#venti

That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#bosnia-and-herzegovina #bosnian-war #ethnic-cleansing #genocide #humanitarian-intervention

The digital camera is a great invention because it allows us to reminisce. Instantly. ↗

— Demetri Martin

#allows #because #camera #digital #great

Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left. ↗

— Arianna Huffington

#conventional wisdom #everything #filter #just #left

I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started. ↗

— Ray Kurzweil

#because #finished #i #interested #invention

A convention was drawn up on June 17, 1925, in which the principle of supervision, as opposed to that of simple propaganda, was recognized, thanks to the efforts of the labour members, of whom I was one. ↗

— Leon Jouhaux

#drawn #efforts #i #june #labour

As a player, I was fortunate to work with coaching and medical staffs that underscored the importance of utilizing injury prevention exercises, which contributed to my healthy and long playing career. ↗

— Cobi Jones

#coaching #contributed #exercises #fortunate #healthy

A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention. ↗

— Dean Kamen

#assemblage #before #defines #how #ideas

I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate. ↗

— Dean Kamen

#changed #communicate #consider #data #high-speed

In some cases, inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important. ↗

— Dean Kamen

#because #cases #caught #fact #forget

To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions. ↗

— Dean Kamen

#innovations #inventions #language #me #million