Academics From The United States

"Tony Davis, an environmental writer for nearly thirty years, first broke the story that put an end to the myth of 's inexhaustible aquifer. data showed that it was not the size of Lake Superior, but far smaller and more complex than suspected. His handling of the USGS report in the ' gave credibility to the need to create a water conservation program in the city. Davis now writes for the ' in Tucson."

"Before considering these real world consequences however, it is important to note at this point that none of this is said to condone racism as "just another idea" or, more subtlety, to rationalize evil. Rather, this is to suggest that all human beings can be approached on a human level. That contact can be made. This human contact will in turn invariably neutralize the caricatures which skew scholarly analysis and distort the historical record. [...] The demonization of the radical right ill serves us when now, more than ever before, it is vitally important to know all we can about this esoteric milieu's nature and potentialities."

"I hope that, in reading this volume, the reader too will bear in mind Santayana's cautionary dictum: that we are here neither to laugh, nor to cry, but to understand."

"What follows naturally from [the] empiricist starting-point is the division of propositions into two main classes, (i) empirical propositions, about synthetic matters of fact, which are (or should be, if they are to have literal meaning) testable by experience, and (ii) those which are purely analytic, the function of which is to elucidate the use and meaning of terms, but which give no information about the world. The truth or falsity of the latter depends solely on their self-consistency and the law of non-contradiction, whereas of the former self-consistency, though necessary, is not a sufficient condition of truth. Accordingly there are two main types of science, exact science on the one hand comprising logic and mathematics, concerned with analytic truths and using purely deductive reasoning; and empirical science on the other seeking laws which are generalizations from particular experiences and are verifiable (or, more strictly, ‘probabilifiable’) only by observation and experiment."

"Radical right-wing groups — from the survivalists to the neo-Nazis, the Klan — tend to draw people who don't fit well into organizations. They would never make it in the Middle Eastern terrorism game. They are constantly arguing with each other, constantly splitting and forming new groups and changing ideologies."

"Apocalyptic millenarianism starts with a dream. It is a dream of a past that never was and of a future that may never be—a dream, in a word, of perfection. This dream, moreover, seeks to link a past golden age with a future promise of a world governed by a sinless elect under the benevolent rule of the Savior himself. The millennial dream has for two thousand years served as a beacon of hope to all, and as a call to action to a few."

"Christian Identity eschatology is clearly no "pie in the sky" set of speculations. Rather, it is closely matched to the everyday lives of its adherents, who in turn live each day as if it were their last. How could it be otherwise when proofs of the End are so abundant?"

"But I found something else as well, and it took a considerable amount of time before I was able to fully understand it's import. What I found most puzzling was that the monsters of terra incognita, upon closer examination, were not really monsters at all. They held political views which were repugnant, and religious views based on fantastically eccentric interpretations of sacred text. But whatever their belief structure, these were not monsters. They were not the violent and hate filled people I had expected to find. [...] Far from monsters, these strange and isolated people seemed, if anything, to feel too much and understand too little. In their words and deeds they harmed mainly themselves and their families."

"It is an accepted truth that in every age and in every corner of the globe, small groups of people have become unalterably convinced that the processes of history are coming to an end. Although such groups of seekers invariably adopt an oppositional stance to the perceived pattern of changes in their respective societies, seldom are these movements catalyzed from the typical response of selective withdrawal from the dominant culture to a violent determination to act on the belief that the final drama has begun."

"As we discover , we suffer from a variety of s, both in our nearby and distant searches. The most significant effect is – a selection effect which leads brightness limited searches finding brighter than average objects near their sensitivity limit. This bias is caused by the larger volume in which bright objects can be uncovered compared to their fainter counterparts. Malmquist bias errors are proportional to the square of the intrinsic dispersion of the distance method, and because SN Ia are such accurate distance indicators, these errors are quite small – approximately 2%. We use s to estimate these effects, and remove their effects from our s."

"With the as an anchor, theory converged on a standard model of the universe, which was still in place in 1998, at the time of our discovery of the . This standard model was based on the theory of general relativity, and two assumptions. assumption one was that the , and assumption two that it is composed of normal , i.e. matter whose density falls directly in proportion to the volume of space, which it occupies. Within this framework, it was possible to devise observational tests of the overall theory, as well as provide values for the fundamental constants within this model – the current expansion rate (), and the average density of matter in the universe. For this model, it was also possible to directly relate the density of the universe to the rate of cosmic deceleration and the geometry of space. it stated that the more material the faster the deceleration, that above a critical density the universe has a and below this a ."

"… one does not expect a . To my mind, I was genuinely surprised because when you make a discovery of acceleration–well, what causes the acceleration? Well, we give it a name–'–but we don’t understand it yet. I would not be surprised if we don’t understand it during my lifetime. Without understanding it, I felt it wouldn’t be worthy of a Nobel Prize. The fact that it was given pretty timely–you know, I was only 44 last year–was a bit of surprise."

"Our abiding belief is that just as the workmen in the tunnel of St. Gothard, working from either end, met at last to shake hands in the very central root of the mountain, so students of nature and students of Christianity will yet join hands in the unity of reason and faith, in the heart of their deepest mysteries."

"No scientific discovery is named after its original inventor."

"One reason for the astonishing growth of science and technology in this century has been, of course, war; but another, and perhaps a more important one, is simply that science has created the conditions—in western society at least—under which it best flourishes: these are affluence, leisure, and a high regard for education."

"Historical events do not fall out of the heavens. They have a pre-history. To understand them, it is essential to understand the pre-history."

"Historians should always look at continuities and fractures: as I see it, the continuities are always deeper and more profound than any discontinuities."

"I revise a lot my work and read out loud, and often say: “It doesn’t work”; “It’s so boring!” I often realize that I could say something more clearly, more simply, and get rid of many qualifications. I believe that you do not really have a clear thought until you have the right word. The thought is developed in the act of writing: sometimes you are writing a sentence, and you realize that, deep down, you do not really know what you want to say. You revise, and at a certain point you say: “This is really what I think, what I want to say!”"

"...the cultural mission of the Jesuits—what really makes the Jesuits distinctive..."

"The people of Chiangmai are open, friendly, and sunny on the surface but deep, self-contained, and unfathomable beneath. The contradictions in their personalities are like the contrasts in their religious culture between the lovely, if somewhat garish, temple, with its delightful ceremonies, and their witches, with heads of horses, mouths frothing with blood, who are believed to canter through the village at night. Superficially Chiangmai villagers are charming, colorful, and carefree people, but underneath they have dark and brooding natures, with abiding hates, jealousies, and fears that pass from one generation to another."

"Not all s evolve at the same rate, some early species were actually so well adapted that they competed successfully against newer species. are so well suited to life in oceans, lakes, and streams that they still thrive even though most features present in modern, living algae must be more or less identical to those present in the ancestral algae that lived more than 1 billion years ago. Features that seem relatively unchanged are relictual features (technically known as , formerly called primitive features). Like the algae, s are well-adapted to certain habitats and have not changed much in 250 million years; they too have many relictual features. Modern conifers are similar to early ones that arose around 320 millions years ago. The most recently evolved group consists of the flowering plants, which originated about 100 to 120 million years ago with the evolution of several features: flowers, broad, flat, simple leaves, and that conducts water with little friction. The members of the (sunflowers, daisies, and s) ... have many features that evolved recently from features present in ancestral flowering plants. These are derived features (technically known as , formerly called advanced features (i.e., they have been derived evolutionarily from ancient features). One recent (highly derived ) feature in the asters is a . The terms "primitive" and "advanced" are avoided in that they imply inferior and superior."

"Ancestral presumably had abundant, fibrous, heavily , similar to that present in the relictual, leaf-bearing genus '. During the evolutionary radiation of the subfamily , diverse types of bodies and woods arose. Several evolutionary lines have retained an abundant, fibrous wood: all wood cells, even ray cells, have thick lignified walls, and axial is only scanty paratracheal. Aside from a diversity of vessel diameters, there seems to be little protection against during water-stress, and little capacity. This strong wood permits the plants to be tall and to compete for light in their tree-shaded semi-arid habitats. In other evolutionary lines, the wood lacks fibres, and almost all cells have thin, unlignified walls. Vessels occur in an extensive matrix of water-storing parenchyma, and tracheids are also abundant, constituting over half the axial tissue in some species. There is excellent protection against cavitation, but little mechanical support for the plant body; however, these plants are short and occur in extremely arid, unshaded sites. Scandent, vinelike plants of two genera produce a dimorphic wood—while their shoots are extending without external support, they produce fibrous, lignified wood, but after leaning against a host branch, they produce a parenchymatous, unlignified wood."

"s are technically known as angiosperms. Flowers are reproductive structures, some parts produce , which carry sperm cells, other parts have egg cells. During reproduction, new embryos form as part of a seed, and all seeds occur inside fruits. Plants with obvious flowers, such as roses, s, s, and lilies are flowering plants ... But in many other angiosperms, the flowers are tiny and inconspicuous, for example, the flowers of grasses are so small and pale you might never notice them, and the same is true for those of s, s, , and ... Other angiosperms have large, obvious flowers, but they bloom so rarely—at least in cultivation—that many people mistakenly assume that they never flower. are a good example of this: when kept on a , potted cacti may survive and grow without being healthy enough to flower, but in nature they produce spectacular flowers that no one could miss. All angiosperms have s, that is, tissues that conduct water and nutrients from one part of the plant to another."

"The nature part of human nature is to make copies of ourselves — as it is with any other ."

"A generation ago, humans eluded ; with luck, we'll continue to dodge that and other mass terrors. But now we often find ourselves asking whether inadvertently we've poisoned or parboiled the planet, ourselves included. We've also used and abused water and soil so there's a lot less of each, and trampled thousands of species that probably aren't coming back. Our world, some respected voices warn, could one day degenerate into something resembling a vacant lot, where crows and rats scuttle among weeds, preying on each other. If it comes to that, at what point would things have gone so far that, for all our vaunted superior intelligence, we're not among the hardy survivors? The truth is, we don't know."

"We’re facing some questions in this century that are existential in their nature. One is, have we inadvertently pushed so many other fellow species off this planet, species that we coevolved with, that we depend upon for our food and for all kinds of other things that they do, filtering the air, filtering the water? Have we pushed so many of them off that we have started a cascade that is ultimately leading to a that’s going to include ourselves? Second, the climate. We have lived in balance through most of the history of our species with this very thin layer of air that surrounds the planet. But then we jet-propelled our society because we discovered how to tap the energy that nature didn’t need for its own cycle, the excess carbon it had buried away. We’ve dug it all up, and we’ve burned it, and we’ve created these marvels, including the internet that you and I are speaking to each other with right now. In the process, however, we packed the atmosphere with some invisible gases that [hold heat]. We’re basically baking ourselves right now because we have created the . Are we going to be able to stop that process in time? We’re exceeding limits that scientists have warned us we should learn to live within."

"Outside of , they were reputed to be bigger than anyone else in , with diversified investments in marijuana, cocaine, and Mexican brown heroin. Fleets of matching new began zooming around . The became one of the city's more prominent employers.** (200 pages; with photographs by Jay Dusard)"

"Only those who unite scientific knowledge of morality with practice in its application may be trusted to solve promptly and safely problems of conscience. Personal, social, commercial, and political experience proves this abundantly. Moral education requires long, patient, and delicate training, and few acquire it without the aid of casuistry."

"The metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, though the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage."

"Today young people and adults in both Europe and the United States shuffle from day to day and year to year imprisoned in roles assigned to them by families, friends, and employers. But who am I really? What is my true self? The Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr once wrote, “I go into the Upanishads to ask questions,” and the Upanishads, the midwife birthing early Hinduism out of Vedic religion, ask these questions with even more urgency than Don Quixote or Holden Caulfield. Often ignoring and sometimes attacking the ritual obsessions of the Vedas, Hinduism’s homeless sages preoccupied themselves with philosophy instead."

"One should mention right at the start that one still does not understand whether quantum mechanics and special relativity are compatible at a fundamental level in our Minkowski four-space world. One generally assumes that this means finding a complete Yang-Mills gauge theory or the interaction of gauge fields with fermionic matter fields, the simplest form being quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Associated with this picture is the belief that the fundamental vector meson excitations are massive (as opposed to photons, which arise in the limiting case of an abelian gauge symmetry. The proof of the existence of a “mass gap” appears a necessary integral part of solving the entire puzzle. This question remains one of the deepest open issues in theoretical physics, as well as in mathematics. Basically the question remains: can one give a mathematical foundation to the theory of fields in four-dimensions? In other words, can do quantum mechanics and special relativity lie on the same footing as the classical physics of Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, or Schrödinger—all of which fits into a mathematical framework that we describe as the language of physics. This glaring gap in our fundamental knowledge even dwarfs questions of whether there are other more complicated and sophisticated approaches to physics—those that incorporate gravity, strings, or branes—for understanding their fundamental significance lies far in the future. In fact, one believes that stringy proposals, if they can be fully implemented, have limiting cases that appear as relativistic quantum fields, just as relativistic quantum fields describe non-relativistic quantum theory and classical physics in various limiting cases."

"History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance."

"The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn."

"The missionaries were vortices of force thrown out in advance by the force to the eastward that was making west. They thought that they came to bring Christ but in thinking so they were deceived. They were agents of a historical energy and what they brought was the United States. The Indians had no chance. If it looked like religion it was nevertheless Manifest Destiny."

"Mr. Lincoln was telling his countrymen that the achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire, and he was telling them that Yesterday must not be permitted to Balkanize it."

"Between the amateur and the professional, ... there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different integration, a different nervous and muscular and psychological organization. ... A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom."

"Well-known among scholars is Ong’s call to reflect on how deep the transformations of societies transitioning from orality to scripture are. Less noticed was his remark that the transition carries ethical implications, particularly about conscience, the internal moral compass that guides human behavior."

"No one will ever tell in full the heroism or the stupidity of the foreign missions, the holiness-saturated devotion of the missionaries or their invincible foolishness. There were only two agencies for the extension of civilization on a large scale, armies and missions, and in the light of history the primitives who drew the armies were much the better off. The missionary was a man glad to submerge self in a holy cause but, except in a minority so small it does not count, his dedication locked him away from reality so completely that at this distance he seems crazed if not crazy. The heathen were not people to him: they were souls."

"The route led through the enchanted chaos of the Arizona deserts, a country mostly of naked rock in mesas, peaks, and gashed canyons, painted tremendous colors with brushes of comet’s hair. Frequently it was a giant-cactus country — saguaro by designers of modern decoration, cholla by medieval torturers — or a country of yuccas and the yucca’s weirdest form, the Joshua tree. Sometimes it was even a grass country. And through most of the route it was a country where occasionally you could find the characteristic oasis of the Southwest, a little, hidden arroyo with something of a stream in it, choked with cottonwoods, green plants blooming only a rifle shot from desolation."

"The common man fled westward. A thirsty land swallowed him insatiably. There is no comprehending the frenzy of the American folk-migration. God’s gadfly had stung us mad."

"Hetæræ accompany the fine arts in association with quick money. They came to Virginia as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separable from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte’s portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in laquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization."

"California was almost entirely dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people."

"The migration was under way. ... Its great days were just around the turn of spring — and an April restlessness, a stirring in the blood, a wind from beyond the oak openings, spoke of the prairies, the great desert, and the western sea."

"The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains."

"Burrow (1972) notes the existence of a word for the horse which is found only in Tamil and Brahui (DED 500: Tamil ivuli, Brahui (h)ullī, and which therefore must have existed in the earliest Dravidian [...] McAlpin suggests that this early Dravidian word probably referred to the Asian wild ass, Equus Hemionus, which is native to South Asia, rather than to the domesticated horse, Equus Caballus."

"In the South, a lady’s opinions could not be more important than a drawing-room charade, an accompaniment to sillabubs and cobbler."

"Remember always that the three abominations are: (1) rum, (2) any other sweet drink, and (3) any mixed drink except one made of gin and dry vermouth in the ratio I have given."

"You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest-lived. The fragile tie of ecstasy is broken in a few minutes, and thereafter there can be no remarriage."

"When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour."

"Nothing can be done with people who put olives in martinis, presumably because in some desolate childhood hour someone refused them a dill pickle and so they go through life lusting for the taste of brine."