My Kindle Clippings/2013
From charlesreid1
January
========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 41-46 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:03 PM It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. “How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 50-51 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:04 PM now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 219-21 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:16 PM I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 240-44 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:18 PM The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 295-96 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:21 PM When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 390-94 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:33 PM I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some at the drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared, so I sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a chapter of SIMON CALLED PETER.—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 464-80 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:37 PM The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the room. “I almost made a mistake, too,” she declared vigorously. “I almost married a little kyke who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Lucille, that man’s ‘way below you!’ But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure.” “Yes, but listen,” said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down, “at least you didn’t marry him.” “I know I didn’t.” “Well, I married him,” said Myrtle, ambiguously. “And that’s the difference between your case and mine.” “Why did you, Myrtle?” demanded Catherine. “Nobody forced you to.” Myrtle considered. “I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,” she said finally. “I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.” “You were crazy about him for a while,” said Catherine. “Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.” She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past. “The only CRAZY I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out. ‘oh, is that your suit?’ I said. ‘this is the first I ever heard about it.’ But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon.” ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 489-94 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:39 PM “It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’” ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 593-99 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:48 PM “I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us positively. “Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.” She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 604-7 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:48 PM “Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour. “This is much too polite for me.” We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host: I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 652-59 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:51 PM “I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.” He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 790-95 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:59 PM At first I was flattered to go places with her, because she was a golf champion, and every one knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 797-803 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:59 PM Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man’s coat. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 803-12 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 09:00 PM “You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.” “I am careful.” “No, you’re not.” “Well, other people are,” she said lightly. “What’s that got to do with it?” “They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.” “Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.” “I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.” Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 815 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 09:00 PM Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1112-20 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:23 PM “I have been glancing into some of the rooms. Let’s go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car.” “It’s too late.” “Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming-pool? I haven’t made use of it all summer.” “I’ve got to go to bed.” “All right.” He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness. “I talked with Miss Baker,” I said after a moment. “I’m going to call up Daisy to-morrow and invite her over here to tea.” “Oh, that’s all right,” he said carelessly. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.” “What day would suit you?” “What day would suit YOU?” he corrected me quickly. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble, you see.” ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1224-30 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:29 PM I went in—after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short of pushing over the stove—but I don’t believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears, and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room. “Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1255-65 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:31 PM And inside, as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music-rooms and Restoration salons, I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of “the Merton College Library.” I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter. We went up-stairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths—intruding into one chamber where a dishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the “boarder.” I had seen him wandering hungrily about the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby’s own apartment, a bedroom and a bath, and an Adam study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall. He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1311-20 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:33 PM “I don’t play well. I don’t—I hardly play at all. I’m all out of prac——” “We’ll go down-stairs,” interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The gray windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light. In the music-room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall. When Klipspringer had played THE LOVE NEST. he turned around on the bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom. “I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play. I’m all out of prac——” “Don’t talk so much, old sport,” commanded Gatsby. “Play!” “IN THE MORNING, IN THE EVENING, AIN’T WE GOT FUN——” ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1322-30 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:34 PM “ONE THING’S SURE AND NOTHING’S SURER THE RICH GET RICHER AND THE POOR GET—CHILDREN. IN THE MEANTIME, IN BETWEEN TIME——” As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon whe Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1332-34 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:34 PM They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Bookmark Loc. 1442 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:43 PM ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1443-44 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:43 PM and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1486-93 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:46 PM Almost the last thing I remember was standing with Daisy and watching the moving-picture director and his Star. They were still under the white plum tree and their faces were touching except for a pale, thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek. “I like her,” said Daisy, “I think she’s lovely.” But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place.” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village—appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1507-12 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:47 PM Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air. “Lots of people come who haven’t been invited,” she said suddenly. “That girl hadn’t been invited. They simply force their way in and he’s too polite to object.” “I’d like to know who he is and what he does,” insisted Tom. “And I think I’ll make a point of finding out.” ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1534-39 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:49 PM “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!” He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.” He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1541-53 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:51 PM . . . One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1674-78 | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:58 PM “She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of——” I hesitated. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. . . . high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl. . . . ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1823-29 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:06 AM “He isn’t causing a row.” Daisy looked desperately from one to the other. “You’re causing a row. Please have a little self-control.” “Self-control!” Repeated Tom incredulously. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.” Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization. “We’re all white here,” murmured Jordan. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1856-72 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:08 AM “You’re revolting,” said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice, dropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: “Do you know why we left Chicago? I’m surprised that they didn’t treat you to the story of that little spree.” Gatsby walked over and stood beside her. “Daisy, that’s all over now,” he said earnestly. “It doesn’t matter any more. Just tell him the truth—that you never loved him—and it’s all wiped out forever.” She looked at him blindly. “Why—how could I love him—possibly?” “You never loved him.” She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now. It was too late. “I never loved him,” she said, with perceptible reluctance. “Not at Kapiolani?” demanded Tom suddenly. “No.” From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up on hot waves of air. “Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes dry?” There was a husky tenderness in his tone. . . . “Daisy?” “Please don’t.” Her voice was cold, but the rancor was gone from it. She looked at Gatsby. “There, Jay,” she said—but her hand as she tried to light a cigarette was trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette and the burning match on the carpet. “Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.” ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1873-90 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:09 AM “You loved me TOO?” he repeated. “Even that’s a lie,” said Tom savagely. “She didn’t know you were alive. Why—there’re things between Daisy and me that you’ll never know, things that neither of us can ever forget.” The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby. “I want to speak to Daisy alone,” he insisted. “She’s all excited now——” “Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom,” she admitted in a pitiful voice. “It wouldn’t be true.” “Of course it wouldn’t,” agreed Tom. She turned to her husband. “As if it mattered to you,” she said. “Of course it matters. I’m going to take better care of you from now on.” “You don’t understand,” said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. “You’re not going to take care of her any more.” “I’m not?” Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to control himself now. “Why’s that?” “Daisy’s leaving you.” “Nonsense.” “I am, though,” she said with a visible effort. “She’s not leaving me!” Tom’s words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. “Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger.” “I won’t stand this!” cried Daisy. “Oh, please let’s get out.” “Who are you, anyhow?” broke out Tom. “You’re one of that bunch that hangs around with Meyer Wolfsheim—that much I happen to know. I’ve made a little investigation into your affairs—and I’ll carry it further to-morrow.” ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1911-21 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:11 AM “You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr. Gatsby’s car.” She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn. “Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.” They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts, even from our pity. After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whiskey in the towel. “Want any of this stuff? Jordan? . . . Nick?” I didn’t answer. “Nick?” He asked again. “What?” “Want any?” “No . . . I just remembered that to-day’s my birthday.” I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1924-26 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:12 AM Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 1927 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:12 AM So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 2088-92 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:51 AM “You ought to go away,” I said. “It’s pretty certain they’ll trace your car.” “Go away NOW, old sport?” “Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal.” He wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 2103-5 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:52 AM But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously— ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Bookmark Loc. 2119 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:54 AM ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 2118-25 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:54 AM “I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was, ‘way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?” On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 2134-40 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:56 AM Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand. That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 2155-62 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:58 AM He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach—he was penniless now—was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street. The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 2176-82 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:59 AM “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps, and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 2503-14 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 01:36 AM She was dressed to play golf, and I remember thinking she looked like a good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair the color of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished she told me without comment that she was engaged to another man. I doubted that, though there were several she could have married at a nod of her head, but I pretended to be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I wasn’t making a mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up to say good-bye. “Nevertheless you did throw me over,” said Jordan suddenly. “You threw me over on the telephone. I don’t give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.” We shook hands. “Oh, and do you remember.”—she added——” a conversation we had once about driving a car?” “Why—not exactly.” “You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.” “I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.” ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 2514-15 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 01:36 AM She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. ========== The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Highlight Loc. 2547-49 | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 01:40 AM And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. ==========
April
In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight Loc. 36-37 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:28 AM
What had shaped the relationship between scientists and the state in history in different cultural and national contexts? What should be the proper role of science in a democratic society?
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight Loc. 47-50 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:30 AM
What I have found, as I have tried to argue in the book, is that the most important contribution of PSAC was not its advice to the government on what technology could do, but, rather, what it could not do. It is this sense of technological skepticism, I believe, that we still need in our own age of global technological enthusiasm and renewed American militarism if we are to prevent future Great Leap Forwards and escape the various shadows of Sputnik.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight Loc. 110-12 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:36 AM
"You know, Jim, this bunch of scientists was one of the few groups that I encountered in Washington who seemed to be there to help the country and not help themselves. "4 In Eisenhower's eyes, PSAC appeared not only free of self-interest, but also a "good" scientific-technological elite that presented a counterbalance to the military-industrial complex that he would warn the nation of shortly in his famous farewell address.'
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight Loc. 110-14 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:37 AM
"You know, Jim, this bunch of scientists was one of the few groups that I encountered in Washington who seemed to be there to help the country and not help themselves. "4 In Eisenhower's eyes, PSAC appeared not only free of self-interest, but also a "good" scientific-technological elite that presented a counterbalance to the military-industrial complex that he would warn the nation of shortly in his famous farewell address.' To what extent this perception corresponded to the reality of PSAC and American politics of science is a question of more than historical interest. As we enter a new era of technological enthusiasm, we need more than ever to scrutinize the historical forces still shaping our perceptions of what science and technology can and cannot do for social progress.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight Loc. 119-22 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:38 AM
The illusion of technological fixes, PSAC scientists believed, often led to not only a waste of societal resources on impractical developmental projects, such as the si billion failure to make a nuclear-powered airplane, but also, sometimes, dangerously misguided public policy, such as the perilous arms race and later the war in Vietnam. Thus, with any given project, the allure of the technological imperative must be tempered with a critical, independent evaluation of both its technical limitations and policy implications. Has the necessary basic research been completed and the project's technical feasibility been proven before going into costly production?
==========
In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight Loc. 119-23 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:39 AM
The illusion of technological fixes, PSAC scientists believed, often led to not only a waste of societal resources on impractical developmental projects, such as the si billion failure to make a nuclear-powered airplane, but also, sometimes, dangerously misguided public policy, such as the perilous arms race and later the war in Vietnam. Thus, with any given project, the allure of the technological imperative must be tempered with a critical, independent evaluation of both its technical limitations and policy implications. Has the necessary basic research been completed and the project's technical feasibility been proven before going into costly production? Has it passed a rigorous cost-benefit analysis? Can it fulfill its stated mission and, most important of all, does that mission make sense in the context of broad, long-term policy considerations?
==========
In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 3 | Loc. 136-37 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:41 AM
Most also had supported J. Robert Oppenheimer and James Conant in their tumultuous conflict with physicists Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence over the H-bomb in late 1949•
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 148-50 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:43 AM
Clearly not all American scientists subscribed to PSAC's technological skepticism. As perhaps the most prominent nuclear physicist of the day, Teller, for example, was conspicuously missing from the committee roster. Indeed, he would often make a formidable one-man anti-PSAC not only by battling the committee's various arms control proposals but also by advocating technological fixes, especially nuclear energy, in all areas of national life. As a popular joke among physicists went, "You got a problem? Eddie's got a bomb."7
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 151-52 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:44 AM
The split in the scientific community, which can be traced to the hydrogen bomb debate in 1949-1950, was not only over the direction of American nuclear policy, but also over whether technology offered a solution to social and political problems.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 156-57 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:45 AM
Eventually, many PSAC scientists came to agree with critics of the war outside of the committee that the American sense of technological superiority played a significant part in leading the country into the conflict.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 163-65 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:46 AM
Yes, they consciously tapped into the undercurrent of anxiety in the age of technological enthusiasm, and their technological critique might have contributed to the countercultural movement of the late 196os and early 19706 and even the postmodern questioning of science and technology.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 169-71 | Added on Monday, April 08, 2013, 02:48 AM
Rationality, to them, should not stop at the technical but should be extended into the policy arena as well. Thus theirs was not an argument against technology, but one for appropriate technology, for a broadened concept of technological rationality that encouraged technological development not for its own sake but for its benefits in achieving social, political, cultural, and economic goals in a democratic society.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 171-72 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:00 AM
By insisting on looking at the "big picture" whenever they examined a particular technology, they abandoned a purely technical approach to the evaluation of technology and adopted instead what historian of technology Thomas P. Hughes calls the systems approach to technology'
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 178-81 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:03 AM
PSAC also deserves our attention as a key institution at the interface between the scientific community and the broader polity during the Cold War.9 As historian
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt argues, institutional histories can be a powerful "point of convergence" of intellectual, social, and cultural history of science." Studies of scientific institutions, including laboratories, academies, and societies, have long held a key place in the history of science and blossomed especially in recent years."
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 177-78 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:03 AM
Although PSAC was abolished decades ago and the Cold War has finally ended, the tension between technological enthusiasm and skepticism with which PSAC grappled during the Cold War has not left us.
==========
In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 219-20 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:12 AM
Instead of showing science's positive contributions toward technological progress, PSAC focused on the role of basic research in evaluating technology, or, more important, in showing the limits of technology.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 231-32 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:15 AM
Thus, basic research was justified not only as a source of new technological initiatives, as Vannevar Bush had argued, but perhaps more important, as a way to prevent the government from going into blind alleys in costly applied research and development.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 238-39 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:16 AM
in the everyday life of a science adviser in the trench, technical proficiency probably counted more than the scientific discoveries on which the science advisers made their reputations."
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 256 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:22 AM
American joke that the Soviets could not sneak a nuclear "suitcase bomb" into the country because they had not perfected the suitcase.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 258-60 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:22 AM
It led many, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to realize that a "total Cold War" had dawned in which science, technology, education, and the pursuit of national prestige ranked with military and economic strengths as vital forces.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 265-67 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:24 AM
Because Sputnik called into question the adequacy of both the government's support for and use of science, PSAC scientists took on both "science in policy" to make science better serve the government's needs and "policy for science" so that the government could support science effectively.
==========
In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Bookmark on Page 15 | Loc. 288 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:30 AM
the
==========
In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 288-90 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:31 AM
providing the United States with a "worthy counterpart" to the Royal Society of London and the French Academy.' Indeed, by the early twentieth century, the NAS had largely evolved into an honorific society of scientific elites, ill prepared to serve the government's needs when another crisis, World War I, came along.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 318-21 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:38 AM
Jewett resented FDR's restrictions of the scientists' role to "details of research problems
of the government departments." "I say this," Jewett continued, "because of a feeling that if my training, experience and judgment were of any value to the scientific departments of the Government that value lies rather in the field of matters of scientific policies which may or may not embrace research, than in the narrower field of research alone ."s'
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 328-31 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:40 AM
The 1933 World's Fair ("Century of Progress") in Chicago captured this faith in pure science with its motto: "Science Finds, Industry Applies, and Man Conforms.` Notably, Lewis Mumford, a prominent American public intellectual and one of the fiercest critics of what he called megatechnics, put an important twist on the thesis of scientific superiority when he wrote approvingly in the 1930s about "a liberated scientific curiosity" as "a counterweight to the passionate desire to reduce all existence to terms of immediate profit and success."23
==========
In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Bookmark on Page 18 | Loc. 340 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:42 AM
'All
==========
In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 340-41 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:42 AM
'All science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos," recalled Richard Feynman, a talented young group leader at the bomb laboratory during World War II. `And that was not much science," Feynman added, "it was mostly engineering.""
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 344-45 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:43 AM
Furthermore, in the hard times during the Depression, only the most enterprising experimentalists and most talented theoreticians survived the selection process and got to play key roles in the wartime research projects.3°
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 356-59 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2013, 01:47 AM
When a naval officer asked Rabi to make a certain radar device but refused to tell him what it was for-"We prefer to talk about this in our swivel chairs in Washington"-Rabi knew exactly what to do: "I didn't say anything. Neither did I do anything." Finally the officers relented and the two sides worked together to produce "a fantastically great radar." Fortunately, Rabi reflected, "our money did not come from the military directly" but from the OSRD.34
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 409-10 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2013, 07:38 PM
the question of dual allegiance to science and government had long frustrated American scientists' pursuit for a role in public policy.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 414 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2013, 07:39 PM
Although many scientists continued to concentrate on their science either as a personal preference-Feynman claimed to practice "active irresponsibility"-or
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 435-36 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2013, 07:42 PM
Science, Mumford insisted, should not only pursue truth for its own sake, but be made to answer the question: "Is it beneficial?", Such public questioning of their responsibility contributed to scientists' resolve "to make science serve the cause of peace"
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 437-38 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2013, 07:42 PM
Such appeals encouraged scientists to leave the ivory tower or weapons labs, if temporarily, to enter the public sphere and attempt to shape nuclear policy.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 508-12 | Added on Monday, April 22, 2013, 09:26 PM
The resultant GAC report marked several important departures in the history of science advising. Even more than the Franck Committee, the GAC based its recommendation against the H-bomb on explicitly social, political, and moral considerations: the H-bomb was not a military instrument but a weapon of geno- cide.'9 The majority appendix to the report, drafted by Conant, and cosigned by DuBridge, Rowe, Smith, Buckley, and Oppenheimer, argued that it was both necessary and possible to stop the development of this technology. "Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon, until the present climate of world opinion changes."3° The minority appendix to the GAC, signed by Rabi and Fermi, condemned the H-bomb even more forcefully, calling it "necessarily an evil thing considered in any light."3'
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 508-15 | Added on Monday, April 22, 2013, 09:26 PM
The resultant GAC report marked several important departures in the history of science advising. Even more than the Franck Committee, the GAC based its recommendation against the H-bomb on explicitly social, political, and moral considerations: the H-bomb was not a military instrument but a weapon of geno- cide.'9 The majority appendix to the report, drafted by Conant, and cosigned by DuBridge, Rowe, Smith, Buckley, and Oppenheimer, argued that it was both necessary and possible to stop the development of this technology. "Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon, until the present climate of world opinion changes."3° The minority appendix to the GAC, signed by Rabi and Fermi, condemned the H-bomb even more forcefully, calling it "necessarily an evil thing considered in any light."3' Thus, in advising the government, the GAC sought to explain not what a technology could do, but rather what it could not do. "[I]t is not a weapon," the committee agreed, "which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes." In other words, it would not help the United States win the Cold War militarily even if it could be made.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 526-29 | Added on Monday, April 22, 2013, 09:29 PM
Both the majority and the minority views of the GAC enraged its critics. Edward Teller, who firmly believed in the necessity of deterring Soviet aggression with superior American military technology, denounced the GAC for abandoning Oppenheimer's earlier position on a scientist's duty. "The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature," Teller argued:
It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist's job to find the ways in which these laws can serve human will. However, it is not the scientist's job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives.38
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 534-35 | Added on Monday, April 22, 2013, 09:32 PM
President Truman did not share the GAC's moral concern over the development of the H-bomb. Three years ago he had privately dismissed Oppenheimer as a "cry-baby scientist" when the physicist told him that he had blood on his hands in the aftermath of Hiroshima.'
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 544 | Added on Monday, April 22, 2013, 09:33 PM
It reinforced the idea that scientists, as experts, should be strictly "on tap" and not "on top."
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 575-77 | Added on Monday, April 22, 2013, 09:42 PM
"Either my comments and advice must play an important part in the councils of your administration or I must be free to speak plainly in public on all those matters of science in which I feel that my war experience gives me a duty to speak."3 Soon he left the White House, disillusioned by what he perceived to be Truman's unwillingness to heed outside scientific advice.'
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 622-25 | Added on Wednesday, April 24, 2013, 06:28 PM
Although freed from possible military encroachment and left to support basic research, the NSF was forced to accommodate itself to a federal science funding mechanism dominated by the DOD and the AEC. Its budget languished both in the BOB and in Congress, due partly to its detachment from direct defense concerns. This situation would change with Sputnik, but for much of its formative period, the NSF remained an underfunded promise for the future.
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May
hunter s thompson - the great shark hunt (The Great Shark Hunt)
- Highlight Loc. 210-24 | Added on Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 01:44 PM
He was laughing wildly. "Hell yes! And they'll all be nekkid too!" I shook my head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim. "There's going to be trouble," I said. "My assignment is to take pictures of the riot." "What riot?" I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. "At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers." I stared at him again. "Don't you read the newspapers?" The grin on his face had collapsed. "What the hell are you talkin about?" "Well. . . maybe I shouldn't be telling you. . ." I shrugged. "But hell, everybody else seems to know. The cops and the National Guard have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 20,000 troops on alert at Fort Knox. They've warned us -- all the press and photographers -- to wear helmets and special vests like flak jackets. We were told to expect shooting. . ." "No!" he shouted; his hands flew up and hovered momentarily between us, as if to ward off the words he was hearing. Then he whacked his fist on the bar. "Those sons of bitches! God Almighty! The Kentucky Derby!" He kept shaking his head. "No! Jesus! That's almost too bad to believe!" Now he seemed to be sagging on the stool, and when he looked up his eyes were misty. "Why? Why here? Don't they respect anything?" I shrugged again. "It's not just the Panthers. The FBI says busloads of white crazies are coming in from all over the country-- to mix with the crowd and attack all at once, from every direction. They'll be dressed like everybody else. You know -- coats and ties and all that. But when the trouble starts. . . well, that's why the cops are so worried." He sat for a moment, looking hurt and confused and not quite able to digest all this terrible news. Then he cried out: "Oh. . . Jesus! What in the name of God is happening in this country? Where can you get away from it?" "Not here," I said, picking up my bag. "Thanks for the drink. . . and good luck." He grabbed my arm, urging me to have another, but I said I was overdue at the Press Club and hustled off to get my act together for the awful spectacle.
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hunter s thompson - the great shark hunt (The Great Shark Hunt)
- Highlight Loc. 239-42 | Added on Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 01:48 PM
and now, humming along in a Yellow Cab toward town, I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger's brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, "Hell yes, I'm from Texas," deserves whatever happens to him. And he had, after all, come here once again to make a nineteenth-century ass of himself in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout with nothing to recommend it except a very saleable "tradition."
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hunter s thompson - the great shark hunt (The Great Shark Hunt)
- Highlight Loc. 286-91 | Added on Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 01:53 PM
There was nothing particularly odd about him. No facial veins or clumps of bristly warts. I told him about the motel woman's description and he seemed puzzled. "Don't let it bother you," I said. "Just keep in mind for the next few days that we're in Louisville, Kentucky. Not London. Not even New York. This is a weird place. You're lucky that mental defective at the motel didn't jerk a pistol out of the cash register and blow a big hole in you." I laughed, but he looked worried. "Just pretend you're visiting a huge outdoor loony bin," I said. "If the inmates get out of control we'll soak them down with Mace." I showed him the can of "Chemical Billy," resisting the urge to fire it across the room at a rat-faced man typing diligently in the Associated Press section.
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hunter s thompson - the great shark hunt (The Great Shark Hunt)
- Highlight Loc. 325-35 | Added on Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 01:57 PM
He had done a few good sketches, but so far we hadn't seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for the lead drawing. It was a face I'd seen a thousand times at every Derby I'd ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry-- a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture. One of the key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is that close inbreeding tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well as the strong points. In horse breeding, for instance, there is a definite risk in breeding two fast horses who are both a little crazy. The offspring will likely be very fast and also very crazy. So the trick in breeding thoroughbreds is to retain the good traits and filter out the bad. But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised, particularly in a narrow Southern society where the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable, but far more convenient -- to the parents -- than setting their offspring free to find their own mates, for their own reasons and in their own ways. ("Goddam, did you hear about Smitty's daughter? She went crazy in Boston last week and married a nigger!") So the face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend was a symbol, in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 670-73 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 08:22 AM
The action in science advising on nuclear weapons took place largely outside of ODM-SAC as the H-bomb program headed toward its first test in 1952, code-named "Mike." Although a Panel of Consultants on Disarmament in the State Department, chaired by Oppenheimer but led largely by Bush, argued for a postponement of the test to give the test ban another chance, Edward Teller counterattacked, effectively, not only for proceeding with the test but also for establishing a second nuclear weapons laboratory at Liver- more.38
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 691-94 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 08:25 AM
Remarkably, the key to ODM-SAC'S justification of scientists' role in the government was not what science and technology could contribute directly to the military strength, but their role in shaping planning and policy. "Perhaps the greatest single improvement in the effective use of science in the national defense will lie," the committee argued, "in its use in helping to bring about the increasing clarification of our over-all strategic objectives and priorities, and a greater understanding of where our problems lie and of their relative importance."
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 694-99 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 08:26 AM
Continuing earlier attempts in the same direction, the ODM-SAC'S quest for science in policy implied a concurrent demand for scientists in policy. Such science advisers would not only alert the government about opportunities offered by scientific and technological developments, but also, more important, carry out critical evaluations at the interface between technology and policy so that both the potentials and limits of new technologies could be recognized and incorporated in the making of policy. Such integration of science and scientists in policy would, the committee believed, "serve to reduce waste, confusion and futility in technical development." Finally, the scientists also linked its advice on science in policy with policy for science when the committee contended that such critical technical and policy evaluations would in turn have to rest on "the best available estimates of scientific
fact and technical promise," offering, implicitly, rationale for federal support of scientific research.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 717-18 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 08:33 AM
the intensified Cold War abroad and rising anti-Communism at home severely circumscribed the space for the kind of technological skepticism that was first identified with the GAC and then associated with the ODM-SAC.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 718-20 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 08:33 AM
At a time when the Truman administration was preoccupied with "fighting tomorrow's wars with tomorrow's weapons," these liberal-moderate scientists' advocacy of critical evaluations of military technology, with its accompanying demand for scientists to play a role in strategic policymaking, generated much less enthusiasm in the government than Edward Teller's fervent promotion of direct scientific and technological contributions to national defense.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 735-36 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 08:39 AM
Thus the new administration appreciated scientists' critical role in military technology, but it was reluctant to allow them to enter into policymaking.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 761-62 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 08:48 AM
The ODM-SAC watched in horror as McCarthy's reckless investigations devastated an Army research laboratory at Fort Monmouth and threatened to do the same for MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in December 1953•
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 774-77 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 08:51 AM
Ironically and tragically, Oppenheimer had foreseen the gathering storm as early as the summer of 1946 when he discussed with Lilienthal the consequences of a Soviet opposition to international control of atomic energy. Speaking in "a really heart-breaking tone," Oppenheimer predicted, in Lilienthal's paraphrase:
This will be construed by us as a demonstration of Russia's warlike intentions. And this will fit perfectly into the plans of that growing number who want to put the country on a war footing, first psychologically, then actually. The Army directing the country's research; Red-baiting; treating all labor organizations, CIO first, as Communist and therefore traitorous, etc."
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 785 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 08:53 AM
Unjustified attacks on scientists "are reducing the morale of important research laboratories and reducing the availability of key scientists for important posts in the Government," DuBridge warned.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 791-95 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 08:56 AM
The hearing on Oppenheimer's security clearance before the AEC Personnel Security Board, chaired by Gordon Gray, presented such a rich and fascinating
window on modern American science and politics that it has attracted the attention of various scholars from historians to dramatists. Among the many issues it highlighted was one that has been central in the history of American science advising: the boundary between the technical and the political that defined the proper role of scientists as government advisors. Oppenheimer was attacked not only for giving "wrong" advice on matters such as the hydrogen bomb, but for giving such advice at all.
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 811-14 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 09:20 AM
policy-drew not only rebuttal from Oppen- heimer-"Does this mean that a loyal scientist called to advise his Government does so at his peril if he happens to believe in the wisdom of maintaining a proper balance between offensive and defensive weapons?"-but also from other scientists such as Bush, who argued that "Scientists need to be used not as lackeys or underlings but as partners in a great endeavor to preserve our freedoms."
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In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Zuoyue Wang)
- Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 836-38 | Added on Friday, May 31, 2013, 09:24 AM
It was to the president's and the AEC's relief, that the "mass exodus" from weapons laboratories that had been predicted by the ODM-SAC and the AEC's GAC failed to materialize in the wake of the Oppenheimer case.44
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June
The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook (Julie Kaufmann and Beth Hensperger)
- Bookmark Loc. 1942 | Added on Sunday, June 02, 2013, 12:56 PM
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The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook (Julie Kaufmann and Beth Hensperger)
- Highlight Loc. 1942-64 | Added on Sunday, June 02, 2013, 12:56 PM
As guests of the Old ways Food Preservation Society of Boston, a group of food writers and restaurateurs traveled en maze to Morocco a few years ago. The result has been an epiphany regarding North African cuisine, so influenced by the French and Arabs, with the food-loving public reaping the benefit of many excellent articles, travelogues, and exceptional recipes from the little-known land of Casablanca fame. While couscous is the most prevalent starch in Moroccan cuisine, rice is also made. Serve this slightly spiced rice with an array of plain, separately steamed vegetables—green beans, fava or lima beans, carrots, butternut squash, celery, zucchini—and some chickpeas. Preserved lemons are often available in Middle Eastern markets, or you can easily make your own. MACHINE: Medium (6-cup) rice cooker ; fuzzy logic or on/off CYCLE: Regular/Brown Rice YIELD: Serves 4 to 5 1½ cups aromatic long-grain brown rice, such as Texmati 2¾ cups water or vegetable stock ¾ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 1 teaspoon ground coriander ½ teaspoon ground cardamom 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces ¼ cup minced preserved lemon, for garnish 1. Coat the rice cooker bowl with nonstick cooking spray or a film of vegetable oil. Place the rice in the rice bowl. Add the water, salt, pepper, coriander, and cardamom; swirl just to combine. Close the cover and set for the regular/Brown Rice cycle. 2. When the machine switches to the Keep Warm cycle, add the butter. Close the cover and let the rice steam for 10 minutes. Fluff the rice with a wooden or plastic rice paddle or wooden spoon. This rice will hold on Keep Warm for 2 hours. Serve hot, sprinkled with a bit of the preserved lemon.
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The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook (Julie Kaufmann and Beth Hensperger)
- Highlight Loc. 1864-83 | Added on Sunday, June 02, 2013, 12:57 PM
Salty miso, a fermented soybean paste that is thick like peanut butter, adds a nice, healthy dimension to plain brown rice (a little dab will do ya, as it is quite strongly flavored). Miso is a traditional Japanese food and there are many types from which to choose, although sometimes finding the one to suit your palate is a challenge. There are the traditional misos, found in Japanese groceries, and unpasteurized misos, geared to health food devotees. The mildest misos are white and a creamy yellow-white, suitable for this recipe (the darker the color of the miso, from red to brown, the stronger the flavor). This rice is really good alongside simple steamed or sautéed vegetables. You can use long,medium-, or short-grain brown rice in this recipe. Top with minced fresh Italian parsley, mitsuba (a Japanese herb found fresh in Asian markets), or green onion tops, and some cubed hot or cold tofu. MACHINE: Medium (6-cup) rice cooker ; fuzzy logic or on/off CYCLE: Regular/Brown Rice YIELD: Serves 3 to 4 1½ tablespoons white or yellow miso 2¼ cups water or vegetable stock One 1-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled Juice of ½ small lemon (about 2 teaspoons) 1 cup brown rice 1. In a small bowl, mash the miso in ¼ cup of the water to dissolve. 2. Place the dissolved miso, the remaining 2 cups water, the ginger, and lemon juice in the rice cooker bowl. Add the rice; swirl to combine. Close the cover and set for the regular/Brown Rice cycle. 3. When the machine switches to the Keep Warm cycle, let the rice steam for 15 minutes. Fluff the rice with a wooden or plastic rice paddle or wooden spoon. Remove and discard the ginger before serving. This rice will hold on Keep Warm for 1 to 2 hours. Serve hot.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page xvii | Loc. 104-5 | Added on Friday, June 07, 2013, 08:22 AM
This doesn't mean that controversies are suppressed; in fact, quite the opposite is true. The IPCC brings controversy within consensus, capturing the full range of expert opinion.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page xvii | Loc. 116 | Added on Friday, June 07, 2013, 08:25 AM
In the words of T. S. Eliot,
We
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page xviii | Loc. 119-21 | Added on Friday, June 07, 2013, 08:28 AM
Yet these countless versions of the atmosphere's history have also converged. Could it be that one day some grossly different data image will emerge, in which the planet did not really warm across the period of historical records, or human activity played no significant role in climate change? Sure, it's possible; in science, never say never. But the chances of such a thing happening today are vanishingly small.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page xviii | Loc. 127-29 | Added on Friday, June 07, 2013, 08:30 AM
In the mid 1990s, environmental conservatives and climate-change skeptics promoted the idea that "sound science" must mean "incontrovertible proof by observational data," whereas models were inherently untrustworthy. But in global climate science, at least, this is a false dichotomy. The simplistic "models vs. data" debate lingers on, but in recent years it has been largely replaced by more sophisticated approaches.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page xix | Loc. 141 | Added on Friday, June 07, 2013, 08:33 AM
Computer models hold the key to transforming these information resources into knowledge.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 12-13 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 12:34 PM
Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Note Loc. 13 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 12:35 PM
novel starts with a time sequence. quantifying time and controlling it.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 18-20 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 12:36 PM
“I cried till I didn’t have any tears left,” she tells me. “I just lay here counting the seconds.” “How many seconds?” I ask her. “Millions and millions of them.” “No, but how many exactly?” “I lost count,” says Ma.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 54-55 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 12:39 PM
Ma’s blue dress is hanging over a bit of my sleeping eye, I mean the eye in the picture but the dress for real in Wardrobe.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 93-94 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 12:43 PM
I don’t like nine. I find a tiny leaf coming, that counts as ten.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 108-9 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 12:44 PM
“What’s wrong with needing?” “It’s hard to explain.”
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 134-35 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 12:51 PM
Before I came down from Heaven Ma left it on all day long and got turned into a zombie that’s like a ghost but walks thump thump. So now she always switches off after one show,
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 156-58 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 12:52 PM
When I step away there’s a black 5 a little bit over the 4. I love five the best of every number, I have five fingers each hand and the same of toes and so does Ma, we’re our dead spits. Nine is my worst favorite number. “What’s my tall?”
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 247-49 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 01:02 PM
We recycle the cereal box from Ancient Egyptian Pyramid, Ma shows me to cut a strip that’s as big as her foot, that’s why it’s called a foot, then she puts twelve little lines. I measure her nose that’s two inches long. My nose is one inch and a quarter, I write it down.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 250-53 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 01:02 PM
“Hey,” I say, “let’s measure Room.” “What, all of it?” “Do we have something else to do?” She looks at me strange. “I guess not.” I write down all the numbers, like the tall of Door Wall to the line where Roof starts equals six feet seven inches. “Guess what,” I tell Ma, “every cork tile is nearly a bit bigger than Ruler.”
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 357-58 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 01:12 PM
The Bugs are invisible but I talk to them and sometimes count, last time I got to 347. I hear the snap of the switch and Lamp goes out all at the same second.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 393-94 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 01:15 PM
Brightness is coming in Skylight, the dark snow’s nearly gone. Ma’s looking up too, she’s got a small smile on, I think the prayer did magic.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 456-57 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 01:21 PM
Stealing is when a boy takes what belongs to some boy else, because in books and TV all persons have things that belong just to them, it’s complicated.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 464-65 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 01:21 PM
Here come the turtle babies out of their shells, but the turtle mothers are gone already, that’s weird. I wonder if they meet sometime in the sea, the mothers and the babies, if they know each other or maybe they just swim on by.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 555-56 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 01:27 PM
It would be cool to sometimes go smaller again and sometimes bigger like Alice.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 656-59 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 01:35 PM
Ma?” “Yeah.” “Where are we when we’re asleep?” I can hear her yawn. “Right here.” “But dreams.” I wait. “Are they TV?” She still doesn’t answer. “Do we go into TV for dreaming?” “No. We’re never anywhere but here.” Her voice sounds a long way away.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 714-15 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:34 PM
Germs are real, and blood. Boys are TV but they kind of look like me, the me in Mirror that isn’t real either, just a picture.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 764-66 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:40 PM
We watch the medical planet where doctors and nurses cut holes in persons to pull the germs out. The persons are asleep not dead. The doctors don’t bite the thread like Ma, they use super sharp daggers and after, they sew the persons up like Frankenstein.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 771-80 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:42 PM
“The bottle where he took the pill, that’s the exact one we’ve got, the killers.” Ma stares at the TV, but it’s showing a car speeding around a mountain now. “No, before,” I say. “He actually had our bottle of killers.” “Well, maybe it was the same kind as ours, but it’s not our one.” “Yeah it is.” “No, there’s lots of them.” “Where?” Ma looks at me, then back at her dress, she pulls at the hem. “Well, our bottle is right here on Shelf, and the rest are . . .” “In TV?” I ask. She’s staring at the threads and winding them around the little cards to fit back in Kit. “You know what?” I’m bouncing. “You know what that means? He must go in TV.” The medical planet’s come back on but I’m not even watching. “Old Nick,” I say, so she won’t think I mean the man in the yellow helmet. “When he’s not here, in the daytime, you know what? He actually goes in TV. That’s where he got our killers in a store and brung them here.”
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 787-89 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:42 PM
“Jack—” Jack what? What does Jack mean? Ma leans back on the pillows. “It’s very hard to explain.” I think she can explain, she just won’t. “You can, because I’m five now.”
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 802-4 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:44 PM
“Not tonight, I can’t think of the right words to explain.” Alice says she can’t explain herself because she’s not herself, she knows who she was this morning but she’s changed several times since then.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 816-20 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:45 PM
I hate when she’s Gone, but I like that I get to watch TV all day. I put it on really quiet at first and make it a bit louder at a time. Too much TV might turn me into a zombie but Ma’s like a zombie today and she’s not watching even. There’s Bob the Builder and Wonder Pets! and Barney. For each I go up to touch hello. Barney and his friends do lots of hugs, I run to get in the middle but sometimes I’m too late. Today it’s about a fairy that sneaks in at night and turns old teeth into money. I want Dora but she doesn’t come.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Note Loc. 820 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:46 PM
television blurring line between reality and not. same thing happening to everyone but on different scales.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 821-23 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:47 PM
Cartoons are over so I watch football and the planet where people win prizes. The puffy-hair woman is on her red couch talking to a man who used to be a golf star. There’s another planet where women hold up necklaces and say how exquisite they are.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 825 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:47 PM
How can TV be pictures of real things?
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 848-50 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:50 PM
Dora is a drawing in TV but she’s my real friend, that’s confusing. Jeep is actually real, I can feel him with my fingers. Superman is just TV. Trees are TV but Plant is real, oh, I forgot to water her.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 878-79 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:53 PM
“Some really sticky kind, so you’ll end up with teeth like mine?” I don’t like when Ma does sarcasm.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Highlight Loc. 889-91 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 02:55 PM
In the night she’s flashing, it wakes me in Bed. Lamp on, I count five. Lamp off, I count one. Lamp on, I count two. Lamp off, I count two. I do a groan. “Just a bit more.” She’s still staring up at Skylight that’s all black.
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Room (Emma Donoghue)
- Bookmark Loc. 1484 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 03:48 PM
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1526-27 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 05:53 PM
Between 1945 and 1965, digital computers revolutionized weather forecasting, transforming an intuitive art into the first computational science. Unlike many scientific revolutions, this one was planned.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1539-42 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 05:57 PM
In a process I have called "mutual orientation," scientists and engineers oriented their military sponsors toward new techniques and technologies, while the agencies oriented their grantees toward military applications. This relationship mostly produced general directions rather than precise goals; rarely did military funders require scientists to specify exactly how their research might be used by the armed forces. Nonetheless, military funders did expect that at least some of the work they paid for would ultimately lead to weaponry or to other forms of strategic advantage, including useful practical knowledge.'
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1545-47 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 06:00 PM
General George C. Kennedy of the Strategic Air Command claimed in 1953 that "the nation which first learns to plot the paths of air masses accurately and learns to control the time and place of precipitation will dominate the globe."'
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 1580-81 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 06:51 PM
In an early postwar funding request, von Neumann mentioned "high speed calculation to replace certain experimental procedures in some selected parts of mathematical physics.""
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 1587-89 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 06:53 PM
The widely recounted D-Day story, along with many others, entrenched meteorology as a military science. For example, commanders used "applied climatology" in siting new bases, choosing transport routes, and deciding when to launch operations.17 Statistical climatology had also assisted in scheduling the Normandy invasion: analysis had revealed that May and July would probably be worse than June for operations in the English Channel.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1601-3 | Added on Sunday, June 09, 2013, 06:56 PM
"The leak indicated that a comprehensive meteorological theory existed (when it most certainly did not) and emphasized the weather control aspects." In order to sell a project that could forecast, or control, the weather, the meteorologists needed to have a plausible theory to back it up."23
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1634-37 | Added on Monday, June 10, 2013, 08:36 AM
In March and April of 1950, Jule Charney, Ragnar Fjortoft, George Platzman, Joseph Smagorinsky, and John Freeman spent five weeks at Aberdeen. Von Neumann's wife, Klara, taught the team to code for the ENIAC and checked the final program. Von Neumann himself rarely appeared, but called in frequently by telephone. Working around the clock for 33 days, the team at Aberdeen carried out two 12-hour and four 24-hour
retrospective forecasts. A second ENIAC expedition took place a year later, but the group never published its results.29
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 1747-50 | Added on Monday, June 10, 2013, 07:20 PM
Hurd Willett of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing around 1950, bemoaned the absence of noticeable improvement: "... probably there is no other field of applied science in which so much money has been spent to effect
so little real progress as in weather forecasting. . . . In spite of ... [the] great expansion of forecasting activity, there has been little or no real progress made during the past forty years in the verification skill" of basic surface forecasts.55
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 1765-68 | Added on Monday, June 10, 2013, 07:29 PM
The history of NWP is often presented as one of continuous success and steady progress. Indeed, many scientists with whom I spoke while researching this book expressed surprise or outright skepticism when I noted that it took several decades for computer models to approach human forecast skill. Yet, as we have seen, climbing the hierarchy of models did not lead instantaneously to better forecasts; in fact, initially the opposite was true. Simple barotropic models remained extremely popular with working forecasters well into the 1970s, long after baroclinic and primitive-equation model forecasts had become routinely available.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 1768-75 | Added on Monday, June 10, 2013, 07:29 PM
Why, then, did the national weather services of most developed countries commit themselves so rapidly and completely to this new technological paradigm? First, older techniques had reached their limits; no one put forward any competing vision for major progress in forecast quality and scope. Second, it marked a generational change. As meteorology's scientific sophistication increased, and as the field became professionalized during and after World War II, consensus had developed around the desirability
of grounding forecasting in physical theory. Roger Turner has argued that a small group of theoretically savvy meteorologists, led most notably by Carl-Gustav Rossby and Francis Reichelderfer, "actively constructed" this consensus around what Turner calls "universal meteorology": "... between the 1920s and the 1940s, Rossby, Reichelderfer and their allies designed the institutions, established the curriculum, and cultivated the values that guided the weather cadets trained during World War II.i6O This new cadre of theorists stood ready, on both sides of the Atlantic, to tackle the risky physics and thorny mathematics of numerical modeling. Finally, Charney, Rossby, and von Neumann together articulated a clear research and development program for NWP. As computer power increased, researchers would climb the hierarchy of models, increasing grid resolution and adding ever more realistic physics.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 1776 | Added on Monday, June 10, 2013, 07:30 PM
With the ENIAC as proof of concept, von Neumann staked his considerable reputation on the belief that electronic digital computing would develop rapidly and inexorably.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 1777-79 | Added on Monday, June 10, 2013, 07:30 PM
From the beginning, Charney, Rossby, and von Neumann framed numerical weather prediction as a plan, not a gamble. In the end it worked, of course. But 20-20 hindsight makes it easy to miss the many ways in which it might have failed.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 1796-1801 | Added on Monday, June 10, 2013, 07:35 PM
Second, computer modeling required a considerably different range of expertise than previous forecasting techniques. The ideal modeler had a
strong background in physics and mathematics as well as in meteorology. Anticipating this requirement in 1952, John von Neumann pointed out that an "educational problem" blocked the path to operational NWP:
There is an educational problem because there are practically no people available at the present time capable of supervising and operating such a program. Synoptic meteorologists who are capable of understanding the physical reasoning behind the numerical forecast are needed to evaluate the forecasts. . . . Mathematicians are needed to formulate the numerical aspects of the computations. During the first several years of the program the meteorological and mathematical aspects probably cannot be separated and personnel familiar with both aspects are needed. An intense educational program could conceivably produce enough people in about three years.12
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 1801-2 | Added on Monday, June 10, 2013, 07:35 PM
Von Neumann did not mention-and may not have anticipated-that veritable armies of computer technicians, programmers, and other support personnel would also be required.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 1821-22 | Added on Monday, June 10, 2013, 07:38 PM
And price was only one factor. Scientific programmers, skilled technical support personnel, and expertise in numerical methods all remained in short supply.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 1822-23 | Added on Thursday, June 13, 2013, 08:43 AM
The most successful institutions paired theorists with technical wizards, many of them meteorologists who had discovered an aptitude for programming.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 1823 | Added on Thursday, June 13, 2013, 08:43 AM
Without the latter, the crucial, highly complex translation of mathematics into computer code could not proceed.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 1828-29 | Added on Thursday, June 13, 2013, 08:44 AM
For this reason, meteorology has historically been the foremost civilian consumer of supercomputer power. Only the designers of nuclear weapons have laid a greater claim to the world's most advanced computers."
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 1848-49 | Added on Thursday, June 13, 2013, 08:49 AM
As we saw in chapter 6, John von Neumann and others understood the significance of this power "to replace certain experimental procedures" almost immediately, although the full extent of it would take some time to dawn on anyone.3
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 1856-61 | Added on Thursday, June 13, 2013, 08:51 AM
"infinite forecast."' By this phrase, von Neumann did not intend deterministic prediction of weather over long or "infinite" periods. Instead, he had in mind the statistically "ordinary circulation pattern" that would emerge when "atmospheric conditions . . . have become, due to the lapse of very long time intervals, causally and statistically independent of whatever initial conditions may have existed." This phrase sounds remarkably like the mathematical concept of chaos, by which minute variations in initial conditions rapidly generate extreme divergences in outcomes: a butterfly flaps its wings over Brazil and causes a tornado in Texas. In fact, the theoretical meteorologist Edward Lorenz first discovered what we now call chaos theory while working with atmospheric models in the early 1960s.8 But in the mid 1950s, these results, and the idea of chaos itself, remained unknown. In 1955, von Neumann's "infinite forecast" expressed the widespread belief that global atmospheric flows might display predictable symmetry, stability, and/or periodicity. Research aimed at finding such predictable features remained active throughout the 1950s.9
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 1874-75 | Added on Thursday, June 13, 2013, 08:54 AM
What counts are not mere tabulations of data; it is their intelligent organization according to physical laws so as to lead to physical depiction of relevant processes and schemes of motion.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
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If Earth had no atmosphere or oceans, its average surface temperature would be about -19°C. Instead, the heat retained in the atmosphere and oceans maintains it at the current global average of about 15°C.
At the equator, Earth receives more heat than it can re-radiate to space; at the poles, it re-radiates more heat than it receives. Thus the climate system, as a thermodynamic engine, serves to transport heat from the equator toward the poles.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
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Svante Arrhenius's calculations of carbon dioxide's effect on Earth's temperature constituted one of the earliest one-dimensional (zonal) EBMs.13
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
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Parameterizing physical processes accurately is the most difficult aspect of climate modeling and is a source of considerable scientific and political controversy.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
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experiment," he wrote, "contains empirical elements in that the representation of certain physical effects is based on meteorological experience with the actual atmosphere, rather than being predicted from fundamental laws ofphysics."
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
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Phillips's model provoked enormous excitement.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
- Note on Page 152 | Loc. 1989 | Added on Friday, June 14, 2013, 07:12 PM
funny how math as al anguage casts excitement as excitement over language accurately describing the things it describes
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
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Phillips marked out the path: start with simplifying assumptions, such as barotropy and quasi-geostrophy, then eliminate them, one by one, until nothing remained but the primary physics.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
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We first constructed with considerable care, and in fact programmed, the most general of a hierarchy of models in order to uncover in some detail the body of physics needed, to determine where the obvious weaknesses were, and to give us some idea of the computational limitations we could expect. The perspective thus gained was invaluable. We then laid out a program of simplified models which can be constructed as a sub-set of the most general one. The main requirements were (1) that each model represent a physically realizable state, (2) that they could be
constructed computationally . . . , and (3) that they collectively would provide a step-by-step study of the behavior of new processes and their influence on the interactive system. Hence, many of the intermediate models in themselves may lack detailed similitude to the atmosphere but provide the insight necessary for careful and systematic scientific inquiry.32
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
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This strict attention to correcting physical theory and numerical methods before seeking verisimilitude became a hallmark of the GFDL modeling approach.33 The full primitive-equation GCM ("the most general" model) served as a conceptual framework, driving work on simpler models which led to refinements of the GCM.
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A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Paul N. Edwards)
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Arakawa persuaded Mintz to pay more attention to designing model dynamics that could sustain long-term inte- gration.42
August
========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 1453-54 | Added on Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 10:14 AM The doctor's small nods were designed to appear not as responses but as invitations to continue, what Dretske called Momentumizers. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 1487-90 | Added on Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 10:17 AM 'So you'd say anxiety is a big part of your depressions.’ It was now not clear whether she was responding to the doctor or not. 'Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. Doctor Carton said lurid, one time. That's the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh-sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It's like what's the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower.’ ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 2038-39 | Added on Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 07:53 PM Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 2239-48 | Added on Thursday, August 08, 2013, 09:29 AM conducting technical interviews,4444 used silent pauses as integral parts of his techniques of interface. Here it defused Marathe. Marathe felt the ironies of his position. One strap of Steeply's prostheses' brassiere had slipped into view below his shoulder, where it cut deeply into his flesh of the upper arm. The air smelled faintly of creosote, but much less strongly smelling than the ties of train tracks, which Marathe had smelled at close range. Steeply's back was broad and soft. Marathe eventually said: 'You in such a case have nothing. You stand on nothing. Nothing of ground or rock beneath your feet. You fall; you blow here and there. How does one say: "tragically, unvoluntarily, lost." Another silence ensued. Steeply farted mildly. Marathe shrugged. The B.S.S. Field Operative Steeply may not have been truly sneering. The city Tucson's lume appeared a bleached and ghostly white in the unhumid air. Crepuscular animals rustled and perhaps scuttled. Dense and unbeautiful spider webs of the poisonous U.S.A. species of spider Black Widow were beneath the shelf and the incline's other outcroppíngs. And when the wind hit certain angles in the mountainside it moaned. Marathe thought of his victory over the train that had taken his legs.45 ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 2383-85 | Added on Thursday, August 08, 2013, 09:39 AM or else floods his eyes with Murine and heads down to the Headmaster's House for another late dinner with C.T. and the Moms, and eats like such a feral animal that the Moms says it does something instinctively maternal in her heart good to see him pack it away, but then he wakes before dawn with awful indigestion. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 2397-2400 | Added on Thursday, August 08, 2013, 09:40 AM You've got what he calls your Despairing type, who's fine as long as he's in the quick-improvement stage before a plateau, but then he hits a plateau and sees himself seem to stall, not getting better as fast or even seeming to get a little worse, and this type gives in to frustration and despair, because he hasn't got the humbleness and patience to hang in there and slog, and he can't stand the time he has to put in on plateaux, and what happens?’ ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 2447-52 | Added on Thursday, August 08, 2013, 09:45 AM Accretive means accumulating, through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. At like fourteen, give and take, they figure here. Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there's no point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole shitload of head-space you don't need for the mechanics anymore, after they've sunk in. Now the mechanics are wired in. Hardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways. Just wait. You start thinking a whole different way now, playing. The court might as well be inside you. The ball stops being a ball. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 245-48 | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:37 AM At eighteen, presenting original work at the All-Union Mathematical Congress, he measured his success by his ability to get the yellow-fingered, chainsmoking geniuses to stop being kind. When they gave up being encouraging, when they made their first sarcastic remark, when they started to sneer and to try to shred his theorems, he knew they had ceased seeing a kid and started to see a mathematician. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 261-69 | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:39 AM He had been doing a bit of consultancy. It went with being attached to the Institute of Industrial Construction; you had to sing for your supper every so often. And he didn’t really mind. It was a pleasure to put the lucid order in his head to use. More than a pleasure, a relief almost, because every time the pure pattern of mathematics turned out to have a purchase on the way the world worked, turned out to provide the secret thread controlling something loud and various and apparently arbitrary, it provided one more quantum of confirmation for what Leonid Vitalevich wanted to believe, needed to believe, did believe when he was happy: that all of this, this swirl of phenomena lurching on through time, this mess of interlocked systems, some filigree-fine, some huge and simple, this tram full of strangers and smoky air, this city of Peter built on human bones, all ultimately made sense, were all intricately generated by some intelligible principle or set of principles working themselves out on many levels at once, even if the expressions didn’t exist yet which could capture much of the process. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 272-74 | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:40 AM He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 274-81 | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:40 AM He might have been born in Germany, and then this tram ride tonight would have been full of fear. On his professor suit would have been a cotton star, and dark things would have looked out of people’s faces at him, just because his grandfather had worn earlocks, had subscribed to a slightly different unverifiable fairytale about the world. He would have been hated there, for no reason at all. Or he might have been born in America, and then who could say if he would even have had the two kopecks for the tram at all? Would a twenty-six-year-old Jew be a professor there? He might be a beggar, he might be playing a violin on the street in the rain, the thoughts in his head of no concern to anyone because nobody could make money out of them. Cruelty, waste, fictions allowed to buffet real men and women to and fro: only here had people escaped this black nonsense, and made themselves reality’s deliberate designers rather than its playthings. True, reason was a difficult tool. You laboured with it to see a little more, and at best you got glimpses, partial truths; but the glimpses were always worth having. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 302-4 | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:42 AM He had thought about ways to distinguish between better answers and worse answers to questions which had no right answer. He had seen a method which could do what the detective work of conventional algebra could not, in situations like the one the Plywood Trust described, ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 324-31 | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:45 AM It was 3% of extra order snatched out of the grasp of entropy. In the face of the patched and mended cosmos, always crumbling of its own accord, always trying to fall down, it built; it gained 3% more of what humanity wanted, free and clear, just as a reward for thought. Moreover, he thought, its applications did not stop with individual factories, with getting 3% more plywood, or 3% more gun barrels, or 3% more wardrobes. If you could maximise, minimise, optimise the collection of machines at the Plywood Trust, why couldn’t you optimise a collection of factories, treating each of them, one level further up, as an equation? You could tune a factory, then tune a group of factories, till they hummed, till they purred. And that meant – ‘Watch what you’re doing!’ cried the short woman. ‘Take your head out of your arse and watch what you’re doing, why don’t you?’ ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 339-41 | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:46 AM But here it was possible to plan for the whole system at once. The economy was a clean sheet of paper on which reason was writing. So why not optimise it? All he would have to do was to persuade the appropriate authorities to listen. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 353-54 | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:47 AM though he already understood that it would take a huge quantity of work to compose the necessary dynamic models. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 556-57 | Added on Thursday, August 15, 2013, 08:28 PM America was a torrent of clever anticipations. Soviet industries would have to learn to anticipate as cleverly, more cleverly, if they were to overtake America in satisfying wants as well as needs. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 582-85 | Added on Thursday, August 15, 2013, 08:32 PM Whether or not they wanted him there, the force and capacity of the Soviet state had obliged them to let him in. Think of it! Miners had gouged at the stubborn earth, railroadmen had blown on their hands at dawns colder than rigor mortis, machinists had skinned off bright curls of swarf, soldiers had died in the shit and the mud, so that one of their own could demand to be received in this quiet, rich room as an equal. Here he was. They had to deal with him. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 64 | Loc. 1032-36 | Added on Friday, August 16, 2013, 10:24 AM Here he was, plodding along in the heat, and all his education and all his good prospects didn’t make him any less a human speck, inching across the wide, flat floor of Russia. After another while, he started to laugh. Let this be a lesson to you, Mr Economist, he told himself. Any time you get imperious, any time you start to mistake the big enclosing terms you use for the actions and things they represent, just you remember this. Just you remember that the world is really sweat and dirt. But the descriptions of the world in economics were powerful. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1069-77 | Added on Friday, August 16, 2013, 10:29 AM Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on. That was Marx’s description, anyway. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1257-68 | Added on Friday, August 16, 2013, 10:54 AM In the chaos and economic collapse following the overthrow of the Tsar by disorganised liberals, they were able to use the discipline of the cult’s membership to mount a coup d'état – and then to finesse themselves into the leadership of all those in Russia who were resisting the armed return of the old regime. Suddenly, a small collection of fanatics and opportunists found themselves running the country that least resembled Marx’s description of a place ready for socialist revolution. Not only had capitalist development not reached its climax of perfection and desperation in Russia; it had barely even begun. Russia had fewer railroads, fewer roads and less electricity than any other European power. Its towns were stunted little venues for the gentry to buy riding boots. Most people were illiterate. Within living memory, the large majority of the population had been slaves. Despite this absence of all Marx’s preconditions, the Bolsheviks tried anyway to get to paradise by the quick route, abolishing money and seizing food for the cities directly at gunpoint. The only results were to erase the little bit of industrial development that had taken place in Russia just before the First World War, and to create the first of many bouts of mass starvation. It became inescapably clear that, in Russia, socialism was going to have to do what Marx had never expected, and to carry out the task of development he’d seen as belonging strictly to capitalism. Socialism would have to mimic capitalism’s ability to run an industrial revolution, to marshal investment, to build modern life. Socialism would have to compete with capitalism at doing the same things as capitalism. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1648-58 | Added on Friday, August 16, 2013, 10:43 PM A pentode is plugged together with a signal inverter, so that the current switches off if it was on, and on if it was off. This is NOT. And that’s all it takes. Wired together in the right order, these are the only moves required to mechanise the whole panoply of reasoning; to set the yes–no picture growing towards the complexity of a Rembrandt in the Hermitage. Sixteen of AND, six of OR and three of NOT, arranged in a branching tree, make this board capable of adding. It can add the 1 in our first pentode to a zero in another pentode, and produce (of course) 1; then add that 1 to another 1 carried over from a previous addition, and produce 0, with an extra 1 to be carried over in turn, down a wire to the circuit board next in the stack, where the next addition is about to commence. 1 plus 0 plus 1 equals 0, carry 1. Of course, Sergei Alexeievich, sitting up late in 1943 manipulating 1s and 0s with a pencil, could do this himself, and operations so much more demanding that the comparison is ridiculous. But he couldn’t do it in one ten-thousandth of a second, and do it again ad infinitum every ten-thousandth of a second. Here’s the power of the machine: that having broken arithmetic down into tiny idiot steps, it can then execute those steps at inhuman speed, forever. Or until a vacuum tube blows. And in fact ten thousand operations per second is no longer so very fast, as these things go. ========== Pyomo - Optimization Modeling in Python (Springer Optimization and Its Applications, Vol. 67) (William E. Hart, Carl Laird, Jean-Paul Watson and David L. Woodruff) - Note Loc. 298 | Added on Saturday, August 17, 2013, 12:49 PM defining a as a coeff matrix A ========== Pyomo - Optimization Modeling in Python (Springer Optimization and Its Applications, Vol. 67) (William E. Hart, Carl Laird, Jean-Paul Watson and David L. Woodruff) - Highlight Loc. 304-7 | Added on Saturday, August 17, 2013, 12:51 PM Pyomo addresses this and other, related issues by allowing modeling components to be initialized with user-defined functions, which we call rules. The idea is that complex initialization of a collection of constraints or objectives (for example) can be managed by a function that generates each constraint or objective expression individually. Similarly, rules can be used to construct complex sets and parameters in a generic manner. ========== Pyomo - Optimization Modeling in Python (Springer Optimization and Its Applications, Vol. 67) (William E. Hart, Carl Laird, Jean-Paul Watson and David L. Woodruff) - Highlight Loc. 760-62 | Added on Monday, August 19, 2013, 09:28 AM Similarly, data can be loaded into another parameter than what is specified in the relational table: This specifies that the index set is loaded into the z set and that the data in the D column in the table is loaded into the Y parameter. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 1893-99 | Added on Monday, August 19, 2013, 07:08 PM It almost looked like the hospitable home for a million separate stories which every great city was. It almost looked like Paris. But he had seen Paris. Moreover he worked in film: he saw this city, and he couldn’t help but notice the way its surfaces habitually turned face-outward to be seen, instead of inwards for the comfort of the inhabitants. He recognised the thinness of the scrim, the cutting of corners where the audience would have its attention elsewhere and be content to register a general blur of grandeur. Those doors would be out of focus anyway: who needed to make sure they actually fitted their frames? The skyscrapers blocked out bold volumes of air, the walls of the city were receding planes, leading the eye back to a sky painted on glass. Moscow was a set, and like all sets looked more convincing from the middle distance than close up. ========== Pyomo - Optimization Modeling in Python (Springer Optimization and Its Applications, Vol. 67) (William E. Hart, Carl Laird, Jean-Paul Watson and David L. Woodruff) - Highlight Loc. 1497-1502 | Added on Tuesday, August 20, 2013, 09:22 PM Example I O.A.8 explores a grid of starting points and keeps a list of all of the unique solutions that are found. This script illustrates some of the powerful extensibility that is possible using the object-oriented features of Python. The script declares a new class with class Solution: that is intended to store a candidate solution and the initial starting point that was used. We have added two methods to the class, one to check if a candidate solution is different using a numerical tolerance, and one to print out the candidate solution and the corresponding initial values. The ability to define new classes on-the-fly inside of Python can be very powerful. The script then solves all the problems with different initial values, and keeps a list of all the unique solutions that are found. These unique solutions are printed to the screen. ========== Pyomo - Optimization Modeling in Python (Springer Optimization and Its Applications, Vol. 67) (William E. Hart, Carl Laird, Jean-Paul Watson and David L. Woodruff) - Highlight Loc. 1504-5 | Added on Tuesday, August 20, 2013, 09:23 PM It is often useful to fix variables at known values to assess how other variables change. Consider Example 8.A.2, which defines a simple multimodal function of two variables. Example 10.A.9 illustrates how variable fixing is used to analyze this model by iteratively fixing and unfixing variables. ========== Pyomo - Optimization Modeling in Python (Springer Optimization and Its Applications, Vol. 67) (William E. Hart, Carl Laird, Jean-Paul Watson and David L. Woodruff) - Highlight Loc. 1510-11 | Added on Tuesday, August 20, 2013, 09:24 PM There are often times when you may want to solve a sequence of models with slightly different constraints. Pyomo offers a simple mechanism to enable and disable various model components. ========== Pyomo - Optimization Modeling in Python (Springer Optimization and Its Applications, Vol. 67) (William E. Hart, Carl Laird, Jean-Paul Watson and David L. Woodruff) - Highlight Loc. 1514-15 | Added on Tuesday, August 20, 2013, 09:24 PM Our strategy will be to solve the problem first with the bilinear expression and use this solution as an initialization for the actual problem with the trilinear expression. ========== Pyomo - Optimization Modeling in Python (Springer Optimization and Its Applications, Vol. 67) (William E. Hart, Carl Laird, Jean-Paul Watson and David L. Woodruff) - Bookmark Loc. 1515 | Added on Tuesday, August 20, 2013, 09:24 PM Example ========== Pyomo - Optimization Modeling in Python (Springer Optimization and Its Applications, Vol. 67) (William E. Hart, Carl Laird, Jean-Paul Watson and David L. Woodruff) - Highlight Loc. 1516-19 | Added on Tuesday, August 20, 2013, 09:25 PM The previous section illustrated how a model can be easily altered. In that example, our goal was to solve a simpler problem to provide initialization for the more difficult problem, and we showed how different constraints could be added or dropped to allow for this. In this section, we illustrate another approach, where we define two completely different models, yet load the results from solving one instance into another instance to provide initialization. Results are loaded based on variable name. Therefore, any variables with the same name will have new values loaded from the results object. ========== Pyomo - Optimization Modeling in Python (Springer Optimization and Its Applications, Vol. 67) (William E. Hart, Carl Laird, Jean-Paul Watson and David L. Woodruff) - Highlight Loc. 1565-67 | Added on Tuesday, August 20, 2013, 09:30 PM This example serves to illustrate, at a very high level, the scripting of a complex hybrid optimization algorithm using Pyomo and Coopr. Despite the complexity of the process (hidden in large part due to code modularization), the code is relatively compact. Including the code for the model definition, there are a total of approximately 650 lines of Python code, including white-space. 10.5 ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 2037-38 | Added on Thursday, August 22, 2013, 10:13 AM ‘Do not worry, my soul,’ said the wise wife. ‘Go to sleep. The morning is wiser than the evening.’ ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2120-22 | Added on Thursday, August 22, 2013, 10:21 AM Where the United States (for example) was a society ruled by lawyers, with a deep well of campus idealism among literature professors and sociologists, the Soviet Union was a society ruled by engineers, with a well of idealism among mathematicians and physicists. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2158-60 | Added on Thursday, August 22, 2013, 10:26 AM (Contemporary joke: Khrushchev asks a friend to look over the text of one of his speeches. ‘I can’t deny, Nikita Sergeyevich, that I did find some errors. “Up yours” should be two separate words, and “shit-ass” is hyphenated.’) ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2173-75 | Added on Thursday, August 22, 2013, 10:28 AM These old men were not ordinary people; they were the Freezer, the Glutton, and the Magician. The Magician drew a picture of a boat on the sand, and said: ‘Brothers, do you see this boat?’ ‘We see it.’ ‘Sit in it.’ All of them sat in the boat. The Magician said: ‘Now, little light boat, serve me as you have served me before.’ Suddenly the boat rose in the air … ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 2422-26 | Added on Thursday, August 22, 2013, 06:41 PM ‘And the person he’s talking to’ – slight, ascetic, horn-rimmed glasses – ‘is Professor Ershov of the computer centre.’ ‘Who says –’ ‘Who famously says –’ ‘“A programmer”’, they chorused together, ‘“must combine the accuracy of a bank clerk with the acumen of an Indian tracker, and add in the imagination of a crime writer and the practicality of a businessman.”’ ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2605-7 | Added on Thursday, August 22, 2013, 06:58 PM There isn’t much logical difference between not being able to find something you can afford, and being able to find something you cannot afford. Is there?’ ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2628-34 | Added on Friday, August 23, 2013, 12:51 PM She too was a believer in a world that could be reduced, along one dimension of its existence, to information: only in her case, it was the information of the genes, not the information of the computing circuit, which stood as the pattern of patterns. And once you had seen it, once you had parted the curtains of the visible world and seen that human beings were only temporary expressions of ancient information, dimly seen in tiny glimpses by the light of science’s deductive flashlight, but glimpsed enough to tell that it was vast, and intricate, and slowly changing by indifferent rules of its own as it went on its way into a far future – then all the laws and plans of the self-important present looked like momentary tics and jitters in comparison. A dark message, posted from the past to the future; a dark armada, floating through time. Dark masses, moving in the dark. Dark water. Dark ocean swell. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 2969 | Added on Friday, August 23, 2013, 01:14 PM later on in samizdat whisperings, ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 2982-84 | Added on Friday, August 23, 2013, 01:16 PM When his own base of operations in the Academy expanded into the fully autonomous TSEMI, the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute, with a building out among the muddy new boulevards of the Sparrow Hills and a banner in the hall reading ‘Comrades, Let’s Optimise!', ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3032-33 | Added on Friday, August 23, 2013, 01:20 PM from bone to bone the marrow flows, like pearls poured from one vessel to another.’ ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3108-19 | Added on Friday, August 23, 2013, 01:27 PM A little problem with Solkemfib, the viscose plant at Solovets, away off in the green gloom of the north-eastern forests. It was one of Maksim Maksimovich’s new generation of chemical-fibre operations, along with the big new installations at Barnaul and Svetlogorsk, and it ought not to have been causing trouble at this point in its life-cycle, with machines only four years old and the trials of running them in safely behind. It had its own wood-pulp mill, to provide cellulose, and a nice big lake for water. Power came by 220-kilovolt line from one of the hydro stations on the upper Volga. Everything else arrived and departed on a railroad spur. Really, it was only salt, sulphur and coal in, viscose out. That was the particular simplicity of viscose production from the planner’s point of view. None of the more complex chemical inputs the process required – sulphuric acid, lye, carbon disulphide – could easily be transported in bulk. They all had to be manufactured on the spot, at the plant itself; which meant that, to the remote and abstracting eye of someone chiefly concerned with supply chains, a viscose plant could be treated as robust. It was relatively insensitive to disruption. It could be supplied from multiple sources. It was not a hostage to problems elsewhere. Feed it its raw materials, and it chugged along, an economic black box, busily turning trees into sweaters and cellophane and high-strength cord for car tyres. This always struck Maksim Maksimovich as a very obliging way for a physical process to work – and charmingly close to the political textbooks too. Trees into sweaters! Brute matter uplifted to serve human purposes! What could be more dialectical? ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 3223-26 | Added on Friday, August 23, 2013, 07:17 PM you should see Pemulis with an emulsion curve, yawning blasély under his bill-reversed yachting hat and scratching an armpit, juggling differentials like a boy born to wear a pocket-protector and high-water corduroys and electrician's tape on his hornrims' temples, asking Mario if he knows what you call three Canadians copulating on a snowmobile. Mario and his brother Hal both consider Pemulis a good friend, though friendship at E.T.A. is nonnego-tiable currency. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 3528-29 | Added on Friday, August 23, 2013, 08:34 PM how the drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether. ==========
September
Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 271 | Loc. 3848-54 | Added on Saturday, September 07, 2013, 09:32 PM Lenin’s core of original Bolsheviks, and the socialists like Trotsky who joined them, were many of them highly educated people, literate in multiple European languages, learned in the scholastic traditions of Marxism; and they preserved these attributes even as they murdered and lied and tortured and terrorised. They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors – the vydvizhentsy who refilled the Central Committee in the thirties – were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative, the most greedy, the most sycophantic; people whose adherence to Bolshevik ideas was inseparable from the power that came with them. Gradually their loyalty to the ideas became more and more instrumental, more and more a matter of what the ideas would let them grip in their two hands. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 3854-57 | Added on Saturday, September 07, 2013, 09:32 PM High-level Party meetings became extravagantly foul-mouthed from the 1930s on, as a way of signalling that practical people were now in charge, down-to-earth people: and honest Russians too, not those dubious Balzac-readers with funny foreign names. ‘Ladies, cover your ears!’ became the traditional start-of-meeting announcement. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 3858-60 | Added on Saturday, September 07, 2013, 09:33 PM Stalin took his philosophical obligations entirely seriously. The time he spent in his Kremlin library was time spent reading. He held forth on linguistics, and genetics, and economics, and the proper writing of history, because he believed that intellectual decision-making was the duty of power. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 3864-69 | Added on Saturday, September 07, 2013, 09:34 PM A sculptor dared to tell him he didn’t understand art: ‘When I was a miner,’ he snapped, ‘they said I didn’t understand. When I was a political worker in the army, they said I didn’t understand. When I was this and that, they said I didn’t understand. Well, now I’m party leader and premier, and you mean to say I still don’t understand? Who are you working for, anyway?’ Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 273 | Loc. 3883-89 | Added on Saturday, September 07, 2013, 09:36 PM now drought and falling yields had pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of bread rationing and forced them to waste precious foreign currency on importing wheat, ten million humiliating tonnes of it. He had tried to stick his thumb in the scales of the strategic balance by putting the missiles in Cuba; and the world had nearly burned. He was getting angrier and angrier, more and more impatient, more and more puzzled. ‘You’d think as first secretary I could change anything in this country,’ he told Fidel Castro. ‘The hell I can! No matter what changes I propose and carry out, everything stays the same. Russia’s like a tub full of dough …’ The yeasty mass kept pushing back, and all he knew how to do was to keep trying the same methods, more and more frantically, more and more frenziedly, announcing new policies, rejigging the organisation chart, tinkering and revising, even to the point of messing with the basis of philosophical kingship itself. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 274 | Loc. 3892-94 | Added on Saturday, September 07, 2013, 09:37 PM till by October 1964 there was a solid majority around the Presidium table for replacing him. Which left the question of what to do about his promises. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 275 | Loc. 3894-95 | Added on Saturday, September 07, 2013, 09:37 PM Once a turnip said, ‘I taste very good with honey.’ ‘Get away, you boaster,’ replied the honey. ‘I taste good without you.’ ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 281 | Loc. 3980-83 | Added on Saturday, September 07, 2013, 09:44 PM And he stalled at the lights! The starter motor chugged fruitlessly, he pumped at the choke, and the engine only started as the lights turned back to red. When they went green, the Volga, released, bounded forwards in a series of humiliating hiccoughs. ‘What a balls-up!’ he muttered, meaning more than the junction. ‘Steady on,’ said Melnikov, looking at him sharply. ‘Leave him be,’ said the boss, from the back seat. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 282 | Loc. 3991-95 | Added on Monday, September 09, 2013, 10:03 AM ‘No one needs me now,’ he said to the air straight in front of him. ‘What am I going to do without work? How am I going to live?’ It was unbearable seeing him so reduced. The driver pulled out his cigarettes. ‘Would you care for a smoke, Nikita Sergeyevich?’ he asked. ‘I’ve lost my job, not my senses,’ the boss snapped. ‘Put that crap away.’ That was better. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 294 | Loc. 4161-66 | Added on Monday, September 09, 2013, 10:16 AM ‘Mokhov; Gosplan,’ he said, holding out a hand bristled with dark hairs right down to the knuckles. ‘You’ve dropped your cigarette. Have one of mine instead. They’re Swedish; not bad.’ Ceremoniously, he held up his lighter for Emil and then for himself. The blue flame was almost dissolved into the blueness of the day, and the smoke only tasted like an intensification of the hot summer air, but it was soothing. Emil breathed in a welcome numbness from it. Mokhov arranged himself on the railing in an arch of spindly black segments, and waited. He looked like an allegory of famine. ========== Paintwork (Tim Maughan) - Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 231 | Added on Tuesday, September 10, 2013, 09:35 AM We have the technology, if you have the money. Viva la singularity”. ========== Paintwork (Tim Maughan) - Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 335-37 | Added on Tuesday, September 10, 2013, 09:42 AM Yeah, I am getting back into 2D. 3D is dead. Augmented is over. It’s just fucking background noise. It’s just fucking TV and Twitter and all… this- “ He waves a dismissive shadowy hand at the rave behind them. “It’s all this shit. Disposable, infinitely fucking copyable digital noise. Mass-produced and instantly forgotten. 3D is over.” ========== Paintwork (Tim Maughan) - Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 387-88 | Added on Tuesday, September 10, 2013, 09:45 AM 3D printers. Instant designs. Everything is too easy. Disposable. Copied and deleted. Digital and ephemeral. Easily forgotten. ========== Paintwork (Tim Maughan) - Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 490-93 | Added on Tuesday, September 10, 2013, 09:50 AM Bristol was drowning. The drizzle had turned into torrential rain, alternating black and white droplets falling from the heavens. As they hit the forest of decaying architecture they splattered it with toxic paint; acid burning into concrete as clouds of suffocating fumes filled the war-torn streets. With an insidious clanking and scratching the beetles started to emerge from the gutters and alleys in their thousands, mouths turned up to the sky to drink in the poisonous rain... ========== Paintwork (Tim Maughan) - Highlight on Page 50 | Loc. 698-701 | Added on Tuesday, September 10, 2013, 10:06 AM It was the inevitable consequence of living solely with people who had decided to dedicate their lives and careers to the virtual. They were companions only due to some seemingly outmoded geographical and economic meatspace necessity, and they all understood it, ever aware that however close they may become to one another, all their true friendships and allegiances lay elsewhere. ========== Paintwork (Tim Maughan) - Highlight on Page 73 | Loc. 1044-50 | Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 10:16 AM Marcus had always tinkered and hacked away at any hardware or software he could get his hands on; making the games harder or easier, finding ways to cheat, finding – somehow – the online source code so that he could customise them. And not just games. When the hardware manufacturers and network providers wanted to augment-up Cuba and the paranoid government said no, together with a small group of fellow hackers he even set up Havana's first Spex AR space, from some thrown-together Google Earth data and strategically hidden, citywide, pirate radio style WIMAX routers. It would have been enough to have put him in a re-education centre for two years had he been caught, but the only people who ever knew about it loved Marcus – and the way he managed to feed their tech-lust cravings – too much to ever breathe a word. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 358 | Loc. 5039-44 | Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 05:56 PM So the days stretched out, extraordinarily long and extraordinarily empty. He had gardened like crazy at first, laying out long ambitious vegetable beds, pruning and composting from dawn till dusk, except when Nina Petrovna called him in to meals – but it grew old, after a while. And you couldn’t fill a mind with such things. Before, whenever he doubted, he had worked. Whenever he had been troubled by a memory, he had worked, telling himself that the best answer to any defect in the past must be a remedy in the future. The future had been his private solution as well as a public promise. Working for the future made the past tolerable, and therefore the present. But now no one wanted his promises. The hours gaped. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 358 | Loc. 5045-47 | Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 05:57 PM Little by little, in the most undisciplined way, things he had never wanted to remember drifted up from the depths; foul stuff, past hours and minutes it did nobody any good to recall, leaving their proper places in oblivion and rising up into the mind, like muck stirred up from the bottom of a pond to stain the clean water above. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 358 | Loc. 5050-52 | Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 05:57 PM God forbid that he himself should ever be so weak: but he could see now the appeal of the idea of being purged of it all, of it all somehow being taken magically away, so you could leave this life as innocent as you had entered it. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 359 | Loc. 5054-57 | Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 05:58 PM Sometimes the stuggle in his head seemed so disconnected from the eventless world around him that it felt as if the whole thing, the whole bloody history, the whole of the vast country out there beyond the wheatfield, might have been a dream of his, one of those particularly intricate and oppressive fever dreams whose parts you struggle over and over to try to put into order, yet never can; as if there might never have been a Soviet Union at all, except in his head, only this field of Russian wheat. ========== Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Highlight on Page 359 | Loc. 5062-66 | Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 05:59 PM While he was actually watching, he felt only a veteran’s mild, containable annoyance at the things the director got wrong. It was later that it would all turn poisonous: in the night, in the still solitary centre of the night. He would dream all the vile detail of war that the film had left out, and when he awoke, beside the steady breathing of Nina Petrovna, he would find the images he had dreamed of still equally vivid in his mind’s eye; and hoisting up unstoppably behind them, lifted from the murk as if on hooks, out would come the other memories. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 100-101 | Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 06:08 PM We conclude that Ballard is quite unstimulated by human interaction—unless it takes the form of something inherently weird, like mob atavism or mass hysteria. What excites him is human isolation. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 227-31 | Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 06:21 PM This growing isolation and self-containment, exhibited by the other members of the unit and from which only the buoyant Riggs seemed immune, reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis. Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 244-46 | Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 06:22 PM Kerans reached the bar and filled his glass, collecting himself. He had only managed to survive the monotony and boredom of the previous year by deliberately suspending himself outside the normal world of time and space, and the abrupt return to earth had momentarily disconcerted him. In addition, he knew, there were other motives and responsibilities. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 288-90 | Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:44 PM Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time boardrooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 290-93 | Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:45 PM Looking up at the ancient impassive faces, Kerans could understand the curious fear they roused, re-kindling archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when the reptiles had gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one zoological class feels towards another that usurps it. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 299-301 | Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:48 PM Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 302-3 | Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:48 PM The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 302-4 | Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:48 PM The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 304-6 | Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:49 PM Impenetrable Mato Grossos sometimes three hundred feet high, they were a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past, and the only avenues of transit for the United Nations military units were through the lagoon systems that had superimposed themselves on the former cities. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 324-26 | Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:51 PM PERHAPS IT WAS this absence of personal memories that made Kerans indifferent to the spectacle of these sinking civilizations. He had been born and brought up entirely within what had once been known as the Arctic Circle—now a sub-tropical zone with an annual mean temperature of eighty-five ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 330-31 | Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:52 PM junction of two extremes of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown by wild orchids. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 363-66 | Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:55 PM The birth of a child had become a comparative rarity, and only one marriage in ten yielded any offspring. As Kerans sometimes reminded himself, the genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself, apparently moving backwards in time, and a point might ultimately be reached where a second Adam and Eve found themselves alone in a new Eden. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 372-75 | Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:56 PM He was plucking the orange-sized berries from the ferns overhanging the station and tossing them up at the chittering marmosets dangling from the branches above his head, egging them on with playful shouts and whistles. Fifty feet away, on a projecting cornice, a trio of iguanas watched with stony disapproval, whipping their tails slowly from side to side in a gesture of impatience. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 441-42 | Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 08:52 AM Perhaps these sunken lagoons simply remind me of the drowned world of my uterine childhood—if ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 480-83 | Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 08:56 AM Kerans had still not made up his mind—once away from Beatrice his indecision returned (ruefully he wondered if she was deliberately trying to confuse him, Pandora with her killing mouth and witch’s box of desires and frustrations, unpredictably opening and shutting the lid)—but rather than stumble about in a state of tortured uncertainty, which Riggs and Bodkin would soon diagnose, he decided to postpone a final reckoning until the last moment possible. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 524-28 | Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:01 AM Suddenly, as he visualised himself throwing his weight on to the handles of a plunger box and catapulting Riggs, the base and the testing station into the next lagoon, he stopped and steadied himself against the rail. Smiling ruefully at the absurdity of the fantasy, he wondered why he had indulged it. Then he noticed the heavy cylinder of the compass dragging at his jacket. For a moment he peered down at it thoughtfully. ‘Look out, Kerans,’ he murmured to himself. ‘You’re living on two levels.’ ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 46 | Loc. 535-39 | Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:02 AM A burly, intelligent but somewhat phlegmatic man of about 30, he had quietly kept himself apart from the other members of the unit. Something of an amateur naturalist, he made his own descriptive notes of the changing flora and fauna, employing a taxonomic system of his own devising. In one of his few unguarded moments he had shown the notebooks to Kerans, then abruptly withdrawn into himself when Kerans tactfully pointed out that the classifications were confused. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 541-44 | Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:03 AM The loose fragmentary relationships aboard the base, where a replacement was accepted as a fully paid up member of the crew within five minutes and no one cared whether he had been there two days or two years, was largely a reflection of Hardman’s temperament. When he organised a basket-ball match or a regatta out on the lagoon there was no self-conscious boisterousness, but a laconic indifference to whether anyone took part or not. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 582-85 | Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:07 AM Hardman smiled sceptically, glancing up briefly at Kerans. ‘I think you’re being over-optimistic, Doctor. What you really mean is that I won’t be aware of them.’ He picked up a well-thumbed green file, his botanical diary, and began to turn the pages mechanically. ‘Sometimes I think I have the dreams continuously, every minute of the day. Perhaps we all do.’ ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 50 | Loc. 590-93 | Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:09 AM ‘Perhaps you’re right, Lieutenant. In fact, some people used to maintain that consciousness is nothing more than a special category of the cytoplasmic coma, that the capacities of the central nervous system are as fully developed and extended by the dream life as they are during what we call the waking state. But we have to adopt an empirical approach, try whatever remedy we can. Don’t you agree, Kerans?’ ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 604-7 | Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:10 AM However varied his faults, in the past he had always believed them to be redressed by one outstanding virtue—a complete and objective awareness of the motives behind his actions. If he was sometimes prone to undue delays this was a result, not of irresolution, but of a reluctance to act at all where complete self-awareness was impossible—his affair with Beatrice Dahl, tilted by so many conflicting passions, from day to day walked a narrow tightrope of a thousand restraints and cautions. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 55 | Loc. 666-67 | Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:29 PM However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 706-7 | Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:32 PM A more important task than mapping the harbours and lagoons of the external landscape was to chart the ghostly deltas and luminous beaches of the submerged neuronic continents. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 60 | Loc. 724-27 | Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:02 AM Overhead the sky was vivid and marbled, the black bowl of the lagoon, by contrast, infinitely deep and motionless, like an immense well of amber. The tree-covered buildings emerging from its rim seemed millions of years old, thrown up out of the Earth’s magma by some vast natural cataclysm, embalmed in the gigantic intervals of time that had elapsed during their subsidence. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 62 | Loc. 747-53 | Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:04 AM At first he assumed that this reflected a shrewd unconscious assessment that his good sense would prevail, but as he started the outboard and drove the catamaran through the cool oily swells towards the creek into the next lagoon he realised that this indifference marked the special nature of the decision to remain behind. To use the symbolic language of Bodkin’s schema, he would then be abandoning the conventional estimates of time in relation to his own physical needs and entering the world of total, neuronic time, where the massive intervals of the geological time-scale calibrated his existence. Here a million years was the shortest working unit, and problems of food and clothing became as irrelevant as they would have been to a Buddhist contemplative lotus-squatting before an empty rice-bowl under the protective canopy of the million-headed cobra of eternity. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 824 | Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:12 AM colonies of bats erupted out of the green tunnels like clouds of exploding soot, ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 849-53 | Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:15 AM They were about ten miles north-west of the central lagoons, the towers almost obscured in the mists along the horizon. Five miles away, directly between them and the base, was one of the two motor launches, cruising down an open channel, its white wake fading across the glassy sheet of the water. Blocked by the urban concentration to the south, less silt had penetrated into the area, and the vegetation was lighter, more expanses of unbroken water between the principal lines of buildings. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 857-59 | Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:15 AM gazing out over the expanses of blue water. The nearest structure was an isolated department store two hundred yards away, and the open vistas reminded Kerans of Herodotus’ description of the landscape in Egypt at floodtime, with its rampart cities like the islands of the Aegean Sea. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 870 | Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:17 AM the bright sunlight masking the molten mirror of the surface. ==========
October
Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 430-31 | Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 10:58 AM When Irish eyes are not smiling, you should have a better story or a good pair of running shoes. ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 456-58 | Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 11:01 AM reruns of the well-known seventies sitcom have drawn comment all up and down his client list. He can footnote certain episodes as other teachers might the sutras, with the three-part family trip to Hawaii seeming to be a particular favorite—the bad-luck tiki, Greg’s near-fatal wipeout, Vincent Price’s cameo as an unstable archaeologist . . . ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 519-22 | Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 11:06 AM “So,” shrugging away any scold signifiers in face and voice, “a mom-approved first-person shooter.” “That’s exactly the slogan we’re gonna use in the ads.” “You’re advertising where, on the Internet?” “The Deep Web. Down there advertising is like still in its infancy? And the price is what Bob Barker might call ‘right’?” Air quotes, Vyrva’s hair, back in braids, bouncing to and fro. ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 527-30 | Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 11:06 AM “The game is just a promotional freebie,” Vyrva frowning cute-apologetic. “Our product is still totally DeepArcher?” “Which is . . .” “Like ‘departure,’ only you pronounce it DeepArcher?” “Zen thing,” Maxine guesses. “Weed thing. Just lately everybody’s been after the source code—the feds, game companies, fuckin Microsoft? all have offers on the table? It’s the security design—like nothing any of these people’ve ever seen, and it’s makin them all crazy.” ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 608-10 | Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 08:36 PM the address from the other side of the street, and as soon as she catches sight of it, her heart, if it does not sink exactly, at least cringes more tightly into the one-person submarine necessary for cruising the sinister and labyrinthine sewers of greed that run beneath all real-estate dealings in this town. ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 795-97 | Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 08:57 PM Culture, I’m sorry, Hermann Göring was right, every time you hear the word, check your sidearm. Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it begs to be suburbanized and corrupted.” ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 59 | Loc. 843-44 | Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 12:29 AM No more dangerous than a chess game, it seems to Reg. Defense, retreat, deception. Unless it’s a pickup game in the park where your opponent turns violently psychopathic without warning, of course. ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 970-72 | Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 01:12 PM Wreck, wearing a green glow-in-the-dark T-shirt reading UTSL, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of LUST or possibly SLUT but later learns is Unix for “Use The Source, Luke.” ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1024-28 | Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 02:57 PM Somewhere back in the Valley, among those orange groves casually replaced with industrial campuses, they came to a joint epiphany about California vis-à-vis New York—Vyrva thinks maybe more joint than epiphany—something to do with too much sunshine, self-delusion, slack. They’d heard this rumor that back east content was king, not just something to be stolen and developed into a movie script. They thought what they needed was a grim unforgiving workplace where the summer actually ended once in a while and discipline was a given daily condition. By the time they found out the truth, that the Alley was as much of a nut ward as the Valley, it was too late to go back. ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1112-13 | Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 11:47 PM “What’s known as bleeding-edge technology,” sez Lucas. “No proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with.” ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1116-20 | Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 11:48 PM According to Justin, DeepArcher’s roots reach back to an anonymous remailer, developed from Finnish technology from the penet.fi days and looking forward to various onion-type forwarding procedures nascent at the time. “What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.” “Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.” “At random.” ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1120-21 | Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 11:48 PM “At pseudorandom.” ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1145-55 | Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 11:52 PM “You heard about this from Eric?” “He has a tap in a back office at hashslingrz.” “Somebody’s in there wearing a wire?” “It’s, actually it’s a Furby.” “Excuse me, a—” “Seems there’s a voice-recognition chip inside that Eric was modifying—” “Wait, the cute fuzzy little critter every child in town including my own had to have a couple of Christmases back, that Furby? this genius of yours hacks Furbys?” “Common practice in his subculture, seems to be a low tolerance there for cuteness. At first Eric was only looking for ways to annoy the yups—you know, teach it some street language, emotional-outburst chops, so forth. Then he noticed how many Furbys were showing up in the cubicles of code grinders over where he works. So we took the Furby he was messing with, upgraded the memory, put in a wireless link, I brought it in to hashslingrz, sat it on a shelf, now when I want I can stroll by with a pickup inside my Nagra 4 and download all kinds of confidential stuff.” “Such as this hawala that hashslingrz is using to get money out of the country.” “Over to the Gulf, it turns out. This particular hawala is headquartered in Dubai. Plus Eric’s been finding that to even get to where hashslingrz’s books are stashed, they put you through elaborate routines written in this, like, strange Arabic what he calls Leet? It’s all turning into a desert movie.” ========== Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 118 | Loc. 1658-60 | Added on Friday, October 18, 2013, 08:06 AM Some conspiracies, they’re warm and comforting, we know the names of the bad guys, we want to see them get their comeuppance. Others you’re not sure you want any of it to be true because it’s so evil, so deep and comprehensive.” ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1090-93 | Added on Saturday, October 19, 2013, 11:12 PM Kerans felt, beating within him like his own pulse, the powerful mesmeric pull of the baying reptiles, and stepped out into the lake, whose waters now seemed an extension of his own bloodstream. As the dull pounding rose, he felt the barriers which divided his own cells from the surrounding medium dissolving, and he swam forwards, spreading outwards across the black thudding water. . . . ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1133-34 | Added on Saturday, October 19, 2013, 11:15 PM Phantoms slid imperceptibly from nightmare to reality and back again, the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah. ==========
November
The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 1676-78 | Added on Thursday, November 07, 2013, 10:41 PM Quietly he began to move towards it, floating slowly towards the centre of the dome, knowing that this faint beacon was receding more rapidly than he could approach it. When it was no longer visible he pressed on through the darkness alone, like a blind fish in an endless forgotten sea, driven by an impulse whose identity he would never comprehend. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 2637-38 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 07:58 PM Increasingly, Kerans felt that Hardman’s real personality was now submerged deep within his mind, and that his external behaviour and responses were merely pallid reflections of this, overlayed by his delirium and exposure symptoms. ========== The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 2669-71 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 08:02 PM So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again, within a few days was completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 27-29 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 08:07 PM That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. —Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 71-74 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 08:11 PM This story is rich with lessons for the modern era. It is about exceptionalism, the view that the United States is inherently more moral and farther-seeing than other countries and therefore may behave in ways that others should not. It also addresses the belief that because of its immense power, the United States can not only topple governments but guide the course of history. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 74-76 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 08:12 PM To these widely held convictions, the Dulles brothers added two others, both bred into them over many years. One was missionary Christianity, which tells believers that they understand eternal truths and have an obligation to convert the unenlightened. Alongside it was the presumption that protecting the right of large American corporations to operate freely in the world is good for everyone. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 158-59 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 08:21 PM History remembers John Watson Foster’s brief term as secretary of state for a singular accomplishment. In 1893 he helped direct the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 210-12 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 10:36 PM Foster became rich and powerful, but remained nearly friendless and often seemed ill at ease. Allie developed into a witty raconteur whose genial manner could beguile almost anyone. He was, as one biographer put it, “the romantic and adventurous member of the family” but also “a much darker, more ruthless and unscrupulous man than his brother.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 260-62 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 10:43 PM With typical precision, he made a date to take her canoeing on the same day his bar exam was scheduled in Buffalo; if he felt confident he had passed, he would propose. The exam went well. A few hours later, while paddling, Foster asked Janet to marry him. She accepted immediately. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 404-12 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:00 PM Liberals rose up in protest. Violence threatened the interests of thirteen Sullivan & Cromwell clients, owners of sugar mills, railways, and mines who had $170 million—the equivalent of $42 billion in the early twenty-first century—invested in Cuba. They turned to the firm for protection. Foster took the case and traveled immediately to Washington. The next morning he had breakfast with “Uncle Bert.” By his own account he “suggested that the Navy Department send two fast destroyers—one for the northern coast and one for the southern coast of the portion of Cuba controlled by revolutionaries.” Lansing agreed, and the warships were dispatched that afternoon. Marines landed and spread into the countryside to repress protests, beginning what would be a five-year occupation. Liberals realized the futility of resistance and called off their uprising. This was the first foreign intervention in which Foster played a role. It showed him how easy it can be for a rich and powerful country, guided by the wishes of its wealthiest corporations, to impose its will on a poor and weak one. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 435-36 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:03 PM Already he had become comfortable tending simultaneously to the interests of the United States and those of Sullivan & Cromwell clients. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 455-57 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:06 PM His European counterparts were young men of equal ambition and talent, among them John Maynard Keynes, who would soon begin revolutionizing economic theory, and Jean Monnet, one of the visionaries who, a generation later, would lay the foundation for what became the European Union. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 466-75 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:08 PM He found what he wanted at Le Sphinx, an elegant brothel in Montparnasse where the air was redolent of rose perfume, lush fabrics covered the walls, and nude women sat at an elaborate art deco bar. It was one of several lavish houses that became legendary in Paris and far beyond during the 1920s. They attracted an array of sensualists, among them the writers Lawrence Durrell, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, and Henry Miller; film stars including Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and Marlene Dietrich (women were welcome); artists like Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti; and even the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII. All pursued what one chronicler of the age called “an art of living fueled by desire and eccentricity [in] a world where money and class put moral judgments in abeyance.” For Allie, a visit to Le Sphinx satisfied more than just his well-developed sexual appetite. It also gave him a chance to mix with a new kind of elite and to observe people’s behavior at moments free of inhibition. By day he watched statesmen grapple with great questions of war, peace, and the fate of nations. By night he saw some of the same people, plus a diverse parade of others, in far looser circumstances. It was food for the mind. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 495-96 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:10 PM He was unable to see Wilson, but delivered his pamphlet to Colonel House, and received a note acknowledging its receipt. As far as is known, neither of the Dulles brothers was aware of him. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 496-502 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:10 PM Wilson argued ceaselessly for the principle of self-determination. He defined the term as meaning that “national aspirations must be respected,” that no people should be “selfishly exploited,” and that all must be “dominated and governed only by their own consent.” His application of this principle, however, was highly selective. He believed that self-determination was the right of people who lived in the collapsing Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, but not those who lived in overseas colonies. That excluded the Vietnamese, so the conference ended with Ho Chi Minh empty-handed. A year later he became a founding member of the French Communist Party. He then made his way to Moscow, joined the Comintern, and set out to wage revolutionary war against the overlords of the world—among them, three decades later, the Dulles brothers. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 503-6 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:11 PM Wilson’s double standard set off four other explosions of anger from subject peoples. All broke out within a few months of one another in the spring of 1919: a revolution against British rule in Egypt, an anti-Japanese uprising in Korea, the opening campaign of Gandhi’s epic resistance movement in India, and a wave of protest by anti-imperialists in China, which the independence leader Sun Yat-sen attributed to their anger at “how completely they had been deceived by the Great Powers’ advocacy of self-determination.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 506-9 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:11 PM By refusing to confront nationalist demands that were emerging in these and other countries, the Western leaders who gathered in Paris laid the groundwork for decades of upheaval. Their determination to preserve their dominions far outweighed their commitment to the abstract principle of self-determination. This was as true for Wilson as for the others. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 517-19 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:12 PM Allie helped award the disputed Sudetenland, populated mainly by German-speakers, to the new nation of Czechoslovakia, and later admitted that his Boundary Commission had turned Czechoslovakia into “a banana lying across the face of Europe.” Fourteen years later, the Nazis would rise to power in part by exploiting German anger at these two fiats. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 519-20 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:12 PM The Paris conference was a global coming-out party for a triumphant America. Wilson’s delegation numbered in the hundreds, far more than had ever represented the United States anywhere. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 521-23 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:12 PM It was the destiny of the United States, he declared in a speech before departing, “to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity” to the world’s less civilized peoples, and to “convert them to the principles of America.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 529-31 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:13 PM The intimate connection that would define their later lives—and shape the fate of nations—grew from a deep mutual trust and sympathy that they developed for the first time as adults in Paris. Opposites in personality, they were in perfect accord politically and philosophically. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 540-46 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:14 PM A strong strain of paternalism also shaped Wilson’s worldview. He was a product of Southern gentility, admired the Ku Klux Klan, and considered segregation “not humiliating but a benefit.” As president he ordered both the federal bureaucracy and the Washington transit system segregated. He hosted the premiere of the film The Birth of a Nation at the White House and lamented afterward that its portrayal of black men as violent simians “is all so terribly true.” During his eight years in office he sent American troops to intervene in more countries than any previous president: Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, and even, in the turbulent period following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 547-50 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:15 PM he wanted to bring democracy to oppressed people. This was a radically new concept. Past American leaders had taken the opposite view, that darker-skinned people were incapable of self-government and needed to be ruled by others—a view summarized by the first American military commander in Cuba, General William Shafter, when he pronounced Cubans “no more fit for self-government than gunpowder is for hell.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 560-65 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:16 PM Once home from the peace conference, Wilson did all he could to combat the poison he saw emanating from Russia. Using the newly passed Sedition Act, he endorsed the deportation of supposed subversives, and after several anarchist bombs exploded and police uncovered a plot to mail others to wealthy industrialists and bankers, he authorized Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to launch the first of what would become two years of raids that led to the arrest of thousands of immigrants and the deportation of hundreds. No less than twenty-five times in 1919 and 1920, Wilson deployed the United States Army to suppress “labor unrest” or “racial unrest.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 574-80 | Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 11:18 PM Foster also took a ghostwriting assignment from his mentor Bernard Baruch, who like many of Wilson’s friends and admirers was disturbed by the runaway success of a 1919 book attacking the Versailles treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John Maynard Keynes. The book warned that the treaty’s reparations section, which Foster had drafted and Baruch presented as his own, exposed Europe to “the menace of inflationism.” Baruch resolved to reply. His book, ponderously titled The Making of the Reparation and Economic Sections of the Treaty, argued that reparations clauses were “vital to the interest of the American people and even more vital to world stability.” Foster did most of the writing and editing, for which Baruch paid him ten thousand dollars. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 600-602 | Added on Saturday, November 09, 2013, 12:10 AM As the world’s navies were converting from coal-powered to oil-powered warships, marking the beginning of the petroleum age, he worked to ensure that the United States won its share of access to the resource that would shape the unfolding century. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 602-5 | Added on Saturday, November 09, 2013, 12:11 AM Between trips to the Middle East, Allen found enough time to attend evening and early-morning classes at George Washington University Law School, from which he graduated in 1926. Nonetheless he sensed his career and life stalling. He was in his thirties, living on a civil servant’s salary and a modest inheritance from “Grandfather Foster.” His work had little impact. Once he found a packet of his reports lying unopened in a State Department closet. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 605-9 | Added on Saturday, November 09, 2013, 12:12 AM Life with Clover was increasingly complicated. At one point Allen confronted her with an exorbitant bill from Cartier’s, and she calmly explained that she had learned of his relationship with another woman and had bought herself an emerald necklace as “compensation.” She then announced that she intended to buy a new piece of jewelry each time she discovered one of his affairs. This would have led the couple quickly to bankruptcy, and she did not carry out her threat. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 612 | Added on Saturday, November 09, 2013, 12:12 AM Later he called this period “the slough of my Despond.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 621-23 | Added on Saturday, November 09, 2013, 12:14 AM Foster became part of a four-man team running the firm, and a few months later, Cromwell made him the sole managing partner. He was thirty-eight years old and just fifteen years out of law school. Thus began his quarter century as one of the American elite’s most ruthlessly effective and best-paid courtiers. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 651-52 | Added on Saturday, November 09, 2013, 03:07 PM “I’m not sure I want to go to heaven,” Douglas mused later in life. “I’m afraid I might meet John Foster Dulles there.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 858-68 | Added on Saturday, November 09, 2013, 03:35 PM In 1934 he brought the biggest German nickel producer, I.G. Farben, into the cartel. This gave Nazi Germany access to the cartel’s resources. “Without Dulles,” according to a study of Sullivan & Cromwell, “Germany would have lacked any negotiating strength with [International Nickel], which controlled the world’s supply of nickel, a crucial ingredient in stainless steel and armor plate.” I.G. Farben was also one of the world’s largest chemical companies—it would produce the Zyklon B gas used at Nazi death camps—and as Foster was bringing it into the nickel cartel, he also helped it establish a global chemical cartel. He was a board member and legal counsel for another chemical producer, the Solvay conglomerate, based in Belgium. During the 1930s he guided Solvay, I.G. Farben, the American firm Allied Chemical & Dye, and several other companies into a chemical cartel just as potent as the one he had organized for nickel producers. In mid-1931 a consortium of American banks, eager to safeguard their investments in Germany, persuaded the German government to accept a loan of nearly $500 million to prevent default. Foster was their agent. His ties to the German government tightened after Hitler took power at the beginning of 1933 and appointed Foster’s old friend Hjalmar Schacht as minister of economics. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 873-77 | Added on Saturday, November 09, 2013, 03:37 PM Working with Schacht, Foster helped the National Socialist state find rich sources of financing in the United States for its public agencies, banks, and industries. The two men shaped complex restructurings of German loan obligations at several “debt conferences” in Berlin—conferences that were officially among bankers, but were in fact closely guided by the German and American governments—and came up with new formulas that made it easier for the Germans to borrow money from American banks. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 926-28 | Added on Saturday, November 09, 2013, 03:41 PM He supported the neutralist America First committee—Sullivan & Cromwell drew up its articles of incorporation without charge—and roused its members with speeches denouncing Churchill, Roosevelt, and other “warmongers.” Hitler impressed him as “one who from humble beginnings, and despite the handicap of alien nationality, had attained the unquestioned leadership of a great nation.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 959-62 | Added on Sunday, November 10, 2013, 11:15 AM He tried to persuade a Supreme Court justice, Harlan Fiske Stone, to resign and direct Sullivan & Cromwell’s ultimately unsuccessful challenge to the law. Stone declined—and lamented in passing that the flow of talented lawyers to firms serving corporate power “has made the learned profession of an earlier day the obsequious servant of business, and tainted it with the morals and manners of the market-place in its most anti-social manifestations.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 962-66 | Added on Sunday, November 10, 2013, 11:16 AM The Dulles brothers were paragons of the Wilsonian idea that came to be known as “liberal internationalism.” They believed that trouble in the world came from misunderstandings among ruling elites, not from social or political injustices, and that commerce could reduce or eliminate this trouble. This was a refined version of the “open door” policy the United States had embraced for decades—a policy that might better be called “kick in the door” because it was aimed at forcing other countries to accept trade arrangements favorable to American interests. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 976-79 | Added on Sunday, November 10, 2013, 11:18 AM To provide this guidance in a systematic way, they brought their new club into being in 1921. They called it the Council on Foreign Relations. Its motto was a single Latin word that spoke volumes: ubique, meaning “everywhere.” This was an era when American foreign policy was the province of a small elite, and the men who founded the council were all certified members. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 983-89 | Added on Sunday, November 10, 2013, 11:20 AM Coolidge was the founding editor of the council’s journal, Foreign Affairs, which made its debut in the summer of 1922 with articles by Foster and Root, among others. After Coolidge’s death in 1928 the editorship passed to Allen’s lifelong friend Hamilton Fish Armstrong. He held the job for nearly half a century, including a period in the 1940s when Allen served as the council’s president. “No nation can reach the position of a world power, as we have done, without becoming entangled in almost every quarter of the globe in one way or another,” Foster wrote in what could be taken as a summary of the council’s internationalist credo. “We are inextricably and inevitably tied to world affairs.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 997-99 | Added on Sunday, November 10, 2013, 11:22 AM Promoters of “internationalism” were eager above all to preserve stability. Like many of them, Foster saw authoritarian leaders like Hitler as valuable allies in the fight against Bolshevism. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1426-32 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 04:27 PM the Truman Doctrine. “Totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States,” the president asserted. “At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions.… The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1433-35 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 04:28 PM Congress accepted Truman’s worldview and appropriated the $400 million he requested for military aid to countries where Communist influence was seen to be growing. Some historians pinpoint this as the moment when the Cold War began in earnest, as the United States proclaimed that it considered the entire world a battleground between the superpowers. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1458-60 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 04:33 PM For much of his life, Foster had believed that the root of conflict and global instability was the failure of nations to cooperate. After the war he abandoned this view. In his new theology, threats to peace came not from the recklessness of nations, but the recklessness of one nation: the Soviet Union. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1486-89 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 04:37 PM Occasionally a voice emerged to offer a less apocalyptic view of Soviet intentions. The columnist Walter Lippmann urged Americans to “stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race,” and warned that Washington’s fixation on the Cold War “is misconceived, and must result in a misuse of American power.” These warnings, however, were overwhelmed by a fast-developing national consensus that the world had been divided between godly forces and others that were evil. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1494-98 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 04:38 PM Niebuhr, however, never sought a political role. Instead he remained reflective, and was uncomfortable with Foster’s emerging good-versus-evil view of the world. It contradicted his own belief in moral ambiguity, the danger of self-righteousness, the imperfection of human institutions, and what he called “the similarity between our sin and the guilt of others.” Foster believed the principal threat to the United States came from Moscow; Niebuhr saw it in the egotism of Americans and their leaders. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1506-10 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 04:39 PM Vishinsky combined a confrontational style with an absolute insistence on squeezing every bit of advantage for his side, which he believed embodied the future of humanity. During one summit he was so relentlessly demanding that American delegates retreated to regroup. One of them wondered aloud what Vishinsky might have become if he had been born and raised in the United States. “Why, there’s no doubt about it,” General Walter Bedell Smith answered. “He would have been senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1550-53 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 04:44 PM “There were strong objections to having a single agency with the authority both to collect secret intelligence and to process and evaluate it for the President,” according to one history. “The objections were overruled, and CIA became a unique organization among Western intelligence services, which uniformly keep their secret operations separate from their overall intelligence activities.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1597-1601 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:20 PM These operations were to be “so planned and executed that any US government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and that if uncovered the US government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” As the CIA evolved in the way Allen wished, Foster also began sensing events moving in his direction. He believed he could direct American diplomacy better than Secretary of State Marshall or anyone else working for “that shirt salesman from Kansas City,” as he called Truman. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1606-9 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:20 PM At home he found his adversaries not just among Democrats, but also in the group of Republicans who wished the United States to play a less intrusive role in the world. Their leader, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who ran against Dewey for the Republican presidential nomination in 1948, rejected the idea that destiny was calling Americans to overspread the globe. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1612-14 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:21 PM The contest for the Republican presidential nomination in 1948 was not just between Dewey and Taft, but between the “internationalist” and “isolationist” wings of the party. Foster was Dewey’s foreign policy adviser during the campaign, and through Dewey, he pressed his internationalist views. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1657-60 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:25 PM Three months after Foster took his seat in the Senate, Communists under Mao Zedong won the civil war in China. Foster had known Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the defeated Nationalists, for more than a decade, and was also close to the equally autocratic President Syngman Rhee of South Korea. Both were not simply anti-Communist but Christian, which made Foster especially zealous in their defense. He had once described the two men as “modern-day equivalents of the founders of the Church.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1681-83 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:27 PM In the end Foster was defeated by a decisive 200,000 votes. “I’m glad that duck lost,” Truman said after hearing the news. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1719-23 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:31 PM attack—the fact that we had no forewarning of it—only stimulated the already existent preference of the military planners for drawing their conclusions only from the assessed capabilities of the adversary, dismissing his intentions, which could be safely assumed to be hostile. All this tended to heighten the militarization of thinking about the Cold War in general, and to press us into attitudes where any discriminate estimate of Soviet intentions was unwelcome and unacceptable.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1738-39 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:32 PM “Even if the spy Allen Dulles should arrive in Heaven through someone’s absentmindedness,” Ehrenburg wrote in Pravda, “he would begin to blow up the clouds, mine the stars, and slaughter the angels.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1848-50 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:52 PM He pledged that “liberating the captive peoples” would be one of his priorities in office, and vowed not to rest “until the enslaved nations of the world have in the fullness of freedom the right to choose their own path.” His running mate, Senator Richard Nixon of California, scorned the Democrats for treating the confrontation with Communism as a “nicey-nice little powder-puff duel.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1868 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:57 PM The Cold War became a holy war against the infidels, ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1868-69 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:57 PM a defense of free God-fearing men against the atheistic Communist system. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1872-74 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:58 PM As it turned out, the image was an illusion. The specter of a powerful Russia was remote from the reality of a country weakened by war, with a shattered economy, an overtaxed civilian and military bureaucracy, and large areas of civil unrest. The illusory image was at least partly due to a failure of intelligence.… ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1882-83 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:59 PM He also considered Paul Hoffman, the administrator of the Marshall Plan—which covertly funneled 5 percent of its budget to the ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1882-83 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 09:59 PM He also considered Paul Hoffman, the administrator of the Marshall Plan—which covertly funneled 5 percent of its budget to the CIA—and ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1904-8 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:03 PM “Smooth is an inadequate word for Dulles,” Stone wrote. “His prevarications are so highly polished as to be aesthetically pleasurable.… Dulles is a man of wily and subtle mind. It is difficult to believe that behind his unctuous manner he does not take a cynical amusement in his own monstrous pomposities. He gives the impression of a man who lives constantly behind a mask.… It is fortunate for this country, Western Europe and China that he was not at the helm of foreign policy before the war. It is unfortunate that he should be now.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1921-22 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:05 PM During his OSS days, Allen’s cryptonym had been simply a number, 110. This time he chose a more mysterious one: Ascham. It was the name given to an elite warrior class in ancient Egypt, and is said to mean “those who stand at the left hand of the king.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1927-29 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:06 PM Because she was a woman, though, she faced discrimination at every stage. Her boss at the Commerce Department frankly told her she had “the best brain in this building,” but that he would not promote her because “I don’t believe in women getting too high up.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1935-39 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:07 PM Foster was shaped above all by a lifetime working for international banks and businesses, whose interests he had come to identify with those of the United States. His mastery of complex legal and financial codes reflected a rigorously organized mind, but he was not a deep thinker. The few new ideas he developed were modest in scale, dealing with matters like tariffs and exchange mechanisms. His ideology was the defense of the two principles that he believed best served global commerce: free enterprise and American-centered internationalism. He was driven to find and confront enemies, quick to make moral judgments, and not given to subtlety or doubt. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1943-50 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:08 PM Dwight Eisenhower took office on January 20, 1953. “Forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history,” he declared in his inaugural address. “Freedom is pitted against slavery, lightness against the dark.” Never before had siblings directed the overt and covert sides of American foreign policy. It was an arrangement fraught with danger. The Dulles brothers had shared such common backgrounds, and spent so much time together over so many years, that their minds had come to function as one. They knew, or believed they knew, the same deep truths about the world. Their intimacy rendered discussion and debate unnecessary. There would be no reason for State Department and CIA officers to meet and thrash out the possible advantages and disadvantages of a proposed operation. With a glance, a nod, and a few words, without consulting anyone other than the president, the brothers could mobilize the full power of the United States anywhere in the world. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1951-54 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:09 PM “It has always surprised me that more of a fuss was not made over the constellation of power resulting from Foster at State and Allen at the CIA,” Mary Bancroft wrote years later. “Undoubtedly the only reason that there was not more criticism of this particular combination was that Eisenhower was in the White House. The American people had placed their faith in Daddy—and Daddy could do no wrong.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1974-76 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:11 PM Many historians have observed that, as Stephen Ambrose put it, “Eisenhower and Dulles continued the policy of containment. There was no basic difference between their foreign policy and that of Truman and Acheson.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1985-90 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:12 PM First, historians now know that covert operations were far more important during World War II than outsiders understood at the time. Spectacularly effective ones, including the breaking of German codes, remained secret for decades. As the Allied commander, Eisenhower was of course privy to all of them. Understanding the role they played in winning the war must have left him with a deep appreciation for what covert action can achieve. Eisenhower would also have seen covert action as humanitarian. It was a way to fight high-stakes battles at low cost. Never foreseeing the long-term effects these operations might have, he imagined them as almost bloodless. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1992-95 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:13 PM And of course in those days, you had this notion of plausible deniability. You could really believe no one would ever know what you had done. If somebody said, ‘Mr. President, I don’t understand why you authorized that operation against Arbenz,’ he would look you in the face and say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ That’s the way things were done in those days.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2000-2007 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:14 PM First was missionary Christianity. “I see the destiny of America embodied in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, just as the human race was represented by the first man,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This destiny reached apotheosis in the Dulles brothers. They were raised in a parsonage and taught from childhood that the world is an eternal battleground between righteousness and evil. Their father was a master of apologetics, the discipline of explaining and defending religious belief. They assimilated what the sociologist Max Weber described as two fundamental Calvinist tenets: that Christians are “weapons in the hands of God and executors of His providential will” and that “God’s glory demanded that the reprobate be compelled to submit to the law of the Church.” The second force that shaped the brothers was American history. They could only have been awed by its upward arc. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2010-11 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:15 PM As adults, Foster and Allen were shaped by a third force: decades of work defending the interests of America’s biggest multinational corporations. Although not plutocrats themselves, they spent their lives serving plutocrats. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2012-13 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:15 PM corporate globalism—what they and other founders of the Council on Foreign Relations called “liberal internationalism.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2029-32 | Added on Monday, November 11, 2013, 10:17 PM In his famous Independence Day speech to the House of Representatives on July 4, 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams proclaimed that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The Dulles brothers, however, did. Six impassioned visionaries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America became the monsters they went abroad to destroy. Their campaigns against these six were momentous battles in the global war the United States waged secretly during the 1950s. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2091-95 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2013, 08:50 PM Mossadegh emerged from an ancient culture enveloped in fatalism, poetry, and a belief that most problems will never be solved because injustice rules the lives of men. A very different culture shaped the Dulles brothers. They grew up as their country soared toward prosperity and global power. Like many Americans of their generation, they were boundlessly optimistic and self-confident. They believed that their country was uniquely blessed, that God wished it to project influence around the world, and that good people would welcome this influence because it was righteous, benevolent, and civilizing. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2131-33 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 11:32 AM Foster remained somber and withdrawn. He rarely ventured out at night, preferring to sit at home working on a speech, reading a detective novel, or playing backgammon with Janet. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2134-44 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 11:33 AM He was an awkward dinner guest, often inelegantly dressed in off-green suits, with distracting habits like stirring his drink with his index finger and stretching his legs to reveal stretches of pale skin. During one dinner, the wife of an undersecretary of the navy noticed him picking melted wax from a candle, squeezing it into a ball, and chewing it. “Now, Mr. Dulles, I scold my children for doing that,” she told him. “It’s bad manners and it messes up the tablecloth.” Foster quickly apologized for his “terrible habit” and later acknowledged the lady’s gift of a box of candles to soothe any hurt feelings. Social graces were not his strength at work either. His confidence in his own judgment was so strong that he felt little need to consult State Department professionals, and he often treated them brusquely. During meetings he doodled incessantly on yellow legal pads, taking breaks to sharpen his pencil with a pocket knife. When lost in thought he made what the columnist Stewart Alsop called “small clicking noises with his tongue.” The extended silences between his sentences were legendary. “His speech was slow,” the future British prime minister Harold Macmillan wrote after one meeting, “but it easily kept pace with his thoughts.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2159-61 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 11:36 AM The columnist Allen Drury called him “a man of notoriously thin skin who is not above trying to get the jobs of newspapermen who criticize his agency.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2176-78 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 11:41 AM Whether this was a sober estimate of Soviet power or a wild exaggeration, it both reflected and intensified the sense of fear that many Americans felt. Foster sought to make nuclear combat seem a real, imminent possibility. He conveyed a terrifying worldview. Most Americans came to share it. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2183-88 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 11:46 AM Even before Eisenhower took office, however, members of his incoming administration had begun discussions with agents of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service about a plot against Mossadegh. Their interlocutor was Christopher Montague Woodhouse, a former chief of the British intelligence station in Tehran, who made a secret trip to Washington soon after the election. At the State Department and again at the CIA, he argued that Mossadegh should be overthrown not as punishment for seizing Britain’s oil company, but because he had become too weak to resist a possible Soviet-backed coup. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2189 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 11:46 AM “A powerful ally was Frank Wisner, who was then director of [CIA] operations. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2211-12 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 11:54 AM Foster realized that if Mossadegh thrived, leaders of other countries might follow him toward neutralism. If he were to fall, neutralism would seem less tempting. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2228-29 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 11:58 AM The Eisenhower administration came to office pledging to lead the United States out of what Vice President Richard Nixon had called “Dean Acheson’s college of cowardly communist containment.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2240-43 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 12:03 PM Striking against Mossadegh was also tempting because of the political risk of not doing so. Senator Joseph McCarthy and other anti-Communist zealots in Congress were denouncing diplomats they blamed for the “loss” of China. If Iran were somehow to be “lost,” Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers would be accused of having failed to act. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2244-47 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 12:05 PM Losing access to Iranian oil, a foundation of British economic and military power, was difficult for British leaders even to contemplate. They had been forced to surrender India; Kenya was afire with anticolonial passion; and now the Iranians had nationalized their oil industry. One British diplomat warned plaintively that if this momentum was not stopped, “we will be driven back to our island, where we shall starve.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2265-66 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 12:09 PM “If it weren’t for the Cold War,” McGhee mused as the coup was being planned, “there’s no reason why we shouldn’t let the British and the Iranians fight it out.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2286-88 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 12:11 PM By 1953 the CIA had become a truly global organization, six times larger than when it was founded in 1947. Allen commanded fifteen thousand employees in fifty countries, with an annual budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars, no accounting necessary. He had remarkably little to show for it. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2300-2302 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 12:19 PM They asked that the CIA be authorized to do something it had never done before: overthrow a foreign leader. Their target would be Mossadegh. Less than two months after taking office, the brothers were bringing American foreign policy into a new age. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2391-92 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 12:49 PM a morally centered warrior who assumes burdens—even the moral burden of murder—in order to ensure the ultimate triumph of justice. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2491-94 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 07:50 PM Foster never forgot the trauma of Woodrow Wilson’s collapse after his failure to win Senate approval for American entry into the League of Nations. From it he drew the lesson that makers of American foreign policy must work closely with Congress and avoid alienating any of its prominent members. This made him eager, in his own words, “to find a basis for cooperation with McCarthy.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2562-63 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 07:58 PM “Some paradox of our nature,” the essayist Lionel Trilling has observed, “leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Bookmark Loc. 2624 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 08:06 PM ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2623-27 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 08:07 PM “He eliminated himself instantly and unequivocally,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoir. “He said, in effect, ‘I have been interested since boyhood in the diplomatic and foreign affairs of our nation. I’m highly complimented by the implication that I might be suited to the position of chief justice, but I assure you that my interests lie with the duties of my present post. As long as you are happy with my performance here, I have no interest in any other.’” Foster’s decision to remain as secretary of state opened the way for the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2639-42 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 08:08 PM “This fellow preaches like a Methodist minister,” Churchill complained privately. “His bloody text is always the same: that nothing but evil can come out of a meeting with Malenkov. Dulles is a terrible handicap. Ten years ago I could have dealt with him. Even as it is I have not been defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2660-61 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 09:36 PM All three of the concepts that Americans associated most directly with Foster—rollback, the agonizing reappraisal, and massive retaliation—were devoid of serious meaning. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2756-59 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013, 09:59 PM Early in 1954 he declared that “it is entirely up to Guatemala to decide what kind of democracy she should have,” and demanded that outside powers treat Latin American countries as more than “objects of monopolistic investments and sources of raw materials.” Time called this “the most forthright pro-Communist declaration the President has ever uttered.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2871-72 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 10:55 AM Once a reporter asked him what the CIA was. “The State Department for unfriendly countries,” he replied. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2957-58 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 11:09 AM Congress passed a bill adding the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and then another making “In God We Trust” the nation’s official motto. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2961-67 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 11:11 AM The CIA had no direct channel to Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano of Guatemala, but its indirect channel was ideal. The most prominent Catholic prelate in the United States, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, was not only outspokenly anti-Communist, but also a crafty global power broker with deep contacts throughout Latin America. Among his friends were three dictators—Batista, Trujillo, and Somoza—who detested Arbenz. Spellman had a special interest in Guatemala, not only because Archbishop Rossell y Arellano shared his political views—he admired Francisco Franco and considered land reform “completely communistic”—but also because of Guatemalan history. In the 1870s Guatemala had been the first Latin American country to embrace the principles of anticlericalism: lay education, civil marriage, limits on the number of foreign-born priests, and a ban on political activity by the clergy. The Church had an old score to settle there. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3002-6 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 11:16 AM On the morning of June 16, 1954, Foster, Allen, and Eisenhower’s other top national security aides met with the president for breakfast in the family quarters of the White House. Allen reported that all was ready in Guatemala. “Are you sure this is going to succeed?” Eisenhower asked. Allen said it would. “I want all of you to be damn good and sure you succeed,” the president told them. “I’m prepared to take any steps that are necessary to see that it succeeds. When you commit the flag, you commit it to win.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3030-33 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 11:18 AM the planes were deployed. Later he told one of his close military comrades, General Andrew Goodpaster, that it was an easy choice. “If you at any time take the route of violence or support of violence,” he said, “then you commit yourself to carry it through, and it’s too late to have second thoughts.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Note Loc. 3033 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 11:18 AM wow. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3065-69 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 11:26 AM “A combination of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Banana Empire had finally managed to crush this small nation, indefensible and inoffensive, one hundred times smaller than its adversary, and drown in blood a flowering democracy dedicated to the dignity and economic liberation of its people. The next day, John Foster Dulles announced the ‘glorious victory’ and proclaimed his delight at the crime’s consummation.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3107-9 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 01:30 PM When the fighting ended with Japan’s surrender in August, the team commander, Major Allison Thomas of the U.S. Army, had a farewell dinner with him and asked him if he was a Communist. “Yes,” Ho replied. “But we can still be friends, can’t we?” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3143-45 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 01:34 PM Foster arrived in Geneva with a single goal: to prevent any compromise with Ho. Every other delegation, except for the one representing Vietnam’s old emperor, Bao Dai, favored compromise. Rather than accept the consensus, Foster resolved to lead the United States on a course of its own. In time this would lead it to war in Vietnam. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3162-64 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 01:40 PM In 1950, eager to win French support for the American-led war in Korea, Truman put aside his anticolonial impulse and agreed to begin subsidizing France’s war in Vietnam. He sent $100 million. By 1952 this aid had tripled to $300 million. Two years later it was nearly $1 billion. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3175-76 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 01:42 PM It is one of the most dangerous, in fact potentially suicidal, things a great nation can do in world affairs: to cut off its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice and a misguided dispensation of good and evil. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3179-85 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 03:07 PM Late in 1953, Viet Minh attackers surrounded the strategic French outpost at Dien Bien Phu, in Vietnam’s mountainous northwest. All understood that a decisive battle was at hand. If France faced defeat, might the United States send troops to relieve the besieged garrison? When this question was raised at a National Security Council meeting on January 8, 1954, according to the official transcript, President Eisenhower reacted “with vehemence.” “[There’s] just no sense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina,” he said. “If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us. I cannot tell you … how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3313-16 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 07:36 PM noted a lack of intellectual engagement. He often turned aside probing discussion by telling a story, or musing about his favorite baseball team, the Washington Senators. His mind was undisciplined. By one account he “seemed almost scatterbrained.” A senior British agent who worked with him for years recalled being “seldom able to penetrate beyond his laugh, or to conduct any serious professional conversation with him for more than a few sentences.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3229-30 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 10:46 PM Overseas Press Club in New York on March 29, 1954. His central challenge was to explain to Americans why they must resist Ho. The answer was what he called the “domino theory.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3434-35 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 11:06 PM Just hours after this fateful meeting, in faraway Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz resigned. On a single weekend—June 26–27, 1954—the second Dulles target fell and covert action against the third began. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3462-69 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2013, 11:10 PM Lansdale seized on a provision of the Geneva accord that allowed anyone in North or South Vietnam to move freely to the other part of the country. More than one million Catholics lived in the north. Communists had not treated Catholics well in Indochina, and CIA officers launched a large-scale propaganda campaign aimed at frightening them into abandoning their homes and fleeing to the south. They bribed soothsayers to predict doom in the north, persuaded priests to tell their parishioners that “the Virgin Mary has fled to the south,” and distributed leaflets suggesting that Ho’s regime was plotting anti-Catholic pogroms, had invited Chinese troops into the country who were raping Vietnamese women, and expected an American nuclear attack. Tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, responded to this campaign. Carrying their belongings on their backs, they flooded into the harbor town of Haiphong, where U.S. Navy warships were waiting to carry them south. This is said to have been the largest-scale naval evacuation in history. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3569-71 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 01:59 PM Churchill agreed. After one of their meetings he remarked, “Foster Dulles is the only case I know of a bull who carries his own china shop around with him.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3663-67 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 02:11 PM Two meetings of powerful leaders, held thousands of miles apart, reflected profoundly different views of the world. Leaders who gathered at Geneva presented the traditional Cold War narrative: two warring blocs led by Moscow and Washington. Those who convened at Bandung offered a counter-narrative. They saw a world divided not between Communists and anti-Communists, but between nations emerging from colonialism and established powers determined to continue influencing them. The summit at Geneva helped maintain a delicate peace between superpowers. From the Asian-African Conference emerged a kaleidoscope of nationalist passions that would shape the next half century. ========== The Stranger (Albert Camus) - Highlight Loc. 93-95 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 07:28 PM The old people, Mother's friends, were coming in. I counted ten in all, gliding almost soundlessly through the bleak white glare. None of the chairs creaked when they sat down. Never in my life had I seen anyone so clearly as I saw these people; not a detail of their clothes or features escaped me. And yet I couldn't hear them, and it was hard to believe they really existed. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Bookmark Loc. 4207 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:23 PM ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4205-8 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:23 PM Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required a.m. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4232 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:28 PM That loneliness is not a function of solitude. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4246-47 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:29 PM That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4256-57 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:30 PM That 99% of compulsive thinkers' thinking is about themselves; ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4263-64 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:31 PM That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4272-73 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:33 PM That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4275-76 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:33 PM That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4284 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:34 PM That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4285-86 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:34 PM That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4287-90 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:34 PM That God — unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God. That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you. ========== Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Highlight Loc. 4294-95 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:35 PM The shopworn 'Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure' would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3684-87 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 10:09 PM James Reston of the New York Times wrote that he had become a “supreme expert” in the art of diplomatic blundering. “He doesn’t just stumble into booby traps,” Reston observed. “He digs them to size, studies them carefully, and then jumps.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3810-14 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 10:24 PM During Allen’s first four years as director of central intelligence, Eisenhower repeatedly defended him and yielded to his judgment. He accepted Allen’s advice that the United States continue to support Diem in South Vietnam even though his own personal envoy urged the opposite; he rejected General Doolittle’s suggestion that he fire Allen; and he turned aside Killian’s criticism of Allen’s administrative ability. Following this pattern, he ignored his intelligence board when it recommended that he curb Allen’s authority. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 3984-88 | Added on Sunday, November 17, 2013, 04:11 PM Omega envisioned a campaign of escalating coercion, but had no fixed goal. At various points, it aimed at forcing Nasser to cut his ties with the Soviet Union, recognize Israel, stop subsidizing nationalists in other Arab countries, and order “a public reorientation of Egypt’s informational media toward advocacy of cooperation and close economic cooperation with the West, including a public statement from Nasser to that effect.” To achieve these goals, the United States would suspend aid programs, refuse arms sales, strengthen pro-American regimes in nearby countries, and work with Britain to counter Nasser’s influence across the Arab world. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Bookmark Loc. 4014 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 10:05 AM ========== Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron) - Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 3063-67 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 10:07 AM Less than two weeks later—only four days before JFK was to take office—the Eisenhower-Nixon administration struck again, this time ordering the State Department to implement travel restrictions for U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba. Often overlooked is the fact that two of the major legacies of the U.S. cold war against Cuba that remain today—the travel restrictions and the lack of diplomatic relations—went into effect the last month Vice President Nixon was in office. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4040-44 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 10:13 AM If things went well, they might even secure the breakup of Indonesia. This would leave Sukarno controlling Java, where most of Indonesia’s population lives, but might bring other resource-rich islands under Washington’s influence. “Don’t tie yourself irrevocably to a policy of preserving the unity of Indonesia,” Foster told Hugh Cumming, the Virginia-bred diplomat he chose as ambassador to Indonesia. “The territorial integrity of China became a shibboleth. We finally got a territorially integrated China—for whose benefit? The Communists.… ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4074-75 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 10:17 AM Whenever he and Allen presented such a far-reaching plan, all understood that President Eisenhower had approved and that they must vote favorably. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4079-81 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 10:17 AM “Allison continued to raise annoying questions throughout the development of the operation,” one CIA officer recalled afterward. “We handled the problem by getting Allen Dulles to have his brother relieve Allison of his post.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4159-60 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 10:58 AM When the rocket was finally launched, with millions watching on live television, it hovered above the launchpad for a few moments and then exploded. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4162-65 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 10:59 AM They also reinforced a spreading sense that both the president and secretary of state had grown weak and tired. In the twenty-six months since Eisenhower’s heart attack, he had suffered both an attack of ileitis—an intestinal inflammation—and a mild stroke. His speech slowed palpably. In public he sometimes seemed disconnected and adrift. Foster also lost his glow and began to slow down. The world was entering a period of profound change, but he remained frozen in intransigence. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4258-61 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 11:08 AM The Chicago Daily News hinted at what was happening—it said that weapons for Indonesian rebels were falling from the sky “like manna from heaven”—but no other newspaper went even that far. Many were spared the necessity of deciding what to print because their correspondents censored themselves. “We did not write about it,” an Associated Press reporter confessed years later. “Maybe it was a kind of patriotism that kept us from doing so.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4315-17 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 11:13 AM Then, before dawn on July 14, 1958, nationalist officers in Iraq overthrew their pro-American monarchy. Soon afterward they executed the king, the crown prince, and Prime Minister Nuri as-Said, who was outspokenly pro-Western and Nasser’s most potent Arab enemy. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4335-36 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 11:15 AM Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon lamented “the mixing of American blood with Arabian oil in the Middle East.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4338-41 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 11:17 AM This episode also illustrated the changing image of Israel in the United States. President Truman had endorsed the creation of Israel in 1948 after overruling both his secretary of state, George Marshall, and his secretary of defense, James Forrestal, who predicted that the existence of a Jewish state would cause endless conflict in the Middle East. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4347-50 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 11:18 AM The emergence of Nasser and his nationalist ideology in the mid-1950s, however, led Foster to shift his view. He considered Arab nationalism illegitimate and inherently anti-Western. Soviet leaders, sensing an opening, abandoned Israel and embraced the Arab cause. Foster, who had not previously been sympathetic to Zionism, jumped into the strategic vacuum and steered the United States steadily closer to Israel. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4350-52 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 11:18 AM This made Foster and Allen midwives of both relationships that framed America’s approach to the Middle East for the next half century: the one with Saudi Arabia and the one with Israel. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4393-97 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 11:23 AM “If there is an out-and-out question as to who began the name-calling between Sukarno and Washington, then I have to admit it was Sukarno,” he wrote in his memoir. “But look here, Sukarno is a shouter. He is emotional. If he is angry, he shoots thunderbolts. But he thunders only at those he loves. I would adore to make up with the United States of America.… Oh, America, what is the matter with you? Why couldn’t you have been my friend?” ========== akmk - Highlight on Page 49 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 12:09 PM Marx’sCapitalisnotablueprintfor asocialisteconomy.Itisanattempttogainathoroughunderstandingofcapitalism.Itis necessarytounderstandcapitalisminordertoovercomeit. ========== akmk - Highlight on Page 51 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 12:11 PM Incapitalistsociety,wealthtakestheformofcommodities,i.e.,almostallthethings whichmakeuptherichesofcapitalistsocietyareproducedforandtradedinmarkets. Theyareproducednotbecausetheyconstitutewealth,butbecausetheycanbesoldat favorableprices.“Evenduringafamine,cornisimportedbecausethecorn-merchant therebymakesmoney,andnotbecausethenationisstarving.”(MarxquotingRicardo inContribution,389/o.) ========== akmk - Highlight on Page 60 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 08:46 PM Inordertosurvive,humansmustconsumeexteriorthingswhich theymustproducesociallywiththehelpofotherexteriorthings.Ifthesocialcontrolover thesethingsissuchthatonepartofsocietyisforcedtoworkforanotherpartofsociety,this iscalled“exploitation.” ========== akmk - Highlight on Page 61 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 08:48 PM Thenatureofsuchwants,whetherthey arise,forinstance,fromthestomachorfrom imagination,makesnodifference.2 “Phantasie”istranslatedherewith imagination.Acommoditywhich DieNaturdieserBed¨urfnisse,obsiez.B. demMagenoderderPhantasieentspringen, ¨andertnichtsanderSache.2 ========== akmk - Highlight on Page 62 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 08:49 PM Thisindifferencemakesitpossiblethatsomepeopleareundernourishedandhomelessin themidstofgreatwealthandwaste.Howeverthisindifferenceisalsoaliberationfromthe mediocrityandboredomofastrictlyneeds-basedproduction ========== akmk - Highlight on Page 68 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 08:55 PM Thingswhichhavethesamequalitycanstilldifferquantitatively.Hegel’sbasicdefinition ofquantityisthatitisacharacteristicofthethingwhichdoesnotdefinethething.Evenif youchangethequantityofathingyoustillhavethesamething.Howeverifthiswasthe wholetruththenonewouldfindeverythinginallquantities.Butelephantsarealwaysbig andmicealwayssmall.Todojusticetothis,Hegelintroducestheconceptof“measure”for therightquantityforagivenquality. ForHegel,themeasures,justlikethequalities,areintrinsictothethings.InMarx’s paradigm,notonlythequalitiesbutalsothemeasuresdependonpractical(social)activity ========== akmk - Highlight on Page 71 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 08:59 PM Propertiesareintrinsictoathing.Oneshouldconsiderthemassomethingdormant, thething’spotential.Thesepropertieswakeupandmanifestthemselvesonlywhen thethingisplacedinarelationwithotherthings. •Theusefulnessofathing(inthefirsteditionofCapital,18:2,Marxwritesmoreexplicitly:usefulnessforhumanlife)isthemanifestationofitspropertiesinoneparticularrelation,namely,initsrelationtohumans.Theusefulnessofathingisthereforenot intrinsictothethingitself,butitisarelationshipbetweenthething’spropertiesand humanneeds.Itdependsnotonlyonthethingbutalsoonhumans.“Asheepwould hardlyconsiderittobeoneofits‘useful’qualitiesthatitcanbeeatenbyhumanbeings”[mecw24]538:6/o.Athingisusefulifitspropertiesareabletoservehuman needs.Sincehumanneedsdependonsocialfactors,suchasfashions,technology,and customs,usefulnessinheritsthisdependence. •Thesentence“theusefulnessofathingmakesitause-value”isthedefinitionof“usevalue.”Theuse-valueofathingisitsusefulness—which,aswasjustexplained,is arelativeconcept—consideredasapropertyofthethingitself.Theuse-valueofa thingisthereforenotoneofthepropertiesofthething,buttherelationshipbetween 311.TheCommodity thesepropertiesandhumanneedsorwantsthatisattributedtothethingasifitwasa propertyofthething.(Themodernconceptof“utilityfunction”attributesthissame relationshiptothehumanratherthanthething.) ========== akmk - Highlight on Page 75 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2013, 09:01 PM ToparaphraseMarx’sargument:whatpeoplereallywantistheuse-valueofthethings, notthethingsthemselves,buttheycanonlybenefitfromtheseuse-valueswhentheyhave possessionofthethingsthemselves.Thisisthebasisforthesocialrulesinacommodity societyregulatingwhocanhaveaccesstowhichthings ========== akmk - Highlight on Page 96 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 11:18 AM Sincethismaybeanunfamiliarkindofreasoning,Iwillgivehereanexamplewhere somethinghappenedtomepersonallywhichpromptedmetoapplythesamelogicina differentcontext.OnceIwasdrivingmycarintheeveninghours,andsomecarfacingme intheoppositelaneblinkeditslightsatme.FirstIthought:thismusthavebeensomeone whoknewme,i.e.,Iassumedthatthereasonfortheblinkingwassomethingbetweenthe driveroftheothercarandmyself,somethingrelative.ButsinceitwasgettingdarkIcouldn’t makeoutwhowassittingintheothercar.Onlyafterothercarsblinkedtheirlightsatme, too,didIrealizeIhadforgottentoturnonmyownheadlights. ========== akmk - Highlight on Page 106 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 11:27 AM Inotherwords:exchange,inwhichthecommoditiesaretreatedas equals,canonlythenplaytheimportantroleinthecapitalisteconomywhichitdoesplay,if 661.1.Use-ValueandValue thecommoditiesarenotmadeequalthroughtheexchangebutalreadyequalbeforebeiung exchanged. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4474-79 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 11:49 AM Nixon’s violence-torn trip through Latin America, the collapse of Archipelago, the overthrow and murder of pro-American leaders in Iraq, and the marine landing in Lebanon were more than enough to occupy both beleaguered brothers during the spring and summer of 1958. Then, at the end of August, China resumed shelling the disputed islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Three months later, Khrushchev gave a speech asserting that it was time for all foreign powers to withdraw their troops from Berlin. He said that if the United States wished to continue occupying a sector of the city, it should negotiate with the government of East Germany, which the United States did not recognize. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4511-13 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 11:53 AM Americans had come to view Foster the way children might view a strict old schoolmaster. At the end of his life he seemed frozen into immobility, an anachronism, a prisoner of the past. When he was gone, though, the nation felt bereft. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4540-42 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 11:56 AM Although Eisenhower was near-apoplectic at this prospect, he directed his anger at Castro, not the Soviets. In fact, as his anti-Castro fervor was rising, he decided to invite Nikita Khrushchev to Washington—something that would have been inconceivable while Foster was alive. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4581-84 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 07:58 PM Eisenhower had hoped to end his term with Soviet-American relations improving. Instead they were nearly as frigid as when he took office. “The episode humiliated Khrushchev and discredited his relatively moderate policies,” George Kennan wrote. “It forced him to fall back, for the defense of his own political position, on a more strongly belligerent anti-American tone of public utterance.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4591-94 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 07:59 PM The Congo is said to be the richest piece of geography on earth. When King Leopold II of Belgium appropriated it in 1885, he called it “a splendid piece of cake.” During their seventy-five-year rule, Belgians made immense fortunes in the Congo. Millions of Congolese died through massacre or in slave labor. It was the bloodiest episode in the history of European colonialism. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4601-6 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 08:01 PM Perhaps never has a country been granted independence with less preparation. Belgium had refused to educate its Congolese subjects; in 1960, by one count, there were just seventeen college graduates in a population of thirteen million. Not a single Congolese had substantial experience in government or public administration. There were no Congolese doctors, lawyers, or engineers. The economy was almost entirely in foreign hands. Citizens were spread out across a country the size of Western Europe, and represented a bewildering array of tribes, cultures, and languages. There was neither an educated elite nor a middle class. Since Belgian military commanders refused to promote native soldiers above the rank of sergeant, there was not even a single Congolese officer. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4789-90 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 08:26 PM Allen could not have failed to present Devlin’s cable. Years later, congressional investigators pinpointed this as the day when Eisenhower “circumlocutiously” ordered Lumumba assassinated. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4871-73 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 08:33 PM It was at this life-or-death moment—Lumumba in brooding confinement while the CIA plotted to kill him—that Louis Armstrong arrived in the Congo. Rather than playing for an audience that included Lumumba, he played for one that included Devlin and Ambassador Timberlake. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4911-12 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 08:36 PM This was the spy trade as Allen liked to imagine it, brutal at times but essential to world peace—and always with a neat ending. Neither Bond nor his superiors ever worry about the long-term consequences of their acts, and there never are any. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4915-16 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 08:37 PM The list of places where he helped direct covert operations is an intelligence abecedarian’s dream: Albania, Berlin, China, Guatemala, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Poland, Romania. He was never the same after Hungary. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 4955-58 | Added on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 08:41 PM In late 1960, the Sino-Soviet split burst into public view when Khrushchev abruptly withdrew all Soviet advisers from China, which had emerged as the more radical of the two countries. This development intensified interest in covert action there. Allen welcomed it. His plan to foment civil war in China by attacking from Burma had failed but, undaunted, he decided to try again a thousand miles away, in Tibet. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5017-19 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 11:57 AM The task proved so disgusting and so arduous that both Belgians had to get drunk in order to complete it, but in the end no trace was left of Patrice Lumumba and his companions. Lumumba was thirty-six years old.… ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5046-49 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:02 PM Lumumba’s murder stunned the world and set off a wave of anti-Western passion in Africa and beyond. In the decades that followed, the Congo became a hell of repression, poverty, corruption, and violence. There is much to support the view that this killing was, as the Belgian scholar Ludo De Witte has suggested, “one of the twentieth century’s most important political assassinations.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5063-66 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:05 PM A television interviewer, Eric Sevareid, asked him if he had come to believe that any of his covert operations were unnecessary. He named just one. “I think that we overrated the danger in, let’s say, the Congo,” Allen said. “It looked as though they were going to make a serious attempt at takeover in the Belgian Congo. Well, it didn’t work out that way at all. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5093-96 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:07 PM “I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States,” Jefferson wrote. “The control which, with Florida, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5114-16 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:11 PM Three months later Castro made his tumultuous trip to the United States. The nascent counterculture embraced him. Allen Ginsberg and Malcolm X came to his hotel in Harlem. Supporters cheered outside. One carried a sign reading MAN, LIKE US CATS DIG FIDEL THE MOST—HE KNOWS WHAT’S HIP AND WHAT BUGS THE SQUARES. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5176-80 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:21 PM One of Castro’s closest comrades, the Argentine-born guerrilla Che Guevara, had been in Guatemala in 1954 and witnessed the coup against Arbenz. Later he told Castro why it succeeded. He said Arbenz had foolishly tolerated an open society, which the CIA penetrated and subverted, and also preserved the existing army, which the CIA turned into its instrument. Castro agreed that a revolutionary regime in Cuba must avoid those mistakes. Upon taking power, he cracked down on dissent and purged the army. Many Cubans supported his regime and were ready to defend it. All of this made the prospect of deposing him daunting indeed. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5195-98 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:24 PM “The thing we should never do in dealing with revolutionary countries, in which the world abounds, is to push them behind an iron curtain raised by ourselves,” Walter Lippmann warned in a column after the withdrawal of the Sugar Kings. “On the contrary, even when they have been seduced and subverted and are drawn across the line, the right thing to do is to keep the way open for their return.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5200-5201 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:25 PM History is littered with the names of small places that suddenly flash to the center of world attention. So it was with Laos in the late 1950s. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5219-24 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:27 PM Much debate surrounds this briefing. Kennedy’s opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, later suggested that it might have cost him the presidency. Within the Eisenhower administration, Nixon was actively promoting the plot against Castro, but he was sworn to secrecy. He suspected that Kennedy realized this after Allen’s briefing. In campaign speeches, Kennedy boldly vowed never to tolerate “a hostile and militant Communist satellite” or “a potential enemy missile or submarine base only ninety miles from our shores.” Nixon could not reply. “Are they falling dead over there?” Nixon asked an aide in frustration over what he saw as the CIA’s failure to act. “What in the world are they doing that takes months?” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5235-36 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:29 PM Since no American intelligence officer had ever been sent to kill a foreign leader, Bissell had to conjure a way to strike at Castro. His idea was either brilliant or ridiculous: hire the Mafia. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5243-47 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:30 PM After Kennedy won the presidential election in November, Eisenhower might have frozen the anti-Castro operation, or at least asked Allen to test Kennedy’s interest. Instead he expanded it. He approved what Bissell later called a “change in concept”; rather than smuggle small teams of infiltrators into Cuba, the CIA would launch a full-scale invasion, perhaps with support from the U.S. military. Eisenhower’s national security adviser, Gordon Gray, suggested staging a phony Cuban attack on the American base at Guantánamo Bay to use as a pretext for war. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5256-59 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:31 PM Eisenhower approved covert action against Castro early in 1960, but Lumumba’s sudden emergence in the Congo distracted him. When he received news that Lumumba had been captured, he realized he had won his African battle. Immediately he turned back to Cuba. He summoned Allen and Bissell to the White House and ordered them to repeat in Cuba what the CIA had just achieved in the Congo. “Take more chances and be aggressive,” he told them. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5268-74 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:32 PM “During the 21 December 1960 meeting of the Special Group, Allen Dulles briefed the attendees on a meeting that he had participated in the previous day in New York with a group of American businessmen,” according to a CIA account that remained secret for nearly half a century. “In attendance at this meeting were the vice president for Latin America of Standard Oil of New Jersey, the chairman of the Cuban-American Sugar Company, the president of the American Sugar Domino Refining Company, the president of the American & Foreign Power Company, the chairman of the Freeport Sulphur Company and representatives from Texaco, International Telephone and Telegraph, and other American companies with business interests in Cuba. The tenor of the conversation was that it was time for the US to get off dead center and take some direct action against Castro.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5283-86 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12:33 PM On New Year’s Day a powerful bomb exploded in Havana. “It is the American Embassy that is paying the terrorists to place bombs in Cuba!” Castro told a cheering crowd the next night. Then he said he would no longer allow the United States to station more than eleven diplomats at its embassy in Havana. Eisenhower responded by shutting the embassy entirely and breaking diplomatic relations with Cuba. Castro warned Cubans that this meant an invasion was imminent. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5337-38 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:16 PM Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, counseled him to treat Castro as “a thorn in the flesh, but not as a dagger in the heart.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5352-53 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:17 PM Yet another possibility: Bissell assumed the Mafia would finally get its act together and take out Castro before, or coincident with, the invasion.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5353-60 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:18 PM Bissell ignored one last, poignant warning. It came on Sunday morning, April 9, just eight days before the exile army was supposed to storm ashore at the Bay of Pigs. Bissell was at his home in the Cleveland Park section of Washington when his doorbell rang. Outside were Jacob Esterline, the CIA officer he had put in day-to-day charge of the operation, and Colonel Jack Hawkins, its senior military planner. They were evidently overwrought after a night of agonizing. Bissell ushered them in, and they poured out their hearts. They told him what he already knew: the new landing beach was isolated, with no local population to support the invaders and few escape routes; there would not be enough air cover to prevent Castro from counterattacking; the secrecy that was an essential part of the original plan had evaporated. Given these new conditions, they told Bissell, the invasion was certain to end in “terrible disaster.” If Bissell did not cancel it, they would resign. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5383-86 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:21 PM “Well, how is it going?” he asked an aide who met his plane late that night in Baltimore. “Not very well, sir,” came the reply. “Oh, is that so?” The two men chatted on the ride to Allen’s home in Georgetown. When they arrived, Allen invited his aide in for a drink. Over whiskey, he shifted the subject away from Cuba and began rambling aimlessly. The aide later used a single word to describe this moment: “unreal.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5395-96 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:23 PM Later that day Kennedy told an aide, “I probably made a mistake keeping Allen Dulles.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5422-23 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:37 PM “Under a parliamentary system of government, it is I who would be leaving office,” he told Allen. “But under our system it is you who must go.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5463-65 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:43 PM Johnson told friends in Congress that the Kennedy assassination had “some foreign complications, CIA and other things.” Placing Allen on the Warren Commission ensured that these “complications” would remain secret. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5532-33 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:49 PM “Once you touch the biographies of human beings,” Walter Lippmann observed while the Dulles brothers were in power, “the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5550-53 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:52 PM Foster and Allen never imagined that their intervention in foreign countries would have such devastating long-term effects—that Vietnam would be plunged into a war costing more than one million lives, for example, or that Iran would fall to violently anti-American zealots, or that the Congo would descend into decades of horrific conflict. They had no notion of “blowback.” Their lack of foresight led them to pursue reckless adventures that, over the course of decades, palpably weakened American security. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5554-56 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:52 PM the two men so fully reinforced each other. Their worldviews and operational codes were identical. Deeply intimate since childhood, they turned the State Department and the CIA into a reverberating echo chamber for their shared certainties. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5587-89 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:55 PM Governing a land devastated by two world wars, they feared a resurgence of German and Japanese strength. They felt threatened by the United States, that alone among the combatants emerged from the war wealthier and armed with the atomic bomb. Soviet officials did not have pre-conceived plans to make Eastern Europe communist, to support the Chinese communists, or to wage war in Korea.… ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5590-91 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:55 PM US words and deeds greatly heightened ambient anxieties and subsequently contributed to the arms race and the expansion of the Cold War into the Third World.… ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5596-99 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:56 PM Documents from foreign archives, according to this review, suggest that “rather than congratulate themselves on the Cold War’s outcome, Americans must confront the negative as well as the positive consequences of U.S. actions and inquire more searchingly into the implications of their nation’s foreign policies.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5609-13 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:57 PM Foster’s inability to empathize with masses of people in a changing world robbed the United States of a historic chance. He conveyed a harsh, snarling image that alienated millions and contributed to generations of anti-Americanism. Although Foster did not live to see his reputation decline, Allen did. His last and best-known operation, the Bay of Pigs invasion, was an epic disaster that humiliated him and his country before the world. He lost his job and dropped from public life. Few missed him. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5628-31 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 07:59 PM The passage of years also revealed Allen’s partial responsibility for the epic “mole hunt” that shook the CIA for more than a decade. It was during the last months of his directorship, in 1961, that his counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, launched what became an obsessive search for Soviet agents inside the CIA. This drama unfolded out of public view, but it unhinged the agency and, according to one officer, “caused havoc” for years. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5647-49 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:03 PM Allen imagined himself as a modern incarnation of Sir Francis Walsingham, the chief of Queen Elizabeth’s feared spy network in the sixteenth century, who promoted English power through deft combinations of intrigue and violence. The truth was more prosaic. Allen spent much time in a world of self-reinforcing fantasy. He created an image for himself and came to believe it. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5660-62 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:05 PM When Foster warned Americans that an enemy with “slimy, octopus-like tentacles” was threatening them with the “black plague of Soviet communism,” they heard and were afraid. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5681-85 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:08 PM Researchers have learned that people’s brains are programmed to favor information that confirms what they already believe. Contradictory information threatens cognitive dissonance. The brain rebels against it. Social scientists have long used examples from the Cold War to illustrate the syndromes of groupthink, thought suppression, denial projection, structural blindness, and even mass hysteria. In 1960 the psychologist Charles Osgood wrote that the pull toward consistency “can plague big minds as well as little, in high places as well as low.” He called his first piece of evidence “Specimen 1: International Affairs.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5700-5702 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:10 PM We are often confident even when we are wrong.… Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5702-4 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:10 PM Certain beliefs are so important for a society or group that they become part of how you prove your identity.… The truth is that our minds just aren’t set up to be changed by mere evidence. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5714-16 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:12 PM Early astronomers found the chaos of stars overwhelming, and came up with the idea of constellations as a way of imposing a design on the firmament. Like them, Foster and Allen were drawn to structure, order, and predictability. Their deepest impulses drove them to find patterns in a kaleidoscopic world. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5753-55 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:19 PM Their view of freedom was above all economic: a country whose leaders respected private enterprise and welcomed multinational business was a free country. This too reflected a widely shared American belief. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5762-63 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:19 PM Senator Fulbright once complained that Foster “misleads public opinion, confuses it, [and] feeds it pap.” Yet many Americans devoured his narrative. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5768-73 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:24 PM We like to do things, not understand things. Reality does not limit our ambition. In fact, we are sometimes tempted to believe we can reshape reality to fit our needs. This is another national trait that Foster and Allen perfectly embodied. Their approach to Vietnam was one example. In the mid-1950s Winston Churchill advised his American friends to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was unbeatable, accept his victory, and try to make the best of it. This the Dulles brothers could not do—because they were Americans. Churchill had on his side only negative, depressive, defeatist Old World reality. Foster and Allen counted on something they considered more powerful: the genius of America. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5800-5803 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:30 PM The story of the Dulles brothers is the story of America. Their determination to project power was the same impulse that pushed settlers across prairies and over mountains, wrested rich territories from Mexico, crushed Native American resistance, and drew the United States into wars from Central America to Siberia. It remains potent. As long as Americans believe their country has vital interests everywhere on earth, they will be led by people who believe the same. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 5803-5 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 08:30 PM Foster and Allen tell Americans much about ourselves. Not all of it is comforting. Perhaps that is part of the reason they have faded into such obscurity. Forgetting their geopolitical sins allows the United States to forget its own. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2288-91 | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 12:21 AM All three of his main operations in Eastern Europe, aimed at stirring anti-Communist resistance in Poland, Ukraine, and Albania, collapsed in defeat. His analysts did not foresee Stalin’s death or its first major consequence, the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev as the new Soviet leader. He sought to use Burma and Thailand as staging grounds for guerrilla warfare against “Red China,” but his secret armies won no victories. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2434-38 | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 12:33 AM As the United States was setting out to depose a non-Communist government in Iran, it faced a sudden opportunity to strike inside the Soviet bloc. On June 16, 1953, several thousand construction workers in East Berlin walked off their jobs rather than accept new government work rules. Their protest spread. Crowds besieged government buildings. As word spread through the city, people raced to the scene. One was the chief of the State Department’s Berlin Desk, Eleanor Lansing Dulles. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2514-20 | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 12:36 AM Allen quickly sent Bundy on “personal leave” and announced that he was out of town, a maneuver McCarthy denounced as a “most blatant attempt” to defy the will of Congress. A couple of days later, Allen drove to Capitol Hill for a meeting with McCarthy and other Republicans on his investigating committee. “Joe, you’re not going to have Bundy as a witness,” Allen said. The senators were startled, but Allen held fast and departed cheerfully. Later that day he called Vice President Nixon and asked him to use his influence to calm McCarthy. Nixon did so. Never again did any of McCarthy’s investigators seek to question a CIA officer. Some quietly cheered Allen’s successful defiance, though Walter Lippmann warned that it would strengthen “the argument that the CIA is something apart.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2706-8 | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 12:52 AM Then, at the end of 1953, one of Allen’s men in Berlin, assigned to photograph letters purloined from the East Berlin post office, came across plans for a new underground switching station near the East-West border. Allen shared this discovery with his British counterpart, Sir John Sinclair, and they agreed to dig together. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2741-44 | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 12:55 AM “In Czechoslovakia, the government appointed a Communist interior minister, and then one day there was a reshuffle and suddenly the Communists were in power,” one CIA veteran recalled years later. “The lesson we drew was that you can’t let any Communist into power in any position, because somehow that would be used to take over the government. And if a country didn’t follow that rule, it became our enemy.” ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2767-70 | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 12:57 AM This did not stop Allen from encouraging the anti-Figueres plotters, but they failed for two reasons. First, Allen was preoccupied with deposing Arbenz in nearby Guatemala; second, since there was no army in Costa Rica, he had no instrument through which to carry out a coup. Nonetheless, this episode reflected something disheartening about the policies Foster and Allen pursued in America’s “backyard.” They embraced the region’s dictators while working to undermine its few democracies. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2772-75 | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 12:57 AM One of the oddest aspects of the Dulles brothers’ approach to Latin America was that as they assaulted the leaders of Guatemala and Costa Rica, they happily accepted a president of Bolivia who was in some ways more radical than either one. The Bolivian leader, Victor Paz Estenssoro, came to power in 1952 after a violent rebellion supported by armed workers and powerful Marxist factions—rather than through an election, as Arbenz and Figueres had. ========== The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 2779-80 | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 12:58 AM A State Department spokesman justified American aid to Bolivia with the odd explanation that the Paz government was “Marxist rather than Communist.” As he spoke, the Eisenhower administration was tightening its noose around Guatemala. ==========
December
Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems (Over 100 Works, including The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum, with Exclusive Bonus Features) (Edgar Allan Poe and Maplewood Books) - Highlight Loc. 4927-28 | Added on Thursday, December 05, 2013, 11:43 PM A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Bookmark Loc. 1825 | Added on Thursday, December 05, 2013, 11:57 PM ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 1824-27 | Added on Thursday, December 05, 2013, 11:57 PM And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread 20 Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert th' Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 1831-47 | Added on Thursday, December 05, 2013, 11:59 PM Th' infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd The Mother of Mankinde, what time his Pride Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring To set himself in Glory above his Peers, He trusted to have equal'd the most High, 40 If he oppos'd; and with ambitious aim Against the Throne and Monarchy of God Rais'd impious War in Heav'n and Battel proud With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power Hurld headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Skie With hideous ruine and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire, Who durst defie th' Omnipotent to Arms. Nine times the Space that measures Day and Night 50 To mortal men, he with his horrid crew Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe Confounded though immortal: But his doom Reserv'd him to more wrath; for now the thought Both of lost happiness and lasting pain Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes That witness'd huge affliction and dismay Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate: At once as far as Angels kenn he views The dismal Situation waste and wilde, 60 A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Serv'd only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all; but torture without end Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd: Such place Eternal Justice had prepar'd 70 For those rebellious, here their Prison ordain'd In utter darkness, and their portion set As far remov'd from God and light of Heav'n As from the Center thrice to th' utmost Pole. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 1860-68 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 12:03 AM All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield: And what is else not to be overcome? That Glory never shall his wrath or might 110 Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace With suppliant knee, and deifie his power Who from the terrour of this Arm so late Doubted his Empire, that were low indeed, That were an ignominy and shame beneath This downfall; since by Fate the strength of Gods And this Empyreal substance cannot fail, Since through experience of this great event In Arms not worse, in foresight much advanc't, We may with more successful hope resolve 120 To wage by force or guile eternal Warr Irreconcileable, to our grand Foe, Who now triumphs, and in th' excess of joy Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav'n. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 1881-83 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 11:01 AM Fall'n Cherube, to be weak is miserable Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure, To do ought good never will be our task, But ever to do ill our sole delight, 160 As being the contrary to his high will Whom we resist. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 1915-24 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 11:06 AM Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime, Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat That we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloom For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid What shall be right: fardest from him is best Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail 250 Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less then hee Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: 260 Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Bookmark Loc. 1912 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 01:56 PM ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 1945-52 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 02:02 PM He call'd so loud, that all the hollow Deep Of Hell resounded. Princes, Potentates, Warriers, the Flowr of Heav'n, once yours, now lost, If such astonishment as this can sieze Eternal spirits; or have ye chos'n this place After the toyl of Battel to repose Your wearied vertue, for the ease you find 320 To slumber here, as in the Vales of Heav'n? Or in this abject posture have ye sworn To adore the Conquerour? who now beholds Cherube and Seraph rowling in the Flood With scatter'd Arms and Ensigns, till anon His swift pursuers from Heav'n Gates discern Th' advantage, and descending tread us down Thus drooping, or with linked Thunderbolts Transfix us to the bottom of this Gulfe. Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n. 330 ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 1952-65 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 02:03 PM They heard, and were abasht, and up they sprung Upon the wing, as when men wont to watch On duty, sleeping found by whom they dread, Rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake. Nor did they not perceave the evil plight In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel; Yet to their Generals Voyce they soon obeyd Innumerable. As when the potent Rod Of Amrams Son in Egypts evill day Wav'd round the Coast, up call'd a pitchy cloud 340 Of Locusts, warping on the Eastern Wind, That ore the Realm of impious Pharoah hung Like Night, and darken'd all the Land of Nile: So numberless were those bad Angels seen Hovering on wing under the Cope of Hell 'Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding Fires; Till, as a signal giv'n, th' uplifted Spear Of their great Sultan waving to direct Thir course, in even ballance down they light On the firm brimstone, and fill all the Plain; 350 A multitude, like which the populous North Pour'd never from her frozen loyns, to pass Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous Sons Came like a Deluge on the South, and spread Beneath Gibraltar to the Lybian sands. Forthwith from every Squadron and each Band The Heads and Leaders thither hast where stood Their great Commander; Godlike shapes and forms Excelling human, Princely Dignities, And Powers that earst in Heaven sat on Thrones; 360 Though of their Names in heav'nly Records now Be no memorial, blotted out and ras'd By thir Rebellion, from the Books of Life. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 1977-79 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 02:08 PM First Moloch, horrid King besmear'd with blood Of human sacrifice, and parents tears, Though for the noyse of Drums and Timbrels loud Their childrens cries unheard, that past through fire To his grim Idol. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 1989-91 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 02:10 PM For Spirits when they please Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is their Essence pure, Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 1993-95 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 02:11 PM For those the Race of Israel oft forsook Their living strength, and unfrequented left His righteous Altar, bowing lowly down To bestial Gods; for which their heads as low Bow'd down in Battel, sunk before the Spear Of despicable foes. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 2003-7 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 02:13 PM Next came one Who mourn'd in earnest, when the Captive Ark Maim'd his brute Image, head and hands lopt off In his own Temple, on the grunsel edge, 460 Where he fell flat, and sham'd his Worshipers: Dagon his Name, Sea Monster, upward Man And downward Fish: yet had his Temple high Rear'd in Azotus, dreaded through the Coast Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon, And Accaron and Gaza's frontier bounds. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 2016-22 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 02:16 PM Belial came last, then whom a Spirit more lewd 490 Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love Vice for it self: To him no Temple stood Or Altar smoak'd; yet who more oft then hee In Temples and at Altars, when the Priest Turns Atheist, as did Ely's Sons, who fill'd With lust and violence the house of God. In Courts and Palaces he also Reigns And in luxurious Cities, where the noyse Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towrs, And injury and outrage: And when Night 500 Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine. Witness the Streets of Sodom, and that night In Gibeah, when hospitable Dores Yielded thir Matrons to prevent worse rape. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 2063-66 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 02:21 PM cruel his eye, but cast Signs of remorse and passion to behold The fellows of his crime, the followers rather (Far other once beheld in bliss) condemn'd For ever now to have their lot in pain, Millions of Spirits for his fault amerc't Of Heav'n, and from Eternal Splendors flung 610 For his revolt, yet faithfull how they stood, Thir Glory witherd. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 2087-92 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 02:25 PM He spake: and to confirm his words, out-flew Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze Far round illumin'd hell: highly they rag'd Against the Highest, and fierce with grasped arm's Clash'd on their sounding shields the din of war, Hurling defiance toward the vault of Heav'n. There stood a Hill not far whose griesly top 670 Belch'd fire and rowling smoak; the rest entire Shon with a glossie scurff, undoubted sign That in his womb was hid metallic Ore, The work of Sulphur. Thither wing'd with speed A numerous Brigad hasten'd. ========== The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Milton) - Highlight Loc. 2092-99 | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 02:26 PM As when bands Of Pioners with Spade and Pickaxe arm'd Forerun the Royal Camp, to trench a Field, Or cast a Rampart. Mammon led them on, Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell From heav'n, for ev'n in heav'n his looks and thoughts 680 Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of Heav'ns pavement, trod'n Gold, Then aught divine or holy else enjoy'd In vision beatific: by him first Men also, and by his suggestion taught, Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands Rifl'd the bowels of thir mother Earth For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew Op'nd into the Hill a spacious wound And dig'd out ribs of Gold. Let none admire 690 That riches grow in Hell; that soyle may best Deserve the pretious bane. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 4460-62 | Added on Monday, December 09, 2013, 06:46 PM At last, indeed, he received from the conspirators the bloody purple of Gallienus: but he had been absent from their camp and counsels; and however he might applaud the deed, we may candidly presume that he was innocent of the knowledge of it. When Claudius ascended the throne, he was about fifty-four years of age. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 4484-88 | Added on Monday, December 09, 2013, 07:13 PM The emperor expiated on the mischiefs of a lawless caprice, which the soldiers could only gratify at the expense of their own blood; as their seditious elections had so frequently been followed by civil wars, which consumed the flower of the legions either in the field of battle, or in the cruel abuse of victory. He painted in the most lively colors the exhausted state of the treasury, the desolation of the provinces, the disgrace of the Roman name, and the insolent triumph of rapacious barbarians. It was against those barbarians, he declared, that he intended to point the first effort of their arms. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 4504-11 | Added on Monday, December 09, 2013, 07:16 PM We still posses an original letter addressed by Claudius to the senate and people on this memorable occasion. "Conscript fathers," says the emperor, "know that three hundred and twenty thousand Goths have invaded the Roman territory. If I vanquish them, your gratitude will reward my services. Should I fall, remember that I am the successor of Gallienus. The whole republic is fatigued and exhausted. We shall fight after Valerian, after Ingenuus, Regillianus, Lollianus, Posthumus, Celsus, and a thousand others, whom a just contempt for Gallienus provoked into rebellion. We are in want of darts, of spears, and of shields. The strength of the empire, Gaul, and Spain, are usurped by Tetricus, and we blush to acknowledge that the archers of the East serve under the banners of Zenobia. Whatever we shall perform will be sufficiently great." The melancholy firmness of this epistle announces a hero careless of his fate, conscious of his danger, but still deriving a well-grounded hope from the resources of his own mind. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 4647-48 | Added on Monday, December 09, 2013, 08:58 PM Fear has been the original parent of superstition, and every new calamity urges trembling mortals to deprecate the wrath of their invisible enemies. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 4866-67 | Added on Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 11:43 AM "Surely," says he, "the gods have decreed that my life should be a perpetual warfare. A sedition within the walls has just now given birth to a very serious civil war. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 4884-89 | Added on Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 11:47 AM However Aurelian might choose to disguise the real cause of the insurrection, his reformation of the coin could furnish only a faint pretence to a party already powerful and discontented. Rome, though deprived of freedom, was distracted by faction. The people, towards whom the emperor, himself a plebeian, always expressed a peculiar fondness, lived in perpetual dissension with the senate, the equestrian order, and the Prætorian guards. Nothing less than the firm though secret conspiracy of those orders, of the authority of the first, the wealth of the second, and the arms of the third, could have displayed a strength capable of contending in battle with the veteran legions of the Danube, which, under the conduct of a martial sovereign, had achieved the conquest of the West and of the East. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 4915-18 | Added on Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 11:53 AM Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder. The death of Aurelian, however, is remarkable by its extraordinary consequences. The legions admired, lamented, and revenged their victorious chief. The artifice of his perfidious secretary was discovered and punished. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 4931-38 | Added on Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 11:56 AM Should the soldiers relapse into their accustomed seditions, their insolence might disgrace the majesty of the senate, and prove fatal to the object of its choice. Motives like these dictated a decree, by which the election of a new emperor was referred to the suffrage of the military order. The contention that ensued is one of the best attested, but most improbable events in the history of mankind. The troops, as if satiated with the exercise of power, again conjured the senate to invest one of its own body with the Imperial purple. The senate still persisted in its refusal; the army in its request. The reciprocal offer was pressed and rejected at least three times, and, whilst the obstinate modesty of either party was resolved to receive a master from the hands of the other, eight months insensibly elapsed; an amazing period of tranquil anarchy, during which the Roman world remained without a sovereign, without a usurper, and without a sedition. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5010-11 | Added on Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 12:22 PM All that had yet passed at Rome was no more than a theatrical representation, unless it was ratified by the more substantial power of the legions. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5200-5204 | Added on Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 06:55 PM We cannot, on this occasion, forget the desperate courage of about fourscore gladiators, reserved, with near six hundred others, for the inhuman sports of the amphitheatre. Disdaining to shed their blood for the amusement of the populace, they killed their keepers, broke from the place of their confinement, and filled the streets of Rome with blood and confusion. After an obstinate resistance, they were overpowered and cut in pieces by the regular forces; but they obtained at least an honorable death, and the satisfaction of a just revenge. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5293-96 | Added on Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 07:05 PM Carinus, the elder of the brothers, was more than commonly deficient in those qualities. In the Gallic war he discovered some degree of personal courage; but from the moment of his arrival at Rome, he abandoned himself to the luxury of the capital, and to the abuse of his fortune. He was soft, yet cruel; devoted to pleasure, but destitute of taste; and though exquisitely susceptible of vanity, indifferent to the public esteem. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5320-26 | Added on Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 07:07 PM If we confine ourselves solely to the hunting of wild beasts, however we may censure the vanity of the design or the cruelty of the execution, we are obliged to confess that neither before nor since the time of the Romans so much art and expense have ever been lavished for the amusement of the people. By the order of Probus, a great quantity of large trees, torn up by the roots, were transplanted into the midst of the circus. The spacious and shady forest was immediately filled with a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand fallow deer, and a thousand wild boars; and all this variety of game was abandoned to the riotous impetuosity of the multitude. The tragedy of the succeeding day consisted in the massacre of a hundred lions, an equal number of lionesses, two hundred leopards, and three hundred bears. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5399-5403 | Added on Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 07:17 PM The troops, so lately returned from the Persian war, had acquired their glory at the expense of health and numbers; nor were they in a condition to contend with the unexhausted strength of the legions of Europe. Their ranks were broken, and, for a moment, Diocletian despaired of the purple and of life. But the advantage which Carinus had obtained by the valor of his soldiers, he quickly lost by the infidelity of his officers. A tribune, whose wife he had seduced, seized the opportunity of revenge, and, by a single blow, extinguished civil discord in the blood of the adulterer. ========== History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon) - Bookmark on Page 374 | Loc. 5403 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 10:52 AM ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight Loc. 245-48 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:36 AM And credit is due to Fidel Castro, because as much as his personality dominated the revolution and everything in Cuba for so long, what was also evident from this visit is that he has left in place an institutionalized state and government that, even if inefficient and lacking in transparency, can and does function without him. The revolution, it turns out, is not a product of charisma and repression alone. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 1 | Loc. 300-302 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:44 AM pressure for abolition gradually built as Great Britain first abolished the slave trade (1807), then abolished the institution of slavery altogether (1830s). Yet slavery in Cuba would only be partially eliminated in 1868. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 3 | Loc. 310-12 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:46 AM Between roughly 1810 and 1825, Spain’s colonial empire fell apart, the victim of a substantially declining power base, domestic unrest within Spain, imperial overstretch, and a spate of powerful independence movements led by such dynamic leaders as Simon Bolivar, José de San Martín, and Miguel Hidalgo. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 3 | Loc. 321-24 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:48 AM many criollos recognized that their own economic clout rested on the institution of slavery. As a result, elites looked with great trepidation to the example of Haiti, where just a few years earlier, Toussaint L’Ouverture had initiated a rebellion that eventually led to the proclamation of a “negro republic.” Fears of unleashing a restless slave population and contending with massive social upheaval tempered the desirability of independence, at least for a time. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Bookmark on Page 4 | Loc. 326 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:49 AM ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 325-29 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:49 AM In 1823, Secretary of State and future president John Quincy Adams called both Cuba and Puerto Rico “natural appendages of the North American continent.” He reasoned, “There are laws of political as well as physical gravitation; and if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, can not choose but to fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only toward the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature can not cast her off from its bosom.” ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 346-49 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:52 AM Perhaps the most well known are the handful of filibustering expeditions led by a former general in the Spanish Army, Narcisco López, often with U.S. citizens as mercenaries. Following his capture and execution, López’s supporters throughout the U.S. South established a secret society that would plot to participate in several additional conspiracies. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 349-50 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:55 AM By the 1860s, clamors for independence and abolition had grown to a fever pitch, especially in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 354-56 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:55 AM After 10 years of inconclusive conflict, rebels and the Spanish agreed to end the war with the 1878 Pact of Zanjón, an agreement that granted amnesty to those who had participated in the conflict and freedom to those slaves who had fought in the rebel army. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 358 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:55 AM Slavery was formally abolished (at all levels and without exception) in 1886. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 369-71 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:58 AM Martí was also wary of U.S. designs—annexationist or otherwise. “I know the monster, because I have lived in its lair,” he wrote, “and my weapon is only the slingshot of David.” ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 374-75 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 11:58 AM He argued for education as the basic motor for development throughout Latin America—a concept that would be a foundation of the Cuban Revolution’s social policies under Fidel Castro. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 415 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 02:22 PM “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war,” Hearst famously said to one of his cartoonists covering the conflict. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 425-30 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 02:25 PM The war was over rather quickly. From the time the United States declared war in late April 1898 to the signing of an armistice in August, hardly three months had passed. During this short period, U.S. forces destroyed the Spanish navy and routed Spanish forces in its other colonial possessions: Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The United States and Spain signed a final peace treaty in December 1898 in Paris. Just as Cuban independence forces had been blocked from occupying key cities once the Spanish were defeated, they were not permitted to participate in the Paris negotiations. The American flag, not the Cuban flag, was raised over Havana. General Gómez, who once trusted American intentions, had been betrayed. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 540-42 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 06:56 PM Batista emerged victorious in the 1940 elections and, despite his continuing and increasingly strong political accommodation with the Communists (among those leftists who had so strongly resisted the United States during the Machado years), forged deeper economic and security ties with an ideologically pragmatic Washington as the United States entered World War II. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 549-51 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 06:57 PM Grau’s second presidency was a grave disappointment, as public sector corruption returned in a way not seen since the 1920s. Opposition soon grew in the form of the Ortodoxo Party, founded in 1947 under the leadership of charismatic former student activist and frenetic nationalist Eduardo Chibás. A young lawyer, Fidel Castro, would soon become an active participant in Ortodoxo affairs. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 553-55 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 06:58 PM By middecade, U.S. capital controlled over 40% of the Cuban sugar industry, 23% of all nonsugar industry, 90% of all telephone and electric services, and 50% of Cuba’s railway services (which were heavily utilized by the sugar industry). Havana, long a tourist destination for Americans, experienced a boom in the sex and gambling industries, both of which were promoted by the American mob as well as Cuban locals. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 561-65 | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 07:00 PM With the elections of 1952 approaching, the strength of the Ortodoxos worried both Cuban conservatives and the ever-influential United States. Batista entered the field as well, having remained an imposing figure in Cuban politics from a seat in the Senate, which he assumed in 1948. Behind the scenes, Batista and other conspirators in the military were convinced that the nation was descending into political and economic chaos once again. In early March 1952, with Batista’s own chance at victory slim in the elections three months down the line, the military launched a coup. Constitutional rule in Cuba thus ended. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 572-73 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 10:40 AM Among a new generation of revolutionaries, the 1952 coup crystallized the view that brittle democratic institutions, polarization, and corruption had made the path of electoral politics a dead end. Among these was Fidel Castro. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 590-91 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 10:42 AM The suicidal and spectacular nature of the Moncada attack, the power of the speech, and its concluding words, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me,” put Fidel Castro on Cuba’s national political map. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 605-9 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 10:45 AM In March 1957, joined by another clandestine group associated with Carlos Prío, the Organización Auténtica (OA), the Directorio staged an attack on the presidential palace in Havana in an effort to assassinate Batista and thus bring down his regime. Most of the individuals involved in the palace attack were killed, including Echeverría. In the aftermath, with assistance from the FBI, Batista’s repressive forces blanketed Havana with a dragnet of informants, police, and security agents who mopped up most of the Directorio’s network. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 625-27 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 10:50 AM Seeing the Cuban Revolution as much more than the work of a handful of bearded rebels isolated in the mountains with their peasant supporters is critical to understanding how much popular and broad-based support Castro’s army possessed when it triumphed on January 1, 1959. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 632-34 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 10:50 AM the guerrilla foco came to be cast as the formative experience of the revolutionary, the womb that gestated the “new Cuban man,” that near-superhuman individual, free of material wants and bourgeois false consciousness, whom Che Guevara would mythologize and attempt to reproduce throughout Cuban society. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 642-45 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 10:52 AM (Fiorini, whom Cuban intelligence came to believe had been working as an American agent during the insurrection, later worked with the CIA to overthrow Castro, and was involved in assassination plots against him. When Nixon finally became president, Nixon employed Fiorini more directly: Fiorini/Garcia was the same Frank Sturgis who staged the Watergate burglary that would destroy Nixon’s presidency.) ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 665-67 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 10:56 AM But many of Cuba’s leading revolutionaries had been educated at American universities; grew up on Hemingway, Cab Calloway, Ivory soap, and Coca Cola; and did not yet imagine, as the outsider Che Guevara may well have, a Cuban future without the United States. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 677-83 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 10:57 AM Batista’s departure to exile amid overwhelming rebel support on New Year’s Eve of 1958 marked the end of nearly 25 years on the political stage. Over the course of his career, several different Batistas had emerged. First was a young officer, caught in the throws of political turmoil during the 1930s. Second was the Populist leader who during the late 1930s and early 1940s ushered in a social democracy and permitted space for left-wing, including Communist, activists—all consistent with international politics in the era of the Great Depression and the Popular Front during World War II. Finally, as the Cold War hardened to a freeze in the early 1950s, Batista emerged as an anti-Communist strongman, in the same vein as many other Latin American dictators at the time. Above all, he was a survivor and a political animal, one who had helped construct Cuba’s liberal 1940 order and helped destroy it 12 years later. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 718-21 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 11:02 AM In an era where Darwin and the precursors of eugenics were en vogue among biologists, Europeans, and U.S. politicians alike, the Cuban independence movement’s strong ideology of “antiracism”—coupled with the leadership of Afro-Cuban heroes like Antonio Maceo—stood in sharp contrast to dominant international attitudes at the time. Yet as with much in Cuba’s history, practical realities failed to live up to lofty ideals. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 788-93 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 07:25 PM Cuban culture also profoundly influenced aspects of American culture, despite being seemingly outmatched in size or reach. This was most apparent in the arena of music. Just as American jazz left an enduring mark on Cuban music, inspiring the emergence of big-band mambo in the 1950s, for example, Cuban rumba, mambo, and cha-cha-cha shaped everything from U.S. commercial kitsch (Perry Como’s 1954 hit “Papa Loves Mambo” comes to mind) to avant-garde “Cu-bop” jazz pioneered by Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Kenton. Cuban band leaders like Pérez Prado and Xavier Cugat toured the United States extensively, driving dance crazes across the country. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 851-58 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 07:33 PM In the immediate aftermath of the triumph, Guevara took control of the Fortaleza San Carlos de la Cabaña, a Spanish colonial fort just outside of Havana that had become a military barracks and prison. Together with Raul Castro, Che oversaw the rounding up and executions of roughly 160 Batista officers as chief prosecutor for a series of “war tribunals.” Like other similar events in Latin America’s future, these show trials took place in Havana’s main sports stadium and were even broadcast on television. Foreign observers and the international press were alarmed by the revolutionaries’ brand of ad hoc justice, as were important sectors of Cuban society, some of which had been supportive of the revolution to begin with. Yet by and large, the executions not only aroused little popular opposition but in fact also garnered significant support from a Cuban public that had been victimized, traumatized, and perhaps desensitized by the Batista regime’s repression over the previous decade. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 897-98 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 07:36 PM Once it became clear to him that the United States intended to overthrow the Cuban Revolution, Fidel publicly declared himself a Socialist. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 921-24 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 07:41 PM Cubans by and large saw their own democratic order and party system as deeply corrupt, self-immolating, and in many cases beholden to foreign interests. Consequently, revolutionary leaders would resist reinstituting the principal tenets of this order. Likewise, restrictions on free speech, the press, and other civil rights were justified as necessary to secure the government’s hegemony against implacable internal and foreign enemies. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 930-31 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 07:42 PM constricted. By July 1965, the PCC had been created and Fidel was named its first secretary. The one-party nature of the Cuban revolutionary state was thus firmly cemented. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 941-43 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 07:45 PM By the end of the 1960s, Cuba’s revolutionary government had entirely overhauled Cuban society. Nationalizations early in the decade put sugar mills, oil refineries, utilities, transportation companies, most land, and small businesses into the hands of the state. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 976-80 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 07:50 PM By 1962 (when the Cuban Missile Crisis halted the early immigration wave), roughly 200,000 Cubans had left. A second notable wave began in 1965, when Cuban authorities’ decision to permit emigration from the port of Camarioca induced confusion and chaos. United States and Cuban authorities quickly agreed to a program of twice-daily “Freedom Flights” between Havana and Miami. A steady out-migration thus continued over the course of the decade, peaking in 1968 immediately following the expropriation of virtually all remaining, and by then almost entirely locally owned, small businesses. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 982-83 | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 07:51 PM By the time the Freedom Flights ended in 1973, roughly 260,500 Cubans had sought exile in the United States. Both the Catholic Church and the U.S. government played instrumental roles during the exodus. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 436-40 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 02:22 PM Many Cubans, however, still trusted in the Teller Amendment and recognized the need for U.S. assistance in rebuilding the economy. Indeed, during the occupation, influxes of American capital and investment further tied Cuba’s sugar and other industries to those of the U.S. economy. Although McKinley kept open the door to possible annexation, pressure by anti-imperialists at home and the abiding power of Cuban nationalism prevented an outright takeover. Indeed, when the United States permitted municipal elections on the island, annexationist candidates lost across the board. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 443-46 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 02:22 PM Soon afterward, the U.S. Congress passed the Platt Amendment, an attempt to place limits on Cuba’s sovereignty. In addition to constraining Cuba’s ability to conduct its own foreign affairs and international financial matters, the amendment granted the United States the right to intervene in Cuba for the “preservation of Cuban independence” and the adequate “protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Bookmark on Page 48 | Loc. 982 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 02:38 PM ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1327-30 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:10 PM Moscow began purchasing part of Cuba’s sugar crop. Indeed, between 1965 and 1970, the Soviet Union agreed to purchase over 24 million tons of Cuban sugar. As the decade progressed, the Soviet Union began providing Cuba with discounted oil (which Cuba was then allowed to resell on the world market for profit) as well as supplying the island with a wide variety of mechanical parts that could no longer be obtained once the U.S. embargo had gone into effect in 1960. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 71 | Loc. 1336-38 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:11 PM By the mid-1970s, it was estimated that Soviet-funded projects accounted for 10% of Cuba’s total GNP, and by the end of the 1980s, the annual Soviet subsidy had reached between $4 billion and $6 billion according to most estimates. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1428-30 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:23 PM When all was said and done, Cuba had expropriated over 300,000 acres of U.S. property, all U.S.-owned tobacco enterprises, all U.S. banks, and all other U.S. business interests. Cuba offered compensation pegged to the often undervalued claims the companies had filed in their most recent tax returns. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1453-57 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:26 PM Within a matter of months, Eisenhower would instruct the CIA and the State Department to move much more aggressively against Castro. By March of 1960, shortly after the first Soviet delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan arrived in Havana, plans to cut off Cuba’s sugar quota were already under way. At the same time, Eisenhower authorized planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and CIA deputy director Richard Bissell by August 1960 decided to use the U.S. mafia to try and assassinate Castro as part of the invasion plan, while also drawing up a spate of covert operations, including plans for industrial sabotage and political destabilization against the island. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1473-77 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:32 PM Arbenz, who like a generation of Latin American left-leaning leaders wanted to bring a measure of modernity to his country’s institutions and dignity to its population, may well have wanted Guatemala to remain genuinely neutral in the East-West conflict. Yet for Washington in 1954, especially in America’s historic sphere, neutrality was as good as fullblown communism. By comparison to Arbenz, Fidel Castro not only moved much more aggressively against his own country’s political and economic elite but also more boldly challenged U.S. property interests and Washington’s presumptive hegemony over Cuban affairs. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1480-82 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:36 PM Though there were some analysts and covert ops agents in the CIA who understood the difference between the two countries, at the center and top of Washington’s national security circles, one little Latin American country was really no different than the other. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1488-90 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:36 PM If the first mistake—underestimating Castro’s domestic political support—was strategic, the second was related, but tactical in nature. Almost nothing about the U.S. role in the operation was covert, and little about the invasion a surprise. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1495-98 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:37 PM Castro’s victory was helped by the fact that the Bay of Pigs, 202 km to the southeast of Havana, was a most inhospitable and overexposed place to stage an amphibious landing; Brigade 2506 members had to make their way through a virtually impenetrable mangrove swamp onto beaches covered with sharp coral shards, several hundred yards from the protective cover of trees. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 1511-14 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:39 PM Covert operations against Cuba continued in one form or another over the succeeding two decades. The 1975 Church Committee interim report, for example, presented evidence that the CIA was specifically involved in at least eight attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro between 1960 and 1965. Cuban government sources, meanwhile, put the total for assassination attempts by individuals and entities receiving support from the U.S. government in the hundreds. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1516-17 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:40 PM In the 1960s, Operation Mongoose, a sabotage and destabilization campaign carried out on the island with the blessing of Robert Kennedy after his brother’s assassination, involved Cuban exiles as a key resource. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1524-30 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:41 PM In 1976, a handful of disparate groups formed an umbrella organization, Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU). Among its leaders were two already notorious anti-Castro operatives with ties to the CIA, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. Both men were enlisted to carry out acts of sabotage against the Cuban government, and both became known in U.S. and Cuban intelligence circles as the intellectual authors of a terrorist plot (not explicitly a CIA operation, although evidence shows the agency was aware of its likelihood) that successfully blew up Cubana Airlines Flight 455 heading from Cuba to Barbados in 1976, killing all 73 on board, including the entire membership of the Cuban National Fencing Team. Individuals and groups associated with Posada, Bosch, and CORU kept up their violent conspiracies against the Cuban regime well into the 1990s, including several foiled plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1537-38 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:42 PM On October 22, 1962, John F. Kennedy appeared on national television to announce that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1540-41 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:45 PM Kennedy announced a naval blockade of the island and warned against the consequences of a “worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouths.” ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1550 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:49 PM Tensions reached their highest when the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane over Cuba on October 26, the most dangerous day of the crisis. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1554-61 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:51 PM Another key component of the understanding was Khrushchev’s demand with respect to U.S. actions toward Cuba. In a formal letter to Kennedy, the Soviet premier had demanded that the United States sign a formal accord at the United Nations, to “respect the inviolability of Cuban borders, [respect] its sovereignty,” and not “interfere in [Cuba’s] internal affairs.” Moreover, the letter demanded that the United States not “permit [its] territory to be used as a bridgehead for the invasion of Cuba, and restrain those who would plan to carry [out] an aggression against Cuba, either from U.S. territory or from the territory of other countries neighboring to Cuba.” In his response, Kennedy did acknowledge and seem to accept the basic principle that the United States would not invade Cuba. Nonetheless, just as the Soviets probably never intended on fully complying with their commitment to on-site inspection, so too did the United States interpret its pledges as nonbinding. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1565-67 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:53 PM For the world, the end of the crisis brought enormous relief. For Kennedy, it was a moment of tremendous political and geopolitical strength. Indeed, Kennedy’s success at forcing the Soviets to withdraw the missiles went down in history as a major piece of the Camelot lore, reinforcing an image of heroic masculinity and strategic brilliance. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1568-70 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:53 PM Fidel Castro was devastated to find himself but a tool in the Cold War, left without a voice in the conflict’s resolution. To Fidel, the episode was a replay of the 1898 Treaty of Paris, when Cuba’s independence fighters were not permitted to participate in the final negotiations that set the conditions for Spanish withdrawal and the beginning of American primacy in Cuba. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1594-98 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:58 PM by October 1960, following successive nationalizations of U.S. property and business within Cuba, the United States had implemented a partial trade embargo. This policy remained in place until the fall of 1961, when the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act, prohibiting U.S. aid to Cuba and authorizing the president to create a “total embargo” on all trade with the island. By February 1962, the United States had indeed imposed a complete economic embargo with the single exception of licensed sales of food and medicine (an exception that lasted until the mid-1960s). ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1601-4 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 07:58 PM In early 1963, Americans were also prohibited from traveling to the island directly from the United States or engaging in any commercial or financial transactions with Cuba. Meanwhile, only Cubans wishing to seek political refugee status could enter the United States legally. This changed, however, with the passage of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, a landmark law that granted all Cuban migrants the right to “adjust” their status to that of U.S. permanent resident after residing one year within the United States. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 1632-33 | Added on Friday, December 13, 2013, 08:05 PM Eager to maintain executive privilege over foreign policy, in March 1975 Kissinger signaled that the United States would stand back were the OAS to lift its collective diplomatic and commercial embargo of the island. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 1703-7 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 10:29 AM By 1979, the international climate circumscribed the likelihood of a further opening and strengthened hard-liners in the Carter White House who opposed rapprochement with Havana. Not only had the Carter presidency become weakened by the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but also more Cuban troops were flowing into Africa, Fidel Castro had assumed leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Sandinistas had succeeding in ousting the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1713-17 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 10:32 AM By early 1980, Jimmy Carter was fighting with Ted Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination and deflecting a heavy barrage of attacks from the GOP. Republicans argued that his geopolitical weakness had not only allowed the Iranian revolution to jeopardize American interests and the strategic balance in the Middle East but also given the Soviets space to get away with a nuclear buildup that threatened NATO allies in Europe. Closer to American shores, Castro’s communism seemed to be once again stoking the flames of revolution in Central America, Carter’s opponents contended, and revealing the limits of the White House human rights agenda. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 1746-48 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 10:38 AM In the end, Castro knowingly foisted an unwanted influx of migrants on to the United States at a time when the economy was reeling and Carter was already in deep political trouble. In this way, Carter’s vacillation and fundamental misreading of Cuban domestic politics helped deliver Ronald Reagan the White House in the 1980 election. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 1750-52 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 10:39 AM Ronald Reagan’s presidency revived the Cold War. The Soviets became the “evil empire,” their satellites the cause of subversion, and third-world conflict a product of a monumental ideological struggle rather than the result of cumulative grievances exploited or exacerbated by the superpowers. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 1756-59 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 10:40 AM In the spirit of Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s pragmatic defense of U.S. ties to authoritarian (as opposed to totalitarian) governments that were aligned with U.S. interests, Latin America policy under Reagan would continue ties with South America’s anti-Communist military regimes (such as that of Augusto Pinochet in Chile), move aggressively against the leftist insurgency brewing in El Salvador, and unleash a major effort (first covert, then not so much) to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1794-97 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 10:46 AM Richard Allen, Reagan’s first national security advisor, recommended that Mas Canosa and his colleagues closely study the American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC, an organization of American Jews that lobbied Congress for policies that support Israel). By using AIPAC as a model, Allen advised, Cuban Americans could build an organization that would transform Cuban exiles from mere proxies for the U.S. government into citizens with a legitimate stake in their country’s policy toward their homeland. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 1833-34 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 10:54 AM By 2007, U.S. taxpayers had contributed over $500 million to radio and TV broadcasts that few if any Cubans actually hear or see. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 2156-57 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 11:00 AM Cuba had closely and skeptically watched the introduction of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 2163-68 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 11:02 AM the new post–Cold War reality did not really set in for Cuba until 1991. That year, following a series of meetings with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would end its $4 billion to $5 billion annual subsidy to the Cuban economy and begin withdrawing its advisors and troops from the island. This declaration kicked off the darkest period in Cuban revolutionary history. Just as in 1962, when Kennedy and Khrushchev cut a deal to end the Cuban Missile Crisis without consulting Fidel, the Americans and Soviets had once again excluded the Cuban side in their negotiations, deciding unilaterally to remove the Cuban thorn from their diplomatic sides ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 2174-76 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 11:06 AM Facing a virtually overnight external shock that would cause the economy to contract by 34% between 1990 and 1993, Fidel declared that the island was entering a “Special Period in Times of Peace.” This seemingly innocuous euphemism translated into devastating consequences. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 2183-85 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 11:07 AM With such widespread economic devastation, the Communist collapse created a small window of breathing room in which the Cuban leadership allowed the introduction of changes that began, in limited but still significant ways, to reflect a new international reality. In 1992, for example, the National Assembly of People’s Power approved a new constitution to replace the Soviet-era 1976 document. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 2185-87 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 11:08 AM Four features especially demonstrated an awareness that the era of the Cold War and Soviet patronage had ended. First, the 1992 constitution disavowed the formerly atheistic nature of the Cuban state by recognizing the freedom of religion. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 2188-89 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 11:08 AM Second, references to Soviet-style ideology and language regarding Marxism-Leninism and the Communist Party were significantly toned down; ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 2190-91 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 11:08 AM Third, the new constitution made some gestures—albeit far short of a full-scale “transition”—toward the decentralization and expansion of popular participation. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 129 | Loc. 2193-94 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 11:08 AM Fourth, in order to begin creating an improved investment climate, the new constitution explicitly recognized the ability of foreign joint ventures to legally own property. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 2210-11 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 07:45 PM In essence, the island’s government did not fall because the Cuban Revolution was not imposed by outside powers; it was homegrown. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 131 | Loc. 2234-38 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 07:56 PM This discussion was approached in what can only be described as a gingerly manner, because even in the direst circumstances of the early 1990s, Fidel never let anyone forget his profound allergy to the profit, accumulation, avarice, and social inequality inherent in the market. Yet, there were others close to Fidel, like his brother Raul, or the man who came to be known as the economy czar, Carlos Lage, who understood that some experimentation with the market might actually save the revolution from the dire potential consequences of Fidel’s penchant for orthodoxy. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2245-48 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 07:58 PM By legalizing possession of the dollar in 1993 and allowing it to operate alongside the traditional Cuban peso, the Cuban central bank may have tacitly acknowledged the power of the black market, but it was also able to mop up at least some dollars circulating in the underground economy. It opened casas de cambio where Cubans could exchange pesos for dollars and vice versa, ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2259-60 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 07:59 PM Despite these limited small business and agricultural reforms, the scarcity of money and other resources during the Special Period caused a significant degree of material hardship. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2266-68 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 08:00 PM Rice, beans, and bread remained staples, but over the course of the 1990s and into the 2000s, more fruits, vegetables, and fare for the omnivore returned to the diet. Public education campaigns extended from how to cook and eat in the Special Period to how to stop smoking, drink less, and—as the economy recovered and weight gain replaced weight loss—get enough exercise. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 2278-86 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 08:03 PM As with other reforms, Cuba’s new “openness” to foreign investment was contingent on these investments taking place in a regulatory and financial context the Cuban government could directly control. Cuba’s tourism, mining, energy, telecommunications, and biotechnology industries, along with tobacco, rum, citrus, and fishing, were the primary sectors open to foreign investment, with capital from Spain, Canada, France, the UK, Germany, Brazil, Israel, Italy, and Mexico among the first to enter. Under Cuba’s employment laws, companies requiring Cuban labor were prohibited from directly hiring Cuban workers; instead, they were and are still today required to purchase Cuban labor from a state institution in dollars. Cuban workers are then paid in Cuba’s less valuable domestic currency. Such practices have drawn criticism for depriving workers of direct payment or autonomous collective bargaining power. Over time, however, some pay structures allowed for Cubans to be paid partly in domestic currency and partly in dollars or other foreign currencies (although under-the-table, illegal tips in hard currency were also still widespread in many workplaces). ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 2297-2301 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 08:05 PM in an effort to shelter some visitors from these practices, authorities began prohibiting Cubans themselves from going to beaches and hotels designated for foreign tourists, a practice that earned the resentment of Cubans at home and accusations of “tourism apartheid” abroad. Seen in historical perspective, the resurgence of tourism was certainly necessary economically but also deeply ironic. After all, in the 1960s, the revolution had sought to wipe tourism off the map, seeing the industry as an outpost of the American mob and a disparaging sign of the island’s neocolonial status. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 2303-5 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 08:05 PM In the wake of the Cold War, facing sharp budget cuts and a slackening international profile, the Ministry of Defense gradually evolved into the strategic and financial hub for the island’s tourism, real estate, sugar, and other agricultural industries. ========== Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig) - Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2324-26 | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 08:09 PM the state reasserted a degree of control over those sectors that had seen substantial liberalization. State enterprises were banned from operating in dollars and were required to switch to the CUC in 2003 (a parallel currency to the dollar with no international value, created in 1994 to boost the island’s dollar-driven economy). ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 373-76 | Added on Wednesday, December 18, 2013, 02:19 PM I like a goddamned revolver.” “I got what you want, then,” the stocky man said. “I got eight of them. Five Smiths, a Colt Python and two Rugers. Forty-one mags, the Rugers. That fucking mag looks just like a cannon, so help me. Got a mouth on her like the Sumner Tunnel. You could hold up a bank all by yourself with that thing.” ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 538-40 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 12:09 AM “Then two nights ago I get five of these Micmacs come in, real Indians, for a change, and they have a little firewater and begin to break up some of the furniture. So me and a few friends hadda use the pipe on them. ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 540-44 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 12:10 AM “So this broad hollers at me there, just a few minutes ago, about the everlasting flames, and I consider myself a fairly intelligent guy and all that, pretty good judgment, I get drunk once in a while now and then, but I got this strong idea I would like to go up with that piece of pipe under my coat and say: Well, what do I do about those fellows from Detroit, you want to tell me that? The Indians too. Jesus going to punish me for that? And then whack her once or twice across the snout to bring her to her senses.” ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 547-58 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 12:11 AM “Anyway,” he said, “I still got a certain amount of my sanity left and I didn’t have the pipe with me, so I don’t say anything to her and I don’t bop her a couple, like I would like to. You can’t reason with these people, you know. They get that idea in their heads, all they can do is stand there and bellyache Gospel at you, enough to drive a man out of what little mind he’s got left. “I knew this guy, met him when I was at Lewisburg on that federal thing back there three, four years ago. Forget what he was in there for, B and E in a federal building, maybe, post office job. Anyway, not a bad guy. Big, used to box some. He comes from down around New Bedford there. So we strike up a friendship. “I get out first,” Dillon said. “I come back here. I let him know where I am. So when they parole him, he goes home to live with his wife and her mother but he knows where I am if he needs to get ahold of me. And it wasn’t very long before he needed to. Because those two women went right to work driving him out of his mind. Dumb Portuguese types, you know, and what did they do when he was in jail but they decide they don’t want to be Catholics any more, they’re going to be, what is it, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Beautiful. Guy comes home, knows the construction business pretty good, gets himself a job, every night he comes home, there’s maybe a ballgame on or something, they want him to go out and stand on the sidewalk in front of the supermarket, peddling Jesus to every poor bastard that comes around to get a pound of fish. ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 567-68 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 12:12 AM I tell you, them two women preached that poor bastard right back into the can. You can’t reason with people like that, doesn’t do any good at all to talk to them.” ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 570-74 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 12:12 AM “That’s the thing that bothers you, you know? It’s just, well, there’s some things you can help and some kinds of things you can’t do anything about, is all. Knowing the difference, as long as you can tell the difference, you’re in pretty good shape. That was what kind of bothered me about that big broad with the bullhorn there, was that just for a minute or so it was like I didn’t know the difference. You get so you’re in that position, you’re not going to be able to do very much about anything.” ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 575-79 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 12:13 AM “I heard a guy on television the other night,” Dillon said. “He was talking about pigeons. Called them flying rats. I thought that was pretty good. He had something in mind, going to feed them the Pill or something, make them extinct. Trouble is, he was serious, you know? There was a guy that got shit on and probably got shit on again and then he got mad. Ruined his suit or something, going to spend the rest of his life getting even with the pigeons because they wrecked a hundred-dollar suit. Now there isn’t any percentage in that. ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 654-55 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 03:29 PM “Mr. Partridge,” the man nearest him said. His features were frighteningly distorted by the nylon. ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1138-44 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 09:54 PM “Get out,” he said. “No,” the kid said, “up the hill there.” “Right,” Jackie Brown said. “Get out and go up the hill there, and get your friends and the rifles, and come back down here and we’ll do business. Here, not there.” “Why?” the kid said. “Because I think you need exercise,” Jackie Brown said. “I’m afraid of horses. I like the moonlight. And I’m not so fucking stupid as to drive this car into the woods to find two other guys with machine guns who know I’ve got money. This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid. ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1267-75 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 10:15 PM “What’s in the fucking bags?” Jackie Brown said. “Three of them’re full of bread,” the stocky man said. “The rest’ve got meat and potatoes and some beer and vegetables, that kind of thing.” “What’re you giving me?” Jackie Brown said. “The bread,” the stocky man said. “Man can always use a little bread. You can feed the goddamned pigeons or something. Go find some squirrels. Squirrels love bread.” “Your wife make you do the shopping too?” Jackie Brown said. “My friend,” the stocky man said, “you don’t have much time and I’m kind of in a hurry myself. I don’t have time to explain married life to you, and besides, you wouldn’t believe me anyway. I didn’t believe it when they told me, and you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. Let’s stick to business.” ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1309-10 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 10:18 PM Coyle paused again. “You’re welcome,” he said, “always a pleasure to do a favor for a friend with a good memory.” ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1310-15 | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 10:19 PM Eddie Coyle replaced the handset in the receiver carefully. He opened the door of the booth and found a stout woman, about fifty, staring at him. “It took you long enough,” she said. “I was calling my poor sick mother,” he said. “Oh,” she said, her face immediately relaxing into an expression of sympathy. “I’m sorry. Has she been ill long?” Eddie Coyle smiled. “Fuck you, lady,” he said, “and the horse you rode in on.” ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2524-33 | Added on Saturday, December 21, 2013, 01:35 PM “Good,” Dillon said, “I’m glad to hear that. You just drive. I was you, I’d drive to Belmont, and I’d pick roads where I could go pretty fast without making anybody suspicious. I’d come out on Route 2, and I’d look for a gray Ford convertible in the parking lot of the West End Bowling Alleys. I wouldn’t let nothing disturb me. When I got to the alleys, I’d pull up beside the Ford and get out and get in the Ford and wait for me, and then I’d head back for Boston.” “Somebody said something about some money,” the kid said. “If I was you,” Dillon said, “I’d look hard for that convertible. You drive that convertible back to Boston and let me off and if I was you I’d look in that glove compartment for about a thousand bucks before I dropped that car off in the nigger district.” “Is it gonna be hot?” the kid said. “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Dillon said. ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 2600-2603 | Added on Saturday, December 21, 2013, 09:40 PM “And in another year or so,” Clark said, “he’ll be in again, here or someplace else, and I’ll be talking to some other bastard, or maybe even you again, and we’ll try another one and he’ll go away again. Is there any end to this shit? Does anything ever change in this racket?” ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 2604-5 | Added on Saturday, December 21, 2013, 09:40 PM Don’t take it so hard. Some of us die, the rest of us get older, new guys come along, old guys disappear. It changes every day.” ========== The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (George V. Higgins) - Highlight on Page 1 | Loc. 106-7 | Added on Saturday, December 21, 2013, 09:45 PM In most novels, talk is the salt and plot is the meal. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle, talk is the meal. It’s also the plot, the characters, the action, the whole shebang. ==========