I remember one time I was with a friend of mine who lives in New York also, and we went to go pick up his cousin — she’s lived on a farm in New Hampshire her whole life. Her family is this weird family that kept their kids on a farm — anyway, her parents finally died, so she got to leave, and so she came down to visit her cousin, my friend in the city, and so we picked her up at port authority bus station.
She had never been to any city before. And we’re picking her up at the Port Authority, that smelly hole of a place. We pick her up there and she’s just freaking out at New York. She’s never seen anything like it. And we pass this homeless guy and she sees him — I mean, we all passed him, but she saw him. She’s the only one who actually saw him. We didn’t — me and her cousin were like, “So? He’s supposed to be there. So what? There’s a perfectly good reason why that’s not me and it’s him. The right people always win, I’m sure of it.”
But, so there he is, and this dude was particularly homeless. He was one of those high-octane homeless, smelly, just piss smell, the unbelievable piss smell, just — he was piss. He didn’t just smell like piss, he was — when you piss, he comes out. And he had dreadlocks. Not cool-guy, medical-marijuana dreadlocks, just “human-neglect clumps” of hair. A clump of hair for every year that no one knew his name or cared.
His cousin immediately just gets “Oh, my God! Sir, are you okay? What happened?”
What happened? America happened.
What do you mean, “What happened?”
So she’s down there
“Sir, can we call someone?”
And me and my friend, we’re from New York, this is the crazy part, we immediately go to her. We start correcting her behavior like she’s doing something wrong.
“Why, is he okay?”
“No, no, he needs you desperately, that’s not the point. We just don’t do that here. You silly country girl.”
— Louis CK
Category Archives: quotes
Where do you live? What religion? What race? What nationality?
Today these questions are considered logical. By 2001, it will occur that these questions are absurd, meaningless, illogical — anti-evolutionary. Elimination of each false premise brings about more and more wealth, and more and more time to do the important things. We must fly by the generalised principles governing the universe, and not by the ground rules, or the grind-him-down rules, of yesterday’s superstitions.
— R. Buckminster Fuller, “I Seem To Be A Verb” – 1970
welp… we missed that one… 😐
regarding the shutdown of internet in egypt
In the spirit going back to Magna Carta, we require a principle that: No person or organization shall be deprived of their ability to connect to others at will without due process of law, with the presumption of innocence until found guilty. Neither governments nor corporations should be allowed to use disconnection from the Internet as a way of arbitrarily furthering their own aims.
— Tim Berners-Lee
— Tim Berners-Lee
Egypt: Tor Use Skyrocketing as Users Route-Around Internet Blocks
they’ve got to realise that as soon as they shut down regular internet access, that would immediately drive initiative to gain alternative access…
i already use Tor and a couple of other anonymizing software packages, but i’m seriously thinking about things like freenet or openmesh…
Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your Internet
3 Projects to Create a Government-less Internet
Get Internet Access When Your Government Shuts It Down
even more bizarre “christian” behaviour…
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.
–Mohandas Karmachand “Mahatma” Gandhi
Confucius
Once when Confucius was passing near the foot of Mount Tai in a chariot, there was a married woman weeping at a grave mound, and dolorously too. Confucius politely rested his hands on the front rail of the chariot and listened to her weeping. He sent Zilu (Tzu-lu) to inquire of her, saying; “From the sound of your weeping, it seems that you indeed have many troubles.”
Then the woman said; “It is true. My father-in-law died in a tiger’s jaw; my husband also died there. Now, my son has also died there.” Confucius said, “Why do you not leave this place?” The woman said: “Here there is no harsh and oppressive government.”
Confucius said, “Young men, take note of this: a harsh and oppressive government is more ferocious and fearsome than even a tiger.”
The Goal
The goal is to reach the flat roof of the house, which affords an unobstructed view of the entire countryside. You can reach this highest point by climbing stone stairs, wooden steps, bamboo slats, or rope ladders. You can even scale a nearby tree and somehow clamber onto the roof along a large limb. Just get there! Then you will see clearly that the unimaginable variety of prayerful or meditative methods all lead to the same goal, to the same panoramic vision, to the same timeless awareness.
One certainly perceives errors of understanding and superstitious behavior in the various religious traditions as they are imperfectly practiced. So what? Every human approach inevitably contains error or partial understanding. Such distortions are, of course, most difficult to notice in your own approach, because each person stubbornly believes that his own clock tells the correct time. There is no way to purge your personal, social, or religious context from every error, but if you persevere in sheer yearning for God, sheer love of Truth, these unavoidable limitations will gradually be dissolved. It will be sufficient simply to love for love’s sake.
— Paramahansa Ramakrishna
too long for email, but too good to pass up
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
— Jack Kerouac