Friday, May 10, 2024
The Middle Road
Hopes & Dreams
Monday, April 15, 2024
Pathways
Saturday, January 13, 2024
Friday, January 12, 2024
Spare No Expense
Monday, January 1, 2024
Is Something Missing Here?
Friday, December 15, 2023
Euro Christmas Battle
Sunday, October 1, 2023
Downfall of Our Forebearers
Cicero Denounces Cataline --Cesare Maccari, 1889 |
Saturday, July 1, 2023
Saturday, June 24, 2023
More Ducal Branding
Saturday, April 1, 2023
More Groucho Marx Quotes
- The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
- I must confess, I was born at a very early age.
- I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
- Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
- I intend to live forever or die trying.
- A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.
- All people are born alike-- except Republicans and Democrats.
- Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
- A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
- She got her looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.
- Either he's dead, or my watch has stopped.
- Why, a four-year-old child could understand this. Run out and find me a four-year-old child: I can't make head nor tail out of it.
- Before I speak, I have something to say.
- Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.
- Humor is reason gone mad. --Groucho Marx
Wednesday, March 1, 2023
Groucho for Better Thinking
Thursday, November 10, 2022
Happy Veteran's Day
Here are some patriotic photos you may find moving this Veteran's Day... or any other patriotic holiday. They were all taken in the fall in Northern Arizona.
Friday, July 1, 2022
Patriot of Another Country
July, of course, celebrates American Independence Day. Demonstrations of patriotism will abound. If you wish to see old July 4th related posts on this blog, please choose the "Fourth of July", "patriotism", or "politics" links on the left sidebar (on the desktop version).
- That which is imposing here on earth has always something of the quality of the fallen angel who is beautiful but without peace, great in his conceptions and exertions but without success, proud and lonely.
- Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
- A generation that has taken a beating is always followed by a generation that deals one.
Thursday, July 1, 2021
What's Your Path?
Some quotes to ponder as you hike this summer... or not 😉
"Only those who wonder will find new paths." --Norwegian Proverb
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
Pro-Life Bona Fides
Being pro-life, really being pro-life, means realizing you wanted these lives in the world when you see disagreeable toddlers in the grocery store or are seated near crying children on a plane. Oh, and blaming it on bad parenting (as in "I'm pro-life, and the mother should definitely have had these children, but they're only being awful because she's a bad parent") doesn't count. It also may not be true.
Being pro-life isn't easy for anyone. It's not easy for the mother who bore children at times that weren't convenient for her. But it's also not easy on the rest of society. If you're Christian and pro-life, it doesn't fit the full Biblical ethic to make it solely "that woman's problem." Be pro-life in the best sense of the word, and embrace the messiness that comes from children being in the world!
Sunday, August 2, 2020
The Second Coming
*Widening gyre: cycles or circular motions; Yeats was referring to his belief in cycles of history. He felt that an orderly one that came with the birth of Christ was about to give way to chaos. [This writer, looking at history, would not agree it had been all that orderly since Christ's birth.] The times just after First World War, with the concurrent 'flu pandemic, brought a lot of "apocalyptic" thinking about. The devastation of those two events was enormous.
**"The center cannot hold" is taken by some political scientists or laymen to suggest that a third, centrist party cannot take off in places like the United States. The touchstone for the metaphor may actually be military: The center of a battle line being broken through. It may also be Yeats' sense that society's ties to religion or other traditional cultures or worldviews are being torn apart. In this sense, it would be things that "center people" rather than a Centrist view.
However, in our current tribalistic political times, it's sad thing that a Center once created by compromise cannot be heard. It's not totally gone (though it seems more and more people are taking sides, and the rude voices try to drown the Center from both sides), but it doesn't have voice in our current society. Note, also, Yeats saying the worse are "full of passionate intensity."
(I would argue that our "First past the post" election system, the winner takes all idea, is a big part of the problem. With ranked choice voting, more people risk voting for others in multi-party systems, not feeling they're going to "throw the vote" to the candidate they really DON'T like. They put that person 2nd, and if their preferred candidate is taken out of competition, their #2 vote still counts for something. And it can go beyond #2, as far down as ranking is deemed feasible.)
***Spiritus Mundi: spirit of the world; the collective spirit of humankind. According to Yeats, it is a mystical concept, ''a universal memory and a 'muse' of sorts that provides inspiration to the poet or write."
****Apparently the AntiChrist, trying to mock and mimic Christ with its birth in a figurative Bethlehem. Interesting, how is it slouching before birth? Is this an accidental oversight? Or is this a description of something so horrific it forces whatever its maternal creation is to slouch off in an evil journey before birth that mocks the holy one of Mary (pregnant with Jesus) and Joseph? [Thoughts of Voldemort in Harry Potter, before he gets his body back. come to mind. Also, a shadowy Tash overtaking Narnia in the last of the Chronicles of Narnia.]
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
The [Slave's] Complaint*
[written to be sung to the popular ballad, Admiral Hosier's Ghost]
Afric's coast I left forlorn;
To increase a stranger's treasures,
O'er the raging billows borne.
Men from England bought and sold me,
Paid my price in paltry gold;
But, though theirs they have enroll'd me,
Minds are never to be sold.
Still in thought as free as ever,
Me from my delights to sever,
Me to torture, me to task?
Fleecy locks, and black complexion
Cannot forfeit nature's claim;
Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same.
Why did all creating Nature
Make the plant for which we toil?
Sighs must fan it, tears must water,
Sweat of ours must dress the soil.
Think, ye masters, iron-hearted,
Lolling at your jovial boards;
Think how many backs have smarted
For the sweets your cane affords.
Is there, as ye sometimes tell us,
Is there one who reigns on high?
Has he bid you buy and sell us,
Speaking from his throne the sky?
Ask him, if your knotted scourges,
Matches, blood-extorting screws,
Are the means that duty urges
Agents of his will to use?
Hark! He answers!—Wild tornadoes,
Strewing yonder sea with wrecks;
Wasting towns, plantations, meadows,
Are the voice with which he speaks.
He, foreseeing what vexations
Afric's sons should undergo,
Fix'd their tyrants' habitations
Where his whirlwinds answer.**
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Changes Prompted by 1918 Flu Pandemic
The 1918 global flu pandemic, coming in the wake of WWI, was a travesty. So many people were shaken by it, and by their responses (sometimes more selfish than they would have thought of themselves), as well as their survivors' guilt, that first-hand accounts of the flu largely disappeared.
However, the whole tragedy prompted some positive changes that stay with us. Here is a slide show accounting of some of those changes:
Daily Mail: 10 Major Changes Resulting from the 1918 Flu Pandemic
I was really surprised this event was given so much credit for countering "eugenics." Eugenics was the study of how to arrange human reproduction to increase the passing down of "desirable" inherited characteristics. That meant so-called less desirable people were forcibly sterilized (including in the U.S.) There were attempts to promote abortion more heavily among the poor. The 1918 pandemic helped people realize that the conditions of poverty, not personal "defects", allowed diseases to spread more rapidly among the poor.
Francis Galton, an Englishman, was largely responsible for first developing this line of thinking. In the U.S., Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, came to believe in eugenics. (It's not true, however, that she did it for racially motivated reasons. In "The Eugenic Vale of Birth Control Propaganda" (1921), she wrote that "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective." Eugenics was finally dealt its death blow after the Nazi's abhorrent use of it.
Friday, June 5, 2020
Juneteenth
Juneteenth -- a blending of the words June and nineteenth -- is the oldest known US celebration of the end of slavery. It commemorates June 19, 1865. That's the day that Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and told slaves of their emancipation from slavery.
"In accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free," Granger read to the crowd that day. It came more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1980, Texas was the first state to make Juneteenth a state holiday, although it had been celebrated informally since 1865.