Archive For The “Odds & Ends” Category
There are many forms of tyrants, but there are none so terrible as those stifling their own people in the name of freedom. – E.A. Bucchianeri “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right…and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible,…
And 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. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. – George Orwell, 1984 Many many people are asking, is Florida the world’s first…
Zen prayer includes intimacy with the ground of Being, making yourself whole through honest self-reflection, clarifying your deepest spiritual intentions, wishing for the welfare of the world, and affirming the essential goodness of people and life. Prayer can release you from your habitual self-centered tendencies and can open the gates to your miraculous and wondrous…
Not sure all these White Christian Jihadists – bent on regime change at home – are going to be as happy with authoritarianism as they think they are. – Barker Ajax The Ginni Thomas Supreme Court this morning took away a woman’s right to physical autonomy. As if the rape itself was somehow insufficient. When…
History is written by the winner, so it largely depends on who’s writing the history. – Bill Barr When I first learned about the Old West, it was the 1950s. When America was great and beatniks roamed the earth. My grandparents were born in the 1800s and so it was possible to hear true stories…
Albert Einstein once said that ‘insanity’ was ‘Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting to achieve different results’. He was a clever chap, that Einstein fella. And, according to him, I must have been insane. Because I kept on working hard, and I kept on expecting to be rewarded, even though my hard…
Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and they’re giving — our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that. – Kellyanne Conway The flags started going up more than a couple of years ago and I did not like it. Even if I agreed with the ideology,…
It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests – and so…
The past is what you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember. – Harold Pinter This seems a good time for a flashback in case your memory, like most Americans, has gotten hazy. Remember Auqilino Gonell, the U.S. Capitol sergeant who testified about the attack on January 6? “My fellow officers and I were…
Childhood is that state which ends the moment a puddle is first viewed as an obstacle instead of an opportunity. – Michael K. Williams Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t…