"A great many authors have given terrible pictures of future wars, where new types of explosive and gas are used. H.G. Wells has been a rather serious offender in this respect, painting terrible pictures of great cities wiped out in a single air raid, and wide areas poisoned for years on end.

[...]

"Of course if it is ever possible to gain complete control of changes in the nuclei of atoms such as cause radioactivity, much more formidable explosives will be possible. But at present we can neither speed these reactions up nor slow them down to the slightest extent, even in the laboratory, let alone in a bomb."

--- J.B.S. Haldane, A.R.P - Air Raid Precautions, 1938.

"If I had a daughter, I wouldn't want her to believe in god, vote, or major in economics, but I certainly wouldn't want to pass laws against theism, electoral democracy, and the dismal science."

-- Will Wilkinson, May 19, 2011

"Already, on all sides, in France as well as in all countries subject to a regular government, Prostitution sees the number of her agents diminishing, progressively with the number of her victims; she recoils, as in an access of modesty, before the development of moral reason; she does not abdicate, but she knows that she is dethroned; and so, she wraps herself in her courtezan's robes, dreaming no more of reconquering her shameless kingdom. The moment is not far distant when she will blush for herself, when she will go forth forever from the sanctuary of good manners, and when she will fall by degrees into obscurity and forgetfulness. There are certain maladies of the human heart which, like certain physical diseases, end by exhausting themselves and by losing their epidemic or contagious character, under the influence of a proper mode of life. The leper is no longer known to us except by name, and if one meets, here and there, with certain rare traces of this terrible plague of the Middle Ages, one realizes, happily, that it no longer possesses the power to spread and propagate itself; and so it is, we have today no more than certain alarming symptoms of the influenza, which once devastated whole populations and which, today, only rarely attacks certain isolated individuals."

-- Paul Lacroix, History of Prostitution Among All the Peoples of the World, from the Most Remote Antiquity to the Present Day, 1851.

"Look up yonder, mine own Eve!" he cries; "surely we ought to dwell among those gold-tinged clouds, or in the blue depths beyond them. I know not how nor when, but evidently we have strayed away from our home; for I see nothing hereabouts that seems to belong to us."

"Can we not ascend thither?" inquires Eve.

"Why not?" answers Adam, hopefully. "But no! Something drags us down in spite of our best efforts. Perchance we may find a path hereafter."

In the energy of new life, it appears no such impracticable feat to climb into the sky!

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The New Adam and Eve," 1843.

"And it goes back to the fundamental problem that I mentioned in the beginning of failure of alignment between private rewards and social returns. When I was on the Council of Economic Advisors, I saw that not only was the financial sector not innovative, they resisted our innovation. We came up with this idea of having inflation indexed bonds, and it was initially resisted by treasury, resisted by the financial markets. I scratched my head and I asked why. And then we figured out why. People buy these products and hold them to retirement. If you hold them to retirement you don’t make fees, because you don’t have people selling and buying them. And so for the financial sector they were disastrous. For Americans worried about the risk of inflation, they were a fantastic product."

-- Joseph Stiglitz, Roosevelt Institute Round Table, March 6, 2010.

"One of the things that has always stuck in my mind from my childhood addiction to science fiction was Robert Heinlein’s explanation of rocket guidance, where a special “cam” was machined to control the trajectory of a rocket every time it took off. The cam would be rotated with a constant speed and its radius at any given point would determine the average direction of the thrust. It turns out that exactly the same method is used in SCUDs."

-- Geoffrey Forden

"Even within the political side, what makes sense from the perspective of getting re-elected often doesn't make sense from the perspective of forging a legislative coalition, as the existence of Evan Bayh and Tom Coburn constantly reminds us. (One way to be good at getting re-elected and bad at legislative politics is to undercut your own party in an effort to win over centrist voters. Another way is to energise your base by taking legislative positions so extreme they can't possibly be enacted.)"

-- The Economist "Democracy in America" blog

"A secondary the size Wise reported would need to fully consume 90% of its thermonuclear fuel, including the uranium, in order to produce the W-88 warhead's advertized yield of 475 kilotons. If that calculation is correct, there is little wonder the W-88 warhead is still our most modern warhead, despite its being a twenty-five year old, mid-1970s design. It would be a waste of time trying to squeeze out the last 10%. I was recently told that 1962 was the year when weapon designers 'ran out of things to invent.' A dozen years later, they apparently gave up trying."

-- Howard Morland

"By this logic, the Tate-LaBianca murders are part of the damage that the Beatles did in creating the White Album."

-- Michael Leddy

"Feng says Common Cause has gotten reports about [voting district] lines being tailored for incredibly petty desires; in one case, California pols drew a legislator’s grandmother into his district, in another, they drew lines to exclude a sole voter — a pesky gadfly whom a local politician hated dealing with."

-- LA Weekly

"Houston, we have a problem. There is probably no artefact in the history of space exploration more precious than the first television images of the Moon captured by Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts as they disembarked from their lunar module in July 1969.

Unfortunately, the magnetic tapes of those images have gone missing. Worse still, they appear to have been missing for at least 30 years - and nobody, until now, even noticed."

-- Andrew Gumbel, The Independent, August 13, 2006.

"I am in a very sensitive profession. I am a quack. Which is to say, I'm ahead of my time in the field of psychic treatment."

-- Jules Amthor in Murder, My Sweet

"Some of the information required on this worksheet may seem to be irrelevant or even unwarranted. Please know that the California State Bureau of Records consider each item to be important."

-- Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center Birth Certificate Worksheet

"I could almost fancy that I saw him standing in the shadow of my room, so well had Shakespeare drawn him, with his golden hair, his tender flower-like grace, his dreamy deep silken eyes, his delicate mobile limbs, and his white lily hands. His very name fascinated me. Willie Hughes! Willie Hughes! How musically it sounded! Yes; who else but he could have been the master-mistress of Shakespeare's passion,¹ the lord of his love to whom he was bound in vassalage,² the delicate minion of pleasure,³ the rose of the whole world,⁴ the herald of the spring⁵ decked in proud livery of youth,⁶ the lovely boy whom it was sweet music to hear,⁷ and whose beauty was the very raiment of Shakespeare's heart,⁸ as it was the keystone of his dramatic power? How bitter now seemed the whole tragedy of his desertion and his shame! -- shame that he made sweet and lovely⁹ by the mere magic of his personality, but that was none the less shame. Yet as Shakespeare forgave him, should not we forgive him also? I did not care to pry into the mystery of his sin."

-- Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H.

¹ Sonnet xx. 2. ² Sonnet xxvi. 1. ³ Sonnet cxxvi. 9. ⁴ Sonnet cix. 14. ⁵ Sonnet i. 10. ⁶ Sonnet ii. 3. ⁷ Sonnet viii. 1. ⁸ Sonnet xxii. 6. ⁹ Sonnet xcv. 1.

JEWELRY REPAIR
YOU ARE AN ANIMAL

-- sign on former location of Albert Andonian Jewelry at 1312 Wilshire

"Late-filing syndrome, sometimes known as nonfiling syndrome or failure-to-file syndrome, is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A spokeswoman for the American Psychiatric Association said that the group does not recognize it as a psychiatric condition. But legal experts said that it is not uncommon for tax evaders to claim they suffer from such a syndrome, because it can shield them from criminal penalties."

-- New York Times

"The difficulty in early warning, among other things, is that if you give correct warning and act in response to that warning, the attack will likely not materialize (i.e. if the US knew Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor our defensive preparations would prevent Japan from following through). This means that successful warnings are under-counted because the catastrophe never emerges. This tends to weaken early warning systems as they are perceived to be ineffective even though they may have averted serious problems.

The economic analogy is regulation. Regulations were seen as unnecessary and dismantled because there had been no crises, but policymakers failed to consider that there may have been no crises precisely because of the regulation."

-- Jamison Davies

"The financial press and policymakers have made four claims about the nature of the crisis.

1. Bank lending to nonfinancial corporations and individuals has declined sharply.
   
2. Interbank lending is essentially nonexistent.
   
3. Commercial paper issuance by nonfinancial corporations has declined sharply and
   rates have risen to unprecedented levels.
   
4. Banks play a large role in channeling funds from savers to borrowers.

Here we examine these claims using data from the Federal Reserve Board. At least
based on data up until October 8, 2008, we argue that all four claims are false."

-- V.V. Chari, Lawrence Christiano, and Patrick J. Kehoe, "Myths about the Financial Crisis of 2008," Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Working Paper 666, October 2008.

"We have just won a war with a lot of heroes flying around in planes. The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all."

-- General Henry "Hap" Arnold, VJ Day, 1945.

"He [Barack Obama] had some discretion as president to exercise an element of choice for certain of the positions on the masthead; it wasn't wide discretion, but he had some. And I think a lot of the minority editors on the [Harvard Law] Review expected him to use that discretion to the maximum extent possible to empower them. To put them in leadership positions, to burnish their resumes, and to give them a chance to help him and help guide the Review. He didn't do that. He declined to exercise that discretion to disrupt the results of votes or of tests that were taken by various people to assess their fitness for leadership positions.

"He was unwilling to undermine, based on the way I viewed it, meritocratic outcomes or democratic outcomes in order to advance a racial agenda. That earned him a lot of recrimination and criticism from some on the left, particularly some of the minority editors of the Review."

-- Bradford Berenson on Frontline