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“Brand cites the example of France, which constructed “fifty-six reactors providing nearly all of the nation’s electricity in just twelve years.” Nuclear power provides about 77 percent of French electricity, a far greater proportion than in any other nation. Today, according to World Bank figures, France emits 5.2 tons of carbon dioxide per capita. The corresponding figure for the United States is 17. France shut down its last coal-fired power plant in 2004. It is the world’s biggest electricity exporter; meanwhile, French household electricity costs are among the lowest in Europe.”
― The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
― The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
“Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere. As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him: If you wish to study a granfalloon, Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.”
― Cat’s Cradle
― Cat’s Cradle
“The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you’ve got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism. When the direction appears. How long do you think it’ll take for that to happen?”
― Slouching Towards Bethlehem
― Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“One of his favorite Kilgore Trout books dealt with ingratitude and nothing else. It was called The First District Court of Thankyou, which was a court you could take people to, if you felt they hadn't been properly grateful for something you had done. If the defendant lost his case, the court gave him a choice between thanking the plaintiff in public, or going into solitary confinement on bread and water for a month. According to Trout, eighty per cent of those convicted chose the black hole.”
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―
“It would be a good idea to stop asking when it was unforgivably late, or unforgivably early, to have left the Communist Party. We should also stop asking when it was too late, or too early, to have come out against the Vietnam War. A hundred years from now, Howe and Galbraith, Harrington and Schlesinger, Wilson and Debs, Jane Addams and Angela Davis, Felix Frankfurter and John L. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois and Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Reich and Jesse Jackson, will all be remembered for having advanced the cause of social justice. They will all be seen as having been "on the Left". The difference between these people and men like Calvin Coolidge, Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot, Robert Taft, and William Buckley will be far clearer than any of the quarrels which once divided them among themselves. Whatever mistakes they made, these people will deserve, as Coolidge and Buckley never will, the praise with which Jonathan Swift ended his own epitaph: "Imitate him if you can; he served human liberty".”
― Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
― Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
Koodlet’s 2025 Year in Books
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