neal umphred dot com - Page 2 of 52 - ratiocinations out of thin air and elsewhere

liberals should co-opt trump’s “make america great again”!

THE IDEA BEHIND “MAGA” IS FINE: “Make America Great Again!” Who can argue with those four words? Well, actually, anyone can argue with them when we consider what the word “great” is being used to describe. [Continue reading]

ELECTION UPDATE November 7, 2020 (8:45 AM PST)

except for the masks, everything appeared relatively normal

I DID SOME SHOPPING YESTERDAY, mostly for food. I also hit the library along the way, using curbside pick-up for items I had ordered online. I picked up a few books (including Steven Pinker’s The Sense Of Style – The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century and Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer. [Continue reading]

my secret meetings with elvis and bob

EACH YEAR I HIKE MOUNT RANIER to a secret meeting. I use the Carbon Glacier trail and I don’t ascend the whole mountain—that takes days and a team of other hikers. And I have to go it alone. This is just a vigorous day-hike that gets me up to about 7,000 feet where I can look down into the massive glacier. [Continue reading]

quora moderation said my answer may need improvement

I RECEIVED AN EMAIL FROM QUORA that read, “Quora Moderation collapsed your answer to ‘What irrefutable facts do Trump supporters need to know about Trump to change their mind?’ for violating a policy on Quora. Your answer may need improvement.” [Continue reading]

that’s what I’ve been telling people for fifty years!

NOAM CHOMSKY HAD AN INTERVIEW scheduled with Anand Giridharadas for The.Ink website. While each interview promises the potential of unique answers and even the possibility of new thoughts, depending on the interviewer, Chomsky prepared some notes to make certain he mentioned certain points. [Continue reading]

to keep my magic true, you must do one thing

HAL HAD IT MADE! He was young, handsome, and smart with a very good job as an accountant with a successful local company. But he had one weak spot: He liked to gamble. A lot. Unfortunately, he usually lost. [Continue reading]

why I’ve been missing during the coronavirus pandemic

WHERE HAVE ALL THE BLOG POSTS GONE, long time passing? The past few months have seen absolutely nothing posted on any of my blogs. This does not mean that I have not been busy. I just haven’t been busy publishing things I wrote. [Continue reading]

EdwardBrooks StormyDaniels caricature 1500 crop

why is michael cohen telling it all to a “conservative” publisher?

RAW STORY’S TOP STORIES newsletter arrived at 5:51 AM today. The headline that caught my attention was “Michael Cohen is writing a bombshell tell-all book on President Trump to be released before the election.” The story was attributed to Tom Boggioni (April 18, 2020), who acknowledged his source as the Daily Beast in his first paragraph. [Continue reading]

FAVORITE QUOTES

"A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth." – John Dryden, 1682

"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired" – Jonathan Swift, 1721

"What has not been reasoned in, cannot be reasoned out." – Sydney Smith, 1869

"You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into." – anonymous

"Always tell the truth! It makes your lies that much more believable." —Nealism

"All the angels are gone. There's only devils left." – John Dutton

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened." – Michel de Montaigne

"You don't fight fascism because you're going to win. You fight fascism because it is fascist." – Jean-Paul Sartre

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.” – Frank Zappa

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." – James Baldwin

"If women learned to read there seemed to be a possibility that some day some good man might come home and find his wife reading, and the dinner not ready—and nothing could be imagined more horrible than that! That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind—that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man’s comfort." – Nellie L. McClung

"What people call the Christmas spirit [is] a kind of dream or hope we carry with us from childhood. But as adults ... we're imbued by the pragmatic routines of life, which makes it difficult for us to regard anything with childlike wonder. But, you know, it's alright for us to try. We put on silly hats and drape trees with sparkly lights and wrap gifts in garish paper and that's good for us. It's not only alright for us to allow children the transient experience of innocence and joy, it's our responsibility." – Lance Sweets

"When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." – anonymous

"‘What saves a man is to take a step ... then another step." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The old dreams were good dreams. They didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them.'" – Robert Kincaid

"Fascists in a democracy demand the right of free speech, but once in power will absolutely, definitively, not grant it to anyone other than themselves. That's their trick and they know it perfectly well." – William Gibson

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" – Carl Sagan

"Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” – Avi Loeb

"If you value the wrong things, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're going to end up in the wrong place. If you ask the wrong questions, it doesn't matter how much data you collect, your answers will be meaningless." – Mark Manson

"You are better off trying something and having it not work and learning from that than not doing anything at all." – Mark Zuckerberg

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That's why it's important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are." – Maya Angelou.

"Sometimes fear needs fearing more than the things we fear." – Elizabeth Bligh

"If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you see the cost of hiring an amateur." – Nealism

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should, therefore, claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." – Karl Popper

“A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.” – Edward Gibbon

"Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” ~ Lao Tzu

"So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old." – John Stuart Mill

"Clearly, any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness, and duration." – H.G. Wells

“When you speak truth to power, power fights back." – Alexandria Octavia-Cortez

"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind." – Virginia Woolf

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." –Albert Einstein

"Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." – M. Scott Peck

"The future has a way of arriving unannounced." – George F. Will

"Right now, I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." – Steven Wright

“How did it get so late so soon?” ― Dr. Seuss

"While all acronyms are initialisms, most initialisms are not acronyms." – Q (lol)

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble—it's what you know that just ain't so." – Mark Twain

"I don't trust anybody I'm not close enough to kill." – Kelly Burkhardt

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” – Philip K. Dick

"I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats." – Eckhart Tolle