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)

no. 1092

 "What surprises me most about humankind is that we get bored of our childhood, rush to grow up, and long to be children again. That we lose our health to make money and then lose our money to restore our health. That by thinking anxiously about the future, we forget the present, such that we live in neither the present nor the future. That we live as if we'll never die and die as though we've never lived."

~Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

no. 1091

 “There could be a happy world, where cooperation was more in evidence than competition, and monotonous work is done by benevolent and beneficent machines, where what is lovely in nature is not destroyed to make room for hideous machines whose sole business is to kill, and where to promote joy is more respected than to produce mountains of corpses. Do not say this is impossible: it is not. It waits only for men to desire it more than the infliction of pain. There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.”

— Bertrand Russell, Last Essay: 1967

no. 1090

  “The only freedom left in the 21st Century is to be incommunicado.”

James Marden in a voiceover from a deleted scene in the movie Interstate 60.

no. 1089

 

no. 1088

 “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Anne Lamott, from Bird by Bird.

no. 1087

 “Do not leave the pursuit of creativity in your heart up to the whims of capitalism.”

Jason K. Pargin

no. 1086

 “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are thepeople of these United States, at this very hour.”

Frederick Douglass

read the full speech here

no. 1085

"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."

Winston Churchill

no. 1084

"Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about." 

Mark Twain

no. 1083

  “Police are to control your people through laws. The military is to control your enemies. When the military becomes the police, your own people become the enemy. That never ends well.”

Timothy Ellis in “Undead”

no. 1082

 “The next time someone says ‘Not everything's about you’ ask yourself the last time they allowed ANYTHING to be about you. If you can't think of a single time... it's a tactic to shut you up and make everything about them.”

Nicole Filippone @sensorystories.bsky.social

no. 1081

 

no. 1080

 “Life hack: there is no way to make people love you by bombing them, and if they did love you bombing them will fix that.

Because, you see, there's no such thing as an attack on someone's life so legitimate that they say ‘yes, I had that coming, thank you, father.’”

@pymundgeneology.com

no. 1079

 

no. 1078

“When cruelty is seen as patriotic, compassion is seen as treasonous.”

Rev. Benjamin Cremer

no. 1077

“I have this private schema that I have never offered up for scrutiny that biology is information contained in life, culture is information created by life, and technology is information contained in things created by life.”

Hank Green

no. 1076

 

no. 1075

 

no. 1074

 

no. 1073

 Isaac Asimov

no. 1072

 “Socrates said, ‘The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.’ He wasn't talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

no. 1071

 “Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.” 

 ​Chuck Palahniuk

no. 1070

 “Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”

Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1928), Essay, XIII: Freedom in Society, p. 103

no. 1069

 “Hey Trump voters! Yesterday Trump had a press conference in the Oval Office. He said,  ‘You know, our country was the strongest, believe it or not, from 1870 to 1913. You know why? It was all tariff-based. We had no income tax. Then in 1913, some genius came up with the idea of let's charge the people of our country, not foreign countries that are ripping off our country. And the country was never relatively—was never that kind of wealth. We had so much wealth, we didn't know what to do with our money. We had meetings. We had committees. And these committees worked tirelessly to study one subject. We have so much money. What are we going to do with it? Who are we going to give it to?’

Did you know that you know an actual expert on the period of 1870 to 1913? 

It's me. I am. 

I've been studying this time period for two decades and I don't mean reading a Doris Kearns Goodwin book every few months. I am a trained scholar of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 

There's a lot of us actually who study this period.  In fact, I was in a room with many of them over the weekend. We stared at Trump Tower in Chicago while we met.  It was... motivating. 

Do you know what happened between 1870 and 1913? There were two economic panics. Huge ones. Deep, scarring panics where many working people went hungry and jobless. Do you know who was ‘rich’ in that period? The Carnegies. The Vanderbilts. JP Morgan, who almost singlehandedly controlled the nation money's supply. Wild swings occurred in the stock market. Working people were paid pennies. Middle-class people made money, bought homes, and lost them with regularity. There was no economic stability. 

There was no regulation. Between 1880 and 1905 there were well over 36,000 strikes involving 6 million workers. Do you know what they were striking for? The biggest ask was an 8 hour work day. 

Do you know what Congress focused on instead? Passing obscenity law, obsessing about sex and white women's purity. Creating instability in the Phillipines, the Carribbean and Latin America via colonialist, eugenic-based projects. Enriching themselves on kickbacks from industries like the railroads. Rejecting appeals for women's suffrage and anti-lynching laws. State governments doubled-down on segregation law and passed laws to try to control what was taught in classrooms.

Sound familiar?” 

Lauren Thompson

no. 1068

"Today I have grown taller from walking with the trees." 

Karle Wilson Baker

no. 1067

 “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” 

George Washington

no. 1066

 “The world is sick & yes it can be cruel, but it would be a whole lot sicker and a whole lot crueler if it were not for painters & filmmakers & songwriters, the beauty-makers, wading through the blood & muck of things, whilst reaching skyward to draw down the very heavens themselves.” 

Nick Cave

no. 1065

 “Graveyards are libraries. Lots of people there reading. Born when, died then, and all that comes between. Short stories. Large print.”

John Paul Lyon, The Time and Place from With Ravens Passing the Moon

no. 1064

 “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

no. 1063

 “Self-identifying as a centrist is perhaps the most cynical and amoral political identity you can have because you're just openly admitting your beliefs aren't really beliefs they're just strategic positions that only exist relative to others in the room you happen to be in.”

Gillian Branstetter   (@gbranstetter.bsky.social)

no. 1062

 “A recent episode of @thewaroncars.bsky.social introduced me to the very useful term "pluralistic ignorance" for a situation in which people mistakenly believe that others predominantly hold an opinion different from their own, often because the minority is loud.”

 < en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurali... >

Erika Hall (erika.hall.bsky.social)

no. 1061

 “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

Carl Sagan, Cosmos

no. 1060

 “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

 The Great Gatsby (1925)

no. 1059

 Dedicated to my mother, who passed on May 4th

no. 1058

 "The door of the human heart can only be opened from the inside.” 

William Holman Hunt

no. 1057

 "Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability."

~Arundhati Roy

no. 1056

 “Be suspicious of simple answers, that shit’s for fascists and maybe teenagers.”

-Frank Turner

no. 1055

 

no. 1054

 "If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you should feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction.

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants!”

~Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (1943)

no. 1053

 

no. 1052

 

no. 1051

I have to agree with this statement 

no. 1050

 

no. 1049

 

no. 1048

 Socialism is what they called public power.

Socialism is what they called social security.

Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.

Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

-Harry Truman, 1952

no. 1047

“The Internet was touted as “the information superhighway” but is actually a stupidity distribution system”

Andy Borowitz

no. 1046

“It is said the power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.”

David Brin

no. 1045

 Toad sat on the edge of his bed. “Blah,” said Toad. “I feel down in the dumps.” 

“Why?” asked Frog. 

“I am thinking about tomorrow,” said Toad.

no. 1044

 “Show me a budget and I’ll show you who you think matters.”

-Senator Raphael Warnock

no. 1043

 "Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose, and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass." 

~Ursula K. Le Guin, from ‘The Lathe of Heaven’

no. 1042

 “It was the worst of times, it was the even worse than that of times.”

Ed Solomon @edsolomon.bsky.social 

no. 1041

 "If you can purchase US citizenship for $5 million, the ‘illegals’ are only guilty of being poor."

 Feminist News

no. 1040

 

no. 1039

 

no. 1038

 Ursula K. LeGuin’s opinion of the first Harry Potter book:

no. 1037

25 platforms where you can read books for free:

1. Project Gutenberg  

2. LibriVox  

3. Internet Archive  

4. Open Library  

5. Google Books  

6. ManyBooks  

7. Bookboon  

8. Smashwords  

9. Wattpad  

10. Free-EBooks  

11. Read Print  

12. Feedbooks (Public Domain section)  

13. HathiTrust Digital Library  

14. PDFBooksWorld  

15. Bibliomania  

16. Classic Reader  

17. Loyal Books  

18. Library Genesis  

19. Trove  

20. Authorama  

21. DigiLibraries  

22. Europeana Collections  

23. Wikisource  

24. Project Gutenberg 

25. International Children's Digital Library

Not a quote, but still a worthy post. And maybe a source of future quotes?

no. 1036

 “There is in fact no way to make a case for a moral or political obligation to have children that does not degrade the status and dignity of women by claiming ownership their bodies as instruments for collective use.”

Moira Donegan (@moiradonegan.bsky.social)

no. 1035

 “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.”

- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007)

no. 1034

 “Why is there always money to bomb children in Gaza, but not enough to make sure every kid has a safe place to sleep in this country. We don't have a budget crisis. We have a crisis of our values.”

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez

no. 1033

 “The Long Neolithic's shadow infects with a continuing need to erect stones. Modern monuments marking our ongoing desire to speak the lithic language, to enter into conversation with the land itself.”

Dr. K. Brophy 

no. 1032

“Every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. maybe we should all become queers and relax.”

Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man

no. 1031

 My cousin

who is young and angry

tells me at this point

she is waiting for the crash,

she is hoping for the crash,

she can only see a better world

built on the wreckage of this one,

so sympathetically

I try to remind her

that many of us

will be buried in that wreckage.

Plague Poems by @plaguepoems.bsky.social

no. 1030

 “The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he.” 

Karl Kraus (1874-1936), journalist, critic and satirist

no. 1029

 

no. 1028

 "The true horror of existence is not the fear of death, but the fear of life. It is the fear of waking up each day to face the same struggles, the same disappointments, the same pain. It is the fear that nothing will ever change, that you are trapped in a cycle of suffering that you cannot escape. And in that fear, there is a desperation, a longing for something, anything, to break the monotony, to bring meaning to the endless repetition of days."

Albert Camus, The Fall

no. 1027

“I will say this until I die: You long for the "good old days" because you were too stupid to understand what was actually going on back then.“

Dennis Detwiller @drgonzo123.bsky.social 

no. 1026

 “Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison DBW Vol 8

no. 1025

 "Seldom in recent times, it seems, has a social system offered scope so openly and so brazenly to people willing to support anything as long as it brings them some advantage; to unprincipled and spineless men, prepared to do anything in their craving for power and personal gain, to born lackeys, ready for any humiliation and willing at all times to sacrifice their neighbors' and their own honor for a chance to ingratiate themselves with those in power. In view of this, it is not surprising that so many public and influential positions are occupied, more than ever before, by notorious careerists, opportunists, charlatans, and men of dubious record; in short, by typical collaborators"

Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless”

no. 1024

 “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” 

- Haile Selassie I

no. 1023

 

no. 1022

Harpo Marx Family Rules

1. Life has been created for you to enjoy, but you won't enjoy it unless you pay for it with some good, hard work. This is one price that will never be marked down.

2. You can work at whatever you want to as long as you do it as well as you can and clean up afterwards and you're at the table at mealtime and in bed at bedtime.

3. Respect what the others do. Respect Dad's harp, Mom's paints, Billy's piano, (son) Alex's set of tools, (son) Jimmy's designs, and Minnie's menagerie.

4. If anything makes you sore, come out with it. Maybe the rest of us are itching for a fight, too.

5. If anything strikes you as funny, out with that, too. Let's all the rest of us have a laugh.

6. If you have an impulse to do something that you're not sure is right, go ahead and do it. Take a chance. Chances are, if you don't you'll regret it - unless you break the rules about mealtime and bedtime, in which case you'll sure as hell regret it.

7. If it's a question of whether to do what's fun or what is supposed to be good for you, and nobody is hurt whichever you do, always do what's fun.

8. If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world's against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it.

9. Don't worry about what other people think. The only person in the world important enough to conform to is yourself.

10. Anybody who mistreats a pet or breaks a pool cue is docked a month's pay.

no. 1021

 

no. 1020

 

no. 1019

 

no. 1018

 “The opposite of diversity is uniformity. The opposite of equity is inequity.  The opposition of inclusion is exclusion.”

@petebuttugieg.bsky.social

no. 1017

 

no. 1016

 “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins"

 John Locke

no. 1015

 

no. 1014

 

no. 1013

 "No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power." 

P. J. O'Rourke

no. 1012

 “Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.”

Arthur C. Clarke

no. 1011

 "God has made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger."

French author Victor Hugo, born today in 1802 

no. 1010

 

no. 1009

 

no. 1008

 

no. 1007

 

no. 1006

 “If you stick a knife in 9 inches and take it out 6, that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.”

Malcolm X

no. 1005

 "Through the postwar decades Americans happily allowed their towns to be destroyed. They'd flock to Disneyland at Anaheim, or later to Disney World in Florida, and walk down Main Street, and think, gee, it feels good here. Then they'd go back home and tear down half the old buildings downtown and pave them over for parking lots, throw a parade to celebrate a new K Mart opening-even when it put ten local merchants out of business-turn Elm Street into a six-lane crosstown expressway, pass zoning laws that forbade corner grocery stores in residential neighborhoods and setback rules that required every new business to locate on a one-acre lot until things became so spread out you had to drive everywhere. They'd build the new central school four miles out of town on a busy highway so that kids couldn't walk there. They'd do every fool thing possible to destroy good existing relationships between things in their towns, and put their local economies at the mercy of distant corporations whose officers didn't give a damn whether these towns lived or died. And then, when vacation time rolled around, they'd flock back to Disney World to feel good about America."

From Howard Kunstler’s book, The Geography of Nowhere (1993)

no. 1004

 “The windmill told me to tell you, you’re a little bitch”

@droobiee

no. 1003

 “One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this”

Omar El Akkad

(Hello, America!)

no. 1002

 “No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”

–David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005)

no. 1001

For post no. 1001, I’m posting a public service message on the symptoms of a female heart attack, which is not the same as the symptoms males experience (I’m afraid I don’t know who originally wrote this, I stole it from Facebook):

An ER nurse says this is the best description of a woman having a heart attack that she has ever heard. Please read, pay attention, and SHARE..........

FEMALE HEART ATTACKS

I was aware that female heart attacks are different, but this is the best description I've ever read.

Women rarely have the same dramatic symptoms that men have ... you know, the sudden stabbing pain in the chest, the cold sweat, grabbing the chest & dropping to the floor that we see in movies. Here is the story of one woman's experience with a heart attack.

I had a heart attack at about 10:30 PM with NO prior exertion, NO prior emotional trauma that one would suspect might have brought it on. I was sitting all snugly & warm on a cold evening, with my purring cat in my lap, reading an interesting story my friend had sent me, and actually thinking, 'A-A-h, this is the life, all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up.

A moment later, I felt that awful sensation of indigestion, when you've been in a hurry and grabbed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with a dash of water, and that hurried bite seems to feel like you've swallowed a golf ball going down the esophagus in slow motion and it is most uncomfortable. You realize you shouldn't have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thoroughly and this time drink a glass of water to hasten its progress down to the stomach. This was my initial sensation--the only trouble was that I hadn't taken a bite of anything since about 5:00 p.m.

After it seemed to subside, the next sensation was like little squeezing motions that seemed to be racing up my SPINE (hind-sight, it was probably my aorta spasms), gaining speed as they continued racing up and under my sternum (breast bone, where one presses rhythmically when administering CPR).

This fascinating process continued on into my throat and branched out into both jaws. 'AHA!! NOW I stopped puzzling about what was happening -- we all have read and/or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the signals of an MI happening, haven't we? I said aloud to myself and the cat, Dear God, I think I'm having a heart attack!

I lowered the foot rest dumping the cat from my lap, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, If this is a heart attack, I shouldn't be walking into the next room where the phone is or anywhere else... but, on the other hand, if I don't, nobody will know that I need help, and if I wait any longer I may not be able to get up in a moment.

I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed the Paramedics... I told her I thought I was having a heart attack due to the pressure building under the sternum and radiating into my jaws. I didn't feel hysterical or afraid, just stating the facts. She said she was sending the Paramedics over immediately, asked if the front door was near to me, and if so, to un-bolt the door and then lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in.

I unlocked the door and then laid down on the floor as instructed and lost consciousness, as I don't remember the medics coming in, their examination, lifting me onto a gurney or getting me into their ambulance, or hearing the call they made to St. Jude ER on the way, but I did briefly awaken when we arrived and saw that the radiologist was already there in his surgical blues and cap, helping the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambulance. He was bending over me asking questions (probably something like 'Have you taken any medications?') but I couldn't make my mind interpret what he was saying, or form an answer, and nodded off again, not waking up until the Cardiologist and partner had already threaded the teeny angiogram balloon up my femoral artery into the aorta and into my heart where they installed 2 side by side stints to hold open my right coronary artery.

I know it sounds like all my thinking and actions at home must have taken at least 20-30 minutes before calling the paramedics, but actually it took perhaps 4-5 minutes before the call, and both the fire station and St Jude are only minutes away from my home, and my Cardiologist was already to go to the OR in his scrubs and get going on restarting my heart (which had stopped somewhere between my arrival and the procedure) and installing the stents.

 Why have I written all of this to you with so much detail? Because I want all of you who are so important in my life to know what I learned first hand.

1. Be aware that something very different is happening in your body, not the usual men's symptoms but inexplicable things happening (until my sternum and jaws got into the act). It is said that many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn't know they were having one and commonly mistake it as indigestion, take some Maalox or other anti-heartburn preparation and go to bed, hoping they'll feel better in the morning when they wake up... which doesn't happen. My female friends, your symptoms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call the Paramedics if ANYTHING is unpleasantly happening that you've not felt before. It is better to have a 'false alarm' visitation than to risk your life guessing what it might be!

2. Note that I said 'Call the Paramedics.' And if you can take an aspirin. Ladies, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!

Do NOT try to drive yourself to the ER - you are a hazard to others on the road.

Do NOT have your panicked husband who will be speeding and looking anxiously at what's happening with you instead of the road.

Do NOT call your doctor -- he doesn't know where you live and if it's at night you won't reach him anyway, and if it's daytime, his assistants (or answering service) will tell you to call the Paramedics. He doesn't carry the equipment in his car that you need to be saved! The Paramedics do, principally OXYGEN that you need ASAP. Your Dr. will be notified later.

3. Don't assume it couldn't be a heart attack because you have a normal cholesterol count. Research has discovered that a cholesterol elevated reading is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it's unbelievably high and/or accompanied by high blood pressure). MIs are usually caused by long-term stress and inflammation in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hormones into your system to sludge things up in there. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let's be careful and be aware. The more we know the better chance we could survive.

A cardiologist says if everyone who sees this post would Share or re-post, you can be sure that we'll save at least one life.

*Please be a true friend and SHARE this article to all your friends, women & men too. Most men have female loved ones and could greatly benefit from know this information too!                

no. 1000

 

This seemed like a good choice for the 1000th post. 

no. 999

 

no. 998

 “We every one of us need to figure out how to be like this lighthouse right now and just let the current insanity wash over us without moving us.”

@windhorse.bsky.social

[Ludington Light, Lake Michigan, photo by Randy O’Brien]

no. 997

 “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind”

- Kurt Vonnegut

no. 996

 

no. 995

 "No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents." 

Wendell Phillips

no. 994

 Rick: "Don't you sometimes wonder if it's worth all this? I mean what you're fighting for."

Victor Laszlo: "You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we'll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die."

no. 993

 "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

-ALVIN TOFFLER

no. 992

 The best, most cogent and elegantly simple explanation into the inexplicably destructive negotiating processes of the president,by Prof. David Honig of Indiana University.

Everybody I know should read this accurate and enlightening piece...

“I’m going to get a little wonky and write about Donald Trump and negotiations. For those who don't know, I'm an adjunct professor at Indiana University - Robert H. McKinney School of Law and I teach negotiations. Okay, here goes.

Trump, as most of us know, is the credited author of "The Art of the Deal," a book that was actually ghost written by a man named Tony Schwartz, who was given access to Trump and wrote based upon his observations. If you've read The Art of the Deal, or if you've followed Trump lately, you'll know, even if you didn't know the label, that he sees all dealmaking as what we call "distributive bargaining.” 

Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you're fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump's world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.

The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining the two sides don't have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.

The problem with Trump is that he sees only distributive bargaining in an international world that requires integrative bargaining. He can raise tariffs, but so can other countries. He can't demand they not respond. There is no defined end to the negotiation and there is no simple winner and loser. There are always more pies to be baked. Further, negotiations aren't binary. China's choices aren't (a) buy soybeans from US farmers, or (b) don't buy soybeans. They can also (c) buy soybeans from Russia, or Argentina, or Brazil, or Canada, etc. That completely strips the distributive bargainer of his power to win or lose, to control the negotiation.

One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you're going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don't have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won't agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you're going to have to find another cabinet maker.

There isn't another Canada.

So when you approach international negotiation, in a world as complex as ours, with integrated economies and multiple buyers and sellers, you simply must approach them through integrative bargaining. If you attempt distributive bargaining, success is  impossible. And we see that already.

Trump has raised tariffs on China. China responded, in addition to raising tariffs on US goods, by dropping all its soybean orders from the US and buying them from Russia. The effect is not only to cause tremendous harm to US farmers, but also to increase Russian revenue, making Russia less susceptible to sanctions and boycotts, increasing its economic and political power in the world, and reducing ours. Trump saw steel and aluminum and thought it would be an easy win, BECAUSE HE SAW ONLY STEEL AND ALUMINUM - HE SEES EVERY NEGOTIATION AS DISTRIBUTIVE. China saw it as integrative, and integrated Russia and its soybean purchase orders into a far more complex negotiation ecosystem.

Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And that's just not how politics works, not over the long run.

For people who study negotiations, this is incredibly basic stuff, negotiations 101, definitions you learn before you even start talking about styles and tactics. And here's another huge problem for us.

Trump is utterly convinced that his experience in a closely held real estate company has prepared him to run a nation, and therefore he rejects the advice of people who spent entire careers studying the nuances of international negotiations and diplomacy. But the leaders on the other side of the table have not eschewed expertise, they have embraced it. And that means they look at Trump and, given his very limited tool chest and his blindly distributive understanding of negotiation, they know exactly what he is going to do and exactly how to respond to it.

From a professional negotiation point of view, Trump isn't even bringing checkers to a chess match. He's bringing a quarter that he insists of flipping for heads or tails, while everybody else is studying the chess board to decide whether its better to open with Najdorf or Grünfeld.”

— David Honig

no. 991

 “ If progressives lose the future, it will not be due to a lack of good policy ideas. If we lose the future, ceding democracy to authoritarians or bad corporate actors, it will be due mostly to a stunning failure to communicate with people in simple language that connects with them on the level of their moral values. And it will be due to a stubborn rejection of tried-and-true scientific methods of mass communications—methods that conservatives have repeatedly deployed to winning effect.”

George Lakoff

He suggests a remedy here

no. 990

“The simple exhaustion of being lectured daily by the literal dumbest people you've ever seen in your life about how the problem with our society and government is a lack of competency.”

Ed Burmilla, AKA, the writer of Gin and Tacos.