Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

President Bush was criticized this week for not having a clear stance on the Middle East crisis. You know what? Good. The only people with a very clear stance on the Middle East are the crazy people in the Middle East. I’ve had it with all of them. Yasir Arafat? Don’t talk to us in English and say, “I agree to a ceasefire,” and then turn around in Arabic and be like, “Hassan, let’s do this.” O.K.? We’re onto you. We’ve got like two bilingual C.I.A. guys now. We know what you’re saying. And Sharon? When you’re storming West Bank towns and bulldozing people’s homes? Try not to look like ya love it. ’Cause ya kinda look like ya love it.

After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

Smithsonian

I feel this one caption raises so many questions.

You’ve got potential, kid, more potential than any wizard I’ve ever seen, but you’ve got to learn how to use it, you know? Be a bit sweeter to them, learn some spells to clean up that mess you call hair. Above all, you need to hide your evilness better - not too well, but better. Nice well-groomed boys get girls, and Dark Wizards also get girls, but nice well-groomed boys suspected of being secretly Dark get more girls than you can imagine -

NPR INTERVIEWER: It sounds like social media is drawing new people into crime in a way.

FMR. POLICE CHIEF: Oh, well this seems to be the experience that the Brits have just recently experienced. It’s also some evidence, if I understand it correctly, here in the states, with some of the flash mob issues we’ve had here. All of the sudden you’ll get 500-600 bicycles show up for a night of bike riding, on mass, around the city.

You can absolutely quote me on that. Seriously. Because if you look at the most successful sites which link out — Fark, Reddit, Techmeme, Memeorandum, Drudge (and Drudge above all) — they’re all incredibly ugly. And I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s actually as much a feature as it is a bug. The ugly is good, because it drives you away. And the reason you go to that website is to be driven away.

The School of the Americas (since renamed), famous for its training of Latin American killers, announces as one of its “talking points” that the liberation theology that was initiated at Vatican II was “defeated with the assistance of the US army.

If you’re considering Mandarin as part of a program of intensive child-improvement, it’s worth remembering that children aren’t so easy to improve.

You refer to the Pentagon, as is usually done, as a defense organization. In 1947, when the National Defense Act was passed, the former War Department — the American department concerned with war which up to that time was honestly called the War Department — had its name changed to the Defense Department. I was a student then and didn’t think I was very sophisticated, but I knew and everyone knew that this meant that to whatever extent the American military had been involved in defense in the past — and partially it had been so — this was now over: since it was being called the Defense Department, that meant it was going to be a department of aggression, nothing else.

There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.

But it is not and never will be the theory of the Democratic Party.