First, Sir, permit me to observe that the use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.
Edmund Burke
Until a radical change takes place and we wipe out all nationalities, all ideologies, all religious divisions, and establish a global relationship - psychologically first, inwardly before organizing the outer - we shall go on with wars. - J. Krishnamurti
If we all understood that how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world and what is to become of it, we would eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake."
Michael Pollan in the Center for Ecoliteracy's Big Ideas: Linking Food, Culture, Health, and the Environment: "
Meditation of the week
There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned. --Harrison E. Salisbury There are no perfect days. We have struggled hard against this truth. In our demanding ways, we haven't wanted life to be a process; we have wanted to reach a secure point of arrival. We have struggled against the dialogue and learning process of experience. We've looked for a "fix" and for perfection. Even now in recovery we long to "get it right." We continue to learn and to grow, but the lessons we learn are not the things we expected. We grieve the lateness of our learning, and then we go on to learn more. As we grow in this program, we learn how to learn. We become more accepting of life as a process with no shortcut to the truth. We learn to engage in the process and accept that there usually is no right or wrong answer at the end of our search. Today, may I accept the truth, which comes from the lessons of my experience -- and be tolerant of its incompleteness.
Until a radical change takes place and we wipe out all nationalities, all ideologies, all religious divisions, and establish a global relationship - psychologically first, inwardly before organizing the outer - we shall go on with wars. - J. Krishnamurt
“…And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”
Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican Senate leader from Wyoming and co-chairman of the new 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform
The tongue of a bad friend cuts more than a knife.
~Proverb, (Spanish)~
“We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them” Cato the Elder
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” Marcus Aurelius
Meditation of the week
I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, and fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural, clean in mind and clean in body. . . to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid. --Elbert Hubbard
Growing up, we learned there were many places to make wishes: the first star, a well, candles on a birthday cake. We saw Dorothy return from Oz after she wished she were back home. Fairy tales taught us wishes can come true.
We don't have to stop wishing, even though many of our wishes never came true. We may have wished for the impossible when we said "I wish things would get better at home." But we may have gotten our way when we said, "I wish this pain would end." Our dreams came true with the program.
Our best wishes can be about ourselves and the lives we want to have. We can wish for riches and find friends with hearts of gold. We can wish for comfort and health, and get a night of uninterrupted sleep. Whatever we wish for, we can receive.
Author of the Week
It's the birthday of humorist Erma Bombeck, (books by this author) born in Dayton, Ohio (1927). She wrote a regular newspaper column called "At Wit's End" for a small suburban newspaper, beginning in 1964, covering what she called the "utility-room beat." She kept it up until 1994, and eventually her column became so popular that it was syndicated in more than 600 newspapers. She wrote numerous books, including collections of her syndicated columns, and her novel The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank (1976) was one of the top-selling books of the year, and from then on, all of her books were best sellers.
She said, "God created man, but I could do better."
If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living. --Seneca
"This was all part of that hope and change and transparency. Now, a year later, I gotta ask the supporters of all that, 'How's that hopey, changey stuff working out?' " Sarah Palin in a political speech in February 2010.
Yet in the meanwhile I will not deny that it is profitable to contemplate from time to time in the mind, as in a picture, the idea of a larger and better world; lest the mind, becoming wonted to the little things of everyday life, grow narrow and settle down altogether to mean businesses.
Thomas Burnet
You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.
~Jerry Gillies~
Meditation of the week
A big shot is just a little shot who kept on shooting. --Zig Ziglar Consider these words of Calvin Coolidge: "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is filled with educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are alone omnipotent. 'Press on!' has been and always will be the answer to every human problem."
Coolidge was right. In the successful pursuit of a vision, persistence always makes the difference. Colonel Sanders approached 1,094 restaurants before he found someone who would try his recipe for fried chicken. Thomas Edison made over 2,000 attempts before he invented the light bulb. Abraham Lincoln failed in two businesses and lost five elections before he became president.
The ability to persevere in the face of adversity takes a special kind of faith. It's easy to get discouraged when obstacles appear. If you are in such a situation, know that time is on your side. Time plus sustained effort always produce results. After waiting 33 years to win the world championship, a coach was asked, "Was it worth the wait?" "Absolutely," he replied. "In fact, the long delay actually made the victory sweeter."
Author of the week
It's the birthday of another writer from the prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder, (books by this author) born just north of Pepin, Wisconsin (1867), author of the wildly popular children's book Little House on the Prairie (1935) and several other books about growing up in the Midwest in the late 1800s. They're all part of the Little House series, which she began writing when she was in her 60s. Since her death, about a hundred different titles have appeared in the Little House series that she created. From her books have come also a television series on NBC (1974–84), a 26-episode animated Japanese cartoon series called "Laura, The Prairie Girl," a couple of made-for-TV movies, an ABC mini-series (2005), and a musical that opened at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in summer 2008 and is currently on a North American tour. This month the show is in Toronto.
All of her books have remained in print continuously since the time they were first published, have been translated widely, and have sold millions of copies. Little House in the Big Woods begins, "Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs."
And finally, the culmination of millennia of scientific endeavor
For the love of all that is right and good, please don’t look at these Do’s and Don’ts and DON’T read the captions!
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Quotes of the week
I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred toward any one.
~Edith Louisa Cavell, quoted by the newspapers as before being shot by Germans in Brussels, Oct. 15, 1915
To murder character is as truly a crime as to murder the body: the tongue of the slanderer is brother to the dagger of the assassin.
~Tryon Edwards~
William Shakespeare quotes
Hamlet
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool". - (Act V, Scene I).
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". - (Act II, Scene II).
"Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry". - (Act I, Scene III)
"Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind". - (Act III, Scene I).
As You Like It
"All the world 's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts" - (Act II, Scene VII).
"Can one desire too much of a good thing?". - (Act IV, Scene I).
King Henry IV, Part II
"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown". - (Act III, Scene I).
Meditation of the week
It was on February 4th in 2004 that Mark Zuckerburg launched Facebook (at first called "the facebook"). The Web site's name comes from the student directory book with names and photos that is distributed to incoming students at many universities. Harvard sophomore Zuckerburg, a comp-sci major, had gotten the idea for doing an online facebook when he was slightly drunk on a Tuesday night. He'd just been dumped by his girlfriend, he was looking for a distraction, and he hacked into a Harvard database and copied student names and photos from dorm lists and put them online into a site for which he'd written the code. It was immensely popular: In the first four hours it was up, 450 Harvard students used it to look at 22,000 photos of their classmates. A few days later, the site was shut down by Harvard and Zuckerburg was charged with a number of disciplinary things, including violating privacy rules and breaching security. Eventually, the university dropped the charges, and Zuckerburg moved to Palo Alto set up Facebook, Inc. without graduating from Harvard. Today, about 350 million people around the world actively use Facebook as a social networking tool.
You know.
The light on upstairs
before four every morning. The man
asleep every night before eight.
What programs they watch. Who
traded cars, what keeps the town
moving.
The town knows. You
know. You've known for years over
drugstore coffee. Who hurts, who
loves.
Why, today, in the house
two down from the church, people
you know cannot stop weeping.
writer of the week
Richard Brautigan, (books by this author) was born in Tacoma, Washington (1935), best known for his 1967 book Trout Fishing in America, which has sold millions of copies around the world. It's only 112 pages long, it's abstract, it doesn't have much of a plot, and characters in the story reappear in seemingly unrelated incidents.
An idyllic book, but Brautigan's own childhood in the Pacific Northwest was from idyllic. His father abandoned his mother while she was pregnant with him, and his mother was an alcoholic and a heavy smoker. Brautigan had a string of stepfathers. He was extremely poor and often went without food.
On a chilly mid-December night when he was 20, a year and a half after he'd moved out of his mother's house and into a Quaker boarding house, he filled his pockets with rocks, walked up to the Eugene Oregon police station inside City Hall, announced, "I am a criminal. I am going to break the law," starting throwing rocks through the police station window, and asked police to put him behind bars. He was literally starving trying to be a writer, and he figured that if he went to jail he would at least get fed three meals a day.
After a stint at the Oregon State Hospital, Brautigan left for San Francisco. He wore his blond hair long and shaggy, sported old-lady eyeglasses, walked hunched over because of scoliosis, worked on underground newspapers, went to acid-plied rock concerts, and hung around with people in the Beat movement — some people called him "the last of the beats" — but he insisted that he was never one of them. His writing is classified as part of the counterculture movement. During the 1960s, he published a number of books: the poetry collections The Octopus Frontier (1960), All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (1967), which he handed out for free on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), and Please Plant This Book (1969), which was made up of seed packets that had his poems printed on the sides of the packets. But it was his novel Trout Fishing in America, published in 1967, that made him famous all over the world and an icon of the 1960s counterculture movement.
Brautigan continued to write through out the 1970s, though he was severely depressed. He shot himself in 1984.
A poem by Richard Brautigan:
"30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love"
Thinking hard about you
I got on the bus
and paid 30 cents car fare
and asked the driver for two transfers
before discovering
that I was
alone.
The President stood in front of a gathering of House Republicans today and took questions for more than an hour, urging them to put aside partisan games and work with him for the good of the country. He was inspiring. Make sure you check out the highlights: http://my.barackobama.com/ObamaGOP-Email
And finally, the culmination of millennia of scientific endeavor
