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Adam's Profile
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Adam
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 to:
Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity
by Tim Wise
recommended for:
Everyone.
read in January, 2012
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Yes. Tim Wise speaks a real talk that is incredibly accessible, unarguably relevant and extraordinarily necessary. Here, Wise attacks the developing push for a post-racial America, especially by the self-proclaimed liberal left. He levels attacks no...more |
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"Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain embedded in the very fabric of the culture."
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Tim Wise
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"Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move."
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Ayn Rand
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Adam
gave
 to:
The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing With our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside
by Tony Hiss
recommended for:
Developers, Home builders, City goers, City livers, Failed farmers and Regional political officials
read in January, 2012
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| The physical experience of place is in inescapable phenomenon. Yes, the cognition of such experiences is often ignored, suppressed or mis-attributed. Hiss's book is an attempt to call our attention back to these sensational experiences, both for ou...more | |
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Another December of Ayn Rand. . .yes. I don't know if it helps coming from the dry an impersonal texts of law school, or whether the anticipation built up waiting for this self-prescribed end-of-the-year treat creates such a yearning for a good read, ...more |
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I feel blessed and slighted at the same time. Only a few weeks before Professor Bell's death, I arrived at NYU Law school, full of ambition and drive, eager to seek out the man who I knew, just knew, would help play a defining role in my legal educati...more |
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I wonder if my struggles with appreciating poetry are a sign of impatience, lack of creative thinking or a disregard for that which doesn't fit the dominant structure of language. I'm going to hope it's the first only, but, who really knows. |
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Grabbed this piece out of a casa particular after running out of reading in Cuba. British humour will always be lost on me to some degree though I dig a good rip or two on the French. 'A Piano in the Pyreness' is a cheeky tale that borders on traveloug...more |
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Adam
gave
to:
The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children
by Gloria Ladson-Billings
read in August, 2011
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What do you do when you run out of books on vacation? You grab your little brothers stack of educational reading.
Beyond presenting the story of eight exceptional teachers, Ladson-Billings offers a critical examination of how we present 'knowledge'...more |
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“Osama, baah!" Bashir roared.
"Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. That only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.”
― Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time
"Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. That only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.”
― Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time
“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube. indecisiveness ”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube. indecisiveness ”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
“Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end. The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him--man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to--oh, stop it!”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
“So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed.
The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.
Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.
Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' in as unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of history.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
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