no. 1112

 “No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.” 

Ansel Adams

no. 1111

 “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

Desmond Tutu.

no. 1110

 

no. 1109

 ”For my part, the thing that I would wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendour, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals.”

— Bertrand Russell , The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Ch.III: Competition, p. 49

no. 1108

 I have attended several CPR classes over the years, but was never told this…..

When you are alone and have a heart attack. What are you gonna do then ?

A rarely good post that can't be shared often enough:

1. Take a 2 minute break and read this:

Let's say it's 5:25 pm and you're driving home after an unusually hard day's work.

2. You are really tired and frustrated.

All of a sudden your chest pains. They are starting to radiate in the arm and jaw. It feels like being stabbed in the chest and heart. You're only a few miles away from the nearest hospital or home.

3. Unfortunately you don't know if you can make it..

4. Maybe you've taken CPR training, but the person running the course hasn't told you how to help yourself.

5. How do you survive a heart attack when you're alone when it happens? A person who is feeling weak and whose heart is beating hard has only about 10 seconds before losing consciousness.

6. But you can help yourself by coughing repeatedly and very strongly! Deep breaths before every cough. Coughing should be repeated every second until you arrive at the hospital or until your heart starts to beat normally.

7. Deep breathing gives oxygen to your lungs and coughing movements boost the heart and blood circulation. Heart pressure also helps to restore a normal heartbeat. 

8. Cardiologists say if someone gets this message and passes it on to 10 people, we can expect to save at least one life.

9. FOR WOMEN: You should know that women have additional and different symptoms. Rarely have crushing chest pain or pain in the arms. Often have indigestion and tightness across the back at the bra line plus sudden fatigue.  

Instead of posting jokes, you're helping save lives by spreading this message.

❤️ COPY (hold your finger, click on the text and select copy, go to your own page and where you normally want to write, select finger again and paste)

Unknown

no. 1107

 “In all classes, from the lowest to almost the highest, economic fear governs men's thoughts by day and their dreams at night, making their work nerve-racking and their leisure unrefreshing. This ever-present terror is, I think, the main cause of the mood of madness which has swept over great parts of the civilized world.”

― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. VII, The Case for Socialism, 3. Economic Insecurity, p. 90

'In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays' is a 1935 collection of essays by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. The collection includes essays on the subjects of sociology, philosophy and economics. In the eponymous essay, Russell proposes that a balanced allocation of labour, yielding shorter workdays, would decrease unemployment and heighten human happiness through expanded leisure time, consequently encouraging greater involvement in artistic and scientific pursuits.

no. 1106

 "The founding fathers mistrusted government power, and they had very good reason to, as do we. This is why they tried to institutionalize the separation of powers, the right to think, the right to speak, to be heard, to assemble, to complain to the government about its abuses, to be able to vote or impeach malefactors out of office.

John Stuart Mill talked eloquently in his essay "On Liberty" on the importance of free speech, of vigorous interaction. Let me just make one quote here from On Liberty:

"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generations, those who dissent from the opinion still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit: the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error."

Despite our best efforts, some things we believe are probably wrong. We certainly are very keen on recognizing the errors of past times and other nations. Why should our nation, why should our time, be different? If there are things that we believe, if there are institutions in our society that are in error, imperfectly conceived or executed, these are potential impediments to our survival. How do we find the errors? How do we correct them?

I maintain: with courage, the scientific method, and the Constitution. Sooner or later, every abuse of power must confront the Constitution. The only question is how much damage has been done in the interim."

Carl Sagan "Science and Civil Liberties" (ACLU of Illinois Lecture, 1987)

no. 1105

 “When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.”

-Justice Sonia Sotomayor

no. 1104

 “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That is Fascism: ownership of the government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling power.”

 Franklin Delano Roosevelt

no. 1103

 "The issue of government has always been whether individual men and women will have to serve some system of government and economics, or whether a system of government and economics exists to serve individual men and women." 

FDR, 1932

no. 1102

 So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

George Orwell, 1984 

no. 1101

 

C. S. Lewis,  “The Screwtape Letters”

no. 1100

 "We humans are newcomers, arising only a few million years ago. Our present technical civilization is just a few hundred years old. We have not had much recent experience in voluntary interspecies cooperation. We are very devoted to the short-term and hardly ever think about the long-term. There is no guarantee that we will be wise enough to understand our planetwide closed ecological system, or to modify our behavior in accord with that understanding." 

Carl Sagan ; Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

no. 1099

 “Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost.”

A. Whitney Griswold

no. 1098

 “Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers.” 

Mignon McLaughlin (1963)

no. 1097

 "The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality."

- James Baldwin

no. 1096

 A New Declaration of Independence from Tyranny: Effective July 4, 2025

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to break from a leader who governs with cruelty, contempt, and corruption, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal, endowed with inherent dignity and unalienable rights—among these are life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of justice.

That to secure these rights, governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. When a leader becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right and duty of the people to refuse allegiance and to stand united in the defense of their freedoms.

The current holder of high office has shown himself to be unfit to lead a free and just society.

* He disrespects women, mocking survivors of violence and stripping away their rights.

* He fuels racism and white supremacy, scapegoating communities of color and denying their equality.

* He assaults free speech, attacking the press, punishing dissent, and spreading disinformation.

* He exploits public office for private gain, enriching himself and the billionaire class while abandoning the poor and working people.

* He undermines justice, ignores the rule of law, and places himself above accountability.

* He disregards science, endangering lives in times of crisis and sacrificing the planet for profit.

* He fans division and incites violence to maintain power, wielding fear as a weapon against the people.

Time and again, we have protested peacefully, spoken truthfully, and appealed to our shared humanity. We have been met with indifference, hostility, and violence. A leader who governs through hatred and greed is unfit to govern at all.

Therefore, we, the people of conscience and conviction, do solemnly declare our independence from this tyrant and all he represents.

We withdraw our consent.

We refuse to be complicit in cruelty.

We reject the abuse of power for personal gain.

We stand for dignity, truth, equality, and justice for all people.

With firm reliance on each other and unwavering hope in our collective strength,

We pledge to resist oppression in all its forms,

To uphold the rights of the vulnerable,

And to build a future grounded in compassion, courage, and shared humanity.

Let this declaration be both a breaking and a beginning.

Andy Borowitz

no. 1095

 "There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe both the outside and the inside universe without studying it. The 'best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations.

In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us."

Carl Sagan ; Broca's Brain 

no. 1094

 "There is a generation of men and women for whom, in their youth, the planets were unimaginably distant points of light, and the Moon was the paradigm of the unattainable. Those same men and women, in middle life, have seen their fellows walk upon the surface of the Moon; in their old age, they will likely see men wandering along the dusty surface of Mars, their journeys illuminated by the battered face of Phobos. There is only one generation of humans in the ten million-year history of mankind that will live through such a transition. That generation is alive today."

Carl Sagan ; The Cosmic Connection 

no. 1093

 "We have a kind of fear of science and part of the reason is that science is able to show what constitutes a wrong, and unlike some other fields where no matter what you say might be right, here in science you can actually make a mistake and have to defend your view to other people who can actually draw upon facts to disprove it. So it makes some people nervous, the people who want the world to conform to their wishes rather than to the universe's own internal reality."

Carl Sagan (Talk of the Nation : Science Friday NPR)