Quoted: The act of placing a brain into another biological body, à la Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, could arise as the endpoint extension of appropriating blood, sperm, ova, wombs or other organs in a heavily stratified society.

Quoted: A better result, according to Bartlett, would be to bring government revenues into line with projected expenditures via a value-added tax (VAT), a type of consumption tax. Heavy use of VATs is a key reason, he says, why “many European countries have tax/GDP ratios far higher than here without suffering particularly ill effects. They may not be growing as fast as they would if taxes and spending were lower, but neither are their standards of living significantly below those of the United States. Even strenuous efforts to show that Europeans are poorer than Americans show that the differences are merely trivial.”

Quoted: By her own words, Sarah Palin is dumb. Here's the excerpt of pages 255-257 of "Going Rogue: An American Life":

Quoted: I wish Daniel Defoe had had occasion to debate with Nick Griffin.

Quoted: While putting together this post, I had a hard time with the title. I was going to include the words retro or vintage but then I thought - Are most of these retro or are some of these modern? Here was my conclusion: While some of these illustrations have that retro-feel, most are a modern take on a movie classic. What these artists have done so well is take a particular scene or character and create a visual representation of the movie. Most of the time, rather than bombard us with visuals, they ask us to draw on our experiences. From Olly Moss's incredibly simplistic black and red movie posters to Tom Whalen and Brandon Schaefer's more colorful, retro-inspired art, I hope you enjoy this collection of some of the most cleverest and coolest retro-modern movie illustrations around! Rain Man Olly Moss American History X Olly Moss Big Spacesick Back to the Future Spacesick The Shining R Black Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back Tom Whalen The Wizard of Oz Tom Whalen Transformers Tom Whalen Dawn of the Dead Tom Whalen Ghost Busters Brandon Schaefer The Dark Knight Brandon Schaefer Big Trouble in Little China Tyler Scout Inglorious Bastards Tyler Scout Watchmen Ian Vanderhoff Up Eric Tan The Incredibles Eric Tan Ratatouille Eric Tan Spiderman ~ninjaink The Harry Potter Series M.S. Corley (Not all movies yet, but soon to be!) Other Awesome Movie Art: My Modern Movies, Reimagined (8 Pics) Film the Blanks: Test Your Movie Poster Knowledge (10 Examples) Smurf Wars! - 3 Awesome Illustrations

This is sweet.

Quoted: In 2002, two psychologists found a business opportunity selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

Quoted: Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient’s room? Considering the importance of a patient’s frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient’s care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations?
...
I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.