Rationale for a Revolutionist

Our job in an economic bureaucracy is to respond to the world in a way that is predictable and consistent. 

Our job as human individuals is to respond to the world in a way that is fresh and authentic.

Disobedience may be a necessary part in a  meaningful life.

-Josh Mitteldorf

28 August 2004

"We all have possibilities we don't know about. We can do things we don't even dream we can do." -Dale Carnegie

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible." - Arthur C. Clarke

"You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices." - Deepak Chopra

27 August 2004
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
   - Aristotle
Poetics, tr. Malcolm Heath

"Why should any man have power over any other man's faith, seeing Christ Himself is the author of it?"

George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, was that rare and paradoxical thing: a demagogue who railed against demagoguery. He regularly disrupted public gatherings, including sermons of other ministers, to speak the truth of God as it had been revealed to him. Yet that truth included the gentle vision of the Quaker faith: that all of us have the truth of God within, and that no man should impose his dogma on any other.

Imprisoned for refusing to remove his hat to the Judge, and other such blasphemies, he scrawled on the prison wall, "I was never in prison that it was not the means of bringing multitudes out of their prisons."

25 August 2004

Fetuses Give Pregnant Women Stem Cell Therapy

Diana W. Bianchi, M.D. of Tufts University has found that cells from fetuses during pregnancy cross over into mothers and become a large assortment of types of specialized cells in the mothers and persist for years.

Bianchi and her colleagues retrieved cells from women who had male sons and compared them to tissue samples from women who had never had male offspring. The reason the researchers chose women with male offspring is that it would be easy to detect cells from male offspring because male cells carry the Y chromosome.

The tissue samples were from the thyroid, cervix, liver, lymph node, intestine, spleen and gallbladder. 

Bianchi said that not only did they find fetal cells present in the mothers' tissue samples, but that the fetal cells had taken on the characteristics of the mother's cells.  In one case, a woman with hepatitis had re-grown a whole new liver, using stem cells from her son.

Women who have borne children live longer than women who have not.  Could this be a reason why?

"More than two years after the Wright brothers had first flown their aircraft, and in spite of the fact that dozens of eyewitnesses had actually seen them fly, the popular Scientific American magazine continued to ridicule the ‘alleged’ flights. An editorial in the magazine explained why:

If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted ... on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter ... - even if he has to scale a fifteen-story skyscraper to do so - would not have ascertained all about them and published them long ago?"

- Dean Radin,
A Speculative History of Science 

I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.
As the walls clear themselves of everything
but transparency, the scent of carnations
leaves with them. I am out in the open
and above the windows have hinged into butterflies,
sunlight glinting where they've intersected.
They are going to some point true and unproven.

-Rita Dove