Posts tagged Quote
Mike Billy
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In which I’m quoted in a Daily Caller about energy drink regulations in Illinois:
Caffeine was likely dropped from the bill in order to make it more popular, wrote Mike Billy, a reporter for the Illinois News Network.
“I think the legislators knew the bill would never pass if they included caffeine in the definition because caffeine is too popular and people would realize just how ridiculous the regulation is,” Billy wrote in an email to The DC News Foundation. “A server at a restaurant would have to check the age of anyone buying a soft drink.”
But practical considerations aside, permitting caffeine while banning taurine makes little scientific sense, he said.
“Caffeine actually has health risks and there have been no reports of negative health effects associated with taurine, guarana and ginseng in the amounts found in energy drinks,” he wrote. “It’s an arbitrary way to define an energy drink without any regard to science and it accomplishes nothing.”
Read the whole thing here.
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“Under Democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed and are right…” - H. L. Mencken
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“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can can be beaten.” - G.K. Chesterton
Wallpaper size here
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Best part of today’s episode of 30 Rock? Jack Donaghy reading from The Fountainhead at Liz Lemon’s wedding.
It was a short passage that that suits his character: ”“But you see,” said Roark quietly, “… I’ve chosen the work I want to do… and I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me.”“
You can’t have a free market without regulations.
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October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all.
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If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re gonna have to take what they get.
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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I am afraid that the only lessons that have been truly learned In the whole Watergate business are to avoid such idiocies as tapes and illegal, unwarranted break-ins, and to restrict the operation of the fortuitous and the random to the smallest possible area. I would be astonished if the real lesson of Watergate - the Actonian principle that all power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely - were other than forgotten utterly once a crowd-pleasing President with the kind of luster a John F. Kennedy had for academy, press, and the world of intellectuals generally comes back into the White House.
I’ve been reading Robert Nisbet’s Twilight of Authority and this quote really stood out for me.
In this section he was talking about what he called the “transpolitical” or, as he puts it, a political tool that “goes beyond what law or morality authorizes…”
Nisbet was using Watergate as an example because he wrote the book during the Watergate scandal. But, he also cites other examples that go back at least to the 1970s.
If this book were written today I think he might include George Bush’s extrajudicial wiretapping of American citizens and Barack Obama’s Fast and Furious scandal to his list. And these more recent abuses of power, particularly Fast and Furious, are perfect examples of what Nisbet was trying to say and that is that government is not good at policing itself. It is only through accident that these scandals are ever discovered.
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The more real you get the more unreal the world gets.
