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Had she lived, Marilyn Monroe would be 79 years old today.

This quote is attributed to her:

Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

Recommended: The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot and The Misfits. The first two are brilliant comedies. The Misfits is not a comedy. Marilyn is extraordinarily good in all three. She had talent.

Via this site, here’s Richard Feynman on discovering new laws of physics:

First you guess. Don’t laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.

Another front in the jihad: banning books and authors:

Republican Alabama lawmaker Gerald Allen says homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, under his bill, public school libraries could no longer buy new copies of plays or books by gay authors, or about gay characters.

“I don’t look at it as censorship,” says State Representative Gerald Allen. “I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children.”

Books by any gay author would have to go: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple” has lesbian characters.

Allen originally wanted to ban even some Shakespeare.

Yeah, books are dangerous. You start reading, and before long, you’re thinking.

If you think people with this mindset intend to stop anywhere short of death camps, you don’t know them very well.

Update: You know, I think this belongs here:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out.

— Martin Niemöller

Aaron Swartz quotes Martin Luther King:

…there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I suggest that you too ought to be maladjusted.

I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob-rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence.

That speech was made in 1957, almost forty-eight years ago. Martin Luther King was murdered in 1968, almost thirty-seven years ago. Yet you’d almost think he’d seen the current Administration in action. Some things never change.

A Slashdot user named Concerned Onlooker has this signature line:

Since Bush has won it’s time to put away our differences and support him. Just like the Republicans did for Clinton.

Why I’m not falling in line behind the president: Been there. Done that. Still have souvenir knife in my back.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Bob Herbert writes that it’s time for progressive-minded folks to get back to work:

Here’s my advice: You had a couple of days to indulge your depression – now, get over it. The election’s been lost but there’s still a country to save…

Democracy is a breeze during good times. It’s when the storms are raging that citizenship is put to the test. And there’s a hell of a wind blowing right now.

Tom Paine said it well:

These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Finally, from Harriet Tubman:

Children, if you’re tired, keep going. If you’re hungry, keep going. If you’re scared, keep going. If you want to taste freedom, keep going.

George W. Bush will probably name at least three new Supreme Court justices during the next four years. With GOP gains in the Senate, he can push through extremist judges who will blight our laws for thirty years to come.

I’m 52 years old. I’m not likely to live to see the end of the darkness that fell on Tuesday.

Abraham Lincoln:

It is said that an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.”

How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.”

And yet let us hope that it be not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath us and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

A good line, from a Slashdot comment by someone who calls himself “Frigid Monkey“:

No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don’t feel safe.