Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Worries

"If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today."
--E. Joseph Cossman, entrepreneur

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Liberals

"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel"
--Barry Goldwater

Monday, December 28, 2009

Prepare

"A weapon which you don't have in your hand won't kill a snake."
--Proverb, (African)

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Heretics

"A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes."
--Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Learn II

"You live and you learn -- or you don't live long."
--Robert A. Heinlein

Friday, December 25, 2009

Peace

"But peace does not rest in the charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. So let us not rest all our hopes on parchment and on paper, let us strive to build peace, a desire for peace, a willingness to work for peace in the hearts and minds of our people. I believe we can. I believe the problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings.
--John F. Kennedy

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Free II

"What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable life for them, and with this as the foremost object ideas of freedom and self-reliance and service to the community were obscured to the point of disappearing. Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative business, possessed of great wealth, in which all citizens had a right to share... Athens had reached the point of rejecting independence, and the freedom she now wanted was freedom from responsibility. There could be only one result... If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms." .
--Edith Hamilton (August 12, 1867 – May 31, 1963), "The Echo Of Greece" (1957)

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

One

"One small cat changes coming home to an empty house to coming home."
--Pam Brown

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Odds

"All things are at odds when God lets a thinker loose on this planet."
--Edith Hamilton (August 12, 1867 – May 31, 1963), "The Greek Way" (1930)

Monday, December 21, 2009

Feeding Arcata's Homeless

Arcata City Council member Shane Brinton has set up a Facebook page to advocate (gasp!) making it legal to feed the hungry after 9:30 a.m.

Jumping into a discussion on Shane's other/main page, I Posted the following:

The money being wasted on the Plaza CheneyCam would be much better used providing food to those in need.

Better yet, the money being spent on the CheneyCam could be used to hire organic gardenera to teach the homeless how to grow their own food.

Only one problem with that--a majority of the Arcata City Council (keep fighting the good fight, Shane, even tho you're outnumbered today) seem to think that the homeless should not urinate or defecate until they are employed full-time with a permanent street address. A city that refuses to provide something so basic to human dignity, alas, is not going to provide a place for the homeless to grow the means for their survival. Nonetheless, the homeless feeding themselves could be added to the list of offenses under Arcata Ordinances sharpened and pointed at the homeless.

TLC

"Retaliation" Against CONgress

There have been numerous calls for "retaliation" against members of CONgress that voted for the trillion dollar giveaway to the insurance and pharmaceutical drug cartels.

If there are no bona-fide independent candidates to run for office and oppose the RepugliCONS and the DemocRATS, and if voting machine companies determine who wins (s)elections, threats of "retaliation" at the polls are so much hot air.

TLC

Moderates

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for someone else's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Takes

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
--Steven Weinberg, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Times

"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised." --Marilyn Manson, I Don't Like The Media But The Media Likes Me - Columbine statement

Friday, December 18, 2009

Duty II

"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately." --George Carlin

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Patience III

"Today's pig is tomorrow's bacon."
--Professor Michael Zweig
Director of the State University Of New York's Center For Study Of Working Class Life

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Havens

"He was, first and last, the born fighter, to whom the consciousness of being matched against a great adversary suffices, and who can dispense with success. Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory."
--Edith Hamilton (August 12, 1867 – May 31, 1963) , "The Great Age of Greek Literature" (1942), Referring to Aeschylus

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Dream II

"The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing."
--Richard Wright (1908-1960) US author.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Duplicity You Can Believe In

White House to Harry Reid: Cut deal with Joe Lieberman

The White House is encouraging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to cut a deal with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), which would mean eliminating the proposed Medicare expansion in the health reform bill, according to an official close to the negotiations

Source, and full article: Politico, December 14, 2009

_________________________________________

Thomas Jefferson turned to Benjamin Franklin. "Well Ben, Joe LIEberman's threatening to filibuster this Constitutional Convention. I guess we better call King George and let him know we've changed our minds about that independence stuff".

TLC

Orthadox

""The orthodox school has witnessed for centuries that nature itself has never once cured any existing disease with another dissimilar one, however intense. What must we think of this school, which nevertheless has continued to treat chronic diseases allopathically, with medicines and formulas that can only cause a disease condition --God knows which --dissimilar to the one being treated? Even if these physicians have not hitherto observed nature attentively enough, the miserable results of their treatment should have taught them that they were on the wrong road." --Samuel Hahnemann, founder of homeopathy

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Keeps

"Religion is What Keeps the Poor from Murdering the Rich"
--Napoleon Bonaparte

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Hurdles

"There are two ways to pass a hurdle: leaping over or plowing through... There needs to be a monster truck option."
--Jeph Jacques, Questionable Content #1356, 03-10-09

Friday, December 11, 2009

Game

"The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as in playing a poor hand well."
--H. T. Leslie (Writer)

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Stake

"Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake." --Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1997) German-American Psychologist, Writer

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Much

"Resist much, obey little."
--Walt Whitman

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Doctors

"For several centuries, a whole range of causes, which I could not begin to enumerate, have led to the downgrading of that divine science, clinical medicine, to the level of a wretched, money-grubbing exercise in the whitewashing of symptoms and a demeaning traffic in prescriptions, in fact, God forgive us, to a more mechanical trade in which Hippocrates is lost to sight amidst a rabble of charlatans."
--Samuel Hahnemann, founder of homeopathy

Monday, December 07, 2009

Feast

"Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance."
--E. T. Bell

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Sacrifice II

"Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment.
Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk."
-- Bertolt Brecht(1898-1956) German dramatist, stage director, and poet

Saturday, December 05, 2009

Fond

"Fond of lawsuits, little wealth,
Fond of doctors, little health."
--Proverb, (Spanish)

Friday, December 04, 2009

Free

"You can't ever be really free if you admire somebody too much."
--Tove Jansson, Tales from Moominvalley, 1963

Thursday, December 03, 2009

Rejectionists

"What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system..."
--Henry Kissinger, speaking at a conference hosted by AKbank in Istanbul Turkey on May 31, 2007

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Escalation

"Instead of hope and change, in foreign policy Obama is delivering more of the same. But I still have hope because, as our history teaches, the people of Afghanistan will never accept occupation."
--Malalai Joya, Afghan member of Parliament

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Ungratefulness

"I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers." --Kahlil Gibran