People From Los Angeles

"One of the facts of history is that battles do not stay won. Those that matter have to be waged again and again."

"The fearsome fact of our time is that other elements than the government have assumed the role of directing our affairs. To a very large extent the way we live and the things we live for are determined by the interests of powerful and monopolistic corporations"

"Education is still starved. It is the cornerstone of any civilized society and the sharpest sword in the defence of freedom, but it is still the step child of governments and corporations alike."

"The kinds of homes or communities people live in, the resources available for health, education, and security in old age - all these things are subject to the decisions of rulers we do not elect."

"Expensive firefighting equipment is rushed to the scene immediately on the sound of an alarm no matter what is on fire. Elaborate freeways in our metropolitan areas, costing many millions of dollars, are available to any motor vehicle. Microwave systems bring to ones television a program or view of an event taking place thousands of miles away. For the same few cents one can send a letter a short distance or across the continent."

"Yet another means by which to distribute more equally the wealth our people create is by an all-out program in the building of homes. Where did we ever get the idea that it is all right for some Canadian children to grow up in slums and others in mansions? If we can find the money - in other words, the raw materials and the men to do the work - to build skyscrapers and luxurious bank buildings in our large cities, if we can afford to maintain an elaborate defence establishment, if we can cope with the social costs that flow from life on the "other side of the tracks," we can well afford the expenditure of public money in programs designed to eliminate every last slum dwelling there is in this country, in programs designed to redevelop our communities, both urban and rural, toward the day when all our people will live in good homes."

"Ideas change the world, but they do it by assuming shape, they do it by taking concrete form."

"I'm constantly thinking melodies. Now, to add interest to those melodies, obviously you have to know what things can be superimposed over a chord, and I will think of extended arpeggios and the upper estensions. If I'm playing very vertically, I will invariably start to include certaing passing notes which imply certain scales -- like a melodic minor scale against a C minor chord, or diminished scales, something like that. But I'm not thinking of a scale at that specific moment. I'm thinking of the notes as surrounding that chord -- because I know how each of the twelve notes in music sound against a C minor seventh, for instance."

"The boy had to pay the piper, so they all stay in fear of the neighborhood sniper"

"Cause the boyz in da hood are always hard, Keep fuckin with us and we'll pull yo' card knowin nothin in life but to be legit don't quote me boy cause I said shit."

"Perched up high on a rooftop, like a bird I'm having evil thoughts, A black hood covers my face as death flows through my mind at its own pace."

"Cruisin' down the street in my six-fo' jockin' da bitches slappin da hoes."

"The first-known public lottery was sponsored by Augustus Caesar to raise funds for repairing the city of Rome; the first public lottery awarding money prizes, the Lotto de Firenze, was established in Florence in 1530."

"One of the oldest mythological fables tells of Mercury playing at dice with Selene and winning from her the five days of the epact (thus totaling the 365 days of the year and harmonizing the lunar and solar calendars)."

"Although the major gambling casinos do not maintain statistical records on the results of games of Craps, one event has been recorded-that wherein a young man achieved 28 consecutive "passes" at the Desert Inn Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada (June 10, 1950). Odds against such an event are 400 million to 1."

"The hope of a positive expected gain lies in detecting a wheel with sufficient bias."

"Blackjack does possess a memory (the interdependence of the cards) and a conscience (inferior play will inevitably be penalized) and is not democratic (the mental agility and retentiveness of the player are significant factors)."

"Against human opposition the machine usually emerges victorious, since individual patterns tend to be not random but a function of emotions and previous training and experience."

"While no rigorous proof of an optimal strategy has been achieved, Robbins has proposed the principal of "staying on a winner" and has shown it to be uniformly better than a strategy of random selection."

"In 1423, the Franciscan friar St. Bernardino of Siena preached a celebrated sermon against cards (Contra Alcarum Ludos) at Bologna, attributing their invention to the devil. Despite such ecclesiastic interdiction, Johannes Gutenberg printed playing cards the same year as his famous Bible (1440). The cards from Gutenberg's press were Tarot cards, from which the modern deck is derived."

"The essence of the phenomenon of gambling is decision making. The act of making a decision consists of selecting one course of action, or strategy, from among the set of admissible strategies."

"There are no conventional games involving conditions of uncertainty without risk."

"The French philosopher Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs (1766-1845) formalized the statement that good and evil fortune are exactly balanced in that they produce for each person an equivalent result."

"A proven theorem of game theory states that every game with complete information possesses a saddle point and therefore a solution."

"Shortly after pithecanthropus erectus gained the ascendancy, he turned his attention to the higher-order abstractions."

""Breaking the bank at Monte Carlo" is a euphemism for closing a single gaming table. It was last accomplished at the Casino Ste. des Bains de Mer during the final days of 1957, with a harvest of 180 million francs."

"Generally, a betting system for which each wager depends only on present resources and present probability of success is known as a Markov betting system."

"In general statistics can be considered as the offspring of the theory of probability, it builds on its parent and extends the area of patronymic jurisdiction."

"The Germans gathered together ethnic divisions from all over Europe in which men of the same linguistic and cultural background could serve together. The Georgian SS division conducted itself with distinction in normal military action, but a good many people seem to think that anybody who was ever a member of the SS was automatically a war criminal."

"The consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition."

"One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that ‘violence begets violence.’ I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure—and in some cases I have—that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy."

"The earliest full-length account of a chariot race appears in Book xxiii of the Iliad."

"Because the fluctuations in the composition of the deck as it is dependent over successive (and dependent) trials, it is intuitively apparent that altering decisions or the magnitude of the wager or both in accordance with the fluctuations should prove advantageous to the player."

"In our most Puritan of society, gambling-like other pleasures-is either taxed, restricted to certain hours, or forbidden altogether. Yet the impulse to gamble remains an eternal aspect of the irrationality of man. It finds outlets in business, war, politics, in the formal overtures of the gambling casinos, and in the less ceremonious exchanges among individuals of differing opinions."

"Coin matching and finger flashing were among the first formal games to arise in the history of gambling. The class of Morra games extends back to the pre-Christian era, although not until comparatively recent times have game-theoretic solutions been derived."

"Contract Bridge is likely the most challenging card game extant; it is certainly the the most obsessive for its ranks of zealous followers. The initial progenitor of all Bridge forms is the game of Triumph, which gained currency about A.D. 1500. In the mid seventeenth century, Triumph evolved into Whist, a partnership game for four players. The change from Whist to Bridge occurred about 1886with a publication in London of a small pamphlet, titled Biritch or Russian Whist."

"The conclusions seem inescapable that in certain circles a tendency has arisen to fear people who fear government. Government, as the Father of Our Country put it so well, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. People who understand history, especially the history of government, do well to fear it. For a people to express openly their fear of those of us who are afraid of tyranny is alarming. Fear of the state is in no sense subversive. It is, to the contrary, the healthiest political philosophy for a free people."

"Hoplophobia is a mental disturbance characterized by irrational aversion to weapons, as opposed to justified apprehension about those who may wield them."

"The media insist that crime is the major concern of the American public today. In this connection they generally push the point that a disarmed society would be a crime-free society. They will not accept the truth that if you take all the guns off the street you still will have a crime problem, whereas if you take the criminals off the street you cannot have a gun problem."

"The 1911 pistol remains the service pistol of choice in the eyes of those who understand the problem. Back when we audited the FBI academy in 1947, I was told that I ought not to use my pistol in their training program because it was not fair. Maybe the first thing one should demand of his sidearm is that it be unfair."

"We remember the refrain from the Philippines: ‘Underneath the starry flag/Civilize him with a Krag /And then get underway for home sweet home.’ But you have to civilize him first, and how you do that with the ragheads is the problem."

"From a rational standpoint, it might be expected that man should be far more willing to express financial confidence in his skills rather than risking his earnings on the mindless meanderings of chance. Experience, however, has strongly indicated the reverse proposition to hold true."

"The assumption that individuals act objectively in accordance with purely mathematical dictates to maximize their gain or utility cannot be sustained by empirical observation."

"Anthropologists have often commented on the striking resemblance between the uneducated gambler and the primitive."

"A weakness of the random-walk model lies in its assumption of instantaneous adjustment, whereas the information impelling a stock market toward its "intrinsic value" gradually becomes disseminated throughout the market place."

"The decay of the late, great country of South Africa is beginning to become apparent. The name of the Transvaal has been officially changed to ‘Gauteng.’ (One of our friends has suggested that in view of this its inhabitants in the future should be referred to as Oranggautengs.) … And now there is a move afoot to wreck the Kruger National Park, one of the wonders of the world, on the notion that a good bit of its land was ‘taken from the blacks.’ This idea is somewhat akin to giving Yellowstone Park back to the Blackfeet."

"Treatment of the apparently whimsical fluctuations of the stock quotations as truly non stationary processes requires a model of such complexity that its practical value is likely to be limited. An additional complication, not encompassed by most stock market models, arises from the manifestation of the market as a nonzero sum game."

"Reflecting an amalgam of economics, monetary, and psychological factors, the stock market represents possibly the most subtly intricate game invented by man."

"The suicidally disgruntled were legion, And their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives...For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape."

"It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel’s ass."