Slow News, But Not Slow for Us
TODAY is the third day of the year and tomorrow starts the first weekend of 2025. So far we've kept on target, with more than 20 pages/articles per day or with over 60 since the year began 56 hours ago. But today we'll take a break to spend more time with the birds and many coffees in Town. Yesterday we managed to attract - with food of course - over 40 birds to our home all at the same time (a new record). Some of them have names (they are distinguishable by looks and behaviour); most don't.
So far this year (maybe premature to say so because many journalists are still on holiday) the news is very, very slow. Like, almost literally, each day there's maybe a handful of real investigative journalism pieces. Yesterday we noticed that two very large British newspapers, The Independent and Telegraph, published exactly the same stories (probably licensed off some newswire or feed). Last year quite a few papers got sold rather than dissolved (almost the same thing, depending on the buyer) and the Press Gazette wants to tell us that the "future of media" is LLM slop [1, 2]. We refuse to accept this foolishness and we'll do our best to produce many stories about technology. █
“What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” – George Orwell
More from George Orwell:
1. “Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.” – George Orwell
2. “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.” – George Orwell
3. “The nation is bound together by an invisible chain.” – George Orwell
4. “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” – George Orwell
5. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell
6. “In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable.” – George Orwell
7. “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion.” – George Orwell
8. “It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.” – George Orwell
9. “In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.” – George Orwell
10. “The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.” – George Orwell
11. “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell
12. “Think of life as it really is, think of the details of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave. Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without flinching.” – George Orwell
13. “Will the man in the street ever feel that freedom of the mind is as important and as much in need of being defended as his daily bread?” – George Orwell
14. “The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.” – George Orwell
15. “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” – George Orwell
16. “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” – George Orwell
17. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” – George Orwell
18. “In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue.” – George Orwell
19. “It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.” – George Orwell
20. “Such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.” – George Orwell
21. “There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.” – George Orwell
22. “Power is not a means; it is an end.” – George Orwell
23. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations." -Quote is attributed to George Orwell (whose real name happens to be Eric Arthur Blair), but it seems there's no record of him actually writing or saying it.
24. “Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.” – George Orwell
25. “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” – George Orwell
26. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell
27. “That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.” – George Orwell
28. “Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country; but even in England it is not exactly profitable to speak and write the truth.” – George Orwell
29. “We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.” – George Orwell
30. “You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’ – he tapped his forehead – ‘and you’re all right’.” – George Orwell
31. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” – George Orwell
32. “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.” – George Orwell
33. “In the face of pain there are no heroes.” – George Orwell
34. “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” – George Orwell
35. “Who controls the past controls the future.' 'An intelligent man can convince himself of anything.” – George Orwell
36. “Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.” – George Orwell
37. “The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.” – George Orwell
38. “It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.” – George Orwell
39. “It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—anything—but they can’t make you believe it.” – George Orwell
40. “The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.” – George Orwell
41. “In every one of those little stucco boxes, there’s some poor bastard who’s never free except when he’s fast asleep and dreaming,” – George Orwell
42. “For after all, what is there behind it, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money.” – George Orwell
43. “No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be? – George Orwell
44. “Poverty is spiritual halitosis.” – George Orwell
45. “The distinguishing mark of a man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.” – George Orwell
46. “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” – George Orwell
47. “No one can get up much enthusiasm for a Government which puts you in jail if you open your mouth.” – George Orwell
48. “He is a slave with a semblance of liberty which is worse than the most cruel slavery.” – George Orwell
49. “Faith, hope, money—only a saint could have the first two without having the third.” – George Orwell
50. “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing… Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.” – George Orwell
51. “On the whole; human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” – George Orwell
52. “People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.” – George Orwell
53. “This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.” – George Orwell
54. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” – George Orwell
55. “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” – George Orwell
56. “I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.” – George Orwell
57. “Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.” – George Orwell
58. “If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.” – George Orwell
59. “To die hating them, that was freedom.” – George Orwell
60. “A world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.” – George Orwell
61. “In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it.” – George Orwell
62. “Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.” – George Orwell
63. “It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.” – George Orwell
64. “For before you can be sure whether you are genuinely in favor of socialism, you have got to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable, and you have got to take up a definite attitude on the terribly difficult issue of class.” – George Orwell
65. “If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’. . . and you’re all right.” – George Orwell
66. “You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it.” – George Orwell
67. “Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.” – George Orwell
68. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” – George Orwell
“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.” – George Orwell
69. “You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.” – George Orwell
70. “Looking at the whole world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.” – George Orwell
71. “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” – George Orwell
72. “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” – George Orwell