The State of The Union..................

.........................................Politics in America, circa 2017.

What did you say.....................................?

For a minute there I thought you said the Vatican was calling for the use of force against ISIS.  Holy Sermon on the Mount, Batman.

Ouch............

"Failures are skinned knees - painful, but superficial, and they heal quickly."
-H. Ross Perot

Addiction.................

"...The nurses laughed along with him; people always laughed and smiled with Dick Beardsley.  Then the doctors came, and they cut away his clothes and saw the extent of his injuries.  The nurses stopped laughing.  They wouldn't look him in the eye.  Dick felt a stab of fear.  And on the heels of the fear, from a place that didn't seem like his leg but a place beyond his leg, he felt the first cold touch of pain.
     Things moved very quickly then.  They took him to a room and hooked him up with an IV-drip as the pain spread like black floodwater and panic rose in Dick's chest.  He knew how to handle pain; he was a marathoner, after all, which is another way of saying he was a pain wizard.  But this was something different.  This was black and cold and overwhelming.  The nurses had him hooked up to a bag of clear liquid that looked like his dad's gin.  What could that watery stuff do against the black pain massing up from his mangled let, punctured lung, fractured wrist, broken ribs, severe concussion, and cracked vertebrae?
     But just as the black tide was about to swallow him whole, the Demerol molecules washed over his brain's opioid receptors. Dick rocketed into a new and wonderful world.  A world of float and dazzle and laughter and light and peace and no strain, no worry, nor corn to get in, no seconds to save, no falling-down Swedish farm with 9-foot-long timber wolves prowling the woods to tear you limb from limb and PTOs spinning in the yard to do the same.  Nothing nothing nothing but pure joy.  Never in his days had Dick experienced anything remotely like this.  Mindful of his parents' example, he had never touched alcohol and never considered recreational drugs, not even marijuana.
     The Demerol hit him harder than the packed, frozen earth of the barnyard.  Here was truth and light, something so infinitely more pleasing than farming or fishing or running as to be laughable.  This was home.  It was so wonderful that is some higher power told him he could go back, avoid the accident, but never take Demerol, Dick wouldn't hesitate - he would turn the offer down flat.
-John Brant, as excerpted from Duel In The Sun

Plastics........................

Earth Day passed yesterday without much notice from this wee
corner of the blogosphere.  In case you are interested in saving
the planet, you might want to watch some George Carlin, as he
puts it all into perspective.



thanks mark

About George Orwell........

     "It was in Orwell's nature to be an ethically alert and active person; but he was also a skeptical rationalist, quick to spot the fake, the dishonest, the pretentious.  He had no patience with those who romanticize the poor.  He saw that poverty can debase people, turn them into monstrous exploiters of one another.  He had even less patience, naturally, with the wealthy and powerful, or the high falutin' academic world, or the self-important literary one, because he knew their sins of omission and commission were plentiful, and bore the additional responsibility that goes with privilege: not only a responsibility avoided but a capability shunned to extend help to others far less comfortable.  He ended up a loner, disgusted with Tory Britain, yet thoroughly troubled by England's postwar socialist crowd, among whom, he knew, could be found any number of self-centered, condescending, willfully manipulative, and tricky characters.  He had no great love for America's conquering materialism, but Lord, he saw Stalinist Russia to be Hell itself.  A cranky eccentric with respect to 'principalities and powers,' he had, nevertheless, become an increasingly celebrated writer, hailed at the end of his life, he himself knew, by the wrong crowd for the wrong reasons, for his anti-Stalinism was never meant to give courage to those who cared not a whit about the fate of working-class people in contemporary industrial societies."
-Robert Coles, Harvard Diary
as excerpted from the essay Orwell's Decency


thanks doug

Aging gracefully................