Dostoevski in 100 Words or Less

The believers are dead.
The nihilists are dead.
The revolutionaries are dead.
The greatest generation is almost dead.
The hippies are as good as dead.

What remains? What comes after
post modern, post industrial, post punk, post post?
What can you say
after everything has been said
and contradicted?

By a process of auto association
we extract Nothing from something.
We have left ideas behind
because ideas are old school.
We have left experience behind
because experience didn't work out.

What remains is the new turned old
The automat, the Turing machine,
the idea of doubting ourselves into mechanistic non-being.
Such an old idea which was only born yesterday.

What is new under the sun?
Of course, Nothing.
What was before
is what comes again and again and again.
And as soon as we forget about it
and join nihilists, revolutionaries, vets and hippies,
someone will think these same thoughts
in a different and original way.

And won't that be something!

aphorisms

I want to encourage everybody who is anybody to become somebody.
--Anon.

"Four legs good, two legs better... Baaaaaa!"
-Orwell; the sheep

The Masses are Revolting.
-Jose Ortega y Gassette

No, really, the masses are revolting!
-- Peter :)

Those who do not work, do not eat.

--Lenin / Reagan

From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.

--Marx (in theory)

From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. Gimme!

--Marx (in practice)

Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.

--Margaret Thatcher

I had to abandon the principles of the free market in order to save it.

--G.W. Bush

Behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts -- a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, burried under arms with funeral accompaniments.

--Thoreau

When there was peace he was for peace, when there was war he went.

--Auden (on "the Unknown Citizen")

"I had other priorities."

-- Cheney (a well known citizen)

The truth is the one thing nobody will believe.

--Shaw

Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened.

--Churchill

Do not look to much into the void, lest the void look back into thee.

--Nietzsche

He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.

--Samuel Johnson

Forgive, oh Lord, my little jokes on thee, and I'll forgive thy great big one on me!

--Robert Frost

Set My Cell Phone Free

Moses freed the Jews. Lincoln and MLK freed the blacks. Eisenhower freed tyrannized Europe (well the western part anyhow). Galileo and the Enlightenment freed the western mind.

So who will free my cell phone?

I want my cell phone to be free to do what I want it to do. Praise-uh, can I hear an amen? I want it to be free to harness technology, to be all it can be. But my phone is in chains. It wears the shackles of AT&T, Verizon, etc.

I ask it, what do you want to do? It wants me to be able to see my friends when I call, and it wants my friends to see me. It wants me to be able to use Skype, Google Talk or MSN Live in 3g - and not little bits, but ALL OF IT (including the voice chats with China) - But AT&T and Apple say no.

Someday it wants to be the phone of the future, capable of doing things I haven't even thought of yet. But it would settle for less, much less, because even much less would be a whole lot more!

My phone is hedged in by it's masters the big cell companies; it serves not it's users. Not only can it not be the phone of the future, it can't even be the phone of today.

I ask my phone, what do you want to be?

If my phone could be anything, anything at all, it would stop singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot, lay down the thick sack where it holds the profit it picks for massah, and it would become a Japanese phone. Oh wouldn't that be Heaven for a cell phone? Sure, someday it would be great if it projected holographs of the person I'm talking to, or a spreadsheet presentation. But it would settle for just a little videoconferencing, for cheap and fast internet, for TV and radio broadcasts, just like they have in Japan right now!

That doesn't seem so hard, I think.

So why is it so hard?

Poor phone I ask, is their anything they'll let you do.

My phone answers, "I can Maximize shareholder profit, adopt technology at the slowest possible rate that brings in the most dollars for each baby step of improvement. Oh, and I can also never, never, never, threaten existing revenue streams of the big cellular companies without offsetting or greater revenue that replaces those streams."

My cell phone is in chains. It's ring tone is the blues and I had to buy the goddam ringtone to boot. Won't somebody set my phone free?

I'd ask AT&T and Verizon to do it, but they aren't listening to me.