"What Do We Want?" "Not That" "When Do We Want It" "Now"

An as-ever prescient Orwell, on modern protest movements both left and right:

"[Nationalism] can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty."

- George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

Resilience To Stress Differs Between Individuals

"I can handle a hundred thousand men in battle, and take the City of the Sun, but am afraid to manage a lot in the swamp of San Francisco." -William Tecumseh Sherman

Quote of the Day

"In California, where the urgent question of something suspiciously like state failure is staring the electorate in the face, the Brown-Whitman contest hasn't yet risen even to the level of the trivial."

Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 11 October 2010