Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless.  There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

H.G.Wells, The Time Machine

Democracy or Globalization?

Global markets suffer from weak governance and are therefore prone to instability, inefficiency, and weak popular legitimacy…. If you want more and better markets, you have to have more (and better) governance.  Markets work best not where states are weakest, but where they are strong.... Even though it is possible to advance both democracy and globalization…this requires the creation of a global political community that is vastly more ambitious than anything we have seen to date or are likely to experience soon.  It would call for global rule making by democracy…. Democracies have the right to protect their social arrangements, and when this right clashes with the requirements of the global economy, it is the latter that should give way. 

Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy

 We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.

 Chesty Puller

One should never mistake pattern for meaning. 

Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

It rarely paid to frighten people but it never paid to confuse them.

Lifted & spun a bit from Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

Everyone but an economist knows without asking why money shouldn’t buy some things.

Arthur Okun, (cited in in the New York Review)

THE MASS of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, gaolers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.

Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the State chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.

A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

Henry David Thoreau, The Duty of Civil Disobedience

We are what we do, not what we think.  Only the interactions count.

Iain Banks, The Player of Games

Men get very fond of the things they defend, especially when they find themselves defending something stupid.


Theodore Sturgeon in his wonderful short story, The Widget, The Wadget, and Boff 

Knowledge is a pile of bricks, and understanding is a way of building.

Theodore  Sturgeon