Recent quotes:
The Imperial Origins of Big Data - Yale University Press
Over the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, paper emerged as the fundamental substrate which politicians, merchants, and scholars relied on to record and circulate information in governance, commerce, and learning. At the same time, governing institutions sought to preserve and control the spread of written information through the creation of archives: repositories where they collected, organized, and stored documents. The expansion of European polities overseas from the late fifteenth century onward saw governments massively scale up their use of paper—and confront the challenge of controlling its dissemination across thousands of miles of ocean and land. These pressures were felt particularly acutely in what eventually became the largest empire in world history, the British empire. As people from the British isles from the early seventeenth century fought, traded, and settled their way to power in the Atlantic world and South Asia, administrators faced the problem of how to govern both their emigrating subjects and the non-British peoples with whom they interacted. This meant collecting information about their behavior through the technology of paper. Just as we struggle to organize, search, and control our email boxes, text messages, and app notifications, so too did these early moderns confront the attendant challenges of developing practices of collection and storage to manage the resulting information overload. And despite the best efforts of states and companies to control information, it constantly escaped their grasp, falling into the hands of their opponents and rivals who deployed it to challenge and contest ruling powers.Trump's Messianic Video About God Sending Him To Save World
I need somebody who can shape an ax but wield a sword. Who had the courage to step foot in North Korea? Who can make money from the tar of the sand turned liquid to gold? Who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation? We’ll finish this 40 hour week by Tuesday noon, but then put in another 72 hours. So God made Trump.Russia’s Genocide Handbook – Mgrublian Center for Human Rights
As I have been saying since the war began, “denazification” in official Russian usage just means the destruction of the Ukrainian state and nation. A “Nazi,” as the genocide manual explains, is simply a human being who self-identifies as Ukrainian. According to the handbook, the establishment of a Ukrainian state thirty years ago was the “nazification of Ukraine.” Indeed “any attempt to build such a state” has to be a “Nazi” act. Ukrainians are “Nazis” because they fail to accept “the necessity that the people support Russia.” Ukrainians should suffer for believing that they exist as a separate people; only this can lead to the “redemption of guilt.”Liberals do drink more lattes, but maybe not for the reasons you think -- ScienceDaily
In fact, only 16% of liberals, 11% of moderates, and 9% of conservatives prefer lattes. In exploring why liberals show a stronger preference for lattes, the researchers considered numerous factors, including the availability of lattes in one's local area, household income, and gender. Although all of these were predictors of latte drinking, none of them explained the relationship between lattes and liberals. However, latte drinkers' attitudes toward globalization proved most meaningful in explaining why liberals are more likely to drink lattes.Steve Bannon Trump Tower Interview: Trump's Strategist Plots "New Political Movement" | Hollywood Reporter
"Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political movement," he says. "It's everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. […] Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.Can Reading Make You Happier? - The New Yorker
Berthoud and Elderkin are also the authors of “The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies,” which is written in the style of a medical dictionary and matches ailments (“failure, feeling like a”) with suggested reading cures (“The History of Mr. Polly,” by H. G. Wells). First released in the U.K. in 2013, it is now being published in eighteen countries, and, in an interesting twist, the contract allows for a local editor and reading specialist to adapt up to twenty-five per cent of the ailments and reading recommendations to fit each particular country’s readership and include more native writers. The new, adapted ailments are culturally revealing. In the Dutch edition, one of the adapted ailments is “having too high an opinion of your own child”; in the Indian edition, “public urination” and “cricket, obsession with” are included; the Italians introduced “impotence,” “fear of motorways,” and “desire to embalm”; and the Germans added “hating the world” and “hating parties.” Berthoud and Elderkin are now working on a children’s-literature version, “A Spoonful of Stories,” due out in 2016.Viktor Orbán on freedom and independence
There are some dangerous ideas in this speech. What I found most frightening was that “everything, the constitution, the law codes, the parliament, the government, the national economy, serve only the goal of independence.” The emphasis is not on the rule of law and legal and economic structures, but on the nation. And, he added, “we should never forget that what is the most valuable in the Hungarians is what differentiates [them] from others.” If Hungarians were just like the others, “the world wouldn’t need us.” What an awful thought: the subordination of the individual to a national community. And, he added, if we were not different from others, “on what basis could we ask for the help of God against our enemies?”Bias in considering data
Among the American subjects we tested, we found considerable support for banning the car when it was a German car being banned for American use: 78.4 percent thought car sales should be banned, and 73.7 percent thought the car should be kept off the streets. But for the subjects for whom the question was stated as whether an American car should be banned in Germany, there was a statistically significant difference: only 51.4 percent thought car sales should be banned, and just 39.2 percent thought the car should be kept off German streets, even though the car in question was presented as having exactly the same poor safety record.
I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers° of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.