My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
- RFK addressing a crowd about the death of MLK, 40 years ago today

Capitalism without bankruptcy, it is said, is like Christianity without hell.
- The Economist

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
- Douglas Adams

A 34-company committee couldn’t create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite.
- on google’s mobile phone platform

I’m a witness and I want my testimony to be honest and uncensored. I also want it to be powerful and eloquent and to do as much justice as possible to the experience of the people I’m photographing.

This man was in an NGO feeding center being helped as much as he could be helped. He literally had nothing. He was a virtual skeleton. Yet he could still summon the courage and the will to move. He had not given up and if he didn’t give up how could anyone in the outside world ever dream of losing hope.

- from war photographer James Nachtwey’s TED Talk

Point is, what’s so wonderful is that every one of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. There’s a certain orchid look exactly like a certain insect so the insect is drawn to this flower, its double, its soul mate, and wants nothing more than to make love to it.

And after the insect flies off, spots another soul-mate flower and makes love to it, thus pollinating it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. I mean, how could they know that because of their little dance the world lives?

But it does. By simply doing what they’re designed to do, something large and magnificent happens. In this sense they show us how to live – how the only barometer you have is your heart. How, when you spot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way.

- from the film Adaptation

Anwyays, the movie starts with a speech Murrow gave to the Radio Television News Directors Association in 1958. I thought it was a warning we long missed…

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late…

I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us…

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn’t even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

Oh my. Keith Olbermann rips a new one in the Whitehouse. Dear god did he get that perfectly. Check out the full transcript over at DailyKos and wmv video over at putfile.

He was the first genius I had ever seen. The moment of first being, and knowing oneself to be, in the presence of genius, is a solemn moment. It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a black.

But genius — fine control over total power, all height and depth, forever and ever? It had simply never entered my mind, for confirming or denying in conjecture, that I would see this for the first time in a black man. You don’t get over that. You stay young awhile longer, with the hesitations, the incertitudes, the half-obediences to crowd-pressure, of the young. But you don’t forget. The lies reel, and contradict one another, and simper in silliness, and fade into shadow. But the seen truth remains. And if this was true, what happened to the rest of it?

Louis opened my eyes wide, and put to me a choice. Blacks, the saying went, were “all right in their place.” What was the “place” of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?

- Charles L. Black, on seeing Louis Armstrong perform in Austin, Texas, September 1931.

If you made it through the first few minutes of the 20-hour long Ken Burns mini-series Jazz, you might have already heard this quote. I learned recently that hearing this anecdote is what made actually got Ken Burns interested in the topic of jazz. The quote is made all the more amazing by the fact of who Charles L. Black became: one of the lead attorneys for Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision which outlawed segregation in public schools.

It’s a humbling thought, to know such greatness can be bestowed upon one person. It’s also a wonderful thought, to know the power of one. Through music, through sheer talent and presence, one man could create small ripples, ripples which evoke a tidal wave.

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans

- Address, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, March 18, 1968

This quote has been on my mind lately. I came across it while reading the collected speeches of Robert Kennedy a couple years back. It hit me like a brick in the face. I had been looking for speech writing that compared to Aaron Sorkin’s material on the West Wing and this was clearly it. I can never figure out why the DNC doesn’t just hire Sorkin to write the sound byte for important speeches. None the less, it is a shame we never hear today’s leaders speak in these terms. Appealing to our greatest hopes and not our deepest fears, and asking quite clearly what we truly value as a people.