Babe Ruth on superstition

I have just one superstition. Whenever I hit a home run, I make certain I touch all four bases.

~ Babe Ruth

Babe Ruth on swinging for the fences

If I'd tried for them dinky singles I could've batted around six hundred.

~ Babe Ruth

Babe Ruth on failure

Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.

~ Babe Ruth

(Ruth was born on this day, 1895.)

1983

Tom Glass and Kevin Duffy discuss climate change computer models

Glass: As one trained in the sciences and one who worked in IT as a career, I know the difference between science and a computer model.

Before a computer model can be relied upon to take drastic action, denying people liberty and destroying their prosperity, good sense would demand that we check the model to see if it predicts reality well. (That is called science. You know, checking your hypothesis embodied in the computer model against reality to see if it matches observed results.)

To date, I am unaware of any climate computer model that has accurately predicted climate. Until we get one that does, I will oppose the destruction of our liberty and prosperity that ALWAYS seems to be the proposed "solution" to the hypothetical problem.

Duffy: Well said, Tom, but I'll go even further. Let's imagine some day the computer models prove accurate and that there's a serious problem. Are you ready to destroy liberty and prosperity to solve it? Or might that complex adaptive system called the free market have a better chance?

Glass: I agree!

~ Tom Glass and Kevin Duffy, Facebook exchange, February 5, 2020

Henry Kissinger on taking orders from Nixon to bomb Cambodia

[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.

~ Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State

Noam Chomsky on the U.S. bombing of Cambodia

Nixon at one point informs Kissinger . . . that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves . . . genocide.

~ Noam Chomsky

Greg Grandin on Kissinger's bombing campaign in Cambodia from 1969-1973

All told, between 1969 and 1973, the U.S. dropped half-a-million tons of bombs on Cambodia alone, killing at least 100,000 civilians...

In fact, that bombing campaign did have one striking effect: it destabilized Cambodia, provoking a 1970 coup that, in turn, provoked a 1970 American invasion, which only broadened the social base of the insurgency growing in the countryside, leading to escalating U.S. bombing runs that spread to nearly the whole country, devastating it and creating the conditions for the rise to power of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

~ Greg Grandin, "Kissinger, the Bombardier," LewRockwell.com, November 11, 2015