On Lindsey Graham.................................

The really inspiring thing about Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who on June 1st announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, is "his message that the whole world is going down the tubes".  That was the slightly bleak endorsement offered by Stephen Young, a retired business-owner looking on when the senator launched his campaign in Central, the blink-and-you-miss-it country town where he grew up.
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      Mr Graham's survival in South Carolina offers several lessons.  The first is that even deeply conservative places are not monolithic.  South Carolina peach-farmers, for instance, are both powerful and desperate for migrant labour, because their delicate fruit cannot be picked by machine (and locals dislike the work).  In recent years some evangelical Christian pastors have joined business leaders in publicly backing immigration reform, citing biblical injunctions to welcome strangers and preserve families.  Most voters in South Carolina had the idea of rewarding law-breakers.  But most also know that 11m people cannot be rounded up and deported without turning the country into a "concentration camp", says Dale Sutton, a Southern Baptist pastor who has spoken out for reform.  Thus they know that some sort of compromise is unavoidable.

-Two excerpts from this The Economist essay, "Why Lindsey Graham matters"

Chill..................................................

Lee Ritenour.....................................................This Is Love

Come with me..................................

Ryan Tennis & The Clubhouse Band...................Waking Dream

Using honesty to make sense of.............

What do you do when you don’t understand something, don’t have the right words to try to explain it? 
-Scott, sharing a piece of his story

Beauty......................................

found regularly at Radiating Blossom

Uh-oh......................................................

“The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrificed God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world–immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline."

"A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time—but not forever. "

-Eric Voegelin,  as excerpted from here

Contradictions....................................

original copy here

Fifty years ago........................................

Bobby Goldsboro............................................Voodoo Woman

Sometimes you just have to engage........

via

The will to lead.......................................

 “They’ll figure that if a general is going in, it can’t be that rough.”
-Teddy Roosevelt, Jr, securing the beachhead at Normandy

I've long been fascinated by the choices and actions of sons and daughters of famous/dominant fathers.  Do read about Teddy, Jr.   It is quite the story.

via

Wings to fly..........................................

The Allman Brothers Band........Ain't Wasting Time No More

Real risk..................................................

"Some people think self-employment is risky, but the real risk lies in deriving your security from an external source."
-Chris Guillebeau, as excerpted from here

Can I get an Amen............................?

"life doesn't stay fixed."
-happiness myths here

With choice comes.................................

With choice comes freedom, and therefore optimism about our possibilities for the future.  With choice also comes responsibility, which allows us to hold people accountable for their actions.
-Steven Pinker, as excerpted from here

Into............................................

      Without enjoyment like can be endured, and it can even be pleasant.  But it can only be so precariously, depending on luck and the cooperation of  the external environment.  To gain personal control over the quality of experience, however, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, and day out.
-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as excerpted from Flow:  The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Fifty years ago....................................

Dobie Gray.......................................................The In Crowd

The sequence.....................................

Don't look nor wait for 'luck', 'a break', or a kind investing angel.  Work hard, very hard and you'll get really lucky.  Always happens.  But that's the sequence.
-Nicholas Bate, #27 on this list

Sequence.....................................Part 2

Just a reminder for many of us.......................

-full quote here, thanks David

Damned lucky.......................................

We do largely create our own feelings, and we do so by learning (from our parents and others) and by inventing (in our own heads) our own sane and foolish thoughts.
     Create?   Yes, we create.  We consciously and unconsciously choose to think, to feel, and to act in certain self-helping and self-harming ways.
     Not totally.  Not all together.  Not by a long shot!  For we have great help, if you want to call it that, from both our heredity and our environment.
     No, we are hardly born with specific thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  Nor does our environment directly make us act or feel.  But our genes and our social upbringing give us strong tendencies to do (and enjoy) what we do.  And although we usually go along with (or indulge in) these tendencies, we don't exactly have to.  We definitely don't.
     Not that we have unlimited choice or free will.  Heck, no.  We can't, no matter how hard we try, flap our hands and fly.  We can't easily stop our various addictions to such substances as cigarettes, food, and alcohol, or to habits such as procrastination.  We have one hell of a time changing any of our fixed habits.  Alas, we do!
     But we can choose to change ourselves remarkably.  We are able to alter our strongest thoughts, feelings, and actions.  Why?  Because unlike dogs, monkeys, and cockroaches, we are human.  As human beings, we are born with (and can escalate) a trait that other creatures rarely possess:  the ability to think about our thinking.  We are not only natural philosophers, we can philosophize about our philosophy, reason about our reasoning.
     Which is damned lucky!

-Albert Ellis, as excerpted from here