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Due 12/11 (This will be the last for 1998.)
From "Lawyer Jokes" in <http://www.zelo.com/lawyer.htm> 1998:
A woman diagnosed as having a brain tumor was told by her doctor that she would need the transplant of a one-pound brain. The doctor then asked, "What type of brain do you want?"
"What type?" the woman asked.
"Yes," replied the doctor. "There is a substantial difference in price. For example, a one-pound brain of a surgeon costs $60,000, while you can get a one-pound brain of a nuclear physicist for $50,000, and so on.
"Can you give me a one-pound lawyer's brain? Ever since I was a little girl I've dreamed of being a trial attorney."
"That's $250,000," the doctor replied.
"Why so much? the woman asked. "That's over four times what a surgeon's brain costs."
"Do you have any idea how many lawyers it takes to produce a pound of brain?" the doctor replied.

Due 11/28
Bertrand Russell, 1946:
The City of God contains little that is fundamentally original. The eschatology is Jewish in origin, and came into Christianity mainly through the Book of Revelation. The doctrine of predestination and election is Pauline, though St. Augustine gave it a much fuller and more logical development than is to be found in the Epistles. The distinction between sacred and profane history is quite clearly set forth in the Old Testament. What St. Augustine did was to bring these elements together, and to relate them to the history of his time, in such a way that the fall of the Western Empire, and the subsequent period of confusion, could be assimilated by Christians without any unduly severe trial of their faith.
The Jewish pattern of history, past and future, is such as to make a powerful appeal to the opposed and unfortunate at all times. St. Augustine adapted this pattern to Christianity, Marx to Socialism. To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary: Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
The Second Coming = The Revolution
Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth
The terms on the left give the emotional content of the terms on the right, and it is this emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringing, that makes Marx's eschatology credible.

Due 11/9
Fredrick Forsyth, 1994:
Inside the church Leila paused to light her candle from one of the hundreds that burnt adjacent to the door, then, head bowed, made her way to the confessional boxes on the far side of the nave. A black-robed priest passed but paid her no attention.
It was always the same confessional box. She entered at the presice hour, dodging ahead of a woman in black who also sought a priest to listen to her litany of sins, probably more banal than those of the younger woman who pushed her aside and took her place.
Leila closed the door behind her, turned and sat on the penitent's seat. To her right was a fretted grille. She heard a rustle behind it. He would be there; he was always there at the appointed hour.
Who was he? she wondered. Why did he pay so handsomely for the information she brought him? Not a foreigner--his Arabic was too good for that, the Arabic of one born and raised in Baghdad. And his money was good, very good.
"Leila?" The voice was a murmur, low and even. She always had to arrive after him and leave before him. He had warned her not to loiter outside in the hopes of seeing him, but how could she do that anyway, with Kemal lurking at her shoulder? The oaf would see something and report to his master. It was more than her life was worth.
"Identify yourself, please."
"Father, I have sinned in matters of the flesh and am not worthy of your absolution."
It was he who had invented the phrase, because no-one else would say that.
"What have you for me?"
She reached between her legs, pulled aside the crotch of her knickers and abstracted the phoney tampon he had given her weeks ago. One end unscrewed. From the hollow interior she withdrew a thin roll of paper formed into a tube no larger than a pencil. This she passed through the fret of the grille.

Due 10/25
Robert N. Bellah, et.al., 1991
Dewey's devotion to democracy was matched only by his devotion to education--indeed, the two ideas for him were indissolubly linked. Only an educated citizenry, and educated not only in the acquisition of knowledge but in the capacity for active social life, would make a genuine democracy possible. In 1932, in response to immense suffering that the Great Depression was causing to millions in America and the rest of the world, Reinhold Niebuhr published Moral Man and Immoral Society, an angry book that called in question the dominant secular and religious liberalism of the day and served as a reminder that society has a dark side. In the introduction there was a stinging rejection of John Dewey. Niebuhr castigated Dewey for "the assumption that our social difficulties are due to the failure of the social sciences to keep pace with physical sciences which have created our technological civilization. The invariable implication of this assumption is that, with a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution." Niebuhr found this position finally evasive and unrealistic. High-minded disinterested intelligence simply fails to come to terms with what is really happening.

Due 09/30
Flying Penguin, 199?
You get it from Here.

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Due 06/26
Van B. Weigel, 1995
One primary consequence of cognition conceit is the habit of disregarding any purposeful dimension of animal life. We often assume that purpose--or purposeful living--cannot exist apart from rational forms of consciousness. Immanuel Kant himself lectured his students that "so far as animals are concerned, we have no direct duties. Animals are not self-conscious, and they are merely as a means to an end. That end is man." Since, for most of us, our immediate experience with animal life comes in the form of domesticated house pets, this tends to reinforce the perception that animals simply exist--they eat, yawn, and sleep--and have no real purpose in life.
The modern-day institution of factory farming is certainly one of the more distressing manifestations of our disregard of purpose within the animal kingdom. If we genuinely believed that animals had purposes of their own, we simply could not justify the way we cultivate animals for our own consumption--raising them in dark, cramped cages with wire floors or stalls that are so small that an animal cannot move. If we did ascribe purposeful living to animals, it would be greatly radically change our perspective. Certainly our perceptions of animal purpose would be greatly altered if we observes firsthand the struggles of animals in their natural habits--if we grasped something of the labor associated with bearing and protecting the young, building nests, finding food, and fending off predators.

Due 06/12
Willam Least Heat-Moon, 1982
Before the St. Lawrence Seaway made Duluth the most western Atlantic port, people used to say it was an old maid city looking under the bed each night for an ocean. Now Duluth has its ocean, and some citizens dream of a new Chicago here, although a lake that can freeze over for twenty miles out one-quarter of the year is something of a hindrance.

Due 05/18
Charles Darwin, 1871:
A tribe including many members who, from possessing in high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902): "Notebooks, 1912"

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
 

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903): "Essays, 1891"

The Republic form of Government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature--a type nowhere at present existing.
 

Bertrand Russell(1872-1970): "Foreword to E. Gellner: Words and Things, 1959"

The linguistic philosophy, which cares only about lanquage, and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace.
 

Frank Lloyde Wright(1867-1959): "New York Times, 4 Oct. 1953"

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to pant vines--so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
 

Henry D. Thoreau(1817-62): "Walden, 1854"

I once had a sparrow alight on my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.
 

Bertrand Russell(do.): "Mysticism and Logic, 1918"

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.
 

Stuart Ewen(1945- ): "Dissonant Declaration of Independence, Oct. 17, 1997"

That whenever the paraphernalia of social communication becomes toxic to these goals, when the arteries of public enlightenment are blocked by ideational sludge, it is the RIGHT of the PEOPLE to alter or abolish them, and to institute new approaches to the conduct of public discourse which will better protect the mental environment from which we routinely derive our stories and pictures of the world-at-large.