/tag/russia

7 quotes tagged 'russia'

Publisher: kindle import (0)

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

I'm Freeman Hagbard Celine, but the conventional Mister is good enough. I'd prefer you called me by my first name. Hell, call me anything you want to. If I don't like it, I'll punch you in the nose. If there were more bloody noses, there'd be fewer wars. I'm in smuggling mostly. With a spot of piracy, just to keep ourselves on our toes. But that only against the Illuminati and their communist dupes. We aim to prove that no state has the right to regulate commerce in any way. Nor can it, when it is up against free men. My crew are all volunteers. We have among us liberated sailors who were indentured to the navies of America, Russia, and China. Excellent fellows. The governments of the world will never catch us, because free men are always cleverer than slaves, and any man who works for a government is a slave.' 'Then you're a gang of Objectivists, basically? I've got to warn you, I come from a long line of labor agitators and Reds. You'll never convert me to a right-wing position.' Celine reared back as if I had waved offal under his nose. 'Objectivists?' he pronounced the word as if I had accused him of being a child-molester. 'We're anarchists and outlaws, goddam it. Didn't you understand that much? We've got nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing or any other half-assed political category. If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices that were implicit in the system from the beginning. You're talking like a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil. We're outside the system's categories. You'll never get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label for us, we're political non-Euclideans. But even that's not true. Sink me, nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what the fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam.

I'm Freeman Hagbard Celine, but the conventional Mister is good enough. I'd prefer you called me by my first name. Hell, call me anything you want to. If I don't like it, I'll punch you in the nose. If there were more bloody noses, there'd be fewer wars…We aim to prove that no state has the right to regulate commerce in any way. Nor can it, when it is up against free men. My crew are all volunteers. We have among us liberated sailors who were indentured to the navies of America, Russia, and China. Excellent fellows. The governments of the world will never catch us, because free men are always cleverer than slaves, and any man who works for a government is a slave.'\n\n 'Then you're a gang of Objectivists, basically? I've got to warn you, I come from a long line of labor agitators and Reds. You'll never convert me to a right-wing position.'\n\n Celine reared back as if I had waved offal under his nose.\n\n 'Objectivists?' he pronounced the word as if I had accused him of being a child-molester. 'We're anarchists and outlaws, goddam it. Didn't you understand that much? We've got nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing or any other half-assed political category. If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices that were implicit in the system from the beginning. You're talking like a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil. We're outside the system's categories. You'll never get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label for us, we're political non-Euclideans. But even that's not true. Sink me, nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what the fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Author: Thomas L. Friedman

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (2008)

With oil at $200 a barrel OPEC could potentially buy Bank of America in one month's worth of production, Apple in a week, and all of General Motors in just two days. Up to now, Persian Gulf-based sovereign wealth funds have played a very healthy, stabilizing role in the 2008 American subprime mortgage crisis. But it is hard to imagine over time that their economic clout will not get translated politically. After all, that's what America and Britain did when they had financial clout: They used their money to advance their national interests abroad.\n\n 'So what am I saying? That we need to bankrupt all these oil producers? No, I don't want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Egypt or Syria or Russia or Indonesia. That would only cause a different kind of destabilization, born of impoverishment. Besides, the price of oil is not going to drop to zero any time soon, even if we all drive plug-in hybrids. We will need petroleum-based products - from plastics to fertilizers - for as far into the future as anyone can see. But the world will be a better place politically if we can invent plentiful renewable energy sources that eventually reduce global demand for oil to the point where even oil-rich states will have to diversify their economies and put their people to work in more innovative ways.

Our oil addiction is not just changing the climate system; it is also changing the international system in four fundamental ways. First and most imporant, through our energy purchases we are helping to strengthen the most inolerant, antimodern, anti-Western, anti-women's rights , and antipluralistic strain of Islam - the strain propagated by Saudi Arabia.\n\n 'Second, our oil addiction is helping to finance a reversal of the democratic trends in Russia, Latin America, and elsewhere that were set in motion by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism. I call this phenomenon 'the First Law of Petropolitics': As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down; and as the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up.\n\n 'Third, our growing dependence on oil is fueling an ugly global energy scramble that brings out the worst in nations, wheter it is Washinton biting its tongue about the repression of women and the lack of religious freedom inside Saudi Arabia, or China going into partnership with a muderous African dictatorship in oil-rich Sudan.\n\n 'Finally, through our energy purchases we are funding both sides of the war on terror. That is not an exaggeration. To the extent that our energy purchases enrich conservative, Islamic governments in the Persian Gulf and to the extent that these governments share their windfalls with charities, mosques, religious schools, and individuals in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Dubai, Kuwait, and around the Muslim world, and to the extent that these charities, mosques, and individuals donate some of this wealth to anti-American terrorist groups, suicide bombers, and preachers, we are financing our enemies' armies as well as our own. We are financing the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps with our tax dollars, and we are indirectly financing, with our energy purchases, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.

Reaganism, which concluded with the collapse of America's mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, ushered in a period of history in which more and more public officials denigrated government and offered painless bromides for prosperity. The market was always right. Government was always wrong. And any policy proposal that involved asking the American people to do something difficult - to save more, drive more fuel-efficient cars, study harder, or be better parents - was 'off the table.' You could nut utter such phrases (so they claimed) and expect to be elected to any high office in America.

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)