Fire and Knowledge

I was looking through the magazine rack at the hospital and noticed a number of Watchtower pamphlets. For those who don’t know, Watchtower is the Jehovah’s Witnesses propaganda magazine. I became frustrated that they would put their literature there, preying upon sick and scared people at the hospital.

It also reminded me of my time in high school when a friend and I would put gospel tracts in books (especially in the Occult section) at Books-a-Million. That was lame, but not this lame. I wasn’t preying upon the sick and scared, wooing them into a religion where it’s a sin to have blood transfusions.

Anyway, there are no more Watchtower magazines at that hospital.

The University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has found that unhypnotized subjects can easily be made to believe they saw something they didn’t. In a typical experiment, subjects will view a film of a car accident. In the course of being questioned about what they saw, they’re casually given false information. For example, a stop sign is off-handedly referred to, although there wasn’t one in the film. Many subjects then dutifully recall seeing a stop sign. When the deception is revealed, some vehemently protest, stressing how vividly they remembered the sign. The greater the time lag between viewing the film and being given the false information, the more people allow their memories to be tampered with.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 139.

The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence.

—Wendell Berry, “Word and Flesh” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 200.

But just because people work for an institution, they don’t have to write like one.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 167.

T-Mobile claims they own the copyright for the color magenta. How quaintly absurd.

According to the latest Statistical Abstract of the United States, every year more than 400,000 Americans suffer injuries involving beds, mattresses, or pillows. Think about that for a minute. That is almost 2,000 bed, mattress, or pillow injuries a day. In the time it takes you to read this article, four of my fellow citizens will somehow manage to be wounded by their bedding.

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 17.

Glenn Beck talks about the $52 trillion economic asteroid that might come our way in 2019 — that is, the asteroid of Social Security and Medicare. That would be “an IOU of around $455,000 per American household.” According to the U.S. Treasury Secretary, “without change, rising costs will drive government spending to unprecedented levels, consume nearly all projected federal revenues, and threaten America’s future prosperity.”

It would be comforting to believe that the government can simply decree higher pay for low-wage workers, without having to worry about unfortunate repercussions, but the preponderance of evidence indicates that labor is not exempt from the basic economic principle that artificially high prices cause surpluses. In the case of surplus human beings, that can be a special tragedy when they are already from low-income, unskilled, or minority backgrounds and urgently need to get on the job ladder if they are ever to move up the ladder by acquiring experience and skills.

—Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 215.