 fortune index all fortunes
| | #3386 | | "Call immediately. Time is running out. We both need to do something
monstrous before we die."
-- Message from Ralph Steadman to Hunter Thompson
| | | #3387 | | "The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down."
-- H.L. Mencken
| | | #3388 | | "You don't go out and kick a mad dog. If you have a mad dog with rabies, you
take a gun and shoot him."
-- Pat Robertson, TV Evangelist, about Muammar Kadhafy
| | | #3389 | | David Brinkley: The daily astrological charts are precisely where, in my
judgment, they belong, and that is on the comic page.
George Will: I don't think astrology belongs even on the comic pages.
The comics are making no truth claim.
Brinkley: Where would you put it?
Will: I wouldn't put it in the newspaper. I think it's transparent rubbish.
It's a reflection of an idea that we expelled from Western thought in the
sixteenth century, that we are in the center of a caring universe. We are
not the center of the universe, and it doesn't care. The star's alignment
at the time of our birth -- that is absolute rubbish. It is not funny to
have it intruded among people who have nuclear weapons.
Sam Donaldson: This isn't something new. Governor Ronald Reagan was sworn
in just after midnight in his first term in Sacramento because the stars
said it was a propitious time.
Will: They [horoscopes] are utter crashing banalities. They could apply to
anyone and anything.
Brinkley: When is the exact moment [of birth]? I don't think the nurse is
standing there with a stopwatch and a notepad.
Donaldson: If we're making decisions based on the stars -- that's a cockamamie
thing. People want to know.
-- "This Week" with David Brinkley, ABC Television, Sunday, May 8, 1988,
excerpts from a discussion on Astrology and Reagan
| | | #3390 | | The reported resort to astrology in the White House has occasioned much
merriment. It is not funny. Astrological gibberish, which means astrology
generally, has no place in a newspaper, let alone government. Unlike comics,
which are part of a newspaper's harmless pleasure and make no truth claims,
astrology is a fraud. The idea that it gets a hearing in government is
dismaying.
-- George Will, Washing Post Writers Group
| | | #3391 | | Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since
the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology,
phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice
of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the
notion that our lives are influenced individually by the movement of
distant planets. This is the sawdust blarney of the carnival midway.
-- James J. Kilpatrick, Universal Press Syndicate
| | | #3392 | | A serious public debate about the validity of astrology? A serious believer
in the White House? Two of them? Give me a break. What stifled my laughter
is that the image fits. Reagan has always exhibited a fey indifference toward
science. Facts, like numbers, roll off his back. And we've all come to
accept it. This time it was stargazing that became a serious issue....Not
that long ago, it was Reagan's support of Creationism....Creationists actually
got equal time with evolutionists. The public was supposed to be open-minded
to the claims of paleontologists and fundamentalists, as if the two were
scientific colleagues....It has been clear for a long time that the president
is averse to science...In general, these attitudes fall onto friendly American
turf....But at the outer edges, this skepticism about science easily turns
into a kind of naive acceptance of nonscience, or even nonsense. The same
people who doubt experts can also believe any quackery, from the benefits of
laetrile to eye of newt to the movment of planets. We lose the capacity to
make rational -- scientific -- judgments. It's all the same.
-- Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe Newspaper Company-Washington Post Writers
Group
| | | #3393 | | The spectacle of astrology in the White House -- the governing center of
the world's greatest scientific and military power -- is so appalling that
it defies understanding and provides grounds for great fright. The easiest
response is to laugh it off, and to indulge in wisecracks about Civil
Service ratings for horoscope makers and palm readers and whether Reagan
asked Mikhail Gorbachev for his sign. A contagious good cheer is the
hallmark of this presidency, even when the most dismal matters are concerned.
But this time, it isn't funny. It's plain scary.
-- Daniel S. Greenberg, Editor, _Science and Government Report_, writing in
"Newsday", May 5, 1988
| | | #3394 | | [Astrology is] 100 percent hokum, Ted. As a matter of fact, the first edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, written in 1771 -- 1771! -- said that this
belief system is a subject long ago ridiculed and reviled. We're dealing with
beliefs that go back to the ancient Babylonians. There's nothing there....
It sounds a lot like science, it sounds like astronomy. It's got technical
terms. It's got jargon. It confuses the public....The astrologer is quite
glib, confuses the public, uses terms which come from science, come from
metaphysics, come from a host of fields, but they really mean nothing. The
fact is that astrological beliefs go back at least 2,500 years. Now that
should be a sufficiently long time for astrologers to prove their case. They
have not proved their case....It's just simply gibberish. The fact is, there's
no theory for it, there are no observational data for it. It's been tested
and tested over the centuries. Nobody's ever found any validity to it at
all. It is not even close to a science. A science has to be repeatable, it
has to have a logical foundation, and it has to be potentially vulnerable --
you test it. And in that astrology is reqlly quite something else.
-- Astronomer Richard Berendzen, President, American University, on ABC
News "Nightline," May 3, 1988
| | | #3395 | | Even if we put all these nagging thoughts [four embarrassing questions about
astrology] aside for a moment, one overriding question remains to be asked.
Why would the positions of celestial objects at the moment of birth have an
effect on our characters, lives, or destinies? What force or influence,
what sort of energy would travel from the planets and stars to all human
beings and affect our development or fate? No amount of scientific-sounding
jargon or computerized calculations by astrologers can disguise this central
problem with astrology -- we can find no evidence of a mechanism by which
celestial objects can influence us in so specific and personal a way. . . .
Some astrologers argue that there may be a still unknown force that represents
the astrological influence. . . .If so, astrological predictions -- like those
of any scientific field -- should be easily tested. . . . Astrologers always
claim to be just a little too busy to carry out such careful tests of their
efficacy, so in the last two decades scientists and statisticians have
generously done such testing for them. There have been dozens of well-designed
tests all around the world, and astrology has failed every one of them. . . .
I propose that we let those beckoning lights in the sky awaken our interest
in the real (and fascinating) universe beyond our planet, and not let them
keep us tied to an ancient fantasy left over from a time when we huddled by
the firelight, afraid of the night.
-- Andrew Fraknoi, Executive Officer, Astronomical Society of the Pacific,
"Why Astrology Believers Should Feel Embarrassed," San Jose Mercury
News, May 8, 1988
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