no. 737

“Watch out for each other. Love everyone and forgive everyone, including yourself. Forgive your anger. Forgive your guilt. Your shame. Your sadness. Embrace and open up your love, your joy, your truth, and most especially your heart.”

– Jim Henson

no. 736

 

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

  Lenin

no. 735

 

“I look at the world, at the forests and the mountains here, the sky, and it's all right, as it should be. But we aren't. People aren't. We're wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.”

Ursula K LeGuin

no. 734

 "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." 

Upton Sinclair

no. 733

 “There is no death for an otter, only life to the end.”

Ursula K Le Guin

no. 732

 

“The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.”

Ursula K LeGuin

no. 731

 

“To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.”

Ursula K LeGuin

no. 730

 

“How much time do you want, for your progress?”

James Baldwin

no. 729

 

no. 728

 Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on... So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything... The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all... We do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors...but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal... Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. 

Hunter S. Thompson

(Book: Letters of Note)

no. 727

 

"I lived when simply waiting was a large part of ordinary life: when we waited, gathered around a crackling radio, to hear the infinitely far-away voice of the king of England… I live now when we fuss if our computer can’t bring us everything we want instantly. We deny time. 

We don’t want to do anything with it, we want to erase it, deny that it passes. What is time in cyberspace? And if you deny time you deny space. After all, it’s a continuum—which separates us. 

So we talk on a cell phone to people in Indiana while jogging on the beach without seeing the beach, and gather on social media into huge separation-denying disembodied groups while ignoring the people around us.

​I find this virtual existence weird, and as a way of life, absurd. This could be because I am eighty-four years old. It could also be because it is weird, an absurd way to live."

~ Ursula K. LeGuin, Interview by Heather Davis

no. 726

 

 It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree—not with a book, not with a companion, but by yourself—and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fishermen’s song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind. If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which no government can tax, no human agency can corrupt, and which can never be destroyed. 

Jiddu Krishnamurti, This Matter of Culture

no. 725

 

"Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters...Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise."

--Umberto Eco

no. 724

 

"It's not that Christianity has failed, it's just never been tried. "

G K Chesterton

No. 723

 

In particular, the rise of the government was rewritten to reflect a deliberate political campaign designed to make people fearful enough to throw out a government which was being systematically attacked by the people wanting to replace it. Granted, the previous government hadn't been all that effective, but a lot of reasons why came out in the wash. 

The sad part was, the media couldn't see their own role in the events. When the media is owned by those who believe they have the right to choose leaders, and who also believe that only the rich have the right to make decisions, the media ceases to be an objective reporting tool, and becomes an instrument of criminal conspiracy. The sad thing was, nothing had really changed in six hundred years. Well the criminals were now exposed, but how long before they were replaced with more of the same?

from Hire A Hero by Timothy Ellis

Sound Familiar?

no. 722

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.

Ursula K. LeGuin

no. 721

Voldemort is the villian you hope to never face.

Umbridge is the villian you face EVERY DAY.

unknown

no. 720

“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.”


Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th US President

no. 719

case 225

The Three Most Terrifying Words

The nun Hwídah was eating lunch with her clan when a senior monk approached, seeking her aid with a production issue. Not wishing to disturb the others, the senior monk bent down to whisper in Hwídah’s ear.
“Ah,” said Hwídah, rising from the table. “The three most terrifying words.” Immediately she departed with the senior monk.
A novice who witnessed this exchange happened upon the senior monk that evening. The novice asked, “What were those ‘three most terrifying words’?”
The senior monk replied, “Possible race condition.”
The novice thought a moment and said brightly, “Tell Hwídah that those cannot be the ‘three most terrifying words’, for the words ‘Definite race condition’ would be even more terrifying!”
The senior monk laughed and continued on his way.

That night the novice fell into long, terrible nightmares from which he was unable to wake. After what seemed like an eternity he came to his senses, twisted up inside his own bedsheets.
Tossing off the mangled covers, the novice found himself alone in the middle of a featureless desert. An empty sedative bottle lay on the sand nearby. Tied to it was a tightly-folded map of the whole world: all its continents and its mountains and its many, many deserts.
Inside one desert was a tiny red dot, pointed to by a tiny red arrow, next to which was some tiny red text in Hwídah’s handwriting which read, “Possibly your location”.


The Codeless Code
Fables and Köans for the Software Engineer

no. 718

 

“You are a Shit Spotter. It's satisfying work. ... We have observed that most of the trouble in the world has been caused by ten to twenty percent of folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus…The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right. 

— William Burroughs