"Assassination is the extreme form of censorship." -George Bernard Shaw

 "On Thursday, Gabby Giffords rose in the House of Representatives to read the First Amendment to the Constitution. On Saturday, she was gunned down by one of her constituents. Giffords held "Congress on Your Corner" outside a Tucson grocery, something she has regularly done to talk face to face with the public, not all of whom supported her. The interchange of views and information is precious to me, nothing is more symbolic of that than the First Amendment and Giffords' commitment to dialog with her community. Nothing is more offensive to me than efforts to cut that off, the ultimate means of silencing an adversary being assassination. The vituperation we've seen in politics is, in and of itself, a means of cutting off the conversations that are needed to move this society and this nation forward. That the vitriol that has become so common can inspire the weak-minded to physical harm and even murder is something we should be concerned with. Please, we are not Enemies!"

~G Armour Van Horn

The Irish don't like McDonalds?

"As long as there are people who are creatively empowered...there will always be the breaking of the mold. American movies to me, and I've said this before a million times...are becoming more and more homogeneous. Because the marketing objective...and marketing now plays such a major role in movies...it almost, uh, it almost obliterates everything else.  The marketing objective is the lowest common denominator. 'You can't put that here...let's put the car chase there, put the sex scene, let's put the fight in, let's get them back together, they end up happily...they walk off into the sun....' So that there's a formulaic predictability to American movies. That allied with the cynicism of the way movies are put together -the product placement and spin offs and ties and all kinds of crap that you know has nothing to do with the telling of stories...they've turned American movies into McMovies.

So that when the movie goer gets his movie it's like a hamburger. He doesn't want a piece of aubergine in there. He wants his onion, his tomato, his hamburger and his bun. And he doesn't want the bun hard, he wants it soft. And he wants it in two minutes."

-Gabriel Byrne

DON JUAN

"We know that nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to stand the pressure of the unknowable."

The 4 attributes of wariorship: CONTROL, DISCIPLINE, FORBEARANCE & TIME.