Thursday, August 31, 2017
Remember.................................
“Whether you experience heaven or hell, remember that it is your mind which creates them.”
-Timothy Leary
Change......................
There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man.
How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.
-Leo Tolstoy
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Broken rules......................................
If a complete book of surfing's rules could be written, it wouldn't necessarily help unless you could also learn the "know-how" that comes in faithful practice. You could read and understand all of its instructions, grasp them intellectually, and still not know how to put any rule into action. As a new wave situation presents itself, you have to know how to go on in the next moment. To borrow from Ludwig Wittgenstein, the enigmatic early mid-twentieth-century philosopher, if rules were all you had to go by, they couldn't tell you how to "go on" from what came before, even with suggestive coaching. Given only rules, with no further sense of how to apply them to a fresh particular moment, you'd have to look to further rules to tell you which rules to follow and when. But then you'd also need rules for following those rules, and so on, without end, ad infinitum, all the way up. Which is absurd, or impossible, or just not what we do in learning to surf.
-Aaron James, Surfing With Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning
On "catching"...........................
Even during the depths of the depression, there were still people who became wealthy and even millionaires. The thought of poverty was "catching" in those days, but somehow those people did not buy into it; therefore, it did not apply to them. For negativity to apply to our life, we must first subscribe to it and, secondly, give it the energy of belief. If we have the power to make negativity manifest in out life, obviously our mind also has the power to make its converse come true.
-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
Sunday, August 27, 2017
Growing up with Willie.......................
Music in the blood. Music in the house and music in the fields. Music in the air, in the songs sung by the birds flying through the clear blue Texas sky, in the sound of the wind and the thundering rain. Music in the heart of my father, a fine fiddler, and my mother, a beautiful singer, who gave birth first to my sister, Bobbie, and wonder child of music, before two years later giving birth to me.
Mother was Myrle, three-quarters Cherokee Indian, who'd traveled down from dirt-poor Arkansas with Ira, my father, who had followed his father, Alfred, and his mother, Nancy, to Abbott, Texas, where the land was dark and fertile and the farmland offered a degree of hope.
When I came into this world on April 29, 1933, hope was a sparse commodity. The Great Depression had hit the homeland hard. As an adult, I realized that I had grown up in rural Texas during one of the worst periods in American economic history. But that was something I learned out of books. What I learned out of life was something entirely different. What I learned was love. Like music, love was everywhere I looked and everything I felt. Fact is, I equated music with love, 'cause to hear or play or sing a song put me in a loving mood.
-Willie Nelson, It's A Long Story: My Life
Well, isn't it..............................
Nowadays, in our more leisurely style of capitalism, the workaday surfer can be found at surf breaks the world over, stoked in gushing exuberance about the better waves of the day, feeling lighter about the stresses of work, acting as if the whole meaning of human existence can be found in the simple act of riding a wave.
-Aaron James, Surfing With Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning
Surf's up...................................
The Chantays..................................................................Pipeline
Child-like...............................
The Warrior of the Light behaves like a child.
People are shocked; they have forgotten that a child needs to have fun and to play, to be slightly irreverent and to ask awkward, childish questions, to talk nonsense that not even he believes in.
And they say, horrified: "So this is the spiritual path, is it? He's so immature!"
The Warrior feels proud of such comments. And he remains in touch with God through his innocence and his joy, without ever losing sight of his mission.
-Paulo Coelho, Warrior Of The Light: A Manual
Opening paragraphs.................
A song is a short story. It might have been my buddy Harlan Howard, a writer I met in Nashville in the sixties, who first said a song ain't nothing but three cords and the truth.
Well, songs come easy to me. I've written hundreds of them. I see them as little stories that fall out of our lives and imaginations. If I have to struggle to write a song, I stop before I start. I figure if it don't flow easy, it's not meant to be.
The truth should flow easy. Same for songs and stories. If you overanalyze or torture yourself to bring them to life, something's wrong. Just the way a mountain stream, bubbling with fresh clean water, keeps flowing, stories need to flow free and easy. The source of water, like the source of the songs, comes from on high. It's a natural thing. It's a beautiful thing.
-Willie Nelson, It's A Long Story: My Life
The world's done gone crazy...............
Willie Nelson.........................................Come On Back Jesus
Come on back Jesus (Come on back Jesus)
Come on back Jesus
And pick up John Wayne on the way
The world's done gone crazy,
And it seems to get worse everyday
So come on back Jesus,
And pick up John Wayne on the way
Time to take off the glove
They just don't respect peace anymore
But if we have old John Wayne
We know he can swing from the floor
While he kicks their butt
We'll just stand there and watch him and pray
So come on back Jesus,
And pick up John Wayne on the way
Come on back Jesus (Come on back Jesus)
Come on back Jesus
And pick up John Wayne on the way
The world's gettin' crazy,
And it seems to get worse everyday
So come on back Jesus,
And pick up John Wayne on the way
It's getting real hairy
If only old duke man was here
He'd call me old bastard
From out past the atmosphere
Lord the news looked so scary
When I glanced at the paper today
So come on back Jesus,
And pick up John Wayne on the way
Come on back Jesus (Come on back Jesus)
Come on back Jesus
And pick up John Wayne on the way
The world's gettin' crazy,
And it seems to get worse everyday
So come on back Jesus,
And pick up John Wayne on the way
Come on back Jesus, come on back Jesus
Come on back Jesus
And pick up John Wayne on the way
Choose wisely.............................
One of the laws of consciousness is: We are only subject to a negative thought or belief if we consciously say that it applies to us. We are free to choose not to buy into a negative belief system.
-David Hawkins
Saturday, August 26, 2017
On the importance of a culture............
The first thing to understand is that the public peace - the sidewalk and street peace - of cities is not kept primarily by police, as necessary as police are. It is primarily kept by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. In some city areas - older public housing projects and streets with very high population turnover are often conspicuous examples - the keeping of public sidewalk law and order is left almost entirely to the police and special guards. Such places are jungles. No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down.
-Jane Jacobs, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities, 1961
Friday, August 25, 2017
Me too..................................
Rare Earth ...............................................I Just Want To Celebrate
Wisdom...........................
1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
- Respect for self
- Respect for others
- Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6-18 may be found here.
Thanks Michael
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
face the fact........................................
“Why do we love the idea that people might be secretly working together to control and organise the world? Because we do not like to face the fact that our world runs on a combination of chaos, incompetence, and confusion.”
– attributed to Jonathan Cainer
via
Might be the news media's main goal as well...
My sense is that we have seen a decline in thinking about politics as a tool for problem-solving. Instead, we act as if our main goal in politics is anger validation.
-Arnold Kling, as excerpted from here
I don't always read David Brooks..............
..................................but when I do, it is usually because he has written something like this:
But throughout history the wiser minds have understood that anger and moral posturing are not a good antidote to rage and fanaticism. Competing vitriols only build on each other.
In fact, the most powerful answer to fanaticism is modesty. Modesty is an epistemology directly opposed to the conspiracy mongering mind-set. It means having the courage to understand that the world is too complicated to fit into one political belief system. It means understanding there are no easy answers or malevolent conspiracies that can explain the big political questions or the existential problems. Progress is not made by crushing some swarm of malevolent foes; it’s made by finding balance between competing truths — between freedom and security, diversity and solidarity. There’s always going to be counter-evidence and mystery. There is no final arrangement that will end conflict, just endless searching and adjustment.
-as culled from his August 15th op-ed in the NYT
Monday, August 21, 2017
Hey Sweetie..........................
Oh, it's a long, long while
From May to December
But the days grow short,
When you reach September.
When the autumn weather
Turn leaves to flame
One hasn't got time
For the waiting game.
Oh the days dwindle down
To a precious few . . .
September, November . . .
And these few precious days
I'll spend with you.
These precious days
I'll spend with you.
Oh the days dwindle down
To a precious few . . .
September, November . . .
And these few precious days
I'll spend with you.
These precious days
I'll spend with you.
These precious days
I'll spend with you.
Fifty years ago.....................
watch some wondrous lip syncing, before it gets disappeared....
Saturday, August 19, 2017
On seeking answers.....................
How about the experts? Their confusion is more sophisticated, wrapped in impressive jargon and elaborate mental construction. They have predetermined belief systems into which they try to squeeze you. It seems to work for a while and, then, it is just back to one's original state.
It used to be that we could count on social institutions, but they have had their day; nobody trusts them anymore. We now have more watchdogs than institutions. The hospitals are monitored by multiple agencies. Nobody has time for the patients, who get lost in the shuffle. Look down the corridors. There are no doctors or nurses. They are in the offices doing paperwork. The whole scene is dehumanized.
"Well," you say, "there have to be some experts who have the answers." When upset, you go to a doctor or a psychiatrist, an analyst, a social worker, or an astrologer. You take up religion, get philosophy, take the Erhard Seminars Training, tap yourself with EFT. You get your chakras balanced, try some reflexology, go for ear acupuncture, do iridology, get healed with lights and crystals.
You meditate, chant a mantra, drink green tea, try the Pentecostals, breathe in fire, and speak in tongues. You get centered, learn NLP, try actualizations, work on visualizations, study psychology, join a Jungian group. You get Rolfed, try psychedelics, get a psychic reading, jog, jazzercise, have colonics, get into nutrition and aerobics, hang up-side down, wear psychic jewelry. Get more insight, bio-feedback, Gestalt therapy.
You see your homeopath, chiropractor, naturopath. You try kinesiology, discover your Enneagram type, get your meridans balanced, join a consciousness-raising group, take tranquilizers. You get some hormone shots, try cell salts, have your minerals balanced, pray, implore, and beseech. You learn astral projection. Become a vegetarian. Eat only cabbage. Try macrobiotics, go organic, eat no GMO. Meet up with Native American medicine men, do a sweat lodge. Try Chinese herbs, moxiocombustion, shiatsu, acupressure, feng shui. You go to India. Find a new guru. Take off your clothes. Swim in the Ganges. Stare at the sun. Shave your head. Eat with your fingers, get really messy, shower in cold water.
Sing tribal chants. Relive past lives. Try hypnotic regression. Scream a primal scream. Punch pillows. Get Feldenkraised. Join a marriage encounter group. Go to Unity. Write affirmations. Make a vision board. Get re-birthed. Cast the I Ching. Do the Tarot cards. Study Zen. Take more courses and workshops. Read lots of books. Do transactional analysis. Get yoga lessons. Get into the occult. Study magic. Work with a kahuna. Take a shamanic journey. Sit under a pyramid. Read Nostradamus. Prepare for the worst.
Go on a retreat. Try fasting. Take amino acids. Get a negative ion generator. Join a mystery school. Learn a secret handshake. Try toning. Try color therapy. Try subliminal tapes. Take brain enzymes, anti-depressants, flower remedies. Look into strange fermented oddities from faraway places. Hold hands in a circle and get high. Renounce sex and going to the movies. Wear some yellow robes. Join a cult.
Try the endless varieties of psychotherapy. Take wonder drugs. Subscribe to lots of journals. Try the Pritikin diet. Eat just grapefruit. Get your palm read. Think New Age thought. Improve the ecology. Save the planet. Get an aura read. Carry a crystal. Get a Hindu sidereal astrological interpretation. Visit a transmedium. Go for sex therapy. Try Tantric sex. Get blessed by Baba Somebody. Join an anonymous group. Travel to Lourdes. Soak in the hot springs. Join Arica. Wear therapeutic sandals. Get grounded. Get more prana and breathe out that stale black negativity. Try golden needle acupuncture. Check out snake gallbladders. Try chakra breathing. Get your aura cleaned. Meditate in Cheops, the great pyramid in Egypt. ...
Intuitively, we know that somewhere there is an ultimate answer. We stumble down dark byways into cul-de-sacs and blind alleys; we get exploited and taken, disillusioned, fed up, and we keep on trying.
Where is our blind spot? Why can't we find the answer? ...
Maybe the solution is not "out there," and that's why we can'f find it. Maybe we have so many belief systems that we are blinded to the obvious.
-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway Of Surrender
Ed Note: Only tried twenty out of the more than 140 - so far.
Friday, August 18, 2017
Trying my best........................
“Every advance in information technology involves choosing what you want to preserve and what you want to ditch. Scanning rare books on to microfilm is a costly business. The library won't let you do it yourself - they decide first which books should be scanned and which should just rot away in the basement. Against that eventuality, people should start hoarding the kind of books committees of rational people will decide against scanning into a database.”
-Robert Twigger
Fifty years ago..........................
Interstellar Overdrive.....................................................Pink Floyd
Probably should post the psychedelia warning.
When she is right, she is right...............
This intense policing of the virtue of others — it's not even virtuous.
-Ann Althouse, from this post
It is actually our salvation........
And if we were all perfectly rational beings who have no behavioral flaws whatsoever...
But…
WE. ARE. NOT. RATIONAL.
-culled from this Investing in Yourself (Even When It Seems Irrational) post by Ben Carlson
Got this one mastered..................
5. A challenge: Create time and space this weekend to do nothing.
-from this 25 x 5 from Nicholas Bate
Seriously....................................
The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.
-Margot Fonteyn
Fifty years ago.........................
At the book store....................................................
“I'm in a constant process of thinking about things. ”
-Richard Brautigan
Thursday, August 17, 2017
Scott Adams knows a thing or two.....
If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble you might have noticed that President Trump never campaigned to be our moral leader. He presented himself as – in his own words “no angel” – with a set of skills he offered to use in the public’s interest. He was big on law and order, and equal justice under the law. But he never offered moral leadership. Voters elected him with that knowledge. Evidently, Republicans don’t depend on politicians for moral leadership. That’s probably a good call.
When the horror in Charlottesville shocked the country, citizens instinctively looked to their president for moral leadership. The president instead provided a generic law and order statement. Under pressure, he later named specific groups and disavowed the racists. He was clearly uncomfortable being our moral lighthouse. That’s probably why he never described his moral leadership as an asset when running for office. We observe that he has never been shy about any other skill he brings to the job, so it probably isn’t an accident when he avoids mentioning any ambitions for moral leadership. If he wanted us to know he would provide that service, I think he would have mentioned it by now.
Spengler knows some things too...........
The best solution is a compromise which removes the issue from politics altogether. ... That won't do much good, but there isn't much good to be done. The best outcome would be to defuse the issue, and hope that people can walk away from it and get back to the business of getting an education and making a living. Nothing will console Southerners for their defeat in the Civil War; nothing will compensate African-Americans for hundreds of lost years. The best anyone can do is to find a way to live with it and get on with life.
-as he concludes this blog post
How are we doing..........................?
The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers. He must not feel automatically menaced by them.
-Jane Jacobs, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities
Nature......................
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”
-Gregory Bateson
Sunday, August 13, 2017
On nothingness................................
The best sort of ruler promises nothing, and delivers on his promise every time. The worst sort of tyrant has “plans.”...
“That government is best which governs least,” said Henry David Thoreau. Well, yes and no. The statement is used to champion weak government. But I am for a government that is unbreakably strong.
Chinese sages understood this, too, including the mystical Lao Tzu and those old Tories, Confucius and Mencius: that it takes tremendous power to do nothing. Voting whittles that power away.
-as excerpted from this David Warren post
Consider...........................
Consider how the species we call whales have dwelled on this planet fifty-six million years longer than we have and yet they never found it necessary to invent Trident submarines and other fanciful ways of destroying life.
-Matthew Fox
pix via
Fifty years ago...................
The Sunshine Company.......................Back On The Street Again
Saturday, August 12, 2017
On conceptual divisions.........
"... perhaps the great disaster of human history is one that happened to or within religion: that is, the conceptual division between the holy and the world, the excerpting of the Creator from the creation."
-Wendell Berry
Radical amazement.........................
“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
-Abraham Heschel
photo via
Fifty years ago......................
Kenny O'Dell.....................................................Beautiful People
On conspiracy theories................
Friend Bilbo offers nine more cartoons on the subject. Always remember: Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get you.
Friday, August 11, 2017
Fifty years ago...................
Bunny Sigler.............Let The Good Times Roll And Feel So Good
Thursday, August 10, 2017
Fifty years ago.....................
John Hartford................................................Gentle On My Mind
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
Just wondering what "normal rigor" looks like....
Every prominent instance of journalism that proceeds with less than normal rigor when the subject touches on social justice feeds a growing national impulse to dismiss everything published about these subjects—even important, rigorous, accurate articles. Large swathes of the public now believe the mainstream media is more concerned with stigmatizing wrong-think and being politically correct than being accurate. The political fallout from this shift has been ruinous to lots of social-justice causes—causes that would thrive in an environment in which the public accepted the facts.
-Conor Friedersdorf, as taken from here
Opening paragraphs.................
The propensity to barter and exchange is an innate human characteristic. An inclination to divine the future is another deeply ingrained trait. Together they comprise the act of financial speculation. "All life is speculation," declared the celebrated nineteenth-century American trader James R. Keene, "the spirit of speculation is born with men." For the earliest know historical cases of speculation we must turn to ancient Rome during the Republic of the second century B.C. By this date, the Roman financial system had developed many of the characteristics of modern capitalism: markets flourished because Roman law allowed the free transfer of property, money was lent out at interest, money changers dealt in foreign currencies, and payments across the Roman territories could be make by bankers'draft. Capital concentrated in Rome, as it later did in Amsterdam, London, and New York. The idea of credit had also developed, along with a primitive form of insurance for ships and other forms of property. The people of Rome exhibited a passion for the accumulation of wealth, matched by an extravagance in its display and consumption. Gaming was common.
-Edward Chancellor, Devil Take The Hindmost: A History Of Financial Speculation
Fifty years ago..................
The Parliaments..............................................(I Wanna) Testify
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
In principle..........................
The study of the psychology of speculators is as valuable as it ever was. I think the clearest summing up of the whole thing was expressed by Thomas F. Woodlock when he declared: "The principles of successful stock speculation are based on the supposition that people will continue in the future to make the mistakes that they have made in the past."
-Jesse Livermore
Fifty years ago......................
Buffalo Springfield (actually Neil Young)..........Expecting To Fly
A few stray thoughts...............
As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.
It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give
As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.
There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served.
-Jane Jacobs, as culled from her introduction to her 1961 book, The Death and Life Of Great American Cities
One after another....................
I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced that they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.
-attributed to Ellen Goodman
Opening paragraphs.................
The twelfth day of July 1817 saw the arrival of the first of those sultry, sweaty summer days that Concord's farmers knew as dog days. Their almanacs marked these as beginning July 3 and ending August 11 - the forty-day period preceding the rising of the Dog Star, Sirius - but they knew that the first furnace blase of austral air could come a week or more on either side of the third. this was good grass-growing weather; red-top, herd's-grass, sheep's fescue, and Canadian bluegrass and the ripening rye and wheat presented a checkerboard of greens, purples, reds, and golds. Walking the fields were haymakers in white shirts and straw hats, occasionally setting aside their scythes and calling out to one another.
-Kevin Dann, Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau
But, the experts told us......................
There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend- the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars - we could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterday's and day-before-yesterday's suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money, and perhaps even solve the traffic problem.
But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism, and general social helplessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good book store. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering place than others. Commercial centers that are lackluster imitations of standardized suburban chain-store shopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.
-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life Of Great American Cities (1961)
Fifty years ago...................
Bob Crewe Generation................................Music to Watch Girls By
Other than the cold showers, no caffeine.......
..................no sugar, juicing, and doing something terrifying every day, this is a pretty good list for living life large.
Monday, August 7, 2017
Decisions, decisions, decisions......
Every day, either you live by priorities or you live by pressures. There is no other option. Either you decide what is important in your life, or you let other people decide what is important in your life.
-Rick Warren
The more things change...................
A good Parson once said, that where Mystery begins, Religion ends. Cannot I say, as truly at least, of human Laws, that where Mystery begins, Justice ends? It is hard to say, whether the Doctors of Law or Divinity have made the greater Advances in the lucrative Business of Mystery. The Lawyers, as well as the Theologians, have erected another Reason besides Natural Reason; and the Result has been, another Justice besides Natural Justice. They have so bewildered the World and themselves in unmeaning Forms and Ceremonies, and so perplexed the plainest Matters with metaphysical Jargon, that it carries the highest Danger to a Man out of that Profession, to make the least Step without their Advice and Assistance.
Edmund Burke, 1756, as excerpted from here
Say it isn't so...............................................
.................................Be interesting to see how this turns out. I'm old-fashioned enough to believe that a good salesperson is a value-added proposition.
Fifty years ago....................
First Edition (Kenny Rogers)...........................Just Dropped In
Purists may say this is from 1968, but it was recorded in the fall of 1967
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Qualifications.......................
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
-Edmund Burke, 1791 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly
As processes go................................
For the most part, God lets the Evolution Factory handle reality. The Evolution Factory is one of his better projects. Brilliant really.
After all, if You were God and were going to create and run an entire universe, You wouldn’t really want to be running around it all the time doing hands-on alterations on everything from quarks to galaxies. Micromanagement is boring and doing a bunch of handwork on the entire universe for all eternity can get old really quick. It’s much better just to create a process that will essentially hunt and peck along for order across billions of years and, sooner or later, come up with a life form that can both apprehend You and make a hot-fudge sundae at the same time.
You were meant to be here...................
Emerson, Lake & Palmer.............................From The Beginning
There might have been things I missed
But don't be unkind
It don't mean I'm blind
Perhaps there's a thing or two
I think of lying in bed
I shouldn't have said
But there it is
You see it's all clear
You were meant to be here
From the beginning
Maybe I might have changed
And not been so cruel
Not been such a fool
Whatever was done is done
I just can't recall
It doesn't matter at all
You see it's all clear
You were meant to be here
From the beginning
Verse.....................
My son, forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my commandments:
2 For length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.
3 Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart:
4 So shalt thou find favour and good understanding in the sight of God and man.
5 Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
6 In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.
7 Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the Lord, and depart from evil.
8 It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones.
-Proverbs 3: 1-8 The Holy Bible, KJV
to minister.........................
Happiness lies not it the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt, culled from his first inaugural address, March 4, 1933
Recontextualizing.......................
Humor is a means of detachment or recontextualizing the events of life. It is a way of being lighthearted and "wearing the world like a loose garment." It leads to compassion for the totality of human life and reveals the option that one can play at life without getting involved in it as though it were an exhausting life-and-death struggle.
-David R. Hawkins
Standard..............................
"Most folks figure a true friend is someone who accepts them as they are. But that is dangerous garbage to believe." He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. "The kid who works the drive-through at your local fast-food restaurant accepts you for who your are - because he doesn't care anything about you. But a true friend holds you to a higher standard. A true friend brings out the best in you." Jones cocked his head and leaned across the table as if he were about to tell them a secret. "A best friend," he said softly, "will always tell you the truth ... and a wise best friend will include a healthy dose of perspective."
-Andy Andrews, The Noticer: Sometimes, all a person needs is a little perspective
Saturday, August 5, 2017
Fifty years ago.......................
The Bee Gees......................................................To Love Somebody
Spengler makes a point on..............
.....................historical immigration, and suggests some new lines for the President's Senior Advisor. History is a complicated thing. Probably why we don't think too much about it these days.
Acosta repeatedly interrupted Miller, chanting "Give me your tired, your poor...," a line from Emma Lazarus' 1883 sonnet The New Colossus which is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty. If anything, Miller handled the CNN journalist too gently. He might have said: America had no restrictions to immigration in 1883, and millions of white European immigrants poured into the American heartland. To accommodate them we drove out the Native Americans. By 1890 there were only 250,000 Native Americans left in the United States, compared to 2 million or more before European settlers arrived. In other words, we gave privileges to white people and killed or displaced people of color. You can argue the merits of this policy, but we don't want to return to a situation in which immigration occurs at the expense of people who were here first."
Opening paragraphs................
On winter days when she was a child, Jane's grandmother told her, they'd skate on the canal, along twenty miles of it frozen solid near their house. Back in the 1850's, before the railroad finally won out against it, the canal was how you got clean-burning anthracite coal from the mines of central Pennsylvania to big-city markets. It would be loaded on shallow-draft boats, maybe fifteen tons of it at a time, then towed down the canal that ran alongside the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, by mules on the adjacent towpath. A dollar a ton, you could figure, from Wilkes-Barre, in the heart of anthracite country, to Philadelphia. Making the boats, and repairing them, was its own little industry. And since the 1830s a key center of it was Espy, a town of a few hundred drawn out along the north bank of the canal, home to lock tenders and canal maintenance workers, as well as a tannery, a pottery, and a brickyard. From early spring, when the ice melted, until late fall, according to a 1936 memoir, the locals, "set the tempo of their lives to the tireless plodding hoof beats of the mules." Boys in town looked with envy at those their own age driving the mules or else lolling on the decks of passing boats.
-Robert Kanigel, Eyes On The Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs
On causes.......................
No need to understand why cities decline, she counseled, only why they prosper: "The most elementary point is the most startling. There are no causes of stagnation. There are no causes of poverty. There are only causes of growth."
-Robert Kanigel, from the Introduction to Eyes On The Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs
Thursday, July 27, 2017
Fifty years ago.....................
Linda Ronstadt & The Stone Poneys....................Different Drum
Twelve truths....................................
Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it’s impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It’s been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It’s so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we’re being punked. It’s filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together. I don’t think it’s an ideal system.
-Anne Lamott, by way of View From the Ledge
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