Scarecrows...................

The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh

 

Scarecrow, murmur, tell the tale,

Of winds that howl and rains that wail.

Point the way, through dusk and dawn,

A silent guide till night is gone.

No voice to cry, no tears to weep,

Yet dreams he holds in straw-filled sleep

Of fields alive, of skies that hum,

Of harvests reaped when Autumn's come.

Since ancient times his spirit flies,

Carried forth in brooding skies.

Scarecrow stands, both proud and meek,

Telling tales the winds bespeak

-Rob Firchau

equal.........................

 

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. 

-so begins Kurt Vonnegut's classic short story Harrison Bergeron

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Healthy thinking..................

No one wants to hear this right now because we’re living in scary times but things will get better eventually. They’re likely to get worse before they get better, potentially much worse, but I have faith in our human spirit to continue moving forward.

-Ben Carlson, as culled from here

On emotion-based click-bait versions of reality....

     In such a world, where truth routinely loses to emotion-based click-bait versions of reality, how can you know what is true and what is not?   And more importantly, how can you act for the greater good—or even your own good—when you can't reliably sort the truth from the lies?
     If you buy into the full-scary narratives promoted by either the political left or the political right, you're probably experiencing loserthink.  A more useful way to think of the political news is that nearly every major story is exaggerated to the point of falsehood, with the intention of scaring the public.  If you think the frightened feeling you are getting from the news is legitimate and appropriate, you probably don't understand how the business model of news has changed

-Scott Adams, Loserthink, How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Almost seems to be the point....

"If we use up our energies panicking about phantom hobgoblins, we might have none left for the real scares . . ."

-Matt Ridley, taken out of context from this blog post

Witches..................................

     Hobbes was sceptical of tales about ghosts and witches, and this scepticism was itself regarded in some quarters as evidence of irreligion, or at least insufficient respect for spiritual matter.  Denying that there was such a thing as a witch was almost as bad as being one.  There were other enlightened thinkers who shared Hobbes's disdain for stories of supernatural creatures stalking the villages of England;  but the belief in witches was a powerful force in his day, perhaps because these were unsettled times.  A third or more of all the people executed for witchcraft in England between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries were dispatched in the mid-1640s by Matthew Hopkins, the self-described "Witch-finder General," and his associates, just when Hobbes was working out the consequences of his materialist philosophy.

-Anthony Gottlieb,  The Dream Of Enlightenment:  The Rise Of Modern Philosophy

If you want to read something scary, read this.