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I never said it. Honest
I’m told that Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson” (at least in the Arthur Conan Doyle books); Jimmy Cagney never said, “You dirty rat”; and Humphrey Bogart never said, “Play it again, Sam.” But they might as well have, because these apocrypha have firmly insinuated themselves into popular culture.
But with great powers come great responsibilities.
A more or less typical example [of a hoax] is the book of Deuteronomy—discovered in the Temple in Jerusalem by King Josiah, who, miraculously, in the midst of a major reformation struggle, found in Deuteronomy confirmation of all his views.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
But, I am now conjecturing, our brains are calibrated by ancestral natural selection to expect a much more modest level of coincidence calibrated under small village conditions. So we are impressed by coincidences because of a miscalculated gasp threshold.
Information, in the technical sense, is surprise value, measured as the inverse of expected probability. Redundancy is the opposite of information, a measure of unsurprisingness of old-hatitude.
Young urban idealists immersed in a drug culture, with dress styles considered bizarre by conventional standards, and with no prior knowledge of agriculture, are unlikely to succeed in establishing utopian agricultural communities in the American Southwest—even without local harassment.
If scientists cannot give to the man on the street a satisfactory explanation of expenditures in the exploration of space, it is not obvious that public funds should be allocated for such ventures.
But we cannot ask the public to spend large sums just to satisfy the scientist’s curiosity.
Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories of the Bible could not be true.
Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis.
Those who raise questions about the God hypothesis and the soul hypothesis are by no means all atheists. An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject to riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.
Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible—that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbott thought, and not superficially true at all.
We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas.
We marched in spite of Hell, we do—
Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris,
telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve
and a traveling salesman called Lucifer,
We bury your dead and their reputations.
We bury you. We are the centuries.
“Steel screams when it’s forged, it gasps when it’s quenched. It creaks when it goes under load. I think even steel is scared, son.”
In one case of electrical stimulation of the occipital lobe, which is concerned with vision, the patient reported seeing a fluttering butterfly of such compelling reality that he stretched out his hand from the operating table to catch it. In an identical experiment performed on an ape, the animal peered intently, as if at an object before him, made a swift catching motion with his right hand, and then examined, in apparent bewilderment, his empty fist.
These enormous numbers may also explain something of the unpredictability of human behavior and those moments when we surprise even ourselves by what we do. Indeed, in the face of these large numbers, the wonder is that there are any regularities at all in human behavior. The answer must be that all possible brain states are by no means occupied; there must be an enormous number of mental configurations that have never been entered or even glimpsed by any human being in the history of mankind. From this perspective, each human being is truly rare and different and the sanctity of individual human lives is a plausible ethical consequence.
I sometimes wonder whether our myths about gnomes, trolls, giants and dwarfs could possibly be a genetic or cultural memory of those times.
In paranoid thinking a person believes he has detected a conspiracy—that is, a hidden (and malevolent) pattern in the behavior of friends, associates or governments—where in fact no such pattern exists. If there is such a conspiracy, the subject may be profoundly anxious, but his thinking in not necessarily paranoid. A famous case involves James Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense. At the end of World War II, Forrestal was convinced that Israeli secret agents were following him everywhere. His physicians, equally convinced of the absurdity of this idée fixe, diagnosed him as paranoid and confined him to an upper story of Walter Reed Army Hospital, from which he plunged to his death, partly because of inadequate supervision by hospital personnel, overly deferential to one of his exalted rank. Later it was discovered that Forrestal was indeed being followed by Israeli agents who were worried that he might reach a secret understanding with representatives of Arab nations. Forrestal had other problems, but having his valid perceptions labeled paranoid did not help his condition.
The only objection I have ever heard to the widespread use of pocket calculators and small computers is that, if introduced to children too early, they preempt the learning of arithmetic, trigonometry and other mathematical tasks that the machine is abel to perform faster and more accurately than the student. This debate has occurred before.
In Plato’s Phaedrus—the same Socratic dialog I referred to earlier for its metaphor of chariot, charioteer and two horses—there is a lovely myth about the god Thoth, the Egyptian equivalent of Prometheus. In the tongue of ancient Egypt, the phrase that designates written language means literally “The Speech of the Gods.” Thoth is discussing his invention of writing with Thamus (also called Ammon), a god-king who rebukes him with these words:
This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without its reality.I am sure there is some truth to Thamus’ complaint.
One man can make a difference,
and every man should try.
The
author uses symbols to represent key moments in his life. A
butterfly
signals that something important happened (like the butterfly
effect).
A chain signals how past and future events are linked by
circumstance.
A door might either be open or closed to represent an opportunity
gained
or lost.Later Kissinger told the Russians a relevant joke, which they enjoyed hugely: As a Texas sheriff was beating a group of communists, one of them shouted, “Don’t beat me, I am anticommunist.” The Texas sheriff continued to beat him, exclaiming, “I don’t care what kind of communist you are.”
The next morning, at breakfast, Emelyanov repeated this joke and said to me in a friendly fashion, “That is the way you are, Stone, missiles or anti-missiles, you don’t care, you beat them all.” He had gotten the point (And he turned out to be a great ally.)
In Moscow, the fall before, he [Millionshchikov] had described to me the Kafkaesque scene at his dissertation oral in 1917. As was the custom at Ph.D. orals, three candidates presented themselves simultaneously to answer whatever they could. In this case, he had been brilliant, another student competent, and a third student had been able to answer no questions at all.
The chairman of the dissertation committee regretfully advised the third candidate that he had failed. The candidate rose up and said, “It is you who are wrong. This is the year of the great socialist revolution. Russia has become a socialist country. We three candidates have presented ourselves as a collective. The collective has answered all your questions and so it passes, and I, as a member of the collective, also pass.”
Millionshchikov was astonished to see the frightened professors back down in a country that had, they well knew, not the slightest idea what socialism should mean. The student passed. Perhaps, from that moment, socialism in Russia was doomed.
(a) Whoever, with intent to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States:
(I) advises, cousels, urges, or in any manner causes or attempts to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States is subject to a fine of not more than $10,000 or ten years imprisonment.
“Gladiator, befriend not gladiator.”
“I do not think so. I have read the oath of citizenship, and they would have to make certain changes.”
When, at the meeting, my turn came to ask a question, I mentioned the idea that Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard had propounded that elaborate Maginot lines, like Star Wars, normally come at the end of arms races as desperate efforts that don’t work. Such efforts seemed, in his terms, the “frantic belated efforts on the challenged state” to assert an absolute superiority over its arms race challenger. And when they do get to this stage, it seems a sign that the energy in the arms race is exhausted. I suggested to Gorbachev that perhaps, in this context, SDI should not be taken too seriously. (I had lectured about this in Berkeley about a year earlier and concluded that in historical perspective, Star Wars might mean the arms race was really over.) Gorbachev answered, “But you don’t want to permit an arms race in space, do you?” Still, I had made the point.
What can we conclude from all this? When governments face painful decisions, their internal procedures for securing consensus are under strain, and their normal processes do not work. In these cases one must do more than work on a government-to-government basis to influence the outcome. The goal should be to find a person (or persons) inside the government who shares one’s views. After infecting them with the virus of one’s ideas, it can then be left to them to manipulate the levers and controls of a government they know better than we and in which they are not hostile intruders.
America was consumed, at that time, with a completely phony campaign on behalf of American soldiers who were missing in action in Vietnam and supposedly might still be alive after twenty years. One hundred of these missing were missing in Cambodia.But every Cambodian family was an MIA family, with missing loved ones unaccounted for.
Because so much altruistic human activity cannot be firmly linked to good results, the notion that “one man can make a difference” is best understood, I think, as an article of faith. And its corollary, that “every man should try,” should be seen as a companion inspirational injunction. In sum, seeking to make a difference could be at the core of a new secular religion. If orchestrated properly, such a quasi-religious movement could enormously increase the number of entrepreneurial activists, could further bring the altruistic instincts of Mankind to the fore, and could reshape the future. Activism could become less a series of isolated events and more of a genuine trend—strengthening its impact.
“This past year—if you’d have tried, you’d have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people.”
My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to facts, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
few people realize that our modern apparatus of parole, early release, and indeterminate sentencing stems in part from Lombroso’s campaign for differential treatment of born and occasional criminals.
Why and by what right does one class of people lock up, torture, exile, flog, and kill other people, when they themselves are no better than those whom they torture, flog and kill?
our society was far less visually sophisticated.
Yerkes might have argued that an average mental age of thirteen reflected the fact that relatively few recruits had the opportunity to finish or even to attend high school. He might have attributed the low average of some national groups to the fact that most recruits from these countries were recent immigrants who did not speak English and were unfamiliar with American culture. He might have recognized the link between low Negro scores and the history of slavery and racism.
America must be kept American.
But biologists have recently affirmed—as long suspected—that the overall genetic differences among human races are astonishingly small.
The central flaw in sociobiology results from this Darwinian premise: the behaviors that the theory purports to explain must be interpreted as adaptations of organisms.
I hope that you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.
I haven’t seen a picture of an animal in the leading journal of evolutionary ecology for years.
“Not many people know this, but ever since 1933 the United States has essentially been operating under an ongoing declared presidential state of emergency. All it takes is the stroke of a pen to revoke a lot of ‘rights’ Americans take for granted.”
Let’s set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.
“Filipinos are a warm, gentile, caring, giving people,” Avi says, “which is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons.”
Shaftoe’s first haiku (December 1940) was a quick and dirty adaptation of the Marine Creed:This is my rifle
There are many like it but
This rifle is mine.
“Using today’s technology,” Avi shot back, “that is true. But what about quantum computers? And what if new mathematical techniques are developed that can simplify the factoring of large prime numbers?”
“How long do you want these messages to remain secret?” Randy asked, in his last message before leaving San Francisco. “Five years? Ten years? Twenty-five years?”
After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read Avi’s answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the afterimage of a strobe:
I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.
Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally.Charlene’s crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn’t being told that they were wrong that offended them, though—it was they underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything. So on the Night in Question—the night of Avi’s fateful call—Randy had done what he usually did, which was to withdraw from the conversation. In the Tolkien, not the Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf. Tolkien’s Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical creatures who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene’s friends), had actually done a lot for Randy’s peace of mind over the years.
A dwarf on sojourn in the Shire would probably go to a lot of dinner parties where pompous boring Hobbits would hold forth like this. This Dwarf would view the whole thing as entertainment. He would know that he could always go back out into the real world, so much vaster and more complex than these Hobbits imagined, and slay a few Trolls and remind himself of what really mattered.
Jon was a Hobbit who’d actually been out of the Shire recently, so he knew Randy was a dwarf. Now he was fucking up Randy’s life by calling upon Randy to jump up on the table, throw off his homespun cloak, and whip out his two-handed ax.
“Says right here you are gung-ho.”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Sir, it is a Chinese word! There’s a Communist there, name of Mao, and he’s got an army. We tangled with ’em on more’n one occasion, sir. Gung-ho is their battle cry, it means ‘all together’ or something like that, so after we got done kicking the crap out of them, sir, we stole it from them, sir!”
“Well, at one time, there was a group of Muslims called the hashishin who would eat this stuff and then go out and kill people. They were so good at it, they became famous or infamous. Over time the pronunciation of the name changed—we know them as assassins.”
“You know, back in the forty-niner days, every gold mining town in California had a nerd with a scale,” Avi says. “The assyaer. He sat in an office all day. Scary-looking rednecks came in with pouches of gold dust. The nerd weighed them, checked them for purity, told them what the stuff was worth. Basically, the assyaer’s scale was the exchange point—the place where this mineral, this dirt from the ground, became money that would be recognized as such in any bank or marketplace in the world, from San Francisco to London to Beijing. Because of the nerd’s special knowledge, he could put his imprimatur on dirt and make it money. Just like we have the power to turn bits into money.”
“Now, a lot of the people the nerd dealt with were incredibly bad guys. Peg house habitues. Escaped convicts from all over the world. Psychotic gunslingers. People who owned slaves and massacred Indians. I’ll bet that the first day, or week, or month, or year, that the nerd moved to the gold-mining town and hung out his shingle, we was probably scared shitless. He probably gave up and went back East. But y’know what? In a surprisingly short period of time, everything became pretty damned civilized, and the towns filled up with churches and schools and universities, and the sort of howling maniacs who got there first were all assimilated or driven out or thrown into prison, and the nerds had boulevards and opera houses named after them. Now, is the analogy clear?”
“I understand you are good with numbers,” the lady says.
Randy is really racking his brain now. How does this woman know he’s a numbers kind of guy? “I’m good with math,” he finally says.
“Isn’t that what I said?”
“Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves to them—that’s what computers are for.”
Shaftoe consults the instructions. It does not matter that these are printed in Russian, because they are made for illiterates anyway. A series of parabolas is plotted out, the mortar supporting one leg and exploding Germans supporting the opposite. Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes cam in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison. Shaftoe scans the terrain, picks out his killing zone, then climbs up and paces off the distance, assuming one meter per space.
A few minutes later, Waterhouse and cCmndhd go downstairs, headed for “church,” which in Waterhouse’s secret code, means “headquarters of the Mary-fucking campaign of 1944.”
Chester’s eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.
telnet laundry.org (Oakland T3 line)
telnet crypt.kk
telnet tombstone.epiphyte.com
“But in this case, Athena appeared to her in the guise of an old woman and recommended that she display the proper humility. Arachne declined her advice. Finally Athena revealed herself as such and challenged Arachne to a weaving contest, which you’ll have to admit was uncommonly fair-minded of her. And the interesting thing is that the contest turned out to be a draw—Arachne really was just as good as Athena! Only problem was that her weaving depicted the gods of Olympus at their shepherd-raping, interspecies-fucking worst. This weaving was simply a literal and accurate illustration of all those other myths, which make this into a sort of meta-myth.”
“Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.”
Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years [Lord Kelvin’s estimate] to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle know at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was build for. I reckon they would, I dunno.
Only autocracies maintain spies, these are not needed in democracies.
the age of rocks versus the rock of ages, or “how heaven goes” versus “how to go to heaven” in the old one-liners. In exchange for freedom to follow nature down all her pathways, scientists relinquish the temptation to base moral inferences and pronouncements upon the physical state of the world—an excellent and proper arrangement, since the facts of nature embody no moral claims in any case.
How should scientists operate when they must try to explain the results of history, those inordinately complex events that can occur but once in detailed glory? Many large domains of nature—cosmology, geology, and evolution among them—must be studied with the tools of history. The appropriate methods focus on narrative, not experiment as usually conceived.
Contingency is Tolstoy’s cardinal theme in all his great novels.
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice
[The universe runs by law] with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.
We are one among millions of species, stewards of nothing. By what argument could we, arising just a geological microsecond ago, become responsible for the affairs of a world 4.5 billion years old, teeming with life that has been evolving and diversifying for the last three-quarters of this immense span. Nature does not exist for us, had no idea we were coming, and doesn’t give a damn about us.
Darwinian man though well behaved
At best is only a monkey shaved
I was thoroughly charmed until I remembered that, at the actual time recaptured à la Rockwell, my ancestors worked in sweatshops and lived in tenements, while all black people in town probably dwelled in shacks, literally on the other side of the railroad tracks.
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey.
For evolutionists, perhaps the most intriguing and unexpected discovery of molecular genetics emerged during the 1960s when study after study proved that in multicellular organisms, only a small percentage of the total genetic material consists of functional genes in single copies. Most of the genetic material may be “junk” with respect to information needed to build and maintain a working body. Moreover, many genes exist in multiple copies for obscure reasons unrelated to the necessary functions of bodies.
If you are ever asked to talk before a department in the humanities, remember that you have to request the slide projector. Call this Gould’s law and let it be my immortality—long after everyone has forgotten those upside-down flamingos and panda’s thumbs.
One hundred years without Darwin are enough.
If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.
Darwinian man though well behaved
At best is only a monkey shaved.
With Konrad Lorenz as godfather, Robert Ardrey as dramatist, and Desmond Morris as raconteur, we are presented with man, “the naked ape”
I will lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.
The results of two generations of this evolutionary indoctrination have been devastating. Secularized schools have begotten a secularized society. The child is the father of the man and, if the child is led to believe he is merely an evolved beast, the man he becomes will behave as a beast, either aggressively struggling for supremacy himself or blindly following aggressive leaders.
“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions is organic design . . . has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.”
- Each person needs, more than anything, a sense of his own personal identity and personal goals, and this is impossible without some sense of his origin. What a person comes to believe about his origin will inevitably condition what he believes about his destiny.
- Lack of a sound scientific understanding of origin and meanings among modern young people has impelled them to seek help in such anti-scientific solutions as “mind-expanding” drugs, witchcraft, astrology, and the like.
- True mental health, such as teachers desire for their pupils, requires a solid and satisfying philosophy of life, and this certainly demands a mentally-satisfying concept of their personal origin and future.
it must also be emphasized that it is impossible to prove scientifically any particular concept of origins to be true. This is obvious from the fact that the essence of the scientific method is experimental observation and repeatability.
As a matter of observation, belief in something is necessary for true mental health.
The only reason for saying that special creation is incredible would be if one had certain knowledge that there was no God. Obviously, if no Creator exists, then special creation is incredible. But since a universal negative can only be proved if one has universal knowledge, such a statement requires omniscience. Thus, by denying God, Dr. Watson is claiming the attributes of God himself.
4. There is no greater stimulus to responsible behavior and earnest effort, as well as honesty and consideration for others, than the awareness that there well may be a personal Creator to whom one must give account.
Creationists obviously would predict that the basic laws as well as the fundamental nature of matter and energy would not be changing at all. They were all completely created—finished in the past, and are being conserved in the present.
The First Cause of limitless Space must be infinite The First Cause of endless Time must be eternal The First Cause of boundless Energy must be omnipotent The First Cause of universal Interrelationships must be omnipresent The First Cause of infinite Complexity must be omniscient The First Cause of Moral Values must be spiritual The First Cause of Human Responsibility must be volitional The First Cause of Human Integrity must be truthful The First Cause of Human Love must be loving The First Cause of Life must be living
| The First Cause of Evil | must be omnisinister |
| The First Cause of Human Slavery | must be compulsory |
| The First Cause of Human Dishonesty | must be dishonest |
| The First Cause of Human Hate | must be hateful |
| The First Cause of Death | must be dead |
there is nothing in the present structure of natural law that could possibly account for its own origin.
The creation model, on the other hand, in effect predicts the two Laws of Thermodynamics, as noted before.
This is an extremely important scientific discovery and by all means should be emphasized in the classroom. The moon and the earth have different structures and therefore different origins!
For example, do both fish and men have eyes because man evolved from a fish or because both fish and man needed to see, in order to fulfill their intended creative purpose?
It does seem that, if evolutionists really believed that evolution is due to mutations, they would favor all measures which could increase the rate of mutations and thus facilitate further evolution.
The only reason to think that all should not have been living contemporaneously in the past is the assumption of evolution. Apart from this premise, there is no reason to doubt that man lived at the same time as the dinosaurs and trilobites.
Man would not live with dinosaurs and trilobites, for example, any more than he now lives with crocodiles and starfish.
13. Very few human fossils or artifacts would be found at all. Men would escape burial for the most part, and after the waters receded, their bodies would lie on the ground until decomposed. The same would apply to their lighter structures and implements, whereas heavier metallic objects would sink to the bottom and be buried so deeply in the sediments they would probably never be discovered.
Assuming the Creator had a purpose in His creation, and that purpose centered primarily in man, it does seem more appropriate that He would not waste aeons of time in essentially meaningless caretaking of an incomplete stage or stages of His intended creative work.
It seems plausible that effective segregation only could have been achieved if communication were somehow made impossible.
This would be the creation, not of an appearance of age, but of an appearance of evil, and would be contrary to God[’]s nature.
The Word of God must take first priority, and secondly, the observed facts of science, rather than the reputations of men.
Similarly, God’s evaluation of “all that He had made” as “very good” (Genesis 1:31) is strange and grotesque if the sedimentary rocks under the feet of Adam and Eve were at the same time filled with the fossilized remains of billions of years of suffering and death, so that almost everywhere man would look on the earth he would encounter this vast graveyard. It could hardly look “very good” to men; how could it be pronounced “very good” by God?
The Massoretic text, on which the figures cited above were based, differs from the Septuagint and Samaritan texts. The Samaritan text would add 301 years and the Suptuagint 1466 years to the period calculated above from the creation to Abraham.
“No blood test would show a thing. You can’t be prosecuted for the natural contents of your own brain.”
There were multiple levels of play. Both sides won big if you both reached the same mood quickly, through sheer infectious charisma. You won second-class if you got your own way without feeling guilty about it. Pyrrhic victory was when you got your own way but felt rotten. Then there were the various levels of giving in: Gracious, Resigned, and Martyr to the Cause.
“This isn’t politics. This is technology. It’s not their power that threatens us, it’s their imagination. Creativity comes from small groups. Small groups gave us the electric light, the automobile, the personal computer. Bureaucracies gave us the nuclear power plant, traffic jams, and network television. The first three changed everything. The last three are memories now.”
“A wicked knife,” Prentis said, dusting his hands. “Maybe you think that’s dangerous, but you don’t see it all, yet. You know what that is? That’s peasant technology, brother. It’s slash-and-burn agriculture. You know what that might do to what’s left of the planet’s tropical forests? It’ll make every straw-hat Brazilian into Paul Bunyan, that’s what. The most dangerous bio-tech in the world is a guy with a goat and an axe.”
She didn’t mind the crudity—but the themes were amazing.
One game was called “Missile Command.” The player controlled little lumps on the screen meant to represent cities. The computer attacked them with nuclear weaponry: bombs, jets, ballistic missiles.
The machine always won—annihilating all life in a big flashy display. Children had once played this game. It was utterly morbid.
Then there was one called “Space Invaders.” The invading creatures were little pixelated crabs and devil dogs, UFO things from another planet. Dehumanized figures, marching down the screen in lockstep. They always won. You could slaughter them by the hundreds, even win new little forts to fire things—lasers? bombs?—but you always died in the end. The computer always won. It made so little sense—letting the computer win every time, as if circuitry could enjoy winning. And every effort, no matter how heroic, ended in Armageddon. It was all so eldritch, so twentieth century.
There was a third game that involved a kind of round yellow consumer—the object was to eat everything in sight, including, sometimes, the little blue pursuing enemies.
She played this game, mostly, as the level of violence was less offensive. It wasn’t that she liked them much, but as the shifts passed, empty hours spinning over and over, she discovered their compulsive, obsessive quality . . . the careless insistence on breaking all sane bounds that was the mark of the premillennium. She played them until her hands blistered.
It was not bad as such camps went, she [Katje] said. The Boers were used to camps. The British had invented them during the Boer War, and in fact the very term “concentration camp” was invented by the British as a term for the place where they concentrated kidnapped Boer civilians.
For a thousand years we loved our herds,
For a thousand years we must praise the grass.
We will eat the tisma food to live,
We will buy Iron Camels from GoMotion
Unlimited in Santa Clara California.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
H I R O P R O T A G O N I S T Last of the freelance hackers
Greatest sword fighter in the world
Stringer, Central Intelligence Corporation
Specializing in software-related intel
(music, movies & microcode)
Above him, in the house that owns the pool, a light has come on, and children are looking down at him through their bedroom windows, all warm and fuzzy in their Li’l Crips and Ninja Raft Warrior pajamas, which can either be flameproof or noncarcinogenic but not both at the same time.
CHISELED SPAM
is what you will see in the mirror if you surf on a weak plank with dumb, fixed wheels and interface with a muffler, retread, snow turd, road kill, driveshaft, railroad tie, or unconscious pedestrian.
If you think this is unlikely, you’ve been surfing too many ghost malls. All of these obstacles and more were recently observed on a one-mile stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike. Any surfer who tried to groove that ’vard on a stock plank would have been sneezing brains.
Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was.
“Hey, I went to church every week in high school. I sang in the choir.”
“I know. That’s exactly the problem. Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people’s minds.”
“Emotional intensity” doesn’t convey the half of it, of course. It is the kind of coarse and disappointing translation that makes the dismembered bodies of samurai warriors spin in their graves. The word “zanshin” is larded down with a lot of other folderol that you have to be Nipponese to understand.
And Hiro thinks, frankly, that most of it is pseudomystical crap, on the same level as his old high school football coach exhorting his men to play at 110 percent.
The businessman makes another attack. This one is pretty straightforward: a quick shuffling approach and then a snapping cut in the direction of Hiro’s ribcage. Hiro parries it.
Now Hiro knows something about this businessman, namely, that like most Nipponese sword fighters, all he knows is kendo.
Kendo is to real samurai sword fighting what fencing is to real swashbuckling: an attempt to take a highly disorganized, chaotic, violent, and brutal conflict and turn it into a cute game. As in fencing, you’re only supposed to attack certain parts of the body—the parts that are protected by armor. As in fencing, you’re not allowed to kick your opponent in the kneecaps or break a chair over his head. And the judging is totally subjective. In kendo, you can get a good solid hit on your opponent and still not get credit for it, because the judges feel you didn’t possess the right amount of zanshin.
Hiro doesn’t have any zanshin at all. He just wants this over with. The next time the businessman sets up his ear-splitting screech and shuffles toward Hiro, cutting and snapping his blade, Hiro parries the attack, turns around, and cuts both of his legs off just above the knees.
The businessman collapses to the floor.
It takes a lot of practice to make your avatar move through the Metaverse like a real person. When your avatar has just lost its legs, all that skill goes out the window.
“Babel’s a city in Babylon, right?”
“It was a legendary city,” the Librarian says. “Babel is a Biblical term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means God, so Babel means ‘Gate of God.’ But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic, imitating someone who speaks in an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible is full of puns.”
“In assuming that it was very tall, you are relying on an obsolete reading. The tower is described, literally, as ‘its top with the heavens.’ For many centuries, this was interpreted to mean that the top was so high that it was in the heavens. But in the last century of so, as actual Babylonian ziggurats have been excavated, astrological diagrams—pictures of the heavens—have been found inscribed into their tops.”
The Nipponese don’t go in for this nonsense about follow-through. If you strike a man on the top of his head with a katana and do not make any effort to stop the blade, it will divide his skull and probably get hung up in his collarbone or his pelvis, and then you will be out there in the middle of the medieval battlefield with a foot on your late opponent’s face, trying to work the blade loose as his best friend comes running up to you with a certain vengeful gleam in his eye. So the plan is to snap the blade to a full stop just after the impact, maybe crease his brainpan an inch or two, then whip it out and look for another samurai, hence: “Next!”
Hiro puts his head in his hands. He’s not exactly thinking about this; he’s letting it richochet around in his skull, waiting for it to come to rest. “Wait a minute, Jauanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”
“I would say,” Juanita says, “how can you be a Christian with it? Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It’s so National Enquirer-esque, don’t you think?”
“It’s a Christian thing, right?”
“Pentacostal Christians thing so, but they are deluding themselves. Pagan Greeks did it—Plato called it theomania. The Oriental cults of the Roman Empire did it. Hudson Bay Eskimos, Chukchi shamans, Lapps, Yakuts, Semang pygmies, the North Borneo cults, the Trhi-speaking priests of Ghana. The Zulu Amandiki cult and the Chinese religious sect of Shang-ti-hui. Spirit mediums of Tonga and the Brazilian Umbanda cult. The Tungus tribesmen of Siberia say that when the shaman goes into his trance and raves incoherent syllables, he learns the entire language of Nature.”
“The language of Nature.”
“Yes, sir. The Sukuma people of Africa say that the language is kinaturu, the tongue of the ancestors of all magicians, who are thought to have descended from one particular tribe.”
“What causes it?”
“If mystical explanations are ruled out, then it seems that glossolalia comes from structures buried deep within the brain, common to all people.”
“Even the word ‘science’ comes from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate.’ The same root lead to the word ‘shit,’ which of course means to separate living flash from nonliving waste. The same root gave us ‘scythe’ and ‘scissors’ and ‘schism,’ which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.”
“Bumper stickers, Lagos called them. Corrupt political speech. They had an unfortunate tendency to write inscriptions praising their own military victories before the battles had actually taken place.”
“She was the consort of El, who is also known as Yahweh,” the Librarian says. “She also was known by other names: Elat, her most common epithet. The Greeks knew her as Dione or Rhea. The Canaanites knew her as Tannit or Hawwa, which is the same thing as Eve.”
“I thought the Hebrews were monotheists. How could they worship Asherah?”
“Monolatrists. They did not deny the existence of other gods. But they were only supposed to worship Yahweh. Asherah was venerated as the consort of Yahweh.”
“I don’t remember anything about God having a wife in the Bible.”
“The Bible didn’t exist at that point. Judaism was just a loose collection of Yahwsitic cults, each with different shrines and practices. The stories about the Exodus hadn’t been formalized into scripture yet. And the later parts of the Bible had not yet happened.”
“Who decided to purge Asherah from Judaism?”
“The deuteronomic school—defined, by convention, as the people who wrote the book of Deuteronomy as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.”
“I just saved your fucking life, Mom,” Y.T. says. “You could at least offer me an Oreo.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“It’s like, if you—people of a certain age—would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn’t have to take these drastic measures.”
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my live to being bad.
Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn’t for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven’s Achilles’ heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven’s nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach.
Which is okay. Sometimes it’s all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you’ve got.
REASON
version 1.0B7
Gatling-type 3-mm hypervelocity railgun system
Ng Security Industries, Inc.
PRERELEASE VERSION—NOT FOR FIELD USE
DO NOT TEST IN A POPULATED AREA
—ULTIMA RATIO REGUM—
“The minstry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition—sort of an echo of what Enki did. Christ’s gospel is a new man-shub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough: We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.
By nature, men are nearly alike;
by practice, they get to be wide apart.
“During the Boxer Rebellion, the rumor was spread that the orphanages run by European missionaries were in fact abattoirs where white doctors scooped the eyes out of the heads of Han babies to make medicine for European consumption. That many Han believed these rumors accounts for the extreme violence to which the Europeans were subjected during that rebellion.”
“If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but a pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society, as the Master stated many times.”
“In an era when everything can be surveiled, all we have left is politeness.”
Miss Bowlware taught them History of the English-Speaking Peoples, starting with the Romans at Londinium and careening through the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, Wars of the Roses, Renaissance, and Civil War; but she didn’t really hit her stride until she got to the Georgian period, at which point she worked herself up into a froth explaining the shortcomings of that syphilitic monarch, which had inspired the right-thinking Americans to break away in disgust. They studied the most ghastly parts of Dickens, which Miss Bowlware carefully explained was called Victorian literature because it was written during the reign of Victoria I, but was actually about pre-Victorian times, and that the mores of the original Victorians—the ones who built the British Empire—were actually a reaction against the sort of bad behavior engaged in by their parents and grandparents and so convincingly detailed by Dickens, their most popular novelist.
“Not very honourable, I suppose, but then, there is no honor among consultants.”
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