Casey N > Recent Status Updates

"Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics."

And I realized I was sad, not because I was alone but because I was not. And I had indeed come home, and ghosts had come back with me.

I had traveled back to a kind of big bang. A universe would be born on the other side of the water, but first countless worlds would have to die.

"Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows."

"Again, we undervalue our non-human ancestors when we blame them for our violent proclivities. Very likely, they had inhibitions in place that we routinely circumvent. Killing an enemy with teeth and bare hands is emotionally far more demanding than pulling a trigger or pressing a button."

"Remember those macaques who would rather go hungry than profit from harming their fellows; might we have a more optimistic view of the human future if we were sure our ethics were ip to their standards?"

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

"Imagine a moonlit darkness in which their adversaries lay senseless, strewn across the landscape in stupors of sleep."

"The primates are so rich in potential that even a small change in anatomy or physiology may provide an aperture to a universe never dreamt of in the rude sleeping pallets made each night in the low branches of the once-vast tropical forests."

"The young are so ready to learn who to love and who to hate...But humans are not rats...The strategy of long childhoods and early learning introduces a new element: culture," (199).

"Death serves as a poignant reminder of our own limitations and frailties—and of the bond with our ancestors who, in a way, died that we might live," (152).

"It will be enough if a few salient and generic characteristics of life on yet another obscure planet are noted for the cavernous recesses of the galactic archives," (139).

"In human history there are a precious few whose memory we revere because they knowingly sacrificed themselves for others. For each of them, there are multitudes who did nothing," (118).

"Biology is much more like language and history than it is like physics and chemistry," (92).

This is really graphic but really cool as well. The literature is just amazing.

"You can't avoid the game by saying you don't want to play. It'll find you."

Six...Seven

"We must press forward, traveling as much as we can each day-but when I finally lie down, I find sleep elusive."