. 4768-69 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:24 AM they talked for many times half an hour, ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 313 | Loc. 4786-89 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:28 AM ‘But it’s no wonder they left you alone. They wouldn’t go for armed folk, with swords and helmets and shields and all. Make them think twice, that would. And I must say it put me aback a bit when I saw you.’ Then the hobbits suddenly realized that people had looked at them with amazement not out of surprise at their return so much as in wonder at their gear. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 313 | Loc. 4789-91 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:29 AM They themselves had become so used to warfare and to riding in well-arrayed companies that they had quite forgotten that the bright mail peeping from under their cloaks, and the helms of Gondor and the Mark, and the fair devices on their shields, would seem outlandish in their own ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 313 | Loc. 4789-91 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:29 AM They themselves had become so used to warfare and to riding in well-arrayed companies that they had quite forgotten that the bright mail peeping from under their cloaks, and the helms of Gondor and the Mark, and the fair devices on their shields, would seem outlandish in their own country. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 316 | Loc. 4832-34 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:34 AM For a while out of politeness the hobbits visited the Common Room in the evening and answered a good many questions. Bree memories being retentive, Frodo was asked many times if he had written his book. ‘Not yet,’ he answered. ‘I am going home now to put my notes in order.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 317 | Loc. 4848-56 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:36 AM ‘I wonder what old Barliman was hinting at,’ said Frodo. ‘I can guess some of it,’ said Sam gloomily. ‘What I saw in the Mirror: trees cut down and all, and my old gaffer turned out of the Row. I ought to have hurried back quicker.’ ‘And something’s wrong with the Southfarthing evidently,’ said Merry. ‘There’s a general shortage of pipe-weed.’ ‘Whatever it is,’ said Pippin, ‘Lotho will be at the bottom of it: you can be sure of that.’ ‘Deep in, but not at the bottom,’ said Gandalf. ‘You have forgotten Saruman. He began to take an interest in the Shire before Mordor did.’ ‘Well, we’ve got you with us,’ said Merry, ‘so things will soon be cleared up.’ ‘I am with you at present,’ said Gandalf, ‘but soon I shall not be. I am not coming to the Shire. You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 317 | Loc. 4856-58 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:37 AM My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 317 | Loc. 4858-60 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:37 AM I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time. He is a moss-gatherer, and I have been a stone doomed to rolling. But my rolling days are ending, and now we shall have much to say to one another.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 318 | Loc. 4876 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:39 AM The Scouring of the Shire ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 319 | Loc. 4880-83 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:40 AM ‘Who’s that? Be off! You can’t come in. Can’t you read the notice: No admittance between sundown and sunrise?’ ‘Of course we can’t read the notice in the dark,’ Sam shouted back. ‘And if hobbits of the Shire are to be kept out in the wet on a night like this, I’ll tear down your notice when I find it.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 321 | Loc. 4915-16 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:44 AM there was no gain-saying four such masterful travellers, all armed, and two of them uncommonly large and strong-looking. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 321 | Loc. 4918-19 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:45 AM on every wall there was a notice and a list of Rules. Pippin tore them down. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 321 | Loc. 4919 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:45 AM civil disobedience? ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 322 | Loc. 4926-27 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:46 AM ‘All right, all right!’ said Sam. ‘That’s quite enough. I don’t want to hear no more. No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 323 | Loc. 4939-40 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:48 AM ‘You’re arrested for Gatebreaking, and Tearing up of Rules, and Assaulting Gate-keepers, and Trespassing, and Sleeping in Shire-buildings without Leave, and Bribing Guards with Food.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 323 | Loc. 4941-43 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:48 AM ‘I can add some more, if you’d like it,’ said Sam. ‘Calling your Chief Names, Wishing to punch his Pimply Face, and Thinking you Shirriffs look a lot of Tom-fools.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 325 | Loc. 4978-79 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:55 AM It was about eighteen miles to Bywater, and they set off at ten o’clock in the morning. They would have started earlier, only the delay so plainly annoyed the Shirriff-leader. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 325 | Loc. 4979 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:55 AM irritate those of a choleric temper ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 326 | Loc. 4994 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:57 AM this section is about coming home from war ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 327 | Loc. 5000-5001 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:58 AM And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a tall chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 327 | Loc. 5001 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:58 AM environmental degradation ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 327 | Loc. 5005-8 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 02:00 AM When they reached The Green Dragon, the last house on the Hobbiton side, now lifeless and with broken windows, they were disturbed to see half a dozen large ill-favoured Men lounging against the inn-wall; they were squint-eyed and sallow-faced. ‘Like that friend of Bill Ferny’s at Bree,’ said Sam. ‘Like many that I saw at Isengard,’ muttered Merry. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 327 | Loc. 5008 | Added on Thursday, September 19, 2013, 02:00 AM mercenaries ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 329 | Loc. 5034-35 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2013, 11:54 PM The ruffians gave back. Scaring Bree-land peasants, and bullying bewildered hobbits, had been their work. Fearless hobbits with bright swords and grim faces were a great surprise. And there was a note in the voices of these newcomers that they had not heard before. It chilled them with fear. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 329 | Loc. 5045-48 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2013, 11:55 PM ‘Fight?’ said Frodo. ‘Well, I suppose it may come to that. But remember: there is to be no slaying of hobbits, not even if they have gone over to the other side. Really gone over, I mean; not just obeying ruffians’ orders because they are frightened. No hobbit has ever killed another on purpose in the Shire, and it is not to begin now. And nobody is to be killed at all, if it can be helped. Keep your tempers and hold your hands to the last possible moment!’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 330 | Loc. 5056-58 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2013, 11:56 PM ‘Raise the Shire!’ said Merry. ‘Now! Wake all our people! They hate all this, you can see: all of them except perhaps one or two rascals, and a few fools that want to be important, but don’t at all understand what is really going on. But Shire-folk have been so comfortable so long they don’t know what to do. They just want a match, though, and they’ll go up in fire. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 342 | Loc. 5235-39 | Added on Monday, October 28, 2013, 12:14 AM At last all was over. Nearly seventy of the ruffians lay dead on the field, and a dozen were prisoners. Nineteen hobbits were killed, and some thirty were wounded. The dead ruffians were laden on waggons and hauled off to an old sand-pit nearby and there buried: in the Battle Pit, as it was afterwards called. The fallen hobbits were laid together in a grave on the hill-side, where later a great stone was set up with a garden about it. So ended the Battle of Bywater, 1419, the last battle fought in the Shire, and the only battle since the Greenfields, 1147, away up in the Northfarthing. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 342 | Loc. 5242-43 | Added on Monday, October 28, 2013, 12:15 AM Frodo had been in the battle, but he had not drawn sword, and his chief part had been to prevent the hobbits in their wrath at their losses, from slaying those of their enemies who threw down their weapons. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 342 | Loc. 5243 | Added on Monday, October 28, 2013, 12:15 AM mercy and restraint ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 346 | Loc. 5291-92 | Added on Monday, October 28, 2013, 12:18 AM Still I have already done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Note on Page 346 | Loc. 5292 | Added on Monday, October 28, 2013, 12:18 AM saruman motivated by vengeance ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 347 | Loc. 5307-8 | Added on Monday, October 28, 2013, 12:20 AM He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 350 | Loc. 5364-66 | Added on Monday, October 28, 2013, 11:44 PM The trees were the worst loss and damage, for at Sharkey’s bidding they had been cut down recklessly far and wide over the Shire; and Sam grieved over this more than anything else. For one thing, this hurt would take long to heal, and only his great-grandchildren, he thought, would see the Shire as it ought to be. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 351 | Loc. 5375-79 | Added on Monday, October 28, 2013, 11:45 PM So Sam planted saplings in all the places where specially beautiful or beloved trees had been destroyed, and he put a grain of the precious dust in the soil at the root of each. He went up and down the Shire in this labour; but if he paid special attention to Hobbiton and Bywater no one blamed him. And at the end he found that he still had a little of the dust left; so he went to the Three-Farthing Stone, which is as near the centre of the Shire as no matter, and cast it in the air with his blessing. The little silver nut he planted in the Party Field where the tree had once been; and he wondered what would come of it. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 356 | Loc. 5451-58 | Added on Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 07:52 PM The title page had many titles on it, crossed out one after another, so: My Diary. My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again. And What Happened After. Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring, compiled by Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and the accounts of his friends. What we did in the War of the Ring. Here Bilbo’s hand ended and Frodo had written: THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING (as seen by the Little People; being the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo of the Shire, supplemented by the accounts of their friends and the learning of the Wise.) Together with extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilbo in Rivendell. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 357 | Loc. 5468-76 | Added on Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 07:53 PM Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate; And though I oft have passed them by, A day will come at last when I Shall take the hidden paths that run West of the Moon, East of the Sun. And as if in answer, from down below, coming up the road out of the valley, voices sang: A! Elbereth Gilthoniel! silivren penna míriel o menel aglar elenath, Gilthoniel, A! Elbereth! We still remember, we who dwell In this far land beneath the trees The starlight on the Western Seas. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 359 | Loc. 5491-94 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2013, 11:24 PM ‘But,’ said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, ‘I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done.’ ‘So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 360 | Loc. 5516 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2013, 11:41 PM I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.’ ========== TLotR - 03.0 - The Return of the King - The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Highlight on Page 361 | Loc. 5527-29 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2013, 11:43 PM But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap. He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1649-50 | Added on Tuesday, November 05, 2013, 12:25 AM He was, by virtue of his office, a bureau of general misinformation. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1659-60 | Added on Tuesday, November 05, 2013, 12:27 AM 'It was said once to me that it is inexpedient to write the names of strangers concerned in any matter, because by the naming of names many good plans are brought to confusion.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1686-88 | Added on Tuesday, November 05, 2013, 12:29 AM He looked at his boots ruefully. 'No; I am Kim. This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?' He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1690-93 | Added on Tuesday, November 05, 2013, 12:54 AM Kim pretended at first to understand perhaps one word in three of this talk. Then the Colonel, seeing his mistake, turned to fluent and picturesque Urdu and Kim was contented. No man could be a fool who knew the language so intimately, who moved so gently and silently, and whose eyes were so different from the dull fat eyes of other Sahibs. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1707 | Added on Tuesday, November 05, 2013, 12:56 AM There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1760-61 | Added on Tuesday, November 05, 2013, 01:01 AM Do not weep; for, look you, all Desire is Illusion and a new binding upon the Wheel. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1770 | Added on Tuesday, November 05, 2013, 01:02 AM and quietly he measured himself against his self-reliant mates. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1777-84 | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 04:46 AM The mere story of their adventures, which to them were no adventures, on their road to and from school would have crisped a Western boy's hair. They were used to jogging off alone through a hundred miles of jungle, where there was always the delightful chance of being delayed by tigers; but they would no more have bathed in the English Channel in an English August than their brothers across the world would have lain still while a leopard snuffed at their palanquin. There were boys of fifteen who had spent a day and a half on an islet in the middle of a flooded river, taking charge, as by right, of a camp of frantic pilgrims returning from a shrine. There were seniors who had requisitioned a chance-met Rajah's elephant, in the name of St Francis Xavier, when the Rains once blotted out the cart-track that led to their father's estate, and had all but lost the huge beast in a quicksand. There was a boy who, he said, and none doubted, had helped his father to beat off with rifles from the veranda a rush of Akas in the days when those head-hunters were bold against lonely plantations. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1791-93 | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 04:47 AM St Xavier's looks down on boys who 'go native all-together.' One must never forget that one is a Sahib, and that some day, when examinations are passed, one will command natives. Kim made a note of this, for he began to understand where examinations led. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1822 | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 04:50 AM "Is not the jest enough?" Thou wilt go very far in this world.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 1824 | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 04:50 AM disguise ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 4 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 2513 | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 04:55 AM Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks. ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 4 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 2515 | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 04:55 AM Cracky-chan ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 4 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 2575 | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 04:59 AM The message written on her upraised hand was “Sup /b/” ========== Instapaper: Tuesday, Feb. 4 (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 2604-5 | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 05:01 AM Today, entire academic journals exist to study the effect of the web on attention-seeking kids, but nothing like that existed even a few years ago. The Chans provide pretty much the only longitudinal study on the fallout of oversharing. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 1993 | Added on Saturday, May 03, 2014, 11:28 PM night-work. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2001-2 | Added on Saturday, May 03, 2014, 11:30 PM An hour passed, and, with the best will in the world to keep awake all night, he slept deeply. Now and again a night train roared along the metals within twenty feet of him; but he had all the Oriental's indifference to mere noise, and it did not even weave a dream through his slumber. ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 297789-99 | Added on Saturday, May 03, 2014, 11:31 PM fa·kir (also fa·keer, fa·qir, fa·quir)  n. a Muslim (or, loosely, a Hindu) religious ascetic who lives solely on alms.  early 17th cent.: via French from Arabic 'needy man'. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2031-33 | Added on Saturday, May 03, 2014, 11:34 PM But one man struck at a Sahib with a fakir's buck's horn' (Kim meant the conjoined black-buck horns, which are a fakir's sole temporal weapon)—'the blood came. So the other Sahib, first smiting his own man senseless, smote the stabber with a short gun which had rolled from the first man's hand. They all raged as though mad together.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2033-35 | Added on Saturday, May 03, 2014, 11:34 PM Mahbub smiled with heavenly resignation. 'No! That is not so much dewanee [madness, or a case for the civil court—the word can be punned upon both ways] as nizamut [a criminal case]. A gun, sayest thou? Ten good years in jail.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2039-41 | Added on Saturday, May 03, 2014, 11:35 PM Swiftly—as Orientals understand speed—with long explanations, with abuse and windy talk, carelessly, amid a hundred checks for little things forgotten, the untidy camp broke up and led the half-dozen stiff and fretful horses along the Kalka road in the fresh of the rain-swept dawn. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2048-49 | Added on Saturday, May 03, 2014, 11:36 PM 'Now I see, however,'—he exhaled smoke slowly—'that it is with them as with all men—in certain matters they are wise, and in others most foolish. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2054-59 | Added on Saturday, May 03, 2014, 11:38 PM 'Thou art beyond question an unbeliever, and therefore thou wilt be damned. So says my Law—or I think it does. But thou art also my Little Friend of all the World, and I love thee. So says my heart. This matter of creeds is like horseflesh. The wise man knows horses are good—that there is a profit to be made from all; and for myself—but that I am a good Sunni and hate the men of Tirah—I could believe the same of all the Faiths. Now manifestly a Kathiawar mare taken from the sands of her birthplace and removed to the west of Bengal founders—nor is even a Balkh stallion (and there are no better horses than those of Balkh, were they not so heavy in the shoulder) of any account in the great Northern deserts beside the snow-camels I have seen. Therefore I say in my heart the Faiths are like the horses. Each has merit in its own country.' ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2071-73 | Added on Saturday, May 03, 2014, 11:39 PM 'I have met many men, women, and boys, and not a few Sahibs. I have never in all my days met such an imp as thou art.' 'And why? When I always tell thee the truth.' 'Perhaps the very reason, for this is a world of danger to honest men.' ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 11-13 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 01:39 AM "Is he not small for his age, Jessica?" the old woman asked. Her voice wheezed and twanged like an untuned baliset. Paul's mother answered in her soft contralto: "The Atreides are known to start late getting their growth, Your Reverence." "So I've heard, so I've heard," wheezed the old woman. "Yet he's already fifteen." "Yes, Your Reverence." ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 25 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 01:43 AM "A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful," Hawat had said. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 28-32 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 01:44 AM Paul awoke to feel himself in the warmth of his bed -- thinking . . . thinking. This world of Castle Caladan, without play or companions his own age, perhaps did not deserve sadness in farewell. Dr. Yueh, his teacher, had hinted that the faufreluches class system was not rigidly guarded on Arrakis. The planet sheltered people who lived at the desert edge without caid or bashar to command them: will-o'-the-sand people called Fremen, marked down on no census of the Imperial Regate. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 34-36 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 01:45 AM to be conscious by choice . . . blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions . . . one does not obtain food-safety-freedom by instinct alone . . . animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct . . . the animal destroys and does not produce ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 38-39 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 01:47 AM all things/cells/beings are impermanent . . . strive for flow-permanence within ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 44 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 01:47 AM in the Bene Gesserit Way -- in the minutiae of observation. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 48-49 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 01:48 AM Paul sat up, hugged his knees. "What's a gom jabbar?" ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 52-56 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 01:50 AM The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam sat in a tapestried chair watching mother and son approach. Windows on each side of her overlooked the curving southern bend of the river and the green farmlands of the Atreides family holding, but the Reverend Mother ignored the view. She was feeling her age this morning, more than a little petulant. She blamed it on space travel and association with that abominable Spacing Guild and its secretive ways. But here was a mission that required personal attention from a Bene Gesserit-with-the-Sight. Even the Padishah Emperor's Truthsayer couldn't evade that responsibility when the duty call came. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 68-69 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 01:52 AM "Remember that you're a duke's son, ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 73-74 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 01:54 AM she lifted a green metal cube about fifteen centimeters on a side. She turned it and Paul saw that one side was open -- black and oddly frightening. No light penetrated that open blackness. ========== Dune 1 - Dune - Highlight Loc. 121-22 | Added on Sunday, May 11, 2014, 02:01 AM "I observed you in pain, lad. Pain's merely the axis of the test. Your mother's told you about our ways of observing. I see the signs of her teaching in you. Our test is crisis and observation." He heard the confirmation in her voice, said: "It's truth!" ========== Don Juan (Baron George Gordon Byron Byron) - Highlight Loc. 32 | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 12:52 AM old song and new simile ========== Don Juan (Baron George Gordon Byron Byron) - Highlight Loc. 53-54 | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 01:00 AM If Time, the avenger, execrates his wrongs And makes the word Miltonic mean sublime, ========== Don Juan (Baron George Gordon Byron Byron) - Highlight Loc. 74 | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 01:01 AM I want a hero: an uncommon want, ========== Don Juan (Baron George Gordon Byron Byron) - Highlight Loc. 82-84 | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 01:03 AM Nelson was once Britannia's god of war, And still should be so, but the tide is turn'd; There 's no more to be said of Trafalgar, 'T is with our hero quietly inurn'd; Because the army 's grown more popular, At which the naval people are concern'd; Besides, the prince is all for the land-service, Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis. ========== Don Juan (Baron George Gordon Byron Byron) - Note Loc. 84 | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 01:03 AM interservice rivalry ========== Don Juan (Baron George Gordon Byron Byron) - Highlight Loc. 85-86 | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 01:04 AM But then they shone not on the poet's page, And so have been forgotten:—I condemn none, But can't find any in the present age ========== Don Juan (Baron George Gordon Byron Byron) - Note Loc. 86 | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 01:04 AM rap-like insult ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 92 | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 03:07 AM The lady of situations. ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 100 | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 03:09 AM Line 42 Od'] Oed' - Editor. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2280-82 | Added on Monday, July 14, 2014, 11:51 PM The Hindu child played this game clumsily. That little mind, keen as an icicle where tally of jewels was concerned, could not temper itself to enter another's soul; but a demon in Kim woke up and sang with joy as he put on the changing dresses, and changed speech and gesture therewith. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2456 | Added on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 12:14 AM a mother-of-pearl, nickel-plated, self-extracting .450 revolver. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2513-14 | Added on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 12:22 AM men are as chancy as children in their choice of playthings. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2521-23 | Added on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 12:23 AM One advantage of the Secret Service is that it has no worrying audit. That Service is ludicrously starved, of course, but the funds are administered by a few men who do not call for vouchers or present itemized accounts. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Note Loc. 2643 | Added on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 12:40 AM authentication ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2651-53 | Added on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 12:41 AM Kim drew a deep breath and hugged himself all over. The nickel-plated revolver he could feel in the bosom of his sad-coloured robe, the amulet was on his neck; begging-gourd, rosary, and ghost-dagger (Mr Lurgan had forgotten nothing) were all to hand, with medicine, paint-box, and compass, and in a worn old purse-belt embroidered with porcupine-quill patterns lay a month's pay. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 2884-85 | Added on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 01:13 AM 'We of the Game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. Our names are blotted from the book. That is all. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 303 | Loc. 4646-49 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 03:39 AM ‘I was nothing,’ said Nutt. ‘I knew nothing, I understood nothing, I had no understanding, I had no skill—’ ‘But that doesn’t mean someone is worthless,’ said Glenda firmly. ‘It does,’ said Nutt. ‘But it does not mean they are bad. I was worthless. She showed me how to gain worth and now I have worth.’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 305 | Loc. 4667-68 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 03:40 AM you’ve got to do your best,’ said the driver. ‘And the more best you’re capable of, the more you should do. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 308 | Loc. 4720-24 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 03:45 AM ‘She told him he was worthless,’ said Glenda. ‘And sometimes I think all he worries about is being worthy.’ ‘Are you worthy?’ said the woman. ‘What sort of question is that to ask a stranger?’ ‘An interesting and possibly revealing one. Do you think the world is a better place with you in it, and would you do me the courtesy of actually thinking about your answer rather than pulling one off the “affronted” rack? ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 310 | Loc. 4749-50 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 03:48 AM ‘You certainly seem to be a vehement supporter.’ Glenda hesitated. ‘Is that something to do with foxes?’ she said. ‘It means with great passion,’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 311 | Loc. 4762-63 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 03:49 AM The trouble with you is that you make assumptions. You see something and you think you know what you’ve seen. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 314 | Loc. 4805 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 03:53 AM Most love poems were pretty much the same under the curly writing. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 317 | Loc. 4852-56 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 03:57 AM ‘You know Trev said that I’d died?’ Nutt continued. ‘Well, that was true. Probably. Ladyship said that we were made from goblins for the Evil Emperor. The Igors did it. And they put in something very strange. It’s a part of you that isn’t quite a part of you. They called it the Little Brother. It’s tucked in deep inside and absolutely protected and it’s like having your own hospital with you all the time. I know that I was hit very hard, but the Little Brother kept me alive and simply cured things again. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 317 | Loc. 4856-57 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 03:58 AM There are ways to kill an orc, but there are not many of them and anyone trying them out on a living orc is not going to have very much time to get it right. Does that worry you at all?’ ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 318 | Loc. 4869 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 03:59 AM smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things. ========== D - 37.0 - Unseen Academicals - Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Highlight on Page 320 | Loc. 4895-97 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 04:01 AM ‘Oh, you know the sort of thing if you read the papers a lot,’ said Ponder. ‘I seriously think they think that it’s their job to calm people down by first of all explaining why they should be overexcited and very worried.’ ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 7-10 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 04:04 AM This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh Plus computer and LaserWriter Plus printer using MacAuthor word-processing software. The completed document was then printed using a Linotron 100 at The Graphics Factory, London SW3, to produce a final high-resolution image of the text. My thanks to Mike Glover of Icon Technology for his help with this process. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 51-53 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 04:08 AM The faith which moves mountains, or at least believes them against all the available evidence to be pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rock against which the world could hurl whatever it would, yet it would not be shaken. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 65 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 04:09 AM A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the most preposterous things. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 162-63 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 04:18 AM A very understandable fear, especially if you’re barking mad, as I’m afraid to say, with the very greatest sympathy for the poor fellow, he undoubtedly was. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 246-48 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 04:27 AM What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?’ This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 253-55 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 04:28 AM ‘So I used to spend days struggling to write essays on this 16K machine that would have taken a couple of hours on a typewriter, but what was fascinating to me was the process of trying to explain to the machine what it was I wanted it to do. I virtually wrote my own word processor in BASIC. A simple search and replace routine would take about three hours.’ ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 261-62 | Added on Friday, August 01, 2014, 04:29 AM Our intention was to be the Beatles of the early eighties, but we got much better financial and legal advice than the Beatles ever did, which was basically ‘Don’t bother’, so we didn’t. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 937-39 | Added on Saturday, August 16, 2014, 01:47 AM And above all let care be scrupulously shewn in receiving the poor and strangers; for in them specially is Christ received. For the fear that the rich inspire itself secures deference for them. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 942-44 | Added on Saturday, August 16, 2014, 01:48 AM in respect to all the duties of the monastery let the same point be taken into consideration, that when any want it help be afforded them; and, on the other hand, when they have time to spare that they be obedient to any commands given. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 961-63 | Added on Saturday, August 16, 2014, 01:49 AM it suffices a monk to have two tunics and two cowls, two instead of one, to provide for having to wash them and for night-wear; for anything in excess of this ought to be taken away as superfluous. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 965-72 | Added on Saturday, August 16, 2014, 01:50 AM For bedding let a rush mattress, blanket, coverlet and pillow suffice; and these beds are to be frequently searched, by the abbot, for private property, lest any be found: and if anyone be found to have anything he did not receive from the abbot, let him be subjected to very severe discipline. But at the same time, that this vice of private ownership may be wholly uprooted, let there be provided by the abbot all things that are necessary; that is to say cowl, tunic, sandals, shoes, girdle, knife, pen, needle, handkerchief, writing-tablet, that all plea of wanting anything be taken away: yet let the abbot be always mindful of that statement in the Acts of the Apostles that: “Distribution was habitually made to them all separately according as each had need”; and in the like manner let the abbot have regard to the infirmity of those who feel want, not to the malevolence of the envious: and yet in all his judgments let him remember the retribution of God. ========== StBenedict 0580 (St. Benedict) - Highlight Loc. 982-84 | Added on Saturday, August 16, 2014, 01:51 AM let not the evil of avarice creep in in the matter of the prices charged for the goods; but let them always be sold somewhat more cheaply than they can be sold by others who are seculars, that in all things God may be glorified. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 3279-81 | Added on Monday, March 09, 2015, 12:16 AM She is upon the Wheel and wholly given over to the shows of this life, but none the less, chela, she is virtuous, kindly, hospitable—of a whole and zealous heart. Who shall say she does not acquire merit?' ========== The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) - Highlight Loc. 76-77 | Added on Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 09:39 PM "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo." ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 416 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 06:13 PM Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to. ========== Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 437-39 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 06:15 PM The Monk fell to his knees in awe and bewilderment. So braced was he for dealing with the disappointment that was habitually his lot that, though he would never know to admit it, he was completely unprepared for this. He stared at The Door in sheer, blank system error. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 7-8 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:03 AM ISBN 0 575 60266 X Printed and bound in Great Britain by Caledonian International Book Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow All rights reserved. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 8-9 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:04 AM No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, eleCtronic or meChanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 9 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:04 AM boilerplate makes you a pirate ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 20-23 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:06 AM The man was simply competent, calm and observant. He had a kind of blindness to people's foibles that made him peculiarly effective as a manager. He seldom seemed to recognize petty insults, bitchiness or backbiting. He saw people only in terms of their effectiveness or lack of it, at least as far as his public reactions showed; he cut through their surface dross to find the true coin beneath. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 43-46 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:10 AM Lanier had entered her circle while working as a public relations manager for AT&T Orbicom Services. Before being employed by Orbicom, he had spent six years in the Navy, first as a fighter pilot, then flying high-altitude tankers. He had flown the famous Charlie Baker Delta route over Florida, Cuba and Bermuda during the Little Death, refueling the planes of the Atlantic Watch whose vigilance had played such a crucial role in limiting thee war. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 241-42 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 03:09 PM Every few years, we send someone back to the Thistledown to check stability. But we are doubly motivated this time. The Thistledown has been reoccupied." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 268-71 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 03:37 PM The OTV was a registered unarmed military vehicle, subject to the restrictions imposed after the Little Death. It was one of dozens of new vehicles that had been constructed in Earth orbit since the appearance of the Stone, and it differed substantially from the vehicles that had serviced the Joint Space Force's Orbital Defense Platforms. It was larger and capable of traveling much greater distances; by treaty, it could not carry cargoes to the ODPs. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 393-96 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 03:49 PM The elevator entrance, a perfect semicircular arch, had been blasted out of asteroid material, as had all the tunnels, serviceways and bore holes of the Stone, by a fusion torch of extremely high power and efficiency. The sides of the short hall had been polished smooth and etched with acid by the Stoners to reveal the beautiful triangular Widmanstiitten patterns, veined with rocky troilite intrusions. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 404-5 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 03:50 PM The first spacesuited explorers had shown great courage in leaving their craft and approaching the bore-hole walls, which rotated at about three-quacts of a meter per second. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 452-55 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:04 PM It was simple, really. Take one large asteroid, rock with a core of nickel-iron---your average billennia-old chunk of primordial planet-stuff--and push it into an orbit around your planet. Hollow out seven chambers, each connected by an axial bore hole, then worm-hole some of the remaining volume with tunnels, accessways, storage depots and elevators. Bring up supplementary carbonaceous and ice-volatiles asteroids and begin transferring their material into the chambers. Send it on a journey into deepest space, and voila! The Stone. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 473-74 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:07 PM "There are thirty women.here on the science team, and sixty men. Two married couples, four committeds---" "Five," Patricia had added. "And six married but spouses back on Earth. I'm one of those. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 474 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:07 PM census ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 474-77 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:07 PM That means slim pickings for the single men. But committed or not, you're fair game if you put your name on the roster. There's an old saying that has to be bent a bit here: 'Don't dip your pen in the office ink." Since office ink is all there is, some pen dipping is inevitable. But nobody has to take abuse." Carrolson glanced at Polk and Wallace. "Right, girls?" "Paradise," Polk said flatly, looking up from her slate and widening her eyes. "Better than university." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 495-96 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:11 PM A taplar the unit carried a sign announcing, "Genuine STONE 'water---an experience not to be missed. H20 from the stars!" The water was flat but not unpleasant. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 501-3 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:12 PM "What we can't grow in the Stone, we might as well ask for the best from Earthside. It's so expensive to ship up anyway, quality only hikes it a fraction of a percentage point--and we have them convinced we should be fed at least as well as submariners and lunar settlers. Eat hearty--that's a two-hundred-dollar breakfast." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 516-20 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:14 PM "Patricia, you're young, and this might seem very romantic to you, but it's deadly serious. We're working under agreements which took years to iron out--if they're ironed out even yet. We're an international team of scientists, engineers and security forces, and whatever information we find is not necessarily going to be available to every person on the globe, not for some time yet. Since you'll have access to almost everything, you must be particularly responsible--as responsible as I am. Please don't waste your time concerning yourself with . . . Well, I suggest you stay off the social roster. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 541-44 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:17 PM "We're going into the second chamber now, into the first city. We'll spend a few hours there, then take you on the Thirtieth Century Limited." "One of the trains?" He nodded. "We'll skip the third chamber today--too much, too soon. It could overload you. We'll stop at the fourth chamber security compound for a break and lunch, and then go right through to the sixth chamber." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 550-53 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:18 PM "The motors are very old. Some of the engineers think they're worn out," he said, as if he had half listened to her and half followed his own chain of thought. He removed an electronic key from his pocket, dialed a number and opened the gate with a radio signal. "We don't understand the drive yet. The motors' last effective act was to slow the Stone down for insertion into the present orbit. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 553-54 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:18 PM They used chunks of mass removed by robots from the outside of the Stone---mostly in the deep bands. Mass-drivers lobbed the chunks towards a point just above the northern crater. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 558-60 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:19 PM "The chain link wasn't shipped here. We found it." "Chain link fence? "And figurines," Lanier said. "What'are you talking about?" "Humans built the Stone, Patricia. People from Earth." She stared at him, then tried to grin. "Built it twelve hundred years ago. At least, it's about twelve hundred years old." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 561-62 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:20 PM 'I'll believe that before I believe Charlemagne or whoever had the Stone made to order." "I didn't say it came from our past. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 563-65 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:20 PM She nodded, but inside she was furious. This was some sort of initiation. Take the young woman out on a ride, terrorize her, stick her hand into a spaghetti-worm mystery, bring her back and have a good laugh. She's now a true Stoner. Great. She had never stood for that sort of treatment, even as a thirteen-year-old whiz-kid at UCLA. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 568-72 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:21 PM "The middle three chambers have large ponds buried beneath them. The ponds are shallow and filled with several varieties of duckweed, water hyacinth and algae. Plus some other plants we're still identifying. The biggest pond is shaped like a doughnut and circles the fourth chamber. There are ventilation ducts in. the g.ps at about three kilometers---you can see them with binoctllars, or if you have sharp enough eyes--and the Stone is honeycombed with other shafts and ducts." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 572-74 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:22 PM Patricia nodded, avoiding his eyes. She's going to be Stoned soon, Lanier thought. Resentment was the first sign. Resentment and disbelief were much easier than acceptance. And the most careful introductions to the Stone didn't prevent the cycle. Here, everyone came from Missouri. Everyone had to be shown first. All other learning and refinement came later. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 574-75 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:23 PM Six minutes after entering the tunnel, they came to a heavy chain link hurricane fence completely covering the tunnel mouth. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 582-87 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:24 PM It could have been Los Angeles on a very clear day, or any other modern terrestrial city, except for the surreal exaggerao tion. It was bigger, more ambitious and ordered, more architecturally mature. And scattered throughout the city, like bumpers on a pinball board, were the biggest structures she had ever seen in her life. Easily four kilometers tall, they resembled upright chandeliers made of concrete, glass and shining steel. Each facet of the nearest chandelier-structure was as large as entire buildings in between. The chandelier resemblance increased as she looked up and saw them suspended from the chamber floor overhead. Across the two layers of atmosphere, fifty kilometers away, the city became beautifully unreal, like a model behind dusty glass' in a museum. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 598-99 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:25 PM We've never found a live Stoner." "You've found dead ones?" "Quite a number. There are mausoleums in this chamber, and in the fourth chamber. The main cemetery in Alexandria is at two-six degrees and ten kilometers. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 605 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:25 PM We could move twenty million people into just this chamber and still not be crowded." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 606-11 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:26 PM "No," Lanier said. "We don't plan on selling condos. We have fifteen archaeologists on the team, and they'd kill anyone who even suggested it. They hold briefings every few days--I'm sure you'll attend several soon. They're working around the clock, and have been since we brought them up here three years ago. They haven't let us touch anything since that time, except when one of the security team commanders or myself has overruled them. And even then, we needed damned good excuses. ' ' Patricia nodded to the three guards, who returned the greeting cordially, one tipping the visor on his cap. A radio in the guard house beeped and crackled. The senior officer answered. Patricia couldn't catch the guttural message, but the guard replied in what sounded like Russian. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 614 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:26 PM Everyone has to do double and triple duty." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 622-24 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:27 PM None of the plants look healthy. Gardening systems deteriorating---not working at all? Shop windows on street level, nearly all broken. Lobbies of businesses, agencies, open to the air. One window--humanoid mannequin. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 632 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:28 PM "That's one of the libraries---one of two we're investigating now. All the others are closed off." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 634 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:28 PM "Believe me, nobody enters the libraries on whim. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 636-39 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:29 PM Electronic sensors had been placed around the building. Chain link fences topped by wicked-looking razor-wire curls enforced the gentle suggestions of sensors and cameras. Four guards stood before the entrance, carrying Apples antipersonnel lasers---and looking very serious. As Lanier and Vasquez approached, an amplified voice boomed out, "Mr. Lanier. Stop and allow scan. Who's that with you?" ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 639-41 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:29 PM They left the truck and walked to the gate. "We brought the razor wire and sensors up from Earth two years ago," Lanier told her. "When we began to realize what we had, in there." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 647-50 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:30 PM "Most of the city's power nets aren't functioning. We haven't tracked down the power supplies yet, but they're probably not discrete plants. The Stone itself seems to carry a reserve of power, with concentrations in supercooled batteries." Patricia's brow wrinkled. "Batteries?" "Like the hundred-meter cells in Arizona and the Greater African Conservatory." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 651-53 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:30 PM Control and information channels are optical, more so than back on Earth. The buildings are dark because most of the circuit breakers--or whatever served that functionhave been tripped, and nobody's going to reset them until we know more about fire hazards." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 653-55 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:31 PM "Why are the windows broken?" Patricia asked as they continued climbing. "Glass gets brittle with age, slumps. Pressure surges in the atmosphere crack the windows." "Weather?" "Of a sort. There are high- and low-pressure systems in the chambers, updrafts and coriolis, downdrafts near the caps. Even storms. Snow in some of the chambers, infrequently. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 655-56 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:31 PM Most of it seems controlled, but we don't know whether the controls are built-in, static, or whether machines are still hard at work someplace." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 657-59 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:31 PM "We've been pulling data out of these storage banks for a year," Lanier said. "The programming languages weren't familiar to us, so we've only had success producing readable copy and useful images for about six months. As it turns out, the library in the next chamber is even larger, so we're concentrating on it, now. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 676-77 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:33 PM "It's from the future. The Stone is from our future." "We're not certain of that," he said. "But that's why I'm here . . . to help you figure out how." "There are other puzzles, equally mystifying, and perhaps they all tie together." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 699-701 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:35 PM The interior. examined for basics, was like any reasonably new rapid transit system vehicle. The plastic seats and metal fixtures were in good repair. The cars had obviously not been designed for crowding--no handstraps or rails for standing passengers--and the arrangements were spacious, with lots of leg room. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 714-16 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:36 PM "There aren't any provisions for acceleration in the chambers,'' Lanier said. "So they accelerated slowly?" He shook his head. "They had some way to compensate?" "The sixth chamber," Lanier said. "But that's part of the big picture, too." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 724-27 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 04:37 PM "Fourth chamber was a recreation center, as near as we can tell," Lanier said. "And of course, a reservoir and air-purification system. There are four distinct islands here, each with a different habitat. There were underwater habitats, too--coral gardens, freshwater ponds and river systems. Resort, wildlife preserve, fish farm---it's all returned to an untended state, a bit wild but prospering." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 756-57 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:23 PM airlock. Mirsky raised his AKV-297--automatic vacuum-adapted Kalashnikov projectile rifle--and pointed it at the airlock hatch. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 768 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:24 PM "The stars have ears, Coqoral," Mirsky advised the soldier. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 776-77 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:25 PM "To the Indian Ocean," Mirsky said. "For final training as battalion commander." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 788-89 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:26 PM "Think, Patricia. Where did the Stoners go? Why did they go there, how did they get there?" "I don't know," she answered quietly. "We don't know, either. Not yet. Rimskaya is head of the sociology group. They might be able to tell us." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 797-801 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:27 PM The fifth chamber was darker than the previous sections she had visited. A canopy of flat gray clouds painted the cylinder's upper atmosphere, cutting out half the robe light. Beneath the clouds was a Wagnerian landscape of barren mountains, resembling ragged lumps of anthracite mixed with dark-rainbowed hematite. Between the mountains were rusty abyssal valleys, cut by waterfalls feeding into quicksilver rivers. The mountains toward the middle of the chamber floor were startling in their contortions--arches, giant rugged cubes, broken-tipped pyramids and causeways of irregular slab steps. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 801-3 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:28 PM "What in hell was this?" she asked. "A kind of open pit mine, we think. Our two geologist,s--you met Robert Smith, he's one--speculate that when the chambers were hollowed out, the fifth wasn't finished off. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 804-7 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:28 PM As the train's hum decreased in pitch and the tunnel dark brightened, Lanier stood and said, "End of the line." The lower terminal was a cavernous construct of unpainted slabs of reddish concrete and mottled gray-and-black asteroid rock. The platform was marked with faint lines, as though long winding queues had once formed there. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 809-14 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:29 PM the sixth chamber. The valley floor was layered with gigantic inert mechanical forms, cylinders and cubes and stacks of circular plates laid on edge, resembling a monstrous circuit board. Just outside the terminal building, a row of spherical tanks marched off to a distant wall. The wall was at least a hundred meters high, and the tanks half that in diameter. Below this level of the terminal, between the spheres and a parallel row of cylinders resting on their sides, was an immense gully filled with glistening water. The channel was lined with pipe ends and cyclopian pumping apparatus. Over it all, thick black clouds floated in clumps, dropping curtains of rain and flurries of show. Somewhere was a constant pulsing, less heard then felt, like the infra-sound beats of moving mountains or the grinding of distant sea bottoms. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 816-18 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:30 PM "No moving parts in the whole chamber except for large pumps, and not many of those," Lanier said. "The builders relied upon a built-in weather cycle. Rain falls, picks up heat, flows down channels into shallow ponds, evaporates, carries heat up, and the atmospheric maintenance systems drain it off, we're still not sure how." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 818-24 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:33 PM "What does it all do?" "When the Stone was first designed, the sixth chamber was going to be another city:ut the builders had specified that the Stone could only accelerate at three percent g. Just before the Stone was outfittedand before the completion of the major excavation-they found a way to allow the Stone to accelerate to the limit of its power. The method was complex and expensive, but it gave the Stone a versatility the builders couldn't pass up. So the sixth chamber was equipped with selective inertial damping machinery, which makes up a small fraction of what is here now." He nodded at the vista through the glass. "That's why none of the chamber floors are inclined, and none of the ponds or rivers are equipped with slop barriers. They don't need them. The sixth chamber can selectively damp the effects of inertia on any object in the Stone. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 824-25 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 05:33 PM On a large scale, it overcomes acceleration and deceleration of the entire ship. On a small scale, it prevents inertial effects in the trains. It's self-regulating, though we haven't found any 'brain' yet." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 862-63 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:02 PM "This stuff that looks like asphalt--it isn't. It's asteroid rock, all the metals removed, ground up and mixed with a plant-based oil. Very tough, no cracks. We wonder who's going to patent it." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 866-67 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:02 PM How could they consider her so important? In the face of this monumental mystery, what could she possibly do? ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 891-92 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:04 PM "It's bigger," she said. Farley and Lanier stood by the mck, looking up at her. Wu and Chang joined them. "It's bigger than the asteroid. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 896 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:05 PM The asteroid was longer on the inside than it was on the outside. The seventh chamber went on forever. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 919-21 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:07 PM And be doubly wary--no one has proven that the Stone or the corridor is completely deserted. We're just too few to adequately explore and police all the chambers. So if you see anything, report it, but don't believe it." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 924-26 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:07 PM "We're Chinese. We're lucky to have gotten this far. We're here by courtesy and because our governments happen to be friendly this decade. All the same, we're much better off than the poor Russians. They get to study the bore holes and the plasma tubes, and very little else. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 953-54 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:10 PM They headed into the infinite north, if the corridor truly was infinite. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 976-78 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:12 PM The length of the corridor was unknown, but radar signals sent from the bore hole had not yet returned after'the passage of four months. It was assumed that either the corridor had no end or that the signals had been absorbed in some as-yet-unexplained way. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 980-84 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:12 PM The corridor differed from the seventh chamber in one respect: 436 kilometers down the line, it was surrounded by a circuit of artificial structures, four motionless cupolas floating without support above wide dimples in the soil. Each of the four cupolas stood alone, spaced at equal distances from the others around the circumference. What they were made of was unknown, but the substance didn't match any of the characteristics of matter except for solidity. Eight hundred seventy-two kilometers down the line was another circuit, and a new expedition was exploring in that area now.. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 991-93 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:13 PM The Joint Space Command had a very large say in how the studies were conducted. Despite the civilian overgarments, this was largely a military operation. Judith Hoffman, nominally coordinating the civilian and military agencies from her offices in Sunnyvale and Pasadena, tempered this reality a little. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 993-96 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:13 PM The Stone security team consisted of some 300 Americans (about half), 150 British and 100 Germans; the remaining 50 were from Canada, Australia and Japan. France was not a member of NATO-Eurospace and had declined an invitation to send its nationals to the Stone, no doubt partly in protest of N,TO pressure to join in the major rearmament of the first two years of the twenty-first century. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1001-5 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:14 PM The structural breakdown of the science team was informative. There were mathematicians, archaeologists, physicists, social scientists (including historians), computer and information specialists, and medical/biology experts. There were also four lawyers. Engineering consisted of support--with a military ad-junct---and mechanics. Communication also had a military adjunct, in charge of coded transmission. Pickney, assisted by Sylvia Link, was responsible for internal Stone communications and Earth-space-station-lunar settlement networks. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1009-10 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:15 PM The libraries, Carrolson explained, were a purely American preserve, by direct order of Hoffman and the President. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1014-15 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:15 PM If she wished to discuss the library, she could only speak with Rimskaya, Lanier and one science team member she hadn't met yet--Rupert Takahashi. He was on the current corridor expedition. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1024-25 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:16 PM as long as we're measuring pi, I'd like to measure slash aitch and the gravitational constant, whatever else they can think of pertaining to the qualities of the universe. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1033-36 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:17 PM Either it was 'a tube of restraining forces, passing beyond the end of the asteroid through some superspace trickery, or it was not. If not, then it was likely to be constructed itself of superspace trickery. (She considered, and dismissed as philosophically useless---for the moment--the notion that the corridor was an illusion.) Superspace trickery was the more difficult concept to work with. If the Stoners had used the machinery in the sixth chamber to distort space-time, there would be consequences. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1045-46 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:18 PM Seventh chamber plasma tube--power supply? Maintenance? Same as other chamber tubes? ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1055-58 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:19 PM "If the corridor is a matrix of bent geodesics, a warped tube of space, what would you expect to find at its center?" "I wondered about that yesterday afternoon." She paused as the cart neared the end of the staging area. "It's not going to work down the center. There's going to be a region where all the rules fail." "Precisely." "A singularity?" "That's where we're going," Farley said. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1059-61 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:19 PM Farley switched on a light and pulled down two rumply, one-size-fits-all pressure suits from a rack. "You can snug the arm and leg lengths a bit with these straps. Mobility and finesse aren't really needed here, just pressure and temperature and air. This isn't the most visited spot on the Stone." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1072-73 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:20 PM "Plasma tube begins anew in each chamber," Farley said. "It butts against the caps, sustained by a very weak bottle. The bottle also acts to keep the atmosphere in--otherwise, it would all have licked out through the bore holes. Leaked, I mean. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1075-77 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:21 PM "We think there are charged plates inset in the cap material around the circumference of the tube, but we haven't investigated yet. And the corridor tube is quite a different thing from the other tubes. We have even less idea how it works." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1087-89 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:22 PM It resembled a half-meter-wide pipe made of quicksilver, stretching off to its own vanishing point, not in a straight line and not in a curve, not moving and not standing still. If it could be said to reflect at all, it did not behave like a mirror, imaging instead barely recognizable imitations of its surroundings. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1114-15 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:24 PM Energy to maintain the plasma tube in the corridor. Could that be made a function of the separate universe the corridor obviously is? ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1115 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:24 PM Where did the matter come from---all that dirt, and the atmosphere? Not from the Stone, not all of it; that's obvious. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1121-23 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:25 PM It was a beautiful piece of work: a hollow cylinder twenty meters long and six wide, resembling a giant jet engine with all its guts removed. He peered down the middle of the assembly at the sickle-shaped metal pieces that would clamp down on the mysterious something the cylinder would surround. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1124-26 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:25 PM It was called a tuberider. Sitting next to it-brought up in thre cocoons by a subsequent OTV--was a highly modified Boeing-Bell prop-driven vertical/short takeoff and landing aircraft, V/STOL for short, model number NHV-24B. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1126-31 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:25 PM It was the most peculiar aircraft he had ever seen. Developed initially for the U.S. Air Force, designed for search and rescue missions, it could rotate its two wingtip-mounted engines through 120 degrees. The five broad blades of each prop could be folded back into the engine nacelles. And in the tail, aimed slightly above the centerline, was a kerosene-oxygen rocket engine, no doubt to provide extra thrust---but under what conditions? Its wings were rakishly forward-swept and were mounted three-quarters back on the fuselage, almost touching the V-mil. It could carry eighteen people and a crew of two, fully loaded, or fewer passengers and a lot of equipment. It was at once airplane and helicopter and rocket. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1131 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:26 PM He loved it just from reading the specs. He had always had a weakness for Rube Goldberg gadgets. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1131-34 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:26 PM The V/STOL could be fitted to the tuherider in three positions: like an arrow sticking from the side of a log, nose and refueling nozzle inserted mid-cylinder; in the conjunction of its first mission, inserted "up the cylinder's ass" as Heineman thought of it, as its rocket propelled the tuberider down the middle of the plasma robes and bore holes to the seventh chamber; or clamped to the cylinder along its belly. He didn't have the slightest idea what it would do once it was in place. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1138-41 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:27 PM The cocoon had also contained contraband. Not on the manifest--not the official one, at any rate--were two metal boxes the size and shape of coffins. Heineman had a good idea what they contained---high-speed radar-controlled Gaffing guns. He could also guess where they would be installed, and for what reason. They were Joint Space Command items, and the only man who needed to know about their arrival was Captain Kirchner. They were in direct violation of ISCCOM guidelines for the Stone. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1163-67 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:33 PM "She asked for a meter to check out local values of pi, Planck's constantmslash aitch, rather--and the gravitational constant. Electronics threw in speed of light, ratio of proton mass to electron mass, and neutron decay time. I don't know whether she'll use them all, but she's got them." "Sounds pretty high-tech to me." "I asked how they managed to squeeze some of the tests into a package this size. They smiled and said they've been building defense satellites for CSOC for years, and the multi-meter was easy in comparison. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1177 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:34 PM You'll take Vasquez back and forth to the libraries, with a military escort, not Farley. That's my only stipulation." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1208-9 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:37 PM "The second circuit is more than just floating cupolas. There are openings beneath the cupolas. They appear to be wells of some sort. They didn't find out where the wells lead, but they're definitely open." "Then the corridor has holes," ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1214-16 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:38 PM The Axis City had moved a million kilometers down the corridor since its construction five centuries ago. Olmy and the Frant had covered that distance in less than a week, flying their craft in a smooth stretched spiral around the plasma tube. In the history of the Thistledown and the Way, no one had ever entered the asteroid from the outside. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1226-31 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:39 PM He picted graphicspeak at the credit counter and received a confidential response: the apartment was blocked, as were all apartments in the building. None could be occupied or even viewed until the present interdict was revoked. Those orders had been issued after the last of the Naderite families had been transferred from the cities. Only public buildings had been left open for the use of the last scholars, finishing their exodus studies. The Earth people had already put some of those facilities to use, the Thistledown City Library chief among them. He picted a Nexus coded icon into the credit counter and said aloud, "I have authorization to temporarily revoke interdict." "Authorization recognized," the counter replied. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1239-40 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:40 PM The furnishings and decor were all here, reflecting his natural father's attemp to duplicate the apartment they had been driven from in Alexam dna. They had spent two years here, awaiting decisions on their case before their triad family could be moved to the newly finished Axis City. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1243-47 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:40 PM He sat in his father's sky-blue chair before the apment data pillar. Such pillars were now obsolete in the Axis City, used only as channing antiques, but he had spent hundreds of hours as a child in front of this very device and found it familiar and comfortable to work with. Picting his own coded icons, he activated the pillar and opened a custom channel to the building's memory. Once, the memory had served the needs of thousands of tenants, keeping their records and acting as a depository for millions of possible decor variations. Now iLwas virtually blank; Olmy had the impression of swimming in a vast dark hollowness. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1261 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:42 PM "'Brief History of the Death, by Abraham Damon Farmer."" She opened to the printing history and read the date. "2135. Our calendar?" ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1262 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:42 PM "Are they talking about the Little Death?" she asked hopefully. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1265-66 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:42 PM "But if this chronology is . . . right, appropriate . . . if it could possibly be our future . . . then there's going to be a catastrophe in less than a month." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1268-69 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:43 PM the Stone's universe is not the same as ours in at least one important respect." "And that is . . . 7" "In the Stone's past, no giant asteroid starship returned to the Earth-Moon vicinity." "That might make a difference?" ."I'd think so, wouldn't you?" ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1294-98 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:45 PM When the engagements became nu-clear-as all in command knew in their hearts they would--the space-based defense systems, still young and unproven, showed themselves to be remarkably effective. They could not, however, stop the near-shore submarine launches of the three missiles which desUoyed Afianta, Brighton and part of the coast of Brittany. The Russians could not protect their city of Kiev. The nuclear exchange was limited, and the Soviets and Western bloc countries capitulated almost simultaneously. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1300-1301 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:46 PM The Death, when it came, was completely earnest and open. Every weapon was used as it had been designed to be used. There seemed to be no compunction about consequences. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1312 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:46 PM Sea battles during the Death lasted an average of half an hour, and many took less than five minutes. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1312-15 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:47 PM On the first day, while strategic intentions were being tested and before the large-scale escalations, the navies of the Eastern and Western blocs destroyed each other. They were the last great navies allowed on the oceans of the Earth, and their radioactive scrap still pollutes the waters, 130 years later. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1321-22 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:47 PM within a year, highly cooperative societies emerged. The lives of one's fellows became almost infinitely precious--and all of the Death's survivors became fellows. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1334-35 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:48 PM On page 567, she found what she was looking for. Every city in the world that had been bombed was listed in the next two hundred pages, with approximate casualties and deaths. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1335-38 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:49 PM She searched for California and found it: twenty-five cities, each receiving from two to twenty-three warheads. Los Angeles, twenty-three, spaced over a two-week period. ("Spasm," an asterisked footnote commented.) Santa Barbara, two. San Francisco---including Oakland, San Jose and Sunnyvale--twenty over a three-day period. San Diego, fifteen. Long Beach, ten. Sacramento, one, Fresno, one. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1338-40 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:49 PM Vandenherg Space Operations Center, twelve evenly spaced al6ng the coastal strip. Air bases hit in or near the cities, including civilian airports which could be used for military purposes: fifty-three. All space centers around the world had been destroyed, even in noncombatant countries (again the footnote: "Spasm"). ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1354 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:50 PM "Eleven people know, here and there." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1359-61 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:51 PM Can I make conditions?" "What sort of conditions?" "I want my family evacuated. I want some friends taken into the countryside, put under protection. Put where the generals and politicians will be." "No." He walked around the tree slowly. "I'm not angry with you for asking, but no. None of us has asked for anything like that. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1370-72 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:52 PM "They said shuttle landing areas were bombed. In that book." "Yes." "if it happens, we'll be stuck up here, won't we?" "Yes. Most of us. We won't want to go back soon, anyway." "That's why you've started farming. We won't get anything from Earth for . . . how long?" "If there's a war, and it's as described, perhaps thirty years." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1393-95 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:54 PM She had typed up a long, self-censored reply, showed it to Carrolson for approval, and had it sent Earthside on the next OTV Surprisingly, writing the letter had been easy. In it, she said all the things she knew Paul would want to hear, all the things she thought needed to be said if, indeed, Paul was going to be dead in a few weeks. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1426-29 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:57 PM So many questions about logistics and design. How does the air get renewed in the corridor? The Stone's regeneration ponds couldn't possibly keep up with it, not if there's any sizable population of animals farther on. So maybe there's just enough air to last a few thousand years." "That doesn't seem right," Patricia said. '"Whoever--or whatevertset this up, designed it for eternity. Don't you get that feeling?" "Sometimes. Doesn't mean it's a valid assumption." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1434-37 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:58 PM An hour later, Takahashi pointed out the first circuit, four wells at the quadrilateral points of a ring. Each well sat in the middle of a dimple about half a kilometer in diameter and twenty meters deep. In the center of the dimple was an inverted bronze-colored dish fifteen meters wide, suspended eight meters above the bowl. The dish hovered in empty air, unsupported. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1448-49 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015, 06:59 PM "Look at the material of the dish and plug--up close. As far as we can tell, it's the same stuff as the corridor walls." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1698-1700 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 03:07 PM She returned to the system briefly to look up information on the corridor, the exodus of the Stoners and the desertion of the cities. In each instance she was met with a very graphic floating spiked ball signaling no access. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1797-1800 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 03:20 PM "We are fairly certain now that Thistledown City had been evacuated and locked up at least a century before Alexandria.. In other words, the exodus had occurred in the third chamber almost a hundred years before the final evacuation of the second chamber. There is substantial evidence that the second chamber was finally emptied by force. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1800-1801 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 03:20 PM "The Stone was emptied, then, not simply because of a mass social migration, but to fulfill a definite plan. The people behind the plan apparently, gave their more conservative fellows a century to comply, and when they still proved reluctant, moved them out'against their will. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1989-93 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 03:34 PM Chapters in the manuals explained how the damping system did not operate universally; if it had, the Stone's rotation would have been useless, and everything within the chambers would have floated around weightless. The damping was highly selective. And that was super-science. The implications were astonishing. What the sixth chamber machinery did, in effect, was alter the mass-space-time character of everything in the Stone. That was little short of being able to manipulate space and time in such a way as to create the corridor. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 2019-22 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 03:39 PM By creating the corridor, they had knocked the Stone out of its own continuum. The image that came to mind---all too irritatingly specific, since she wasn't at all sure it was accurate---was that of the corridor as a length of whip, and the Stone as the tip. With the creation of the whip, and its inevitable uncoiling in superspace, the tip had been snapped out of one ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 2339-41 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 04:16 PM In the commotion, Lanier had directed his eyes away from the screens displaying the Earth. He returned his attention to them. Tiny orange spots blossomed along the Soviet coast west of Japan, simple suborbital rockets deploying solid debris to bring down low-orit satellites and battle stations. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 2357-59 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 04:17 PM More brilliant white flowers grew from pinpoints to blue-white smudges over Japan and China four in all. These were orbital nuclear bursts, designed to incapacitate communications and power nets with intense flashes of electromagnetic interference---the source of more static over the speakers. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 2506-7 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 04:32 PM The whole world was being swept by a crown fire, with the flames leaping not from tree to tree, but from city to city, continent to continent. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 2667-68 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 04:49 PM "There is no need for fighting. We repeat, there is no need for fighting. You may hold your present positions for the moment, but do not advance any farther. It is imperative you listen. There has been a disastrous exchange of nuclear weapons on Earth." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 2828-31 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:02 PM You are now a Lieutenant General. I give you my insignia." He passed the stars to Mirsky with his right hand, face strained by the pain. "There might be trouble with . . . others in line. But these are my wishes. I trust you, General Mirsky. If what our squadron commander says is true--and it does not seem impossible--then you must negotiate. We may be the last Russians .... ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 2854-55 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:06 PM "You can be taught a command of spoken colloquial and technical Russian in two hours. An additional hour will be required to teach you to read and translate." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 2926-27 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:14 PM "We saw Russia glowing at night. All of Europe is on fire." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 2986-87 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:19 PM "Any word from Earth?" "Not a thing. Some radar activity in the Arctic Ocean---maybe a few surface ships. Can't see much. Smoke is covering most of Europe, Asia, the United Stales. They can't be concerned with us, ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3047-51 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:24 PM The strip of parkland in the second chamber where Mirsky's battalion had landed now took the bodies of the dead. A hundred and six American, British and German soldiers had died in the battle and lay in aluminized sacks down a long trench opened by one of the anthropology team's excavators. Three hundred sixty-two Soviets lay in four more trenches. Another ninety-eight Soviets and a dozen Western bloc soldiers were missing and presumed dead, either destroyed in the battle or drifted out of the bore hole to become freeze-dried mummies in orbit around the Stone. A special marker had been set up for the dead of OTV 45 and the crews of the lost heavy-lifters. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3052-54 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:24 PM They were burying more than just their fellows; though there was no marker yet for the dead of Earth, they were burying distant family members, friends; distant cultures, histories, dreams. They were burying the past, or as much of it as they could part with. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3099-3101 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:29 PM Very likely, there was not a single person alive on Earth whom he knew personaily. That was good statistics but a lousy thought, lousy psychology. Most of his contacts (his people) had lived in cities or worked in military centers. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3161-62 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:35 PM "Talsit," he said. "Smooths the memory, rearranges priorities without dulling memory. Blocks subconscious access to certain disturbing memories. After Talsit, such memories can only be opened by direct conscious will." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3168 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:36 PM "A Frant always wishes to help," Olmy explained. "If it cannot help, it feels pain. I'm afraid you're quite a trial to my Frant." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3177-80 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:37 PM The aircraft's spiral course was hypnotic. With a start, she realized she had been staring at new phenomenon for several minutes without conscious awareness. The dense-packed patterns on the floor of the corridor now crawled with moving lights. Strung along the "freeway" lanes were lines of red and intense white beads. Lances of light swung up in arcs above the' patterns and illuminated the edges of low-flying disks. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3183 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 05:37 PM "The Axis City regulates the flow along a billion kilometers." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3229-30 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 08:39 PM "Why did you bring her back? As evidence?" "I could not leave her; she was close to discovering how to modify sixth chamber machinery." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3264-65 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 08:42 PM They were, after, all, corporeal and usefully employed; theirs was a position of considerable privilege. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3265-66 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 08:42 PM Of the ninety million citizens in the Axis City, corporeal or in City Memory, only fifteen million had important work to do, and of those, only three million worked more than a tenth of their living hours. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3310-13 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 08:46 PM In his favor, he felt, was his continuing education. Or, perhaps more accurately phrased, his enlightenment. Never before had he been able to wander at will through such a huge and diverse source of information. Soviet libraries--military and otherwise-had always been severely restricted, with books available only to those with a demonstrable need to know. Simple curiosity was frowned upon. He had been unsure even about the geography of his own country. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3333-34 | Added on Friday, June 05, 2015, 08:48 PM Heineman had limited the tuberider's speed to nine kilometers per second. Something in the tuberider's construction caused a violent shudder beyond that. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3600-3603 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 09:49 AM The radio crackled and chuffed and a genderless melodic voice began in mid-phrase: "--violation of the Law of the Way. Your craft is in violation of the Law of the Way. Do not resist or your craft will be destroyed. You are under the direction of the Hexamon Nexus and will be removed from the flaw in six minutes. Do not attempt to either accelerate or decelerate." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3695-3700 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 09:56 AM "They already have an advocate. You must accept a direct order from a representative of the President," Olmy said. The neomorph--shaped like an egg, with traction field grappling arms extended to each side and a human face on the forward, large end of the egg--surrounded itself with a picted white circle, signaling compliance under duress. But that was not enough for Olmy. "By order of the President of the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, authority of the Presiding Minister, you are removed from this duty," he said. The neomorph protested furiously in garbled sound and red-shifted picts as it exited the chamber. Olmy took the position, exchanging glances with the remaining neomorph. "This will not reach the court," he stated. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3757-58 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:00 AM "The case is cleared from all pre-trial court records, and negated by circumstance," the woman announced. "You are all guests of the Axis Nader." With a meaningful glance at Olmy, Ram Kikura added, "By authority of the Presiding Minister." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3836 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:11 AM "are they watching us now?" "No. They told me they aren't, anyway. Privacy is very important here." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3853-58 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:15 AM "I speak American English, and have for years, because I am proud of my ancestry, which is North American, specifically United States of America, even more specifically, California. '"When you first saw me, you might have noticed I was picting a flag from the U.S.A. over my left shoulder. This is frequently done by Ameriphiles; it symbolizes our pride. After the Death, it was considered shameful to claim either Russian or American heritage. Those who did so were persecuted. Americans were persecuted more than Russians. When South Americans and Mexicans repopulated large sections of North America, people claiming to be citizens of the United States were arrested. The Naderites of that time were trying to create a unified world government, and there was resentment against the former Superpowers." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3859-60 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:16 AM "The United States gave us most of our culture, the foundations of our laws and government. We feel about America as you might feel about Rome or Greece. Citizens take considerabl pride in having American ancestors. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3872-73 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:17 AM "The Hexamon is the totality of human citizens. You might call it the state. The Nexus is the main lawmaking body of this city, and of the Way from the Thistledown and the forbidden territory to mark two ex nine. That is, the two-billion-kilometer point of the Way." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3877-82 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:18 AM "One hundred million humans occupy the city and the Way. Ten million live off-city, along the Way, chiefly traders and coordinators of the five hundred and seventy-one active wells. Ninety million live in the Axis City. Of these, seventy million are in City Memory. Most of those have lived out their legal two incarnations and have retired their bodies to exist as personality patterns in the City Memory environment. Under special circumstances, they may be assigned new bodies, but most often they are content in Memory. Some five million deviant personalities those who are incomplete or deranged in such a way they cannot be redeemed, even with extreme methods of therapy--are kept inactive." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3968-70 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:27 AM "No, you are out of danger. Your head and brain are being repaired and you will live. But you have decisions to make." "What sort of decisions?" "You can live with the missing portions left blank, or you can receive prosthetic neurological programming and artificial personality segments tailored to fit those remaining to you." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3978-79 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:28 AM "I am a city function shaped to be acceptable to you in your present condition. Human medical authority is not available, so the city has taken it upon itself to repair you." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 3979-81 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:28 AM "Okay," Mirsky said. "That's enough for now. I want to have nothing but darkness." "Yes, that will come naturally after you give us your answer. ' ' "I mean, I wish to die." "That is not an option." "Okay, then yes." He made the decision quickly so as not to have to consider all the possibilities, all the horrors. "You consent to prosthetic programming?" "I consent." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4011-12 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:30 AM the corridor moves forward in time about one year every thousand kilometers. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4066-69 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:40 AM "I'm a rogue. A rather violent one, actually, though you wouldn't know it to look at me. I go where I please, and so long as I'm careful, I maintain. I've been non-corporeal for a hundred and fifty years now, supposedly condemned to inactive Memory. Of course, there's only a copy of me inactivated. Sometimes I'm hired for various jobs. Usually I duel with other rogues. I've taken down sixty in my time. Lethal chess." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4106-8 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:43 AM The Wald was both decoration and a nod to Naderite philsophies; about a third of Central City's atmosphere needs were taken care of in the shafts, with Geshel-designed scrubbers doing the rest. Thousands of varieties of trees and other plantssome food-bearing--had been genetically altered and adapted to weightlessness. Fully a third of the Axis City's biomass was botanical and concentrated in the Wald. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4151-52 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:50 AM There are still two thousand humans in the istledown; sooner or later, we have to bring them under our control. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4180-85 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:53 AM What he felt, above all, was sadness, a sense of loss which almost overwhelmed his sense of duty. He--like Mirsky and most of the young officers had been part of the new Russian military experiment, begun to fix the problems highlighted by the manifold failures of the Little Death. They and their colleagues had worked with each other as a team, not as brutal antagonists in a throwback nineteenth-century system. They had achieved great things, increasing efficiency and decreasing alcoholism, desertion, violence and suicide. They had been the new breed, and their successes had made them cultural heroes. The conquest of the Potato would have brought them untold glory; instead, through some error he could not yet comprehend, they had failed miserably, and their heritage was now ashes. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4205-7 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:56 AM "In the name of Star, Fate, Pneuma and the Good Man, who sought equality and fair deals for all consumers, and who sought the end of overwhelming and inhuman technology, this meeting of the Infinite Hexamon Nexus convenes. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4219-23 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:57 AM "The Thistledown has returned to its construction orbit, automatically and without our knowledge. The creation of the Way did not remove us from all familiar spaces. It is possible that the Thistledown could have completed its intended journey. It did not. Instead, it sought out the sun and altered its course to return home. "But we did not escape all effects of the Way's creation. The Thistledown was indeed shifted into a neighboring continuum, but also into the relative past. It entered its current orbit some three centuries before its launch." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4232-34 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 10:59 AM "The Thistledown entered the solar system five and a half years before the Death. I have evidencepresented in subtext--that our arrival in fact triggered the Death. It is possible that without the Thistledown's presence in orbit around the Earth and Moon, the earth in this continuum would have escaped the Death." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4262-66 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:02 AM Roberta Pickney greeted Hoffman quietly and showed her the intercepted transmissions from Earth and the Moon. "Lunar settlement seems to be doing well," she said. There were heavy bags under her eyes; she looked ten years older than when Hoffman had first met her. "There are still people on Earth, but they're only using low-power transmitters---working off batteries and windmill generators, I'd guess. I think one or two small cities are still transmitting these low-power signals--areas that may have been protected by orbiting platforms. I send out our own signals every now and then, but nobody's called back yet. It's only a matter of time." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4290-93 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:05 AM "What are Jarts?" "Fleas, the Nexus will tell youparasites, monstrously aggressive and not in the least cooperative. The Way was in place a thousand years before it was finally connected to the Thistledown---Way time, of course, which wasn't congruent until the linkup. The Jarts entered through a test gate and took up residency before it was opened. They matured in the Way and we had to fight them back. They know how to open gates and they control between two ex nine and, we think, four ex nine. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4294-99 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:05 AM they have two contingency plans should the Jarts overpower us, which seems all too likely now. The Geshels want to mobilize the entire Axis City, grab the flaw and ride it at near-light-speed over the Jart territories,-and at the same time blow the Thistledown off the end of the Way." "What? Why?" "That could seal the Way---cauterize it. And eliminate the danger of the Thistledown's being reoccupied and having the entire Way controlled by Jarts. The other alternative is to guide the Thistledown to a habitable planet and simply abandon the Way---or close it down, eliminate it. The Axis City could escape by passing through the end of the Way, blowing off the Thistledown and going into orbit around the planet. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4300 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:06 AM The Thistledown is in Earth orbit, an ideal situation for abandoning the Way. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4313-14 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:07 AM Olmy knew Kor-zenowski. Knows him yet. In Thistledown City. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4318-19 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:29 AM Olmy had patterned his tracer after the central mental programs of an old terrestrial species of dog known as a short-haired terrier, supplemented with several of his own partial personalities. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4319-20 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:29 AM By Axis City law, rogues in City Memory were fair game. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4320-24 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:30 AM Citizens could not wipe the rogues they located, but they could corner them and call down an immediate inactivation. Olmy was not interested in inactivation. He simply wanted to maintain a steady trace on the rogueand to keep pressure on him, to heighten the sensation of illicit activity. The rogue was of very high quality; he had outlived dozens of duels, some extending across decades, which meant virtual millennia in City Memory. He kept no name, not even adequate spoor; he had designed his active persona to be efficient, elusive and only as egotistical as necessary to provide motivation for duels. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4330-31 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:31 AM These "rogues" had then engaged in all manner of criminal activities, some of them resorting to acts of violence not seen in the Axis City since thexpulsion of the orthodox Naderites from Alexandria. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4331-34 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:31 AM Most were caught, tried and sentenced, and the punishment carried out--releasing a virulently destructive group of personalities into City Memory. As time passed, some of the rogues were convinced by Hexamon agents that the best way they could spend their time would be to engage in duels-searching out and eliminating other rogues. That solved much of the problem. Dueling caught on, and within a decade, half of the rogues had been eliminated by their own confreres. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4337-39 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:32 AM Hiring a rogue was always risky, Olmy knew. The patron could not expect complete loyalty--a rogue stayed loyai only so long as advantages and interest remained high. To that end, Olmy rewarded the rogue richly with access to several private data banks--and made doubly sure that no one would ever discover who had done the hiring, especiaily the rogue himself. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4361-63 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:35 AM In the train, Mirsky closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall. I am dead, he thought. I can feel it--parts of me missing, replaced--fill dirt in gaping trenches. That means I'm a new person; I'm dead, come alive again. New, but stuck with the old responsibilities. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4368-70 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:36 AM "Did the rogue say whether anyone expected the Stone to return to Earth?" Lanier asked. "No," Patricia said. "But I don't think so. If I'm right, they thought it would simply continue through space, too small to be noticed, and never end up anywhere in particular--because of the snap when they opened the corridor." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4387-94 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:53 AM We can allow you uncensored access to data, but that will require some education," he said. "Full access to data is very complicated, a great responsibility. There is potential for abuse. For a start, would you accept the help of a pedagog? Ram Kikura could assign a ghost---a partial personality based on her own. This pedagog will perform searches for you, as well as instruct. Our younger citizens use them all the time·' "It will let us research anything?" Patricia asked. "That is a difficult request," Ram Kikura said. "Not even a citizen has access to everything in City Memory. There is much that could be dangerous for the untrained---" "Like what?" Heineman asked. "Programs that alter personality, or merge different personalities. Psyche enhancement. Various high-level fictions and theoretical programs. You may wish to explore these later, but for now a pedagog will protect you from inadvertently · . . let's say, getting in over your head·" ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4397-99 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:53 AM "Jesus," Carrolson said. "What in the hell are sleep personas?" Ram Kikura raised her hands. "Perhaps now you see why your legal status is that of children, or at best adolescents. You are simply unprepared for full exposure to all the Axis City has to offer. Please don't be offended. I'm here to help whenever possible-not to hinder or frustrate you. I'm also here to protect, and I will do that over whatever objections you may have." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4405-7 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:54 AM "What's going to happen to our people on the Stone--in the Thistledown?" "We don't know yet," Olmy said. "That decision hasn't been made." "Will they be treated properly?" Farley asked. "Americans and others?" "I can guarantee they won't be harmed," Olmy said. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4433-34 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:56 AM Generators within the cubes were spun by turbines whose "blades" intersected the singularity and were subjected to the spatial transform. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4448-52 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:58 AM Called a flawship, the craft was about a hundred meters long, shaped like an ocarina pinched in the'middle. The two segments of the spindle were almost featureless, one shiny gray-black, the other blue-violet. Facts and figures accompanied the display. The flawship--one of a fleet of more than a hundred---could travel at five thousand kilometers a second. It could disengage from the flaw to allow other tmflic to pass *,hough Heineman confessed he didn't see how this was done, since the flaw passed right down the center of the ship--and it could also send out smaller craft for landing parties and reconnaissance. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4463-66 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 11:59 AM In the next few days, you're going to learn more about the Way, and our mission here---more than even the data pillar could tell you. I'll escort you, and Suli Ram Kikura and I will do everything in our power to plead your case--first, because it is just, and then because I believe that what is in your best interest, also serves the Nexus." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4473-75 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 12:00 PM The suicide rate had declined; her people--Hoffman always thought of them that way, soldiers and civilians--seemed to be accepting their fate, and plans were under way to re-outfit the shuttle and some of the Russian heavy-lifters and see if a trek to the Moon was possible. A few were even discussing an expedition to earth and Rimskaya leading that program up. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4482-83 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 12:52 PM There was the problem of a shortage of women---there had been two rapes and several near instances, but that was fewer than she had expected. Many soldiersNATO and Russianhad donated small arms to the women. They had not had to use them yet. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4492-97 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 12:53 PM The Russian mainland compound resembled an old Western fort. Tall saplings had been stripped of branches and bark and erected to form a secondary wall of defense beyond a high rampart of dirt. Russian soldiers swung wide the gates at their approach, and swung them shut behind. The first thing that caught Hoffman's eye was a gallows. It stood--unoccupied, she thanked God--in the center of a quadrangle cleared of all grass and foliage and demarcated by head-sized boulders: Other log buildings were under construction; the most ambitious was going to be three stories tall, designed along the lines of an old Russian country house. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4506-10 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 12:55 PM First on the agenda was a discussion of the unloading of the heavy-lifter carrying equipment and supplies. It had remained docked in the bore hole since the Death; the crew had been allowed to evacuate, but no agreement had yet been reached on disposition of the cargo. In a few minutes, Hoffman and Mirsky negotiated a satisfactory procedure. All armaments would be left in a locked chamber in the staging area, guarded by Russians and NATO personnel; other materials would be delivered to the Russian fourth chamber compound. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4513-19 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 12:56 PM Mirsky leaned toward her, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. "I am tired of disputes," he said. "I have the calm of a dead man, Miss Hoffman. I'm afraid I unsettle some of my comrades." "You keep saying you were killed. That doesn't make sense, General." "Perhaps not. But it is true. I do not remember everything. But I remember I was shot in the head. Pogodin tells me they--" He held up his hands. "You can deduce who killed me. Half my head." He waved his hand away from the right half of his skull. "Killed, and then I was brought back to life again. I am thankful I was unarmed, or I might be where Belozersky, Vielgorsky and Yazykov are even now." "And where is that?" "I'm not positive," Mirsky said. "In detention, perhaps. It seems Thistledown City still has the means to carry out its own law." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4519-23 | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2015, 12:57 PM "I thought that might be what happened. That means Thistledown City is still capable of making decisions and judgments, and acting on them." "We must watch our behavior there, no?" MirskY suggested. Hoffman nodded and returned to the agenda. One by one, within forty-five minutes, all the items were covered, negotiated and agreed to. "It's been a pleasure," Mirsky said, standing and offering her his hand. Hoffman shook it firmly and he escorted them to the truck. "What about the gallows?" Wallace asked as they backtracked anti-spinward to the zero compound. "What are we going to make of that?" "No more Mr. Nice Guy," Hoffman suggested idly. "Maybe it's just a warning." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4524-31 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 08:26 PM From their quarters in Axis Nader, the five were taken by Suli Ram Kikura and the Frant to the flaw passage, around which the cylindrical precinct rotated. Their transportation was an empty shaft three kilometers long; their fall was similar to a ride in the apartment building elevator in Thistledown City, and therefore--mercifully--not too unexpected. Carrolson enjoyed it the least of them; she had a distinct fear of precipices; not of heights per se, but of edges. She managed, however, with both Lanier's and Ram Kikura's encouragement. "I'm not a goddamned old woman," she said resentfully as they fell. The flaw passage was a half-kilometer-wide pipe through the Axis City, with the singularity at its center. Hundreds of thousands of citizens lined the walls and floated in clutching, roiling yet very coordina'xl clusters along their path. Ram Kikura and the Frant conferred with the passage engineer, a female homorph who, like Olmy, was also self-contained and lacked nostrils. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4533-34 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 08:28 PM in perfect English and Chinese. These languages were now the rage of the four precincts, extending even beyond those who claimed specific ancestry. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4535-38 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 08:28 PM On the flaw was a beetle-like, black maintenance vehicle not dissimilar to the one that had dismantled the tuberider. It was larger, however, equipped with a wide and well-appointed cabin, liberally decorated with rare (and genuine) red bunting. Pictors projected very convincing fireworks around the vehicle and the flaw as Ram Kikura, the mayor and the Frant stood aside, allowing them to enter first. They took seats in a half-circle behind the controls and were gently clamped in by something they could not see. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4539-42 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 09:58 PM Fireworks still blossomed on all sides, sometimes harmlessly intersecting parts of the crowd. "It's not enough just to see you on the pictors," Ram Kikura said. "People haven't changed much. I'd guess that maybe a third of those out there are ghosts---picted themselves, with monitors at the center of their images. See and be seen." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 4542 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 09:58 PM beijing olypmic faux fireworks ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4547-49 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 09:59 PM He lifted his lip slightly at the appearance of some of the neomorphs longated snake-like curls, shiny as chrome; fish, birds and radiolarian spheres like the silicate shells of plankton; varieties of human shape that went beyond the basic descripton of homorph. Farley absorbed it all with gape-jawed fascination. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4551-52 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:01 PM She put her hand on his. Patricia withdrew a little into her seat. So what is this? she asked herself. A little jealousy? Being unfaithful to Paul? Why should Garry pay any attention to you to at all? He came to find you---out a sense of duty. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 4552 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:01 PM patricia was the last to know - responds introspectively ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4552-53 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:01 PM She shut off that area of inquiry, seeing no need to invade a territory of great pain and uncertainty and guilt. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 4553 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:01 PM self control ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4555-57 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:06 PM Within the chamber, there was confusion on all sides; homorphs, neomorphs, some with American flags picted over their shoulders--and at the center, near the podium, two wide and vibrantly living images of the flags of the Republic of China and the United States. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4559-60 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:07 PM Lanier saw several senator or were they corpreps?--wearing the Soviet hammer and sickle. And then they were in the center of the Nexus Chamber. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4560-62 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:08 PM Director Hulane Ram Seija came to the podium and told the Nexus that their guests would soon be going to the Frant gate, to see the workings of commerce in the Way. And after that, they would be taken by Senator Prescient Oyu to meet with her father, who even now presided over the preliminaries, to a gate opening at I.3 ex 9. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4562-63 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:08 PM Lanier had been elected spokesperson for the group. Suli Ram Kikura had suggested--against Olmy's mild objections that he might use this opportunity to state his case. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4568-69 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:09 PM the one place we can call home is now in ruins. This is our tragedy--our mutual tragedy. For you, the history of the Death is remote, but for us it is immediate and very real. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4569-70 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:10 PM We still suffer from our memories, our experiences, and we will grieve for years to come, probably for the rest of our lives." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4572-74 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:10 PM If you would celebrate us, and celebrate our unlikely presence in this chamber, then would it not be appropriate to help us? Earth needs your help desperately. Perhaps we can rewrite history, and correct it. "Let us go home together," he said, feeling his throat catch. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4576 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:11 PM "Let us go home," Lanier repeated. "Your ancestors need you." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4598-4603 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:15 PM "Where are you?" Mirsky shouted for the dozenth time. He stood in the middle of the array of library seats and data pillars, fists raised in the air. His cheeks were red and wet and his neck was ribbed with anger and frustration. "Are you dead, like me? Did they execute you?" Still no answer. "You murdered me!" He clenched his jaw and struggled to control his breathing. He knew if he tried to say anything more, the words would come out in mangled fragments. The little signal in his mind--a brief, explanatory warning, You are now using material not native to your personality, was about to drive him over the edge. So much of what he thought and did was punctuated by this message. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4603-4 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:15 PM lying in his sling at night, trying to sleep, realizing he did not need to sleep. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 4604 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:15 PM at all? ever? ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4604-9 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:16 PM He had the sensation that much of what he remembered about his life consisted of logical reconstructions. The entire left side of his body felt fresh and new, had a different odor, as it were. He realized it wasn't the body that was new, but the corresponding section of his head. The first few days, Mirsky had thought all might go well. He believed he could become used to his status as a Lazarus; he made it seem like a joke, that he was back from the dead, this to gently discredit Pogodin's testimony that Vielgorsky had blown Mirsky's brains out. But the joke had not worked.. To the soldiers who had stood guard outside the library, it had seemed as tightly sealed and oppressive as a tomb. And what did you find in a tomb . . . ? His joke had then become a grim evaluation of reality. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4615-21 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:18 PM "Law in a deserted city." The library asked more questions, narrowing his search to a manageable subject. "Murder," he said. The materiai was rich and detailed. Murder was an offense punishable by psychological evaluation and retailoring of the personality, if such was called for. "What if there is nobody to carry out the punishment?" It is not punishment, the research voice said, it is redemption, a refitting for society. "What if there's no law, no police, no judges, or courts or psychologists?" Suspects can be detained for nineteen days. If that time passes and no judgment is made, or charges specified, suspects are released to the custody of a reintegration counseling clinic. "And if there's no clinic?" Suspects are released on their own recognizance. "Where will they be released?" Unless otherwise requested, at the scene of their ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4623-24 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:19 PM they are held under sedation until authorities retrieve them or nineteen days have passed. Medical workers serve as police units in emergency. He had two more days. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4630-32 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:20 PM He had to carry out his executions---murdersin secret, or they would be worse than useless. Unless he destroyed the three political officers even more thoroughly than they had destroyed him, they would be resurrected, and he would be incarcerated for nineteen days, and it would all begin again--a cycle of insanity and violence beyond the dreams even of Gogol. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4643-46 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:29 PM The political triumvirate will return to take their rightful places. I've been an impediment all along .... " His last duty was to write a message for Garabedian. Viktor : The three political o,icers will return. They will be in the third chamber library sometime within the next forty hours. Accept them as your leaders if you wish; I will no longer impede them. Pavel He left the message in an envelope in Garabedian's tent. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4646-48 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:29 PM Mirsky drove the truck into the woods, heading for the as-yet-unexplored 180 point. There he could be alone, perhaps build a raft and pole across a shallow lake to a tree-covered island, or just explore the thick woods visible fifty kilometers directly overhead. And he would decide what to do next. He did not think he would return. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4652-54 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:32 PM Lanier had barely gotten the hang of maneuvering with the traction fields. Farley seemed more adept--a natural gymnast, which caused him some chagrin. He applied himself more diligently to learning the skill. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 4654 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:32 PM Lanier had barely gotten the hang of maneuvering with the traction fields. Farley seemed more adept--a natural gymnast, which ca… 'cause he was doing gymnastics before ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4655-57 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:33 PM Heineman and Carrolson helped each other along between the homorphs and neomorphs, smiling stilly and nodding, hoping that--as Olmy had told themthey would find it almost impossible to do something socially unacceptable. Anything they did, any mistake they made, would be considered charming. They were, after all, "quaint." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 4657 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:33 PM cunt! ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4661-64 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:34 PM Kikura had wandered off to smooth over another complication-Lanier was being determinedly, if slowly, pushed into a broad dimple by two lean and striking women. The women were dressed in full-length leotards with long, alternately stiff and supple fantails of fabric stretched between theft legs and under their arms. They resembled fancy goldfish; there was little he or Farley could do to discourage them. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4679-82 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:36 PM "We're requested at the bow," Lanier said, brushing by with Farley. Heineman and Carrolson were already on their way. The crowds parted before them; she had never seen so many smiling faces, or fo so much interest in her person. She hated it. She wanted to run and hide. Feeling through her jumpsuit for the letter from Paul, finding it and pressing it, she followed the Frant and Olmy toward the bow of the fiawship. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4691 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:38 PM was moving so rapidly--just over 104 kilometers per second--that ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4707-8 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:40 PM At the midpoint of their journey, after accelerating at just under six g's, the flawship was traveling some 416 kilometers per second; it then began to decelerate. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 4708 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:42 PM c = 300 000 km/s ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4713-17 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:49 PM The indeterminate one stepped forward, a Chinese flag suddenly picted above the left shoulder. "We have not met," it began. "I am Sama illa Rixor, special assistant to the President. My ancestors were Chinese. We have been discussing morphology of those times. Miss Farley, you are rare, are you not? You are Chinese, yet you have Caucasian features. Is it that you have had . . . what they called cosmetic surgery, available even then?" "No . . ." Farley said with some embarrassment. "I was born in China," she said, "But my parents were Caucasian--'' ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4722-23 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:51 PM "Once they've homogenized and passed current memory to each other, one can take up where the other leaves off." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 4723 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:51 PM frants have a sort of hive-mind ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4731-32 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2015, 10:52 PM All that separated them from the vacuum---all that lay between them and the walls of the Way, twenty-five kilometers below--was a battier of subtle energies. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4763-64 | Added on Monday, June 08, 2015, 12:09 PM "This is our second biggest gate, five kilometers in diameter," Olmy said. "The largest is seven kilometers wide and leads to the Talsit world at one point three ex seven." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 4871-77 | Added on Monday, June 08, 2015, 02:46 PM "It would take over a day to approach that velocity, accelerating at about three hundred g's---which is very close to the theoretical limit for the. inertial damping systems, and for something as large as the Axis City, traveling on the flaw. The flaw would be seriously stressed, producing hard radiation and heavy particles .... But within the Way, even a velocity of one-third light-speed would create a space-time shock wave. We would reach that velocity at about one point seven ex nine. We would pass through the territories held by the Jarts with devastating effect. The relativistic distortions within the Way would be incredible. The shape of the Way itself would be altered as we passed, and whatever gates the Jarts have opened would be smoothed out of existence"--he slid his hand in a flat-out gesture"like ironing a piece of fabric in one of your world's laundries." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5330-31 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2015, 02:33 PM the story of Konrad Korzenowski. Called the Engineer, he had designed the inertial damping systems for the Thistledown, and had overseen the in-flight maintenance of the Beckmann drive. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5334-36 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2015, 02:33 PM What the Naderites demanded was that the creation of the Way not alter the original mission, which was to find an Earth-like planet circling the distant star Epsilon Eridani. The Naderites believed their principal mission of settling distant worlds in the name of Earth was a sacred obligation, the only truly acceptable reason for venturing beyond the Solar System. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5350-53 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2015, 02:35 PM After the Jart wars, the Geshel-ruled Hexamon decided it was unnecessary to proceed to Epsilon Eridani; the Thistledown's course was uncertain, and, to be truthful, they simply thought there was more potential for settlement and exploration in the Way. They were right, but that did not satisfy the orthodox Naderites. They had lost not only their mission in life, but their Earth, and their home universe. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5353-54 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2015, 02:35 PM So before retiring his corpus, Korzenowski secretly repro-grammed the Thistledown guidance systems. The ship sought out and located the home Solar System, and began a return journey." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5400-5402 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2015, 02:44 PM The woman in black, left behind by Santiago, tended her group of four hundred with all the mastery of a shepherd over a flock. Her dogs were the chromium crosses, which gently and insistently brooked no dissent, at least not dissent in terms of wandering away. Hoffman wondered vaguely if mood-altering devices were being used on them; she felt calm, not at all apprehensive, and clearheaded, even rested. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5420-22 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2015, 02:46 PM "I've seen some of the papers I will write .... "She scrunched her eyes shut and shook her head, putting her other hand to her cheek. "I probably will never write them . . . but someone else who is me will, or has written them. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5447 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:19 AM all gates up and down the Way had been closed and the lanes between them cleared. The situation was unprecedented in the history of the Way. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5448 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:20 AM The Axis City had moved on. Under Corprep Rosen Gardner's direction, the city's flaw power stations had been seized from the last holdouts. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 5448 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:20 AM violence is a constant ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5448-50 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:20 AM Those who had been killed had had their implants carefully retrieved---some 183 citizens so far. The toll disturbed Gardner, but their deaths were not permanent. With the flaw shaft under his control, he had accelerated the Axis City, moving south toward the Thistledown. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5451-53 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:21 AM In the Thistledown's sixth chamber, four members of Gardner's Korzenowski faction had committed the ultimate crime--they had tampered with the Way machinery. The tampering was minor, but the penalty for even minor offenses was discorporation and complete wiping of all personality records. At this point, Gardner knew, there was no turning back. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5456-57 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:22 AM Four teams of three citizens apiece then exited to the exterior of the asteroid, riding elevator shafts undiscovered by the recently arrived visitors. These shafts opened directly onto buried Beckmann drive units. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5461-62 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:23 AM Populations were shufled between the various precincts as quickly as possible, and City Memory was rearranged and sectioned, all in preparation for the next step of Gardner's plan. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5462-65 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:23 AM The Axis City was partially unstrung from the flaw, the section containing Axis Nader and Central City first. It was Gardner's plan to reverselhe city, leaving these precincts for the Geshels who wished to travel down the Way at near lightspeed and force out the Jarts. What he needed to complete his plans were the two rotating cylinders of Axes Thoreau and Euclid. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5465-67 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:26 AM The re-tuning of the gravity gradient between the Thistledown and the Way was extraordinarily delicate. The engineers within the sixth chamber had their hands full, especially when the large mass of Central City and Axis Nader was shunted to one side within the seventh chamber, allowing the remaining precincts to be unstrung. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5467-69 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:26 AM The entire procedure took five hours. By the time it was done, Axis Nader and Central City had reversed position on the flaw with Axes Thoreau and Euclid. The two pairs of precincts and their related structures were separated by a kilometer, and the pair reserved for the Geshels Central City and Axis Nader--moved slowly north along the flaw. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5469-71 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:28 AM The visitors had been informed of their choice. Of the roughly two thousand captives, only four decided not to cast their lot with the group planning .a return to Earth. Among them were Joseph Rimskaya and Beryl Wallace. The other two were Russians: Corporal Rodzbensky and Lieutenant General Pavel Mirsky. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5471-75 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:29 AM The asteroid was then set into rotation again. Within all the chambers, some damage was unavoidable, but in the fourth chamber, the results were catastrophic. The water globules slowly broke over the basins and land, billions of gallons snapping trees, scouring the forests and forming new rivers as the centrifugal force returned. The plasma tubes within all chambers were suddenly extinguished. The atmosphere barrier fields remained in force, but the chambers were plunged into abyssal night for the first time in twelve centuries. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5475-76 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:29 AM And in the seventh chamber, at the boundary of the Way and the end of the chamber itself, mechanical workers began setting powerful charges to blast the northern end from the asteroid and cauterize the Way. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5481-82 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:31 AM There were always some disadvantages to completely abandoning one's past and culture .... And Mirsky had committed himself to what amounted to the grandest defection of all time. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5489-90 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:36 AM "Our time is limited," he picted to Olmy. "The defense station at one point nine ex nine says it's detecting excessive flaw radiation. The Jarts could be preparing to open a new, very large gate." "Gate to a star's heart?" Olmy asked. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5490-93 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:36 AM "That's the supposition. Station personnel are preparing to The idea had been discussed in upper-level defense circles for decades. It was simple, if drastic: the Way at many points touched on stellar bodies. Since the Way was essentially a hollow, evacuated tube, opening a circuit of massive gates into the heart of a star would suck up the high-pressure, superheated plasma and distribute it throughout the Way. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5493-95 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:36 AM Barriers though constructed of modified Way space-time--would transmit the extreme heat and finally break down, becoming level with the walls. The Way itself would remain intact, but everything else for billions of kilometers would simply dissolve to component particles in the fury. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5495-99 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:38 AM "How fast would the plasma front travel?" Olmy asked. "It would only be slowed by turbulence effects. Its final velocity could be about six thousand kilometers per second." "Then we'd have about thirty-two hours to evacuate." "If they can't open a gate remotely . . ." The thought of the Jarts' being able to manipulate Way gates from a distance had sobered defense planners for years. The Jarts had never demonstrated such a capability within the human-controlled sector, but data from Way disturbances had led many gate researchers---including Ry Oyu's team--to believe they were doing so beyond 2 ex 9. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 5499 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:38 AM cold war fears ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5515-16 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:41 AM delineated with purple to show where manipulators and other instruments would emerge--approached ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 5516 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 01:41 AM highly visual user interfaces ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5565-66 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 02:39 PM "where is the Thistledown?" "In orbit around the Earth and Moon." "What year?" "2005," Patricia said. "That's Journey year?" Korzenowski askedhopefully. "Anno Domini," Olmy said. The Engineer suddenly looked very tired. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5637-39 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:01 PM "If it gets out of control, the cupola encloses us and smooths out the disturbance. If.that happens, we are forever lost to the Way. We go wherever the aborted gate takes us, and we cannot come back. Do you feel that potential?" ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5679-80 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:04 PM And if there's no flaw beyond a certain point--" "The Way is self-sustaining," Yates finished for him. "It is indeed. It doesn't require sixth chamber machinery or any connection with the Thistledown." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5807-9 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:16 PM The plasma front reached the sixty-kilometer sector reserved for the last gate opening, slamming against the barriers, the extreme heat upsetting their subtle geometry. Down came the first barrier, and the little oasis was incinerated; the circuit of wells was fused shut, and the surface of the Way became smooth and undisturbed. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5809-12 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:16 PM Final messages from gates along the human-controlled length of the Way told of'evacuations. Millions of humans decided to remain on the worlds beyond their assigned gates, rather than choose between the separated sections of the Axis City. The last remnants of Way commerce were shut down, and the gates were sealed, preparing both for the passage of the Geshel precincts and the arrival of the plasma front. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5825-26 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:18 PM What she was looking for was far more difficult to find than a particular grain of sand on a beach. She was searching for a universe without the Death, and without herself, also--where the Stone had arrived, but not caused war, and where her alternate had somehow died. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5854-56 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:20 PM It was very difficult. Her theories proved to be not quite as precise as she had hoped. Within even the smallest segments of the geometry stack, worlds of substantial degrees of difference interwove. She could see now why Korzenowski and his followers had initially regarded the regions of geometry stacking as useless. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5897-99 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:31 PM And how many large pyramids had there been on Earth? Three? She counted eight smooth-surfaced white pyramids in a row, filing off to the horizon. "Wrong-o," she said softly to herself. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5925-28 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:33 PM The charges around the perimeter of the seventh chamber were set. Engineers had gone throughout the Thistledown, making final structural checks and testing the sixth chamber machinery. When the asteroid was blown from the beginning of the Way, the sixth chamber machinery would face an enormous strain--the end of its duties as stabilizer of the Way, and a sudden and violent increase in its policing of destructive forces inside the chambers. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 5997-6000 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:39 PM "By the way, I thought I would inform you that numbers of Hexamon citizens have been solicited by a small group of your people. There is a 'wild party'/going on in the quarters of Axis Thoreau. Some of your female personnel are bartering sexual favors, for what commodities I don't know. I have placed that party off limits to my people." Hoffman looked at him, startled, not sure how to respond. "That's wise," she finally managed. "I don't know who would corrupt whom the most." ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 6033-34 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:43 PM The Way was now an independent entity. The hole in space began to heal, wrapped in a thousand varieties of darkness--violet and sea green, carmine and indigo---venting winds mightier than a thousand hurricanes into the vacuum. Closing. Sealing itself off forever from this universe. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 6049-52 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:44 PM India, Africa, Australia and New Zealand and much of South America had emerged from the Death with minor damage. North America, Russia and Europe had been practically sterilized. China had lost a quarter of its population in the nuclear exchange;' another two-thirds had died of starvation during the Long Winter, which was subsiding only now, with help from the orbiting precinct. Southeast Asia had crumbled into anarchy and revolution and genocide; the destruction there was almost as complete. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 6059-62 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:45 PM Lenore tried, again and again, to point out that engineers were as much responsible for saving the Earth as for destroying it. Without the orbital platforms and the whole paraphernalia of space-based defense, the Earth would have been wiped utterly clean of life; the NATO and Soviet platforms managed to destroy some forty percent of all missiles. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 6089-93 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:48 PM Together they would try to convince Earth's chief advocate, Ram Kikura, that the legal rights of the survivors on Earth could not supersede the New Hexamon's duty to eventually force them to undergo Talsit purging. He gathered his if they were not purged mentally as well as physically, the condition of their thinking would be such that strife and discord would tear the Earth apart again, in centuries if not sooner. They had to be mentally healthy to face the future the New Hexamon was already structuring for them; there was no room for the kind of archaic, sick thinking that had led to the Death in the first place. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 6118-29 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:52 PM We have voyaged a considerable distance since achieving near light-speed. I do not believe anyone expected what is happening now. The Way is so complicated; even those who created it could not predict all of its possibilities. We now journey down a ghost Way, its local nature altered by the violence of our near light-speed passage. It has no diameter or boundaries as such; objects with mass simply cannot exist beyond a distance of more than twenty thousand kilometers from the course on which we ride. (The flaw, or singularity, vanished three months ago. Simply evaporated in a pulse of newly createdparticles, some of them unknown even to the Geshels.) We have traveled beyond the domain of the super-set of external universes which encompassed all our various world-lines. Even were we to stop now and open gates to the "outside," whatever that may be, we would encounter realms without matter, perhaps without form or order; it is highly douhtful we would find anything familiar. There are an infinite number of alternatives to the Way, each originating in an alternative world-line, yet reaching beyond that world-line. Until now, Way researchers have not known quite how the alternate Ways were stacked or arranged, or indeed whether they could even be considered real. Since the Way intersects a large group of alternate world-lines--perhaps all--could there be more than one Way? But by traveling close to the light-Speed within the Way, we have answered these questions and found new ones to ask. We have distorted Way geometry in more than the requisite four dimensions; we have also contracted the fifth dimension, drawing the alternate Ways together. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 6129-32 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:52 PM The Way boundaries have become transparent in a wide variety of frequencies, and we can perceive the shape of other Ways. We can select which Way we wish to inspect, using devices similar to the gate-opening clavicles. It is in observing these alternate Ways that Beryl Wallace is now occupied. We can even see (and in some instances, communicate with) beings in other Ways. ========== EON (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 6150-51 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 03:54 PM the one area it is illegal to modify, known as Mystery. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 168-70 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2015, 09:41 AM Third party facilitated surveillance has become a routine tool for U.S. law enforcement agencies, enough so that major providers like AT&T, Verizon, Google, and Facebook all have dedicated teams [11, 12] who collectively receive and respond to approximately one and a half million requests each year.5 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 212-13 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2015, 01:05 PM Over the past four decades, requests for wiretap orders have been rejected just 34 times by federal and state courts. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 218-19 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2015, 01:06 PM more than 97 percent of the 2,732 wiretaps authorized in 2011 were for portable devices. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 240-42 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2015, 01:08 PM Surveillance and the war on drugs The reports reveal one of the lesser known side effects of the war on drugs: the expansion of the surveillance state. The 2011 report reveals that 95 percent of the federal wiretap and 81 percent of the state wiretap orders that year 17were sought in narcotics investigations. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 260-64 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2015, 01:09 PM Based upon the numbers in the annual wiretap report, it is clear that law enforcement agencies rarely engage in real-time interception of Internet communications, even as they continue to increase their use of mobile telephone surveillance. At first blush, this seems rather counterintuitive, given the degree to which our society has become dependent upon email, instant messages, social networks and other Internet based communications. However, there are many ways for law enforcement agencies to monitor Internet communications,19 and it is often easier and cheaper to do it after the fact rather than in real-time.20 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 334-37 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2015, 01:15 PM Although the numbers have fluctuated somewhat over time,30 the number of requests has skyrocketed. By 2009, the latest year for which statistical reports are public, 12,444 pen registers and 11,091 trap and trace orders were issued. As such, this surveillance method vastly outnumbers wiretaps — in 2009, there were 18 times more pen registers than federal wiretaps. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 19-24 | Added on Monday, June 22, 2015, 10:17 AM The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject . . . And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them . . . Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate . . . Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all. - Seneca, Natural Questions, Book 7, first century ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 177-79 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015, 06:15 PM There are some hundred billion (1011) galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred billion stars. In all the galaxies, there are perhaps as many planets as stars, 1011 x 1011 = 1022, ten billion trillion. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 193-97 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:30 PM Some stars are solitary, like the Sun. Most have companions. Systems are commonly double, two stars orbiting one another. But there is a continuous gradation from triple systems through loose clusters of a few dozen stars to the great globular clusters, resplendent with a million suns. Some double stars are so close that they touch, and starstuff flows beneath them. Most are as separated as Jupiter is from the Sun. Some stars, the supernovae, are as bright as the entire galaxy that contains them; others, the black holes, are invisible from a few kilometers away. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 225-27 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:34 PM In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so far, the only world on which we know with certainty that the matter of the Cosmos has become alive and aware. There must be many such worlds scattered through space, but our search for them begins here, with the accumulated wisdom of the men and women of our species, garnered at great cost over a million years. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 231 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:35 PM Eratosthenes. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 247-54 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:37 PM The only possible answer, he saw, was that the surface of the Earth is curved. Not only that: the greater the curvature, the greater the difference in the shadow lengths. The Sun is so far away that its rays are parallel when they reach the Earth. Sticks placed at different angles to the Sun’s rays cast shadows of different lengths. For the observed difference in the shadow lengths, the distance between Alexandria and Syene had to be about seven degrees along the surface of the Earth; that is, if you imagine the sticks extending down to the center of the Earth, they would there intersect at an angle of seven degrees. Seven degrees is something like one-fiftieth of three hundred and sixty degrees, the full circumference of the Earth. Eratosthenes knew that the distance between Alexandria and Syene was approximately 800 kilometers, because he hired a man to pace it out. Eight hundred kilometers times 50 is 40,000 kilometers: so that must be the circumference of the Earth.* ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 257-58 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:38 PM He was the first person accurately to measure the size of a planet. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 265-66 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:39 PM In an unknown ocean they could determine their latitude, but not their longitude, by observing, night after night, the position of the constellations with respect to the horizon. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 270-71 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:40 PM In Eratosthenes’ time, globes were constructed portraying the Earth as viewed from space; they were essentially correct in the well-explored Mediterranean but became more and more inaccurate the farther they strayed from home. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 304-5 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:43 PM But the greatest marvel of Alexandria was the library and its associated museum (literally, an institution devoted to the specialties of the Nine Muses). ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 313-14 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:44 PM Euclid, who brilliantly systematized geometry and told his king, struggling over a difficult mathematical problem, ‘There is no royal road to geometry’; ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 316-18 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:44 PM Apollonius of Perga, the mathematician who demonstrated the forms of the conic sections* - ellipse, parabola and hyperbola - the curves, as we now know, followed in their orbits by the planets, the comets and the stars; ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 318-20 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2015, 06:45 PM the astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, who compiled much of what is today the pseudoscience of astrology: his Earth-centered universe held sway for 1,500 years, a reminder that intellectual capacity is no guarantee against being dead wrong. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 322-24 | Added on Friday, July 10, 2015, 09:40 PM *So called because they can be produced by slicing through a cone at various angles. Eighteen centuries later, the writings of Apollonius on conic sections would be employed by Johannes Kepler in understanding for the first time the movement of the planets. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 329-30 | Added on Monday, July 13, 2015, 12:29 PM Commercial ships docking in Alexandria were searched by the police - not for contraband, but for books. The scrolls were borrowed, copied and then returned to their owners. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 434 | Added on Monday, July 13, 2015, 12:39 PM Far more species have become extinct in the history of the Earth than exist today; they are the terminated experiments of evolution. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 440-42 | Added on Monday, July 13, 2015, 12:40 PM In less than ten thousand years, domestication has increased the weight of wool grown by sheep from less than one kilogram of rough hairs to ten or twenty kilograms of uniform, fine down; or the volume of milk given by cattle during a lactation period from a few hundred to a million cubic centimeters. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 484-85 | Added on Monday, July 13, 2015, 12:45 PM Drosophila melanogaster (which means the black-bodied dew-lover) - tiny benign beings with two wings and big eyes. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 504-6 | Added on Monday, July 13, 2015, 12:47 PM The secrets of evolution are death and time - the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations that were by accident adaptive, time for the slow accumulation of patterns of favorable mutations. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Bookmark on Page 36 | Loc. 544 | Added on Monday, July 13, 2015, 12:51 PM ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 544-46 | Added on Monday, July 13, 2015, 12:51 PM The nitrogen in the Earth’s atmosphere is much more chemically inert and therefore much more benign than oxygen. But it, too, is biologically sustained. Thus, 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 37 | Loc. 560-67 | Added on Monday, July 13, 2015, 12:54 PM After the Cambrian explosion, exquisite new adaptations followed one another with comparatively breathtaking speed. In rapid succession, the first fish and the first vertebrates appeared; plants, previously restricted to the oceans, began the colonization of the land; the first insect evolved, and its descendants became the pioneers in the colonization of the land by animals; winged insects arose together with the amphibians, creatures something like the lungfish, able to survive both on land and in the water; the first trees and the first reptiles appeared; the dinosaurs evolved; the mammals emerged, and then the first birds; the first flowers appeared; the dinosaurs became extinct; the earliest cetaceans, ancestors to the dolphins and whales, arose and in the same period the primates - the ancestors of the monkeys, the apes and the humans. Less than ten million years ago, the first creatures who closely resembled human beings evolved, accompanied by a spectacular increase in brain size. And then, only a few million years ago, the first true humans emerged. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 608-11 | Added on Thursday, July 16, 2015, 11:40 AM There must be ways of putting nucleic acids together that will function far better - by any criterion we choose - than any human being who has ever lived. Fortunately, we do not yet know how to assemble alternative sequences of nucleotides to make alternative kinds of human beings. In the future we may well be able to assemble nucleotides in any desired sequence, to produce whatever characteristics we think desirable - a sobering and disquieting prospect. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 623-26 | Added on Thursday, July 16, 2015, 11:41 AM down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical. We both use nucleic acids for heredity; we both use proteins as enzymes to control the chemistry of our cells. Most significantly, we both use precisely the same code book for translating nucleic acid information into protein information, as do virtually all the other creatures on the planet.* ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 662-64 | Added on Thursday, July 16, 2015, 11:45 AM In the early history of our planet, however, when enormous amounts of organic molecules were being produced by sunlight in a hydrogen-rich atmosphere, very simple, nonparasitic organisms had a fighting chance. The first living things may have been something like free-living viroids only a few hundred nucleotides long. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 46 | Loc. 702-4 | Added on Thursday, July 16, 2015, 11:49 AM Biology is more like history than it is like physics. You have to know the past to understand the present. And you have to know it in exquisite detail. There is as yet no predictive theory of biology, just as there is not yet a predictive theory of history. The reasons are the same: both subjects are still too complicated for us. But we can know ourselves better by understanding other cases. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 748 | Added on Thursday, August 20, 2015, 11:18 AM In the skies was a great calendar, available to anyone with dedication and ability and the means to keep records. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 781-82 | Added on Thursday, August 20, 2015, 11:20 AM There are ten times more astrologers in the United States than astronomers. ========== Cosmos (Carl Sagan) - Highlight on Page 52 | Loc. 797-98 | Added on Thursday, August 20, 2015, 11:22 AM Or consider consider: it means ‘with the planets,’ evidently the prerequisite for serious reflection. ========== Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The face of Anonymous (Gabriella Coleman) - Highlight Loc. 328-31 | Added on Wednesday, August 26, 2015, 12:34 PM Although devilishly hard to study, Anonymous is neither wholly random nor simply chaotic. To be Anonymous means to follow a series of related principles. Anonymous follows a spirit of humorous deviance, works though diverse technical bodies (such as IRC), is built on an anti-celebrity ethic, and intervenes politically in astoundingly rich and varied ways. ========== William Gibson - Neuromancer (milan.ilnyckyj@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 3 | Added on Wednesday, September 02, 2015, 08:35 PM The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jul. 23rd (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 38-42 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2015, 05:14 PM Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much onspace, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda. These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space. ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jul. 23rd (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 56-62 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2015, 05:16 PM Many black papers questioned the use of American funds for space research at a time when many African Americans were struggling at the margins of the working class. An editorial in the Los Angeles Sentinel, for example, argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, “It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of ‘progress’ and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all).” ========== Instapaper: Wednesday, Jul. 23rd (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 79-80 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2015, 05:18 PM Of every three dollars spent on research and development in the United States in 1963, one went for defense, one for space, and the remaining one for all other research purposes, including private industry and medical research. ========== Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The face of Anonymous (Gabriella Coleman) - Highlight Loc. 571-72 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2015, 05:22 PM what folklorists define as argot—specialized and esoteric terminology used by a subcultural group. ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Jun. 20th (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 101-3 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2015, 05:49 PM NASA claims the three Elektron oxygen generators on board the International Space Station have been ‘plagued with problems’, sometimes forcing the crew to use backup sources (either bottled oxygen or the Vika system discussed below). ========== Instapaper: Saturday, Jun. 20th (Instapaper) - Highlight Loc. 103-11 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2015, 05:49 PM In 2004, the Elektron unit shut down due to (initially) unknown causes. Two weeks of troubleshooting resulted in the unit starting up again, then immediately shutting down. The cause was eventually traced to gas bubbles in the unit, which remained non-functional until a Progress resupply mission in October 2004.[14] In 2005 ISS personnel tapped into the oxygen supply of the recently arrived Progress resupply ship, when the Elektron unit failed.[15] In 2006 fumes from a malfunctioning Elektron unit prompted NASA flight engineers to declare a “spacecraft emergency”. A burning smell led the ISS crew to suspect another Elektron fire, but the unit was only “very hot”. A leak of corrosive, odorless potassium hydroxide forced the ISS crew to don gloves and face masks. ========== OF DRUNKENNESS Montaigne (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 35-37 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2015, 05:56 PM As Socrates said that the principal office of wisdom was to distinguish good from evil, we, the best of whom are vicious, ought also to say the same of the science of distinguishing betwixt vice and vice, without which, and that very exactly performed, the virtuous and the wicked will remain confounded and unrecognized. ========== OF DRUNKENNESS Montaigne (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 39-40 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2015, 05:57 PM there are vices wherein there is a mixture of knowledge, diligence, valor, prudence, dexterity, and address; this one is totally corporeal and earthly. ========== OF DRUNKENNESS Montaigne (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 40 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2015, 05:57 PM on drunkedness ========== OF DRUNKENNESS Montaigne (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 76-77 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2015, 06:01 PM even amongst the Stoics there are some who advise folks to give themselves sometimes the liberty to drink, nay, to drunkenness, to refresh the soul:— ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 6-7 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 02:56 PM This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irre-sponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 24-26 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:10 PM Saint John Paul II became increasingly concerned about this issue. In his first Encyclical he warned that human beings frequently seem “to see no other meaning in their natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 26 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:10 PM anthropocentrism ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 36-38 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:11 PM 6. My predecessor Benedict XVI likewise proposed “eliminating the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy and correcting models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 38 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:11 PM critique of capitalism ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 52-55 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:12 PM Outside the Catholic Church, other Churches and Christian communities – and other religions as well – have expressed deep concern and offered valuable reflections on issues which all of us find disturbing. To give just one striking example, I would mention the statements made by the beloved Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, with whom we share the hope of full ecclesial communion. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 55 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:12 PM interfaith dialogue ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 89-92 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:15 PM If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 92 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:15 PM overcoming anthropocentrism ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 100-102 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:16 PM Francis asked that part of the friary garden always be left untouched, so that wild flowers and herbs could grow there, and those who saw them could raise their minds to God, the Creator of such beauty.21 Rather than a problem to be solved, the world is a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 107-8 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:17 PM Here I want to recognize, encourage and thank all those striving in countless ways to guarantee the protection of the home which we share. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 108 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:17 PM acknowledges social movement / coalition ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 112-13 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:18 PM The worldwide ecological movement has already made considerable progress and led to the establishment of numerous organizations committed to raising awareness of these challenges. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 113 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:18 PM social movement ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 113-16 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:18 PM Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solu- tions. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 116 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:18 PM problem of motivation ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 130-36 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:20 PM Although each chapter will have its own subject and specific approach, it will also take up and re-examine important questions previously dealt with. This is particularly the case with a number of themes which will reappear as the Encyclical unfolds. As examples, I will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle. These questions will not be dealt with once and for all, but reframed and enriched again and again. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 136 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:20 PM self-identified themes ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 147-48 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:21 PM Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 148 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:21 PM problem of motivation ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 158-60 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:22 PM Industrial waste and chemical products utilized in cities and agricultural areas can lead to bioaccumulation in the organisms of the local population, even when levels of toxins in those places are low. Frequently no measures are taken until after people’s health has been irreversibly affected. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 160 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:22 PM persistent pollutants ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 164-67 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:24 PM But our industrial system, at the end of its cycle of production and consumption, has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste and by-products. We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 167 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 04:24 PM biophysical burden upon the Earth ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 219-23 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:28 PM 30. Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 223 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:28 PM markets v. human rights ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 231-32 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:29 PM Different species contain genes which could be key resources in years ahead for meeting human needs and regulating environmental problems. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 232 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:29 PM leaves a door open for genetic modification ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 233-37 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:30 PM 33. It is not enough, however, to think of different species merely as potential “resources” to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves. Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 237 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:30 PM anthropocentrism ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 331-37 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:38 PM many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population. This lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality. At times this attitude exists side by side with a “green” rhetoric. Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 337 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:38 PM poverty and the environment ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 347-49 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:39 PM To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 353-60 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:40 PM 51. Inequity affects not only individuals but entire countries; it compels us to consider an ethics of international relations. A true “ecological debt” exists, particularly between the global north and south, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment, and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time. The export of raw materials to satisfy markets in the industrialized north has caused harm locally, as for example in mercury pollution in gold mining or sulphur dioxide pollution in copper mining. There is a pressing need to calculate the use of environmental space throughout the world for depositing gas residues which have been accumulating for two centuries and have created a situation which currently affects all the countries of the world. The warming caused by huge consumption on the part of some rich countries has repercussions on the poorest areas of the world, especially Africa, where a rise in temperature, together with drought, has proved devastating for farming. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 360 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:40 PM ecological debt / ongoing colonialism ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 362-65 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:41 PM “We note that often the businesses which operate this way are multinationals. They do here what they would never do in developed countries or the so-called first world. Generally, after ceasing their activity and withdrawing, they leave behind great human and environmental liabilities such as unemployment, abandoned towns, the depletion of natural reserves, deforestation, the impoverishment of agriculture and local stock breeding, open pits, riven hills, polluted rivers and a handful of social works which are no longer sustainable”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 385-87 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:42 PM The problem is that we still lack the culture needed to confront this crisis. We lack leadership capable of striking out on new paths and meeting the needs of the present with concern for all and without prejudice towards coming generations. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 386 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:42 PM motivation and intergenerational justice ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 394-95 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:43 PM “the interests of economic groups which irrationally demolish sources of life should not prevail in dealing with natural resources”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 409-10 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:44 PM “whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 410 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:44 PM anticapitalist ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 423-28 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:46 PM 59. At the same time we can note the rise of a false or superficial ecology which bolsters com-placency and a cheerful recklessness. As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear. Superficially, apart from a few obvious signs of pollution and deterioration, things do not look that serious, and the planet could continue as it is for some time. Such evasiveness serves as a licence to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 428 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:46 PM contrast with Gardiner on shadow solutions in climate ethics ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 458-60 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:48 PM If the simple fact of being human moves people to care for the environment of which they are a part, Christians in their turn “realize that their responsibility within creation, and their duty towards nature and the Creator, are an essential part of their faith”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 474-77 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:50 PM The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations. This in turn distorted our mandate to “have dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), to “till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). As a result, the originally harmonious relationship between human beings and nature became conflictual (cf. Gen 3:17-19). ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 477 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:50 PM compare with disrespect of treaties ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 487-91 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:51 PM 67. We are not God. The earth was here before us and it has been given to us. This allows us to respond to the charge that Judaeo-Christian thinking, on the basis of the Genesis account which grants man “dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), has encouraged the unbridled exploitation of nature by painting him as domineering and destructive by nature. This is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church. Although it is true that we Christians have at times incorrectly interpreted the Scriptures, nowadays we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 494-95 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:51 PM Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 495 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:51 PM summary of ethical imperative ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 498-505 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:53 PM 68. This responsibility for God’s earth means that human beings, endowed with intelligence, must respect the laws of nature and the delicate equilibria existing between the creatures of this world, for “he commanded and they were created; and he established them for ever and ever; he fixed their bounds and he set a law which cannot pass away” (Ps 148:5b-6). The laws found in the Bible dwell on relationships, not only among individuals but also with other living beings. “You shall not see your brother’s donkey or his ox fallen down by the way and withhold your help… If you chance to come upon a bird’s nest in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the mother sitting upon the young or upon the eggs; you shall not take the mother with the young” (Dt 22:4, 6). Along these same lines, rest on the seventh day is meant not only for human beings, but also so “that your ox and your donkey may have rest” (Ex 23:12). Clearly, the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 505 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:53 PM exegesis ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 505-7 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:54 PM 69. Together with our obligation to use the earth’s goods responsibly, we are called to recognize that other living beings have a value of their own in God’s eyes: “by their mere existence they bless him and give him glory”, 41 and indeed, “the Lord rejoices in all his works” (Ps 104:31). ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 507 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:54 PM inherent value of non-human nature ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 555-59 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:58 PM 75. A spirituality which forgets God as all-powerful and Creator is not acceptable. That is how we end up worshipping earthly powers, or ourselves usurping the place of God, even to the point of claiming an unlimited right to trample his creation underfoot. The best way to restore men and women to their rightful place, putting an end to their claim to absolute dominion over the earth, is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates and who alone owns the world. Otherwise, human beings will always try to impose their own laws and interests on reality. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 559 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:58 PM theological justification ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 567-68 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 08:00 PM Every creature is thus the object of the Father’s tenderness, who gives it its place in the world. Even the fleeting life of the least of beings is the object of his love, and in its few seconds of existence, God enfolds it with his affection. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 568 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 08:00 PM all things dull and ugly ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 574-75 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 08:01 PM If we acknowledge the value and the fragility of nature and, at the same time, our God-given abilities, we can finally leave behind the modern myth of unlimited material progress. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 575 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 08:01 PM overcoming our limitless ambitions ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 579-81 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 08:02 PM We are free to apply our intelligence towards things evolving positively, or towards adding new ills, new causes of suffering and real setbacks. This is what makes for the excitement and drama of human history, in which freedom, growth, salvation and love can blossom, or lead towards decadence and mutual destruction. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 581 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 08:02 PM theory of history ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 586-89 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 08:03 PM Creating a world in need of development, God in some way sought to limit himself in such a way that many of the things we think of as evils, dangers or sources of suffering, are in reality part of the pains of childbirth which he uses to draw us into the act of cooperation with the Creator.49 God is intimately present to each being, without impinging on the autonomy of his creature, and this gives rise to the rightful autonomy of earthly affairs.50 ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 589 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 08:03 PM theodicy problem ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 600-601 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 08:04 PM Our capacity to reason, to develop arguments, to be inventive, to interpret reality and to create art, along with other not yet discovered capacities, are signs of a uniqueness which transcends the spheres of physics and biology. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 601 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2016, 08:04 PM argument for human superiority over nature ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 609-12 | Added on Monday, February 15, 2016, 01:12 PM 82. Yet it would also be mistaken to view other living beings as mere objects subjected to arbitrary human domination. When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society. This vision of “might is right” has engendered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity, since resources end up in the hands of the first comer or the most powerful: the winner takes all. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 612 | Added on Monday, February 15, 2016, 01:12 PM anthropocentrism leads to inequality ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 697-99 | Added on Wednesday, February 17, 2016, 01:12 AM 92. Moreover, when our hearts are authentically open to universal communion, this sense of fraternity excludes nothing and no one. It follows that our indifference or cruelty towards fellow creatures of this world sooner or later affects the treatment we mete out to other human beings. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 699 | Added on Wednesday, February 17, 2016, 01:12 AM our treatmet of non-human nature changes interpersonal conduct ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 443640-46 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 02:56 PM jib 1  n. 1 [SAILING] a triangular staysail set forward of the forwardmost mast. 2 the projecting arm of a crane.  mid 17th cent.: of unknown origin. ========== Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - Highlight Loc. 3412-16 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 02:59 PM They gave him a glass of whitish fluid like to gin, and then more; and in a little time his gravity departed from him. He became thickly treasonous, and spoke in terms of sweeping indecency of a Government which had forced upon him a white man's education and neglected to supply him with a white man's salary. He babbled tales of oppression and wrong till the tears ran down his cheeks for the miseries of his land. Then he staggered off, singing love-songs of Lower Bengal, and collapsed upon a wet tree-trunk. Never was so unfortunate a product of English rule in India more unhappily thrust upon aliens. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 382-84 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:04 PM The Stored Communications Act permits law enforcement agencies to obtain stored communications and subscriber records. This includes historical call records, stored emails, instant messages, web browsing history, search engine records as well as documents stored “in the cloud.” ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 394-99 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:05 PM Law enforcement agencies also routinely compel the disclosure of geo-location information from wireless carriers [60, 61], although the legal standard required to obtain historical and real-time data is by no means settled [62]. Each wireless carrier receives thousands of requests per month, an amount that has grown “exponentially” over the past few years [63]. In order to cope with the flood of requests that they receive, many of the major wireless carriers have created automated web interfaces, through which law enforcement agents can monitor the location of surveillance targets from the comfort of their desks [64]. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 414-17 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:07 PM “There is a problem with the government which is that they have guns and we don’t . . . We are required to follow U.S. law, and we do so, even if we don’t like it. As the CEO of a public company (or a private company) there can be no other answer” [72]. —ERIC SCHMIDT, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, GOOGLE ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 428-30 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:08 PM companies, on a case-by-case basis, have been forced by the courts to add backdoors to their products in order to facilitate access their subscribers’ private information. This power to compel the creation of new features can be used against all companies, even those that have gone out of their way to build their products to be privacy preserving. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 454-55 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:09 PM Pursuant to the court order, Hush modified their product to capture the passwords of the three suspects, which it then used to decrypt the encrypted emails of the three surveillance targets.39 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 470-71 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:11 PM A subsequent investigation by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice found the FBI had widely abused its surveillance powers, including the use of community of interest requests.40 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 471 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:11 PM relevant to phd proposal / research ethics protocol ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 479-81 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:12 PM In 2003, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that providers of in-car GPS-enhanced navigational services can, in some situations, be forced to secretly enable microphones in a customer’s car and record conversations taking place inside the vehicle.41 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 486-89 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:13 PM The Court of Appeals ruled that the FBI has the legal authority to order companies to turn their own technology against their customers. However, due to the fact that the surveillance severely limited the navigation provider’s ability to deliver emergency services to its customers, the court ruled that the FBI’s surveillance order was unlawful and should not have been issued by the district court in the first place.42 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 499-502 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:15 PM The companies that perform most modern surveillance are not specialist firms created to address this niche business opportunity — rather, they are the very same companies that provide communications services and applications directly to consumers. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Comcast, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook all have dedicated surveillance teams, some with more than one hundred employees, who do nothing but facilitate government surveillance of their customers [11]. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 502 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:15 PM Ubiquitous surveillance has been privatized and corporatized ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 511-13 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:16 PM “Technological progress poses a threat to privacy by enabling an extent of surveillance that in earlier times would have been prohibitively expensive.” —US V. GARCIA, 474 F. 3D 994 - COURT OF APPEALS, 7TH CIRCUIT 2007 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 528-32 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:20 PM Law enforcement agencies have essentially deputized the technology companies that provide online services and applications to end users, making these firms an essential component of the modern surveillance state. Thus, the private documents of ten individuals can now be obtained through a single subpoena to Google or Facebook — whose engineers will then locate the files (stored on the company’s servers) and provide them to the government, often, without telling the customer first. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 548-51 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:22 PM Companies receiving surveillance assistance requests often play two, conflicting roles: they facilitate surveillance of their customers, yet are often the only gatekeeper capable of resisting unreasonable or illegal demands. Many firms frequently push back against, and sometimes refuse to comply with, surveillance orders that they believe violate the law [94, 95]. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 590-92 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:28 PM In 2010, Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer of MySpace, confirmed that the company did not charge for the “thousands” of requests it received each year from the government [105]. Similarly, reliable sources have confirmed that Facebook does not charge the government for surveillance assistance and that Mi48crosoft did not start charging until 2012. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 603-4 | Added on Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:29 PM the fees charged by the major wireless phone companies for real-time interception of communications content range between $700 to $2400 per 30 day wiretap, depending on the carrier ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 700-701 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:17 PM Every act of cruelty towards any creature is “contrary to human dignity”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 708-10 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:18 PM The principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and “the first principle of the whole ethical and social order”. 71 The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 729-33 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:19 PM The natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity and the responsibility of everyone. If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all. If we do not, we burden our consciences with the weight of having denied the existence of others. That is why the New Zealand bishops asked what the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” means when “twenty percent of the world’s population consumes resources at a rate that robs the poor nations and future generations of what they need to survive”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 733 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:19 PM killing by overconsumption ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 781-82 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:29 PM Technology has remedied countless evils which used to harm and limit human beings. How can we not feel gratitude and appreciation for this progress, especially in the fields of medicine, engineering and commu- nications? ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 782 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:29 PM acknowledges value of some technology ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 791-97 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:31 PM Yet it must also be recognized that nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired, have given us tremendous power. More precisely, they have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world. Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used. We need but think of the nuclear bombs dropped in the middle of the twentieth century, or the array of technology which Nazism, Communism and other totalitarian regimes have employed to kill millions of people, to say nothing of the increasingly deadly arsenal of weapons available for modern warfare. In whose hands does all this power lie, or will it eventually end up? It is extremely risky for a small part of humanity to have it. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 807-8 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:32 PM a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 808 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:32 PM moral governance of technology ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 817-22 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:33 PM Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit. It is the false notion that “an infinite quantity of energy and resources are available, that it is possible to renew them quickly, and that the negative effects of the exploitation of the natural order can be easily absorbed”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 822 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:33 PM Malthusian ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 840-46 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 12:35 PM The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilat- ed, and we are learning all too slowly the lessons of environmental deterioration. Some circles maintain that current economics and technology will solve all environmental problems, and argue, in popular and non-technical terms, that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market growth. They are less concerned with certain economic theories which today scarcely anybody dares defend, than with their actual operation in the functioning of the economy. They may not affirm such theo- ries with words, but nonetheless support them with their deeds by showing no interest in more balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 863-68 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:34 PM Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best ecological initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic. To seek only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 868 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:34 PM no narrow or technical solutions - like Klein and White, aspires to revolutionary or at least broad social and political change ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 875-76 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:36 PM An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 876 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:36 PM sounds like White ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 888-91 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:42 PM Modern anthropocentrism has paradoxically ended up prizing technical thought over reality, since “the technological mind sees nature as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere ‘given’, as an object of utility, as raw material to be hammered into useful shape; it views the cosmos similarly as a mere ‘space’ into which objects can be thrown with complete indifference”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 891 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:42 PM Klein - extractivism ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 899-900 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:43 PM our “dominion” over the universe should be understood more properly in the sense of responsible stewardship.94 ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 913-14 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:45 PM When the human person is considered as simply one being among others, the product of chance or physical determinism, then “our overall sense of responsibility wanes”. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 914 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:45 PM maintains anthropocentrism. in contrast with deep ecology ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 984-85 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:52 PM Helping the poor financially must always be a provisional solution in the face of pressing needs. The broader objective should always be to allow them a dignified life through work. ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 985 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:52 PM Clintonian - welfare to work ========== Laudato Si - EN (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 998-1000 | Added on Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:53 PM To claim eco- nomic freedom while real conditions bar many people from actual access to it, and while possibilities for employment continue to shrink, is to practise a doublespeak which brings politics into disrepute. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 667-70 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:31 AM 53Google has not publicly confirmed the specific circumstances in which the company shields or leaks IP address information. However, anecdotal reports from users reveal that the company leaks the IP addresses of consumers who use third party email clients to send mail through Google’s SMTP servers. Some users, particularly those using Google Apps with custom domains rather than Gmail, also report leakage of their IP address via a X-Originating-IP header even when using the webmail interface. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 705-6 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:34 AM In 2002, AOL voluntarily developed and began using a proprietary Image Detection and Filtering Program, which calculates a cryptographic hash of each file attached to email messages sent or received by its customers.58 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 732-33 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:36 AM 60Facebook has also voluntarily deployed an automated system that scans the contents of posted messages and chats between users for keywords associated with criminal behavior, which are then manually reviewed by Facebook employees ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 764-67 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:38 AM However, soon after the company enabled HTTPS by default for Gmail in 2010, Adam Langley, one of the company’s engineers revealed that “we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead . . . SSL/TLS is not computationally expensive any more” ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 784-86 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:41 AM backup services, such as those provided by Dropbox and Apple do not use encryption keys only known to the user.70 As a result, these companies can, and are routinely forced to, disclose to the government the data users have uploaded.71 ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 794-96 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:42 AM SpiderOak, describes itself as a “zero knowledge backup provider,” stating that “we do not know anything about the data that you store on SpiderOak not even your folder or filenames. On the server we only see sequentially numbered containers of encrypted data” ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 801-3 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:43 AM 71On March 29, 2012, I received an on-the-record statement from an Apple spokesperson confirming that the company has access to the encryption key used to encrypt files stored with the company’s iCloud backup service. Dropbox has publicly confirmed that it has access to its users’ data and that it receives requests for that data from law enforcement agencies ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 823-26 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:45 AM A great example of this can be found in the wireless telephone market. Sprint Nextel assigns each Internet-connected wireless handset a static IP address, and logs the allocated addresses for 24 months [12]. The company also retains a record of the URL of each webpage viewed by many of its customers. Likewise, Verizon Wireless retains logs of the IP addresses issued to customers for one year, and also logs of the IP addresses of the websites visited by subscribers for one month ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 836-38 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:46 AM Most Internet and telecommunications providers have created law enforcement handbooks, which list surveillance prices, include sample subpoenas and search warrant applications, and also detail the kinds of data that each firm retains, 76and for how long. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 847-48 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:47 AM three telecommunications carriers have been paid $1.8 million per year to provide the FBI with “near real-time access to [two years of stored] United States communications records (including telephone and Internet records)” ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 880-82 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:50 AM the Department of Justice has taken the position that once an email message has been opened, such as by briefly reading it on a mobile device, it is no longer in electronic storage, and thus, a company can be forced to disclose it to the government with a mere subpoena or§2703(d) 79order rather than with a warrant. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 940-41 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:54 AM Verizon argued in court that it has a First Amendment right to voluntarily disclose its customers’ private information to the National Security Agency ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 987-90 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 06:58 AM 93In addition to the warrant protections for content under ECPA, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled in 2010 that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their email messages which are therefore protected by the Fourth Amendment. See United States v. Warshak, 631 F.3d 266, (6th Cir. 2010). ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1023-24 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 07:00 AM Any in-depth, honest discussion of the topic would therefore risk alarming consumers [50, 110], and perhaps give them a reason to share less private data with service providers. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1042-44 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 07:03 AM With few exceptions, the large companies to whom hundreds of millions of consumers entrust their private communications actively assist in the collection and disclosure of that data to law enforcement and intelligence agencies — all while simultaneously promising to protect their customers’ privacy. ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Note Loc. 1044 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 07:03 AM third rulw of the internet - cite in proposal / ethics protocol ========== csoghoian-dissertation-final-8-1-2012 (milan@sindark.com) - Highlight Loc. 1061-65 | Added on Monday, July 04, 2016, 09:09 AM privacy protections such as minimal data retention or encryption of stored data directly conflict with the dominant Silicon Valley business model in which large amounts of user data are collected, analyzed, and monetized. Consequently, firms like Google and Facebook that offer free services to consumers in order to collect their data are far more likely to embrace privacy protection methods that are complimentary to their business models, such as by adopting aggressive, pro-user legal positions in their interactions with the government. In contrast, these firms are unlikely to willingly embrace minimal data retention policies or encrypt stored user data in such a way that they can no longer access it. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 17283-84 | Added on Wednesday, January 04, 2017, 05:16 PM Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius, ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 208635-41 | Added on Friday, January 06, 2017, 01:51 PM Dan·ton   Georges (Jacques) (1759-94), French revolutionary. Initially an ally of Robespierre, he later revolted against the severity of the Revolutionary Tribunal and was executed on Robespierre's orders. ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 719202-13 | Added on Friday, January 06, 2017, 01:52 PM Robes·pierre   Maximilien François Marie Isidore de (1758-94), French revolutionary. As leader of the radical Jacobins in the National Assembly, he backed the execution of Louis XVI, implemented a purge of the Girondists, and initiated the Terror. The following year, however, he fell from favor and was guillotined. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 1710-11 | Added on Saturday, January 07, 2017, 10:14 PM “What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,” returned my companion, bitterly. “The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 2037 | Added on Saturday, January 07, 2017, 10:41 PM interminable lines of new staring brick buildings,—the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 2222-26 | Added on Saturday, January 07, 2017, 10:57 PM Miss Morstan and I stood together, and her hand was in mine. A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two who had never seen each other before that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other. I have marvelled at it since, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing that I should go out to her so, and, as she has often told me, there was in her also the instinct to turn to me for comfort and protection. So we stood hand in hand, like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 2250 | Added on Saturday, January 07, 2017, 10:59 PM a sharp intaking of the breath. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 2850 | Added on Saturday, January 07, 2017, 11:53 PM One of our greatest statesmen has said that a change of work is the best rest. So it is. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 19552-53 | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2017, 01:00 AM it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories.” ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 20277-78 | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2017, 02:44 AM “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 20350-51 | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2017, 02:50 AM a sudden sharp intake of her breath, ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 20926-27 | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2017, 03:03 AM Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable. ========== The New Oxford American Dictionary - Highlight Loc. 881200-881212 | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2017, 03:33 AM trump·er·y ARCHAIC  n. (pl. -er·ies) attractive articles of little value or use.  practices or beliefs that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value or worth.  adj. showy but worthless: trumpery jewelry.  delusive or shallow: that trumpery hope which lets us dupe ourselves.  late Middle English (denoting trickery): from Old French tromperie, from tromper 'deceive'. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 21292 | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2017, 03:33 AM trumpery ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 21359-60 | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2017, 03:38 AM Such slips are common to all mortals, and the greatest is he who can recognize and repair them. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 21984-85 | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2017, 04:04 AM But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. ========== Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Note Loc. 21985 | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2017, 04:04 AM very much at odds with what WWI cost England - also, why reveal the disinformation? ==========