Sixty years ago..................

 

The Beatles................................Michelle

Odds and ends...............

 

sovereignty.................

 

     The vanity of the ego is endless and vainglorious in its grandiose delusion that it can disprove the existence of God. . . .

     Why does the mind even struggle so valiantly to try to supplant Divinity?  The answer is that it really refutes and secretly hates any sovereignty other than its own.  That is the self-perpetuating core of narcissism.

-David R. Hawkins, Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man

In support of publick virtue.............

 

A general Dissolution of Principles & Manners will more surely overthrow the Liberties of America than the Whole Force of the Common Enemy.  While the People are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their Virtue they will be ready to surrender their Liberties to the first external or internal Invader.  How necessary then is it for those who are determind to transmit the Blessings of Liberty as a fair Inheritance to Posterity, to associate on publick Principles in Support of publick virtue.

-Samuel Adams, from this 2/12/1779 letter

wrestling with catastrophe.............

 

And so we’re in a very dim and grim time, but we have to have a blues sensibility. And the blues is about wrestling with catastrophe, but never allowing catastrophe to have the last word, because we have a love and a courage and a joy inside of us that can never be taken away.

-Cornell West, as lifted from here

Opening paragraphs................

 

     The first time I set eyes on Vincent I was standing in the snow next to my father, trembling under the authority of a loaded shotgun.  I remember that it had been a perfect night for poaching.  January cold and windless.  A full moon had whitewashed the thin layer of fog that lingered above the feeder creeks.  Above the sky was clear; below, the ground hard.  Deer had moved down from the forest to glean the wheat fields on Count Robert de Costebelle's estate.   Buyers in Paris waited in the wings, ready to pay cash for a carcass in good condition.

     I recall my father cursing and I remember wanting to hit him for being old and hardheaded and most of all for getting us caught.  A small gnarly terrier scurried between my feet, uprooting pockets of snow in a fit of agitation.  Vincent stood next to his uncle, Serge Lebuison, gamekeeper of Merlecourt.  The year was 1958.  I was eighteen years old.

-Guy De La Valdène, Red Stag

thanks Rob

Society.....................

 

Society is concerted action, cooperation.

     Society is the outcome of conscious and purposeful behavior.  This does not mean that individuals have concluded contracts by virtue of which they have founded human society.  The actions which have brought about social cooperation and daily bring it about anew do not aim at anything else than cooperation and coadjuvancy with others for the attainment of definite singular ends.  The total complex of the mutual relations created by such concerted actions is called society.  It substitutes collaboration for the—at least conceivable—isolated life of individuals.  Society is division of labor and combination of labor.  In his capacity as an acting animal man becomes a social animal. 

     . . . The individual lives and acts within society.  But society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort.  It exists nowhere else than in the actions of individual men.  It is a delusion to search for it outside the actions of individuals.  To speak of a society's autonomous and independent existence, of its life, its soul, and its actions is a metaphor which can easily lead to crass errors.

-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics