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xtruss · 3 years ago

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“Shameless War Criminal Bloody British Bastard Blair” Lectures the World on Military Strategy, With No Word of the Deceit He Engineered For an Illegal Assault on Iraq 🇮🇶, Syria 🇸🇾 and Afghanistan 🇦🇫

— 6 September, 2021 | RT

Former War Criminal Bloody British British PM Tony Blair sees himself as a colossus on the world stage – climate hero, peace maker and thinker for our times – seemingly unaware that many people view him as a ‘War Criminal’ who deserves to be put on trial and throw him behind bars to “Stay, Rest, Rot and Burn in Hell Forever.”

Since he left high office in 2007, there really is no subject in the world on which Tony Blair is reluctant to express an opinion on, buoyed by an unsinkable self-belief and an apparently total absence of self-awareness.

He’s convinced that a huge appetite exists for his latest musings, that French President Emmanuel Macron is desperate for his help in tackling the radical Islamist problems of the Sahel, that US President Joe Biden lies awake at night asking himself, ‘What would Tony do?’ and that the British public has forgotten he took the country into a catastrophic war against Iraq that both the United Nations and even his own government inquiry determined was illegal.

His acquiescence to US demands for an attack on Saddam Hussein earned Blair the US Medal of Freedom from George Bush and 20 years of opprobrium from the British public, which has only increased as the years have passed on par with his own immense personal wealth. A poll in 2017 found a third of the British public would like to see Blair put on trial as a war criminal.

But that’s not something the ex-PM likes to dwell upon. So his speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), almost 20 years to the day since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, made no mention of what followed those unforgettable events: dodgy dossiers, suggestions of bunkers full of weapons of mass destruction or of the purposeful lying to the British people.

Rather than learn any lessons from recent history, like when to wage war, Blair’s appetite is clearly undiminished, as he moaned, “Western societies and their political leaders have become quite understandably, deeply averse to casualties amongst our Armed Forces.” This, in his view, had become, “an overwhelming political constraint to any commitment to Western boots on the ground, except for Special Forces.”

It’s all Biden’s fault apparently. Blair said, “It is clear now – if it wasn't before – that America has decided that for the foreseeable future, it has a very limited appetite for military engagement.”

‘First order security threat’ akin to revolutionary communism: Afghan war didn’t solve radical Islam, Tony Blair says. War Criminal Bloody British Bastard don’t like to talk about “Radical Christians Terrorists, Radical Saffron Hindu Terrorists, Radical God’s Fucked-up People Zionist Cunt Terrorists,” because they can give him a deep f*** and stop paying him to propagate spew filth against Muslims.

Well, yes, Mr. Former Prime Minister, it is true that the Americans have made no secret of the fact that they are sick of fighting ‘forever wars’. But us Brits also do not like to see the lives of young men and women who have signed up to serve their country sacrificed at the altar of political self-aggrandisement. We are now a little less gullible, a little less obliging when it comes to fighting unwinnable, neverending battles and somewhat more suspicious of our glory-seeking political leaders. And that’s all largely down to one person. You.

It’s strange Blair doesn’t acknowledge this. One thing’s certain, he knows his geopolitics; hell, he even has his own eponymous ‘global institute’ packed with researchers, academics and leading experts to tell him what to think and say about the key issues of our time. With one exception. Do. Not. Mention. Iraq.

The exclusion of that country’s name from the conversation is obvious. In looking forward, Blair said that Europe – insisting “for these purposes Britain is part of Europe like it or not” – faced an immediate challenge from the destabilisation of the Sahel and was “already facing the fallout from Libya, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.” Err, by ‘elsewhere in the Middle East’ could Blair possibly mean Iraq? Probably, but let’s not risk spoiling a pleasant chat.

And in the face of that perceived threat, which in the Sahel until now has been largely handled by France, Blair asked, “How do Europe and NATO develop the capability to act when America is unwilling?”

Blair clearly sees military action as an imperative – I’m not sure everyone else agrees – but he also thinks the capacity of Western policymakers to think strategically needs to be reinvigorated.

“For me, one of the most alarming developments of recent times has been the sense the West lacks the capacity to formulate strategy,” he said. “That its short term political imperatives have squeezed the space for long term thinking.

It is this sense more than anything else which gives our allies anxiety and our opponents a belief our time is over.”

Now the picture is starting to become clearer. While Western governments are distracted from war by the need to focus on rebuilding economies, fighting worldwide health crises and seemingly perpetual election cycles which inhibit their ability to think long-term, they need big thinkers, top-shelf statesmen and global heavy hitters to work out how to bomb the citizens of far-off places into oblivion through drone strikes, how to convince a sceptical public that it’s a good idea to send servicemen and women to their deaths and – most importantly of all – how to create the right PR buzz around those decisions, so that everyone feels comfortable about falling into line.

Those Western governments need men just like Tony Blair. He’s free most afternoons, if you’d like to schedule a Zoom call. Just don’t mention the war (on Iraq).

“War Criminal, Boak Bollocks Bloody British Bastard Tony Blair” calls US Afghanistan withdrawal ‘imbecilic’ – What, then, was the Bush-Blair invasion of 2001?

— Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

— August 22, 2021 | RT

War Criminals Bush and Blair met in Washington to discuss the ongoing operations in Afghanistan, November 7, 2001. © REUTERS/Win McNamee

“Serial Warmonger and War Criminal Bloody British Bastard Tony Blair” has blasted the US decision to pull out from Afghanistan, but history tells us the real madness was invading the unconquerable country in the first place.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair –aka ‘The Blair Creature’– is not a happy bunny this Sunday, folks. He has said that the decision to withdraw western forces from Afghanistan was made “in obedience to an imbecilic slogan about ending the ‘forever wars’.”

What he calls the US’ ‘abandonment’ of Afghanistan was “tragic, dangerous and unnecessary.”

In fact we could say the same about Tony Blair himself – and certainly the wars of choice he promoted.

Imbecilic? That’s the perfect word to describe what happened in October 2001 when Afghanistan was invaded in response, we were told, to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, even though none of the terrorists were Afghan nationals.

Had Blair read just a little bit of history, he would have pursued an exclusively diplomatic path to try and get Osama Bin Laden handed over and not have been so keen to send in the troops.

As I wrote in the Daily Express in 2009 in an article entitled ’Afghanistan: History repeats itself,’ “‘That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history,’ said Aldous Huxley. Nowhere is this more applicable than in the case of the many unsuccessful attempts by foreign powers to conquer Afghanistan.”

I went on: “The mighty forces of the British Empire failed three times between 1839 and 1919. The Soviet Union, which at the time had the largest army in the world, tried in 1979: they too were defeated.”

But in 2001, Blair and the then American President George W. Bush thought they would buck the trend. They could topple the Taliban (which they did) and remake Afghanistan – a deeply conservative and very religious country – in the western secular image. Afghanistan would be transformed from a ‘failed terror state’ into a ‘functioning democracy.’ What folly. What imperial arrogance.

Today, Blair is busily trying to spin the invasion of 2001 as a ‘success.’ But, while some things did improve, 'Operation Enduring Freedom' certainly didn’t bring peace to Afghanistan.

According to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, 579 civilians were killed in aerial operations between January and September 2019. That’s more than double the amount ten years earlier. Nearly 111,000 civilians have been killed or injured in the country since 2009.

Far from bringing stability, the 2001 western military invasion, just like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was a major cause of instability.

I recall chatting to a friendly Afghan taxi driver a couple of years ago and saying to him how I’d love to visit the country to see its great natural beauty. “Don’t go,” he said. “It‘s far too dangerous. You would be targeted.”

So much for Afghanistan being ‘safe’ post-invasion.

Whenever the US withdrew, we would have had scenes of chaos. But the Americans had to pull-out at some point otherwise its forces would have been in Afghanistan forever. That doesn’t seem to concern ‘The Blair Creature’ too much. ‘Forever wars’ aren’t a great problem to him or indeed the ‘Inside the Tent‘ political and media figures who promote them. They are, though, for the soldiers who die in them, and for their grieving families.

‘But the US and British forces could have stayed in a support role,’ we’re hearing. But, as was pointed out last week, there is a word for countries whose governments only endure because of foreign military support. The word is “colony.”

Blair and his supporters are tacitly admitting that Afghanistan, billed as a ‘sovereign democratic country’, was actually a colony. I thought ‘imperialism’ was supposed to be a bad thing that we’re all supposed to be ashamed of. So why is it ok when it comes to Afghanistan?

Afghanistan is virtually impossible for foreign powers to subjugate. There’s its hostile terrain, its harsh weather, its fiercely independent people who are very brave, very tough and are highly skilled in mountain warfare. But anyone who’d read the history books would have known all this and not intervened in the first place.

Tony Blair, with his Messiah complex, thought he’d be different. He could succeed in Afghanistan where other, lesser mortals had failed. But the ‘new’ neocon empire met with exactly the same result as the old empire did. Wasn’t it ‘imbecilic’ to think it would be any different?

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jewishsideblog · 8 years ago

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[Image: Inside the Sofia Synagogue]

The Long, Long History of Bulgaria and the Jews

The rescue of Jews in Bulgaria from the Nazi death machine in the Holocaust remains the subject of historical debate.

The generally received perception is that Bulgaria “saved its Jews” during World War 2, resisting pressure from Berlin to deport them to labour camps and inevitably, to join the millions of others victims of genocide. The counterpoint to this, remembered by some but not generally acknowledged, is that not all Jews in territories nominally under Bulgarian control were saved – Jews in northern Greece and parts of Yugoslavia were deported to death camps, in some cases with the active collaboration of Bulgarian minor officials and soldiers. In these deportations, at least 11 000 lives were lost.

In writing on a subject as sensitive as this, there must be a particularly scrupulous quest for context, and for a recounting that is as factual as possible. A challenge in regard to this is that for many years the story of the rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews was distorted by communist historians. Since the fall of communism, latter-day historians have sought to clarify the story, free of distortions, and free of simplifications.

It is generally accepted that the number of Jewish people in Bulgaria immediately after the end of World War 2 was roughly the same as when it began, between 48 000 and 50 000, according to most accounts. Population growth had been low before the war, and during the war some Jews did manage to escape the country altogether.

When Bulgaria joined the war on the side of Nazi Germany and anti-Semitic laws were introduced, it was not the Bulgarian Jews’ first experience of anti-Semitism.

In his book on the saving of the Bulgarian Jews in World War 2, Christo Boyadjieff wrote that there was “sporadic and artificial, introduced in most cases from abroad” anti-Semitism in Bulgaria. Russian troops that fought on Bulgarian soil in 1877 to 1878 brought with them legends of Jewish ritual murders of Christian children, lies that provoked the persecutions in Bulgarian towns such as Pazardjik in 1884, Vratza in 1890, Lom in 1903, and Kustendil in 1904.

In December 1940, Bulgaria’s National Assembly adopted the Defence of the Nation Act.

Inter-marriage between Jews and non-Jews was outlawed. Jews were banned from certain professions. Special taxes were levied. Jews had to submit a record of their family wealth. They were limited to residence in certain zones, and a 5pm curfew was imposed. There were confiscations of property and real estate. Adult men were barred from military service and were drafted to forced labour.

In January 1943, a commission was set up which confiscated almost all Jewish personal jewellery, bank notes, household silver, and any other valuables, depositing them under official seal in Bulgarian National Bank.

Jews were ordered to wear the Star of David. Given their faith that Bulgaria’s royal family, then headed by king Boris III, would back them up, some who wore the yellow star pinned next to it pictures of the king and of the royal family.

They were correct to believe that they had the support of Bulgaria’s king. While some modern historians accord him the role of hero in the saving of the Jews within Bulgaria, and others strongly dispute this, the main credit due to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, civil society, politicians such as Dimitar Peshev, and many ordinary Bulgarians.

Boris III had sent a message to the ninth Bulgarian Zionists’ Conference praising the country’s Jews as always having been good citizens. In June 1942, he accepted the congratulations sent to him by the Jewish Consistory on the occasion of the fifth birthday of his son, Simeon (later Prime Minister of Bulgaria) – an incident, among several others, that resulted in Nazi German officials in Bulgaria sending complaints to Berlin.

In April 1943, he officially told Berlin he would not consent to the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria, offering as an official reason that they were needed to build roads.

The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church sent an official letter to Boris, to the National Assembly, and to the Cabinet demanding that there be no deportations. Deputy Speaker Dimitar Peshev, supported by a large group of MPs from left and right of the political spectrum, attempted to pass legislation that would such deportations illegal.

Meanwhile, Bulgarian diplomats, against official orders, were issuing large numbers of transit visas to Jews elsewhere in Europe to enable them to reach Palestine.

[…]

Yet, for all the unquestionable heroism in the face of fascism, there was the collaboration in Jews from Greece and Macedonia being sent to die in places like Auschwitz and Treblinka – and sometimes en route, as in 1943 when some of the old river cruisers being used to transport Jews up the Danube capsized, causing the deaths of the incarcerated Jews.

Of this aspect, Professor Nissan Oren has written that since the Jews of these territories were never given Bulgarian citizenship, the Bulgarian government could not effectively oppose German pressure.

No doubt debate will continue of this period of Bulgaria’s history, because the final word has not been spoken, even if Bulgaria’s heroism has been acknowledged by some historians and by the Israeli government.

As quoted by Nick Kaltchev in an article on an international symposium in Sofia on who should be credited for saving the Jews in World War 2, one academic, responding to another who pointed out that the Jewish community had had to endure persecutions, humiliations and hardship, “You’re right. It was very hard. But I’m happy because we were spared. The other option was we to be sent to Poland and cremated. Had the king not done what he did, neither you nor I would be able to be here to argue!”

[For a very detailed account of the history of Jews in Bulgaria, please follow the article link above]

#Bulgarian Jews #Bulgaria during the Holocaust #original

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networkingdefinition · 5 years ago

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States Quotes

Official Website: States Quotes

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• A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi… has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for. – Thurgood Marshall • A sincere and steadfast co-operation in promoting such a reconstruction of our political system as would provide for the permanent liberty and happiness of the United States. – James Madison • A State would be happy where philosophers were kings, or kings philosophers. – Plato • After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the United States would enter, in a formal way, what had been up to that date strictly a European conflict. Marcus Garvey’s prophecy about the European scramble to maintain dominance over the whole world was now a reality. – John Henrik Clarke • All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. – Albert Camus • And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right one for your child, you’re as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here’s a voucher, go sign up. – Mitch Daniels • And I just think that we’re at a point in our economic life here in our state – and – and, candidly, across the country, where increased taxes is just the wrong way to go. The people of our state are not convinced that state government, county government, local government has done all they can with the money we already give them, rather than the money that we have… – Chris Christie • And I think musicians can better run this state than politicians. And, hell, beauticians can better run the state than politicians. – Kinky Friedman • Arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence. Not a pretty cocktail of personality traits in the best of situations. No sirree. Not a pretty cocktail in an office-mate and not a pretty cocktail in a head of state. In fact, in a leader, it’s a lethal cocktail. – Graydon Carter • As a state we are so uniquely positioned in so many ways. Our geography, our placement in the country, and our history positions us to be the state that propels energy efficiency as an industry. – Jennifer Granholm • As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states – no more, no less. – Noam Chomsky • As Commander in Chief of the United States Military, I will never send our sons and daughters and our brothers and sisters to die in a foreign land without telling the truth about why they’re going there. – Howard Dean • As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. – Arthur Conan Doyle • As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day. – Sloane Crosley • As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there. – John Donne • As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, – as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, – and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. – John Adams

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'State', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_state').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_state img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State. – Thomas Jefferson • Bravo can’t be responsible for the mental state of every single person that comes onto their network. – Bethenny Frankel • But I contend that if we’re providing total medical coverage for every man, woman, and child in Iraq, shouldn’t we at least be doing the same thing for every man, woman, and child in the United States? – Tony Campolo • But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state. – John le Carre • Canada and the United States are also working at the World Trade Organization and in our own hemisphere with negotiations for a Trade Area of the Americas to try to help countries create a positive climate for investment and trade. – Paul Cellucci • Character is the only secure foundation of the state. – Calvin Coolidge • Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity. – Rachel Cusk • Children today will grow up taking for granted that an African-American or a woman can, yes, become the president of the United States. – Hillary Clinton • Church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact – religion and politics should not be mingled. – Millard Fillmore • Close alliances with despots are never safe for free states. – Demosthenes • Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. – Winston Churchill • Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It’s so different but it’s so similar to the United States, to Miami. It’s like a doppelgaenger. It’s the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans. – Henry Louis Gates • Death is not natural for a state as it is for a human being, for whom death is not only necessary, but frequently even desirable. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep. – Quentin Crisp • Deep down, the Iraqi people want the United States out. And their self-determination should be respected. – Peter Camejo • Delaware State has established itself as an institution of excellence in its own right and attracts a diversity of students from various races, socio-economic status and locations. – Michael N. Castle • Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus’ psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state. – Umberto Eco • During my travels in Iraq, Israel, Gaza, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Europe and all over the United States, I have seen and heard the voices of people who want change. They want the stabilization of the economy, education and healthcare for all, renewable energy and an environmental vision with an eye on generations to come. – Michael Franti • Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion. – Thomas Jefferson • Even when I’m in quite a happy state of mind, I like writing really sad songs. I think a lot of people do. – Ellie Goulding • Ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way, including George Bush senior, Gerald Ford, and others including myself and Bill Clinton. – Jimmy Carter • Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn’t. – Arthur Eddington • Every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents. – Thomas Jefferson • Far less wealthy industrialized countries have committed to end child poverty, while the United States is sliding backwards. We can do better. We must demand that our leaders do better. – Marian Wright Edelman • Flipping the dial through available radio stations there will blare out to any listener an array of broadcasts, 24/7, propagating Religious Right politics, along with what they deem to be “old-time gospel preaching.” This is especially true of what comes over the airwaves in Bible Belt southern states. – Tony Campolo • For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium. – Albert Camus • For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence. – Friedrich Durrenmatt • For ‘Power of 10,’ you can look at the methodology at CBS.com, it’s a company called Rasmussen Reports. We poll thousands and thousands of people for each question, a real cross section of the United States. – Drew Carey • Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It’s agriculture. It’s golf courses. It’s domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf. – Sylvia Earle • I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America. – Al Gore • I am an opponent of Saddam Hussein, but an opponent also, of the sanctions that have killed a million Iraqi children and an opponent of the United States’ apparent desire to plunge the Middle East into a new and devastating war. – George Galloway • I am neither frustrated nor planning anything other than being the best Secretary of State I could be. – Hillary Clinton • I am tolerant of all creeds. Yet if any sect suffered itself to be used for political objects I would meet it by political opposition. In my view church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact. Religion and politics should not be mingled. – Millard Fillmore • I beg you to speak of Woman as you do of the Negro, speak of her as a human being, as a citizen of the United States, as a half of the people in whose hands lies the destiny of this Nation. – Susan B. Anthony • I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute – where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote – where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference – and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. – John F. Kennedy • I believe in the absolute separation of church and state and in the strict enforcement of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. – Al Smith • I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. By my office – and by personal conviction – I am sworn to uphold that tradition. – Lyndon B. Johnson • I believe in the separation of church and state and would not use my authority to violate this principle in any way. – Jimmy Carter • I believed what my father taught me about the separation of church and state, so when I was President I never invited Billy Graham to have services in the White House because I didn’t think that was appropriate. He was injured a little bit, until I explained it to him. – Jimmy Carter • I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. – Barack Obama • I contend that Bush would be a lot more moderate if there weren’t some fundamentalists breathing down his neck every time he wants to establish the state of Israel, every time he wants to do justice for the Palestinian people. – Tony Campolo • I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli. – George H. W. Bush • I do think voters do take into consideration – particularly early state voters – take into consideration a wide range of factors, including electability, and they know that part of electability is the total package that you’re presenting. – Elizabeth Edwards • I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. – Rick Santorum • I don’t have any affirmations, I don’t have any of that stuff. My natural state is to look at things as possibilities and as opportunities. – Michael J. Fox • I don’t think anyone really is interested in reading about my emotional state. It’s not even interesting to me. – Larry David • I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti. – Henry Louis Gates • I grew up in Danville, Illinois, right in the middle of the state. – Dick Van Dyke • I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late ’40’s and early ’50’s was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival. – Angela Davis • I have lived in the United States for half of my life, my entire adult life. – Sheena Easton • I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I’m getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I’m just trying not to get into that sort of state again. – Stephen Fry • I have walked majestically with kings and queens and presidents and other heads of states. – John Henrik Clarke • I mean, what’s great about touring is that’s what you do. You’re in a constant state of motion and then you stop to do a show and you move onto the next city. All you have to do is do the show. That’s the only responsibility that you have. – Margaret Cho • I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief. – Fidel Castro • I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection… and finally, that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacifick temper of the mind, which were the characteristicks of the divine Author of our blessed religion ; without an humble imitation of whose example, in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation. – George Washington • I said we are going to balance an $11 billion budget deficit in a $29 billion budget, so by percentage, the largest budget deficit in America, by percentage, larger than California, larger than New York, larger than Illinois. And we’re going to balance that without raising taxes on the people of the state of New Jersey. – Chris Christie • I started this charity, Fashion for Relief, in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina happened. New Orleans was actually the first place I visited in the United States. It was one of my first big jobs, a shoot for British Elle. It was April 14, 1986. – Naomi Campbell • I think Hell exists on Earth. It’s a psychological state, or it can be a physical state. People who have severe mental illness are in Hell. People who have lost a loved one are in Hell. I think there are all kinds of different hells. It’s not a place you go to after you die. – Al Franken • I think it’s fair to say that diplomacy today requires much more of that if you’re the United States of America than it did 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. – Hillary Clinton • I think the time has come for the United States to do even-handed justice. – Tony Campolo • I think the United States and the secretary of State should be concerned about the poverty in this country – people without health insurance. The United States should stop being the empire and be concerned about other countries. You’ve got to be more worried about your own people. – Hugo Chavez • I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don’t think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths. – Jimmy Carter • I want to make it clear that the black race did not come to the United States culturally empty-handed. The role and importance of ethnic history is in how well it teaches a people to use their own talents, take pride in their own history and love their own memories. – John Henrik Clarke • I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country’s imperialist pretensions. – Hugo Chavez • If anybody ran a business like that they would be out of business quickly, and Barack Obama’s leadership is driving this business, the United States of America, toward a fiscal cliff. – Chris Christie • If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice. – Alan Dershowitz • Illegal immigration continues to be a major problem in the United States. We have people waiting to come here legally. And we should not be rewarding people who have come here illegally. – John Barrasso • I’m in charge of the State Department’s 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts. – Hillary Clinton • I’m President of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli! – George H. W. Bush • In 1988, as an unknown candidate, totally unknown, I won Iowa, came in second in New Hampshire, won South Dakota. I was ahead in every Super Tuesday state the day after South Dakota. The only problem was I didn’t have enough money. I had a million dollars left, and Al Gore had three and Michael Dukakis had three and it was lights out. – Dick Gephardt • In fact, looking at the darkest sides of the United States has only made me appreciate the things that we do right, the things that we do beautifully. We are, for all of our mistakes and all of our crimes, a remarkable place. – Junot Diaz • In his years in Washington, Senator Kerry has been one vote of a hundred in the United States Senate – and fortunately on matters of national security, he was very often in the minority. – Dick Cheney • In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. – Noam Chomsky • In short, it is the position of the people of the United States, as expressed by their representatives in Congress, that Israel’s fight is our fight. And so shall it be until the last terrorist on earth is in a cell or a cemetery. – Tom DeLay • In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497. – Warren Buffett • In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that’s international terror, and we can go on and on. – Noam Chomsky • In the United States, the government is bailing out banks, intervening in the economy, yet in Latin America, the Right continues to talk about ‘free markets.’ It’s totally outdated; they don’t have arguments; they don’t have any sense. – Hugo Chavez • In the United States, the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans. – John Henrik Clarke • In the United States, there is a restaurant called The Outback Steakhouse, and I could survive in there for several weeks at least, sustaining myself on bloomin’ onions and, I’m sure, their legitimate and very Australian cuisine. In the real Outback? I give myself about 14 minutes. – Steve Carell • In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes. – John Kenneth Galbraith • Isil poses a threat to the people of Iraq and Syria, and the broader Middle East – including American citizens, personnel and facilities. If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States. – Barack Obama • It is not a question of religion, or of creed, or of party; it is a question of declaring and maintaining the great American principle of eternal separation between Church and State. – Elihu Root • It is not differences of opinion; it is geographical lines, rivers, and mountains which divide State from State, and make different nations of mankind. – Jefferson Davis • It used to be you needed to have a very large sophisticated state before you could even have a nuclear weapon… Now the technology is widespread enough. It doesn’t take very many people to be able to cobble together a devastating attack, and all it takes is one. – Dick Cheney • It was one of the compromises of the Constitution that the slave property in the Southern States should be recognized as property throughout the United States. – Jefferson Davis • It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state. – John Kenneth Galbraith • It’s sort of well-known that anytime any catastrophe happens anywhere in the world, they can count on the United States for help. – Morgan Freeman • It’s time for the people of the Empire State to strike back. – Andrew Cuomo • I’ve been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now and I never get tired of the view. – Steve Earle • I’ve been to all 50 states, and traveled this whole country, and 90 percent of the people are good folks. The rest of them take after the other side of the family. – Jeff Foxworthy • I’ve used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I’ve still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth. – Jimmy Carter • I’ve written important articles on prevention, on the concept of the preventive state, how the law is moving much more in an area of trying to prevent wrongs than trying to deal with them after they occur. That will be my academic/intellectual legacy. – Alan Dershowitz • I’ve, we have in this state, like many other states, we’re experiencing an enormous budget deficit that we’re trying to grapple with. But we will have progress despite the deficits. – Jennifer Granholm • Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate. – Ulysses S. Grant • Let us not say that we will decide on a political basis at the national level that no State is competent to regulate the practice of medicine in that State if they decide to allow a doctor to prescribe marijuana, because that is what we are talking about. – Barney Frank • Let’s make two things clear: Isil is not “Islamic.” No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of Isil’s victims have been Muslim. And Isil is certainly not a state. – Barack Obama • Marriage is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which one is most likely to find solid happiness. – Benjamin Franklin • Marriage should be viewed as an institution ordained by God and should be out of the control of the state. – Tony Campolo • May peace rule the universe, may peace rule in kingdoms and empires, may peace rule in states and in the lands of the potentates, may peace rule in the house of friends and may peace also rule in the house of enemies. – Virchand Gandhi • Most governments in the United States in a hundred years have not respected the peoples of Latin America. They have sponsored coup d’etats, assassinations. – Hugo Chavez • Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America. And then it goes back to slavery. And I’m sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I’m a black man in America. – Herman Cain • My experiences in film and theatre in the States have been much more rigorous-in England there’s an environment of, Let’s try this. – Kim Cattrall • My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn’t work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious. – Fidel Castro • My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom. – Angela Davis • Nevada’s one of the most conservative states in the Union, but you can do what you want in Vegas and nobody judges you. – Drew Carey • Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies. – Don DeLillo • New Jersey is to New York what Santo Domingo is to the United States. I always felt that those two landscapes, not only just the landscapes themselves but their relationships to what we would call ‘a center’ or ‘the center of the universe,’ has in some ways defined my artistic and critical vision. – Junot Diaz • New York State is upside down and backwards; high taxes and low performance. The New York State government was at one time a national model. Now, unfortunately, it’s a national disgrace. Sometimes, the corruption in Albany could even make Boss Tweed blush. – Andrew Cuomo • No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith. – Anton Chekhov • No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. – James Madison • Now, in New Jersey, we have more government workers per square mile than any state in America. But since I’ve been governor we now have fewer people on the state payroll at any time since Christie Whitman left office in January 2001. That’s the right direction, Mr. President, not the wrong direction. – Chris Christie • Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn’t just by conquest. It’s through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants. – Amy Chua • One doesn’t become a soldier in a week – it takes training, study and discipline. There is no question that the finest Army in the world is found in the United States. – Daniel Inouye • One of my goals upon becoming Secretary of State was to take diplomacy out of capitals, out of government offices, into the media, into the streets of countries. – Hillary Clinton • One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies. – Terry Eagleton • One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits – a total of $3.8m on a $120,000 investment. – Chris Christie • Our brave soldiers and support personnel are engaged in a battle as important as any the United States has ever before waged, for the success of democracy in Iraq is a crucial test of the ideals this Nation was founded upon. – Virginia Foxx • Our educational results lag behind other states, and other nations, but worse still, behind the potential of the kids and the devoted teachers in our classrooms. – Mitch Daniels • Our forces saved the remnants of the Jewish people of Europe for a new life and a new hope in the reborn land of Israel. Along with all men of good will, I salute the young state and wish it well. – Dwight D. Eisenhower • Our state is in crisis. Our people are hurting. Now is the time when we all must resist the traditional, selfish call to protect your own turf at the cost of our state. It is time to leave the corner, join the sacrifice, come to the center of the room and be part of the solution. – Chris Christie • Raising the debt ceiling is not additional spending. It is simply saying, you, the United States of America, can continue to borrow the money you need to pay the bills you have already rung up. – Jay Carney • Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image. – Charles Dickens • Slavery existed before the formation of this Union. It derived from the Constitution that recognition which it would not have enjoyed without the confederation. If the States had not united together, there would have been no obligation on adjoining States to regard any species of property unknown to themselves. – Jefferson Davis • Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. – William Shakespeare • State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome. – Noam Chomsky • States are not moral agents. – Noam Chomsky • Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history. – James Madison • Surveillance technologies now available – including the monitoring of virtually all digital information – have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place. – Al Gore • Thank God, under our Constitution there was no connection between church and state. – James K. Polk • Thank God, under our Constitution there was no connection between Church and State, and that in my action as President of the United States I recognized no distinction of creeds in my appointments office. – James K. Polk • The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. – Hugo Black • The ‘anti-globalisation movement’ is the most significant proponent of globalisation – but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power. – Noam Chomsky • The civil Government, though bereft of every thing like an associated hierarchy, possesses the requisite stability, and performs its functions with complete success; whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the Priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the State. – James Madison • The Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. – Samuel Adams • The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity. – Henry Clay • The Declaration of Independence says when government fails, the people have the right to replace it. Well, New York State government has failed and the people have the right, indeed the people have the the people have the obligation, to act. – Andrew Cuomo • The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community. – James A. Garfield • The divorce between church and state should be absolute. – James A. Garfield • The Drafters of the Constitution were intent on avoiding more than 100 years of religious intolerance and persecution in American colonial history and an even longer heritage of church-state problems in Europe. – John M Swomley • The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It’s been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going. – Al Gore • The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is. – Dick Cheney • The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state. – John Kenneth Galbraith • The Israeli military plays more than a critical role in defending the citizens of the Jewish state. It also plays an important social, scientific and psychological role in preparing its young citizens for the challenging task of being Israelis in a difficult world. – Alan Dershowitz • The most powerful recent innovation in government is when states aggressively use community colleges for retraining. In Michigan, where large numbers of workers were displaced from the manufacturing industry, we created a wildly successful program: No Worker Left Behind. – Jennifer Granholm • The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state. – James Madison • The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again. – Henry Louis Gates • The only tactic liberals have is to try to intimidate people into thinking that the Tea Party is racist. The Tea Party is not a racist movement, period! If it were, why would the straw polls keep showing that the black guy is winning? That’s a rhetorical question. Let me state it: The black guy keeps winning. – Herman Cain • The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer…form the great body of the people of the United States they are the bone and sinew of the country men who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws. – Andrew Jackson • The political system is broken, the economy is broken and so is society. That is why people are so depressed about the state of our country. – David Cameron • The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that’s not equity, it’s just creating a society where you can’t ask anything of people. – Jacques Delors • The problem with touring isn’t the traveling and the shows, it’s the vegetal state you get into. – Julian Casablancas • The question is what will Mitt Romney do as president if his policy is simply to be hands off and let the government be made so small it can be drowned in a bathtub. In the 21st century global economy, no state alone has the ability to compete against China. – Jennifer Granholm • The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion. – Jonathan Swift • The separation of church and state is extremely important to any of us who holds to the original traditions of our nation. . . . To change these traditions . . . would be harmful to our whole attitude of tolerance in the religious area. If we look at situations which have arisen in the past in Europe and other world areas, I think we will see the reason why it is wise to hold to our early traditions. – Eleanor Roosevelt • The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction. – Susan George • The time has come to return integrity, performance and dignity to New York and make it the Empire State once again. – Andrew Cuomo • The Union next to our liberties the most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States, and distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union. – John C. Calhoun • The United States and the freedom for which it stands, the freedom for which they died, must endure and prosper. Their lives remind us that freedom is not bought cheaply. It has a cost; it imposes a burden. And just as they whom we commemorate were willing to sacrifice, so too must we – in a less final, less heroic way – be willing to give of ourselves. – Ronald Reagan • The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written. – Franklin D. Roosevelt • The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian and Caribbean history of the United States. – Carlos Fuentes • The United States needed a civil war to unite properly. – Umberto Eco • The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes. – Dick Cheney • The way I see it, I’m not going to Washington to be the 60th Democratic senator. I’m going to Washington to be the second senator from the state of Minnesota. – Al Franken • There are 10,000 local governments in the state of New York. Ten thousand! Town, village, lighting district, water district, sewer district, a special district to count the other districts in case you missed a district. – Andrew Cuomo • There is a hunger for the United States to be present again. – Hillary Clinton • There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America. – Otto von Bismarck • There’s every reason to believe there will be further attacks attempted against the United States. For us to spend so much time patting ourselves on the back because we got bin Laden that we miss the next attack would be a terrible tragedy. – Dick Cheney • There’s no doubt that the Christian right has gone to bed with the more conservative elements of the Republican Party. And there’s been a melding in their goals when it comes to the separation of church and state. I’ve always believed in the separation of church and state. – Jimmy Carter • There’s something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow. – Roger Ebert • To deny women directors, as I suspect is happening in the States, is to deny the feminine vision. – Jane Campion • To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States. – George W. Bush • Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal. – Friedrich Durrenmatt • Unfenced by law, the unmarried lover can quit a bad relationship at any time. But you – the legally married person who wants to escape doomed love – may soon discover that a significant portion of your marriage contract belongs to the State, and that it sometimes takes a very long while for the State to grant you your leave. – Elizabeth Gilbert • War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means. – Carl von Clausewitz • We believe in a flexible union of free member states who share treaties and institutions and pursue together the ideal of co-operation. To represent and promote the values of European civilisation in the world. To advance our shared interests by using our collective power to open markets. And to build a strong economic base across the whole of Europe. – David Cameron • We don’t have an Official Secrets Act in the United States, as other countries do. Under the First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of association are more important than protecting secrets. – Alan Dershowitz • We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart. In this enlightened Age and in this Land of equal liberty it is our boast, that a man’s religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States. – George Washington • We Hoosiers hold to some quaint notions. Some might say we ‘cling’ to them, though not out of fear or ignorance. We believe in paying our bills. We have kept our state in the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting rather than raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual – we spend less money than we take in. – Mitch Daniels • We in the United States should be all the more thankful for the freedom and religious tolerance we enjoy. And we should always remember the lessons learned from the Holocaust, in hopes we stay vigilant against such inhumanity now and in the future. – Charlie Dent • We must make it clear that a platform of ‘I hate gay men and women’ is not a way to become president of the United States. – Jimmy Carter • We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. – Gouverneur Morris • We were trying to get all of the planes down out of the sky. And we watched as the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed – something no one expected and anticipated. And you could sit there and see and be aware that thousands of people were at that moment being killed as a result of the terrorist attacks that struck the United States. – Dick Cheney • We’ve gotten a long way on missile defense. We know how to do it. We know how to take down incoming warheads, but we need to do a lot more work in order to be – to deploy a system that’ll defend the United States against those kinds of limited strikes that might be possible by a nuclear armed North Korea or Iran. – Dick Cheney • What I found when I became Secretary of State was a lot of doubts and a lot of concerns and fears from friends, allies, around the world. – Hillary Clinton • What the United States has to do is send a clear message to Iran that they will not be able to develop nuclear weapons. Why endure the difficulty of sanctions if they are not going to be able to develop nuclear weapons anyway? – Alan Dershowitz • When a population saves a lot, the funds are invested outside the country as well as inside. If the Japanese invest in the United States, it pushes their exchange rate down and makes their manufacturing more competitive. – Evan Davis • When I decide who to vote for as President, I ask myself who will be best for America and for the world. An important component of my answer involves my assessment of the candidate’s willingness and ability to protect Israel’s security, since I strongly believe that a strong Israel serves the interests of the United States and of world peace. – Alan Dershowitz • When Marcus Garvey died in 1940, the role of the British Empire was already being challenged by India and the rising expectations of her African colonies. Marcus Garvey’s avocation of African redemption and the restoration of the African state’s sovereign political entity in world affairs was still a dream without fulfillment. – John Henrik Clarke • When you listen to Christian radio stations – and there are thousands of them now in the United States – and when you listen to Christian television networks – and there are thousands of Christian television shows across the country – they are all politically right. – Tony Campolo • Why should a city be mandated to do something by the federal government or state government without the money to do it? – Richard M. Daley • Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan… We will gain the inevitable triumph so help us God. – Franklin D. Roosevelt • You can go into neighborhoods in the United States where people dress a certain way because they don’t want to be out of touch, where boys wear pants down to their knees, which nobody has compelled them to do but they pick up the cultural norms, or where girls are improperly dressed by my eyes, but that’s what they see in the media. – Hillary Clinton • You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life. – Bob Dylan • You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too. – John Kenneth Galbraith [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

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equitiesstocks · 5 years ago

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States Quotes

Official Website: States Quotes

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clubofinfo · 7 years ago

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Expert: You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. ‘What a helpful race of beings,’ a Martian would say. Don’t you think so? ― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist, April 2002 Respite. Oregon Coast. Tidepools, grey whales, seals and sea lions, puffins and eagles, riotous rookeries and crashing tides, Milky Way and bioluminescence. One large emotional palette from which to paint new images, and to recharge batteries, reset some clocks, and reflect. Yet, how can a thoughtful person go minutes or hours or days with a blank mind, or into some levitating meditative state without all those deaths by a thousand cuts eating at the conscience? Death by a thousand laws, by a thousand penalties, by a thousand codes/regulations/permits; death by a thousand fines/levies/fees; death by a thousand firings/sackings/diminishments of our collective humanity. Death by a thousand tons of toxins in our community’s air, water, soil, education system, legal framework, urban planning. Death by a thousand seconds of celebrity culture, insane fake news, mauling media, lecherous lawyers, junkyard scientists, medical malpractitioners. Death by a thousand broken treaties, broken laws for the One Percent, broken promises, broken bureaucracies. How can you not wake up, look in the mirror, and be angry? Really angry at the state of the world, at the state of inequities, at the state of billionaires capturing our souls by the gigabytes to the 1,000th power, billionaires foreclosing on our jobs, our schools, our communities, our safety, health, sanity? John Trudell said a lot about that, waking up angry every single day . . . decrying what whites like to think are the great civilizers of the world (themselves) – what whites think western civilization is: The great lie is that it is civilization. It’s not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That’s the great lie, is that it represents civilization. — John Trudell Think about it: going into tourist space has more curves and dangerous cliffs to negotiate than being in the mix 24/7. The mix, man: fighting for homeless, fighting for the drug addicted, fighting for students, fighting for our people’s health, fighting for clean air, water, soil, money. With each overfed, overpaid/-paying, overly obnoxious and arrogant tourist, with every 30-foot RV with Lexus SUV in-tow, with every Indian Pale Ale microbrewery pitcher consumed and mountain of fried clams gobbled up, well, reflection isn’t just looking at Ursula Minor and Major as the tide goes out and the Dungeness crabs come in. Reflection is seeing the human species as a cancer. Self-centered, violent, believing there is a dung heap for the rest of the scum and a golden city for the vaunted, valued, human. More specifically, here’s sentiments from Susan Sontag, not to be taken lightly: If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. … The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. Scheme of things, the scale of the glass half full or glass half empty. The hierarchy of needs, and the implosion of those who have and those who do not. Peter Principle of the most incompetent, the most ethically challenged, the most philistine, the most ignorant, the most self-aggrandizing, the most murderous and sociopathic, rising to the top – in governments, parliaments, boardrooms, corporations, militaries, schools, hospitals . . . et al. A Pacific Coast that was once sane and peopled by Salish Tribes, now one with pink-skinned folks like Gremlins scurrying about to stake out more retail space, more consumer opportunities, more territory yanked from anything left in a fractured “natural world.” Five days of being on the coast, and it was all white people looking for saltwater taffy and goofy expensive humpback whale blown glass monstrosities. Unending kitschy stuff while the Anglo Saxon/Caucasian minds funnel through moving lips to purge out strings of commentary that are insipid, childish, all bundled up in the “where are we going to eat breakfast next and then find a nice seaside table to sip that Pinot while we stay comforted in our great white world?” Not an African-American, Black, Indian, Native American in sight. The smartest things in the air out here along the Oregon Coast are the corvids and thousands upon thousands of sea birds, falcons, bald eagles and osprey. It certainly isn’t the thoughts, words and actions of humanity here, from Newport south all the way to Golden Beach. We are talking about unending caravans of motor homes with full-sized SUVs in tow, the other traffic feeding a crisscross onto summer home beaches, some of them two-month-stay homes, and a lot of real estate for sale, properties moving from one hand to the next and a world of tourists devoid of color. It’s five days, and no Mexican-American families, no African-American families. It’s as if the US of A is that alt right David Duke land of the white Christian. Disconcerting, being out here for a respite for myself and my significant other. Tough jobs both of us manage back in Portland, and the getting away from the woods and rivers where we live and work, to the Oregon Coast is a deserving break. But, again, bizarre, really, the lack of diversity as if the USA, with 335 million citizens, is not about to largely (percentage wise) transform into a country of non-white-Germanic-Anglo people. State of the mind of white Americans tied to their whiteness, their Crypto Christian/Crypto Zionist earth razing and financialization schemes to corner everything we do, see, hope for, dream of, create, think of, believe in, live for, die for, hold dear, propagate as a market, it’s a sickness sent out to all corners of the world through the London School of Economics-Oxford-Yale-Stanford-Yeshiva type of recruiting as slick and effective as any School of the Americas or West Point! Trump is Obama is Clinton is Bush is Andrew Jackson is Nixon is Roosevelt is Washington. Whiteness is the key to civilization, even with our one outwardly mixed-race CEO. He excels as a man of white civilizers holding the key to final subjugation. Obama, who is like a Stepford Son! But let’s pause on the sheer demographics and exponentiality of the globe’s racial make-up coming onto the 8 or 9 billion mark: One demographer, who didn’t want to be named for fear of being called racist, said: ‘It’s a matter of pure arithmetic that, if nothing else happens, non-Europeans will become a majority and whites a minority in the UK. That would probably be the first time an indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority in its historic homeland.’ Lee Jasper, race relations adviser to the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, predicted a similar future, telling The Observer : ‘Where America goes, Europe follows 30 years later. There is a potential for whites to become a minority in some European countries.’ In Europe, with its 40,000-year-old indigenous white population, the rise of a non-white majority may not be greeted with such equanimity. In the United Kingdom, the number of people from ethnic minorities has risen from a few tens of thousands in 1950 to more than 3 million now. In Italy, the birth rate is so low that, without immigration, the population is predicted to decline by 16 million by 2050. The United States government predicts that non-hispanic whites will become a minority in the country by 2055. The United Nations predicts that 98 per cent of world population growth until 2025 will be in developing nations. The population of Europe is expected to drop from 25 per cent of the world total in 1900 to 7 per cent in the next 50 years. — Anthony Browne, The Last Days of a White World, Guardian, September 3, 2000. No matter how quickly the demographics shift in the US of A, correcting and redressing the past biggest injustices of Native American genocide by the white economists, bankers, clerics, militaries, serfs into this country will never happen. First Nations aboriginal peoples used to have this land to themselves. But now, less than one percent of the population they teeter on complete historical banishment, as the largest growth groups are among Latinos (largely derived from Spain), and Asians, (largely from China and the Philippines). This state of the world a la Oregon Coast is a state of people not able to get under the skin of how messed up the country is, has been and is continually going. No large conversations about those things, even the ones who adore and lust after Trump, they just move along in a world of retail relationships, one where the food is talked about while eating it, where the weather is detailed beyond absurdity, and where no serious talk about our collective and individual pain ever unfolds. Whites are lobotomized by debt, depression, deceit, emasculation, Hollywood, F-U Book, the Billionaire Mile High Club of Data Dealers, overeating/under-nutrition, delusions, and dreams of a UFO End Times or New Times. I attempt to gauge how illiterate folks are along the coast, looking at stuff in museums, people trying to understand the scheme of 70 percent of the globe’s surface (oceans) on all life, and their attempts at trying to understand the clouds above and the winds below. The corporations-TV-jefes have done a very good job, alongside the schools, media, ignorant politicians, and celebrities, AND scientists, of denuding the western mind of anything real or pressing, anything resembling a solution to the unfolding ills of climate warming, oceans rising, resources dwindling, bodies toxifying, communities eroding. This vast Pacific Coast is, of course, under the gun as acidification of the waters around Oregon is ramping up due to all sorts of upwellings, smokestack-tailpipe spewings. Species are collapsing. More people are moving into the tsunami belt here, and more woods/forests are being clear cut. More cars, more CO2 pushed out of internal combustion machines and burning of other fossil fuels all the way up the Industrial Age chain our factory technology 12,000 miles away from Depoe Bay. This is a big thing, ocean acidification, and the Oregon Coast is sort of the testing ground for the rest of the world tied to this double-headed monster – climate changing (warming) and ocean acidification. The Surfrider Foundation is working hard on this project to understand how Oregon’s coast will be affected by lower PH levels. Take a look at this amazing web site and organization, a coalescing of forces that very few tourists and locals alike know even little about. Here, the news not fit to broadcast or turn into a Netflix drama (sic): Canary in the Coal Mine Whiskey Creek Hatchery became the ‘Canary in the Coalmine’ for Oregon’s shellfish industry in 2007 when their oyster larvae experienced a massive die off. Scientists determined that the lower pH of the seawater they were pumping in from Netarts Bay was preventing the larvae from growing their shells. On a map of Oregon, find the coastal town of Newport. Draw a straight line directly west, perfectly perpendicular to the coast, out into the mighty Pacific 200 nautical miles from the blinking beacon of the Yaquina Head lighthouse. You’ve just sketched the Newport Hydrographic Line. Nearly everything we know about the function of Oregon’s coastal ocean ecosystem has been learned from samples collected at these stations between 1961 and … well, last week. The technology used along the Newport Line has evolved with the times. Since 2006, autonomous underwater gliders (the first two were named “Bob” and “Jane” after Bob Smith and Jane Huyer) have been patrolling it 24/7. At this very moment, two gliders resembling small yellow missiles are swimming their lonely way, diving and surfacing in an undulating path, collecting data on temperature, salinity, water clarity, ocean currents and more. These remarkable instruments transmit about 10 percent of their data as they “fly,” communicating via satellite when they surface. When a battery gets low, the glider surfaces and calls home. Scientists retrieve it from a boat, switch the battery out for a fully charged replacement, download the full data set and release it. The gliders can be monitored and even controlled via a smart phone app. Initially, studies along the Newport Line focused on physics — currents, temperatures and winds — in order to understand and characterize the most important oceanographic phenomenon in the region: wind-driven coastal upwelling. This process underlies nearly everything else that happens in Oregon’s ocean, from the flourishing fisheries to the presence of gray whales to the low-oxygen conditions and ocean acidification that have been in the news in recent years. In a nutshell, summer winds blowing from the north push surface water to the west and drive the conveyor belt of deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters into the coastal zone, fueling the Northwest’s food webs. Sometimes called “climate change’s evil twin,” a phrase coined by Oregon State’s Jane Lubchenco, ocean acidification is an insidious and unseen effect of rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere. The oceans have always absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere, but as levels of the greenhouse gas have climbed, primarily the result of fossil fuel burning, the oceans have taken in ever-higher amounts, leading to shifts in ocean chemistry. Organisms from oysters to corals are considered sensitive. Over the past 200 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, average ocean-wide pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1. That may not sound like much, but on the pH scale, it amounts to a nearly 30 percent increase in acidity. Other researchers have found that highly acidified water can cause calcium shells made or used by many marine creatures to be harder to build or to dissolve. The net effects may be felt up and down the food chain. Animals in the intertidal and near-shore zones, including economically important species such as oysters and crabs, may be at risk. ‘The ocean may look the same, but the water is changing, especially on the Oregon coast,’ says Chan. Here’s why the Oregon coast is particularly vulnerable to acidification and thus an important place to study ocean chemistry. A Deep-Ocean Conveyor Belt The summer sun can warm your face, and the air can feel hot, but if you’ve ever been swimming along the Oregon coast, you know how cold the water can get. It gets especially chilly when north winds blow and push warmer surface water to the west. In its place, currents from deep in the ocean rise along our beaches and bays to replace it. This water — delivered by a process that scientists call upwelling — isn’t just colder; it also carries more nutrients that can fuel ocean life. On the downside, it has less oxygen and tends to be acidified. Like the proverbial slow boat to China, it can take decades for deep ocean currents to travel to the West Coast. When it last touched the atmosphere at the start of its journey, CO2 levels were lower than they are today. In the future, the water upwelling along our coast will carry the memory of the annual increases in CO2. Okay, so I cut and paste a lot here, but again, what are those crab cake bakes and flounder fries really about here along Oregon’s coastal water, which mostly originates in the North Pacific off Japan? Answer: Two cold, deep-water currents, one of which takes a decade to reach Oregon, while the second current brings those waters to the Oregon coast in about 50 years as it follows amazingly serpentine routes around the globe. Now, here’s the physics and chemistry we don’t talk about when eating our dill-infused, olive tampenade-drenched salmon — cold water holds higher concentrations of CO2 than warmer water, so these circuitous currents start off with increased CO2 levels. Then while making their slow flow toward the U.S. West Coast, the biological activity by organisms living in that water layer — zooplankton, phytoplankton and other microorganisms — constantly generates CO2 until, by the time the ocean conveyor belt of water rises to the surface off the Oregon coast, its CO2 level has increased greatly. Then, as the water is exposed to our atmosphere after decades in the depths of the mother ocean, even more of the greenhouse gas gets absorbed. This is something most Americans can’t-won’t-don’t grasp – chemical changes caused by engines of biomechanics of currents, air, and pollution. Okay-okay, not all tourists get into this level of science and deeper looks at how messed up the world is because of the Corporate Line and Power (One Percent) and the Collective Delusion of their Compliant Consumers (us). But truly, how can people in 2018 NOT go through the thought process of considering each and every bite we take, each mile we drive, each foot of earth we walk onto, each inch of clothing we buy, every trinket and every product we consume as part of the big picture? That little oyster stand in Newport has its intended and unintended consequences already built in, all that embedded energy to get to the oysters (metal in the ships harvested in mines/smelted/galvanized; then fossil fuel dug up and piped in to propel those ships to sea); to harvest the bivalves, then to haul them back, and next to process, package and ship them out, and, finally, to attract people from all parts of the West Coast to consume them. Yes, our own trip to get there and each nibble we make with the squeeze of a lemon, well, the footprint of Homo Sapiens-Consumo-Retailpithecus is dramatic. We are talking about those shellfish, now vulnerable to ocean acidification, all that fossil fuel to propel humans to the parking lot and propel foreign made utensils and plates and equipment to the little archetypal oyster shack, in Oregon, well, consequences are being laid out as I write this on the Cloud. In a world where everything is a retail transaction, where no thought of how the stuff we stuff into our mouths got from farm to fork is expended, it’s no surprise we are cooked intellectually and as communities of me-myself-and-I cancers. Then, more onion peel pulled back: who are these owners of these small businesses in these small towns on the Oregon Coast? Do they care about the world, or their little zone, little hamlets or beach towns? Do they care about the rampant poverty, the growth of shaky families aging in place, in the death spiral of education and decent ways to be, to be human, in small style, while living in a world of entertaining ourselves to death and make-believe idealism and ideals tied to the rich and the famous or notorious? Do they care Portland is filled with houseless people, homeless veterans, youth living on couches under an average of $80K in college debt, people like me working our tails off for the underpay the non-profit world of social services spreads like disease across the land? And that’s not just Portland, but Every Town USA. Do they care about fence line communities in Houston or the lead in water in Flint or the lack of electricity in Puerto Rico six months after a hurricane? Do they care about words having universal meaning, or the poetry in being versus consuming, or the truths of human kind, or the lessons in evolving history, or the potentiality of real revolution, or the bigger power of changing him-or-her-self into a giver, no longer a taker, or being part of the smaller and bigger solution, while still grappling with their privilege, and then finally seeing the future of seven generations out being more important now than ever before? Respite. Observation. A poem. Sanity: Contemplating Nine Crows Jumping Mid-Air for Our Trail Mix near Yachats, Oregon on the eve of partner’s 48th birthday something about cobalt tips, wings the black of eclipse birds smarter than parking lot humanity tricksters, crowing along faded lines jumping, leaping, barely flapping corvid line of avian harmonizing with wind people looking into ocean sky we asked crows into our lives two of us tired of heavy hearts, our own species cancers, riotous Homo sapiens, like the cracks of coast cliffs beaches we surmount hoping gulls congregate we never know when light from animal brother inches into our hearts never know when whimsy follows us into memory, love how coal black birds possess mental might through tricks, we can’t stop thinking birds, smarter than human race, the Oregon Pacific in the background creek emptying into swells we find harbor momentarily comics like Charlie Chaplin waddling, marching, the grip of their sky, somehow transformed into our world too http://clubof.info/

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