Donald Rumsfeld: Memo To Self...The Dire Consequences Of Fear...

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda offshore."
- 43rd President George W. Bush (President Participates in Social Security Conversation in Greece Athena High School Athena Performing Arts Center, Greece, New York 5.24.2005).

Click On Document To ENLARGE:

-Donald Rumsfeld's Memo To Self, US Secretary of Defense (2001-2006). Forced Resignation on 12.18.2006, Eight months after the above memo was written. (The Archives of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff, Pentagon's Military Analyst Program, 4.18.2006) .

"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us."
- 41st President George H.W. Bush ( Reportedly to journalist Sarah McClendon, 12.1992).

Albert Einstein: On God...A Product Of Human Weakness...

"In 1954, Einstein wrote the following letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt." Bought by a private collector in 1955, the German-language letter will be auctioned on May 15th by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair, England and is estimated to sell for 16K. In it, Einstein rejects the idea that the Jews are God's "chosen people" and clarifies his views during this time on God, organized religion and his own Jewish faith:

ABRIDGED
"... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and 'rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things. With friendly thanks and best wishes

Yours, A. Einstein"

" In Einstein's later years he referred to a "cosmic religious feeling" that permeated and sustained his scientific work. In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to "experience the universe as a single cosmic whole". He was also fond of using religious flourishes, in 1926 declaring that "He [God] does not throw dice" when referring to randomness thrown up by quantum theory. His position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide but he always resisted easy stereotyping on the subject.

Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

-Albert Einstein (Abridged Letter translated to English from German. Content is a response to Eric Gutkind re: his newly published book, "Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt", 1.3.1954. Excerpted Additional Text by James Randerson, " Childish Superstition", Guardian UK News 5.13.2008. Image: Gustave Doré (1832-83) "Ascension". The most popular and successful French book illustrator of the mid 19th century. Doré became very widely known for his illustrations to such books as Dante's Inferno (1861), Don Quixote (1862), and the Bible (1866).

William S. Burroughs: Parasitic Beings...

"To reach the Western Lands is to achieve freedom from fear. Do you free yourself from fear by cowering in your physical body for eternity? Your body is a boat to lay aside when you reach the far shore, or sell it if you can find a fool...it's full of holes...it's full of holes.

I want to reach the Western Lands-right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It's a frozen sewer-it's known as the Duad remember? All the filth and horror, fear hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands. Let it flow!

My cat Fletch stretches behind me on the bed. A tree like black lace against a gray sky. A flash of joy. How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he "wants?" You have to be in Hell to see Heaven. Glimpses from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy, a Joy as old as suffering and despair.

The old writer couldn't write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. And then? "British we are, British we stay." How long can one hang on in Gibraltar, with the tapestries where mustached riders with scimitars hunt tigers, the ivory balls one inside the other, bare seams showing, the long tearoom with mirrors on both sides and the tired fuchsia and rubber plants, the shops selling English marmalade and Fortnum & Mason's tea...clinging to their Rock like the rock apes, clinging always to less and less.

In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling on the mountain. "Hurry up please. It's time."

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"Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage."

-William S. Burroughs (1914-1997 Image: Burroughs, 1960s)

Bertrand Russell: What I Have Lived For...

" Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

-Bertrand Russell (Prologue to Russell's Autobiography, 3.25.1956, Image: Passport, 1919) "The 20th Century's most important liberal thinker, one of two or three of its major philosophers, and a prophet for millions of the creative and rational life. He was born in 1872, at the height of Britain's economic and political ascendancy, and died in 1970 when Britain's empire had all but vanished and her power had been drained in two victorious but debilitating world wars. At his death, however, his voice still carried moral authority, for he was one of the world's most influential critics of nuclear weapons and the American war in Vietnam." -The Bertrand Russell Gallery

The State of Humankind: 24/7

"Ladies & Gentlemen:

I have been alone in a room for almost 24 hours with 6 TVs, a laptop and two radios, listening to and watching and reading only political shows and pundits and blogs, sometimes monitoring four or five things at the same time. Just to see if it can be done.

I'll tell you it can be, but I cannot tell you how horrible it is. It rattles the very center of your being. If you care about the state of humankind, it fills you with despair. We are as a people bleak and hostile and suspicious, filled with senseless partisanship and willing to believe anything and everything about anyone. We are full of ourselves and we hate. And we do it 24-7.

Would you be willing, as a sign of compassion and empathy, to do the unthinkable and broadcast right now, as a Valentine to me, 20 seconds of blessed dead air?

Complete silence. Just read my text and then say...nothing. Twenty seconds.

Just to show it can be done. I SEND IT IN.

It turns out, no, it can't be done."

-Gene Weingarten (Excerpt from "Cruel & Unusual Punishment", Washington Post
3-23-08).