Penitentiary

"What the common man longs for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace: the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty. The fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen, in all the forms they take–his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact."
--H.L. Mencken

Without III

"Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master."
--Thomas Hodgskin
Source: Mechanics' Magazine, October 11, 1823,
Ref: Class and Conflict in Nineteenth-century England, 1815-1850, by Patricia Hollis

4-Legged

"Meat is a 4-legged word."
--Mango Wodzak, "Destination Eden"

Voice II

"The Internet has become the phenomenon of the new century. It has become the voice of the people in the first genuine experiment in democracy yet conducted in America. It stands ready to serve every facet, every faction. It creates neighbors where once we were foreigners. It carries our individual voices to new communities formed through the magic of electronics.

The electronic village has been born, and the village voice, via the internet is being heard."

--Gerry Spence,
"Give Me Liberty" (1998)

Fidel Castro, RIP

August 13, 1926 - November 25, 2016

With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?
--Speech on the 25th anniversary of the Moncada Barracks attack (July 26, 1978)


As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.
--Speech at the International Conference on Financing for Development (March, 2002)

Quarter

"Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn 'reasonable' and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed are the final quarter keep you alive."
--Sinclair Lewis,
"It Can't Happen Here" (1935)

Ridding

"We cannot consider ourselves a free and democratic people until we understand and address the evil nature of the warfare-state power which murdered President John F. Kennedy. Until then we cannot begin the vital work of ridding the world of the terror produced by our mighty war machine that crushes hopes for true substantive democracy here and elsewhere."

Source:
"A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes" by Vincent J. Salandria
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/COPA1998VJS.html

Directly

"Yes, Dealey Plaza’s crackling rifle fire was directly connected to the scorching of Vietnam flesh by napalm and the millions of deaths our invasion caused."

--Vincent J. Salandria,
"A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes"

Establishment

"For years, not satisfied with having merely killed President Kennedy, the U.S. media have been busy endeavoring to assassinate his character by publishing a series of books designed to demonstrate that he was a flawed and perverse person so that we might conclude that he deserved his fate. A man who had sacrificed his life for world peace was shot down and then pilloried with defamation for years by a contemptuous and arrogant U.S. establishment."

--Vincent J. Salandria,
"A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes"

Fruitless

"Through Orwellian doublethink the government successfully involved us in years of fruitless debate as to the microanalytic details of how the assassination was executed and what obscure meaning the assassination had on our lives. Through this Orwellian doublethink the government sends us clear signals. It instructs us that if bullets could remove a constitutionally-elected president, and the murderers go unpunished, then we should not take seriously U.S. politics."

--Vincent J. Salandria,
"A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes"

Hammer II

"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer. "
--Will Rogers

Blackboards

"Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"Breakfast Of Champions" (1973)

Resting

"A government resting on the minority is an aristocracy, not a republic, and could not be safe with a numerical and physical force against it, without a standing army, an enslaved press and a disarmed populace."
--James Madison
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: The Federalist No. 46.

Fiction

"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction.
Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."
--Gilbert Keith Chesterton
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: "On the Cryptic and the Elliptic", 1908

Duty VII

"Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime."
--Thomas Paine,
"Public Good" (December 1780).

Grip III

"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent."
--Gore Vidal,
"Cue the Green God, Ted" (1991).

Schoolwork

"Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn’t contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless."
--John Taylor Gatto,
"The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling"

Endangered

Earl: "Augh! They're trying to take the wolf off the endangered list."

Mooch: "I know. But did you hear what they're putting back on the endangered list?"

Earl: "What?"

Mooch: "Empathy and compassion."

--Patrick McDonnell
("Mutts")

Controls

"Whoever controls the media, controls the mind."
--Jim Morrison
(1943 - 1971) Musician

Hostile II

"The press is hostile to the idea of liberty.
Most people in the press are for big government.
Most people think that the solution to anything,
whether it's health care problems, education,
whatever it is -- it's got to be more government."
--Harry Browne
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
July 4, 2002

Color II

"What color is George Soros going to attribute to this manufactured 'revolution' he is attempting? How sad that so many love their enslavement and their elite overlords."
--TLC

Resisted

"We are the proud parents of a child who has resisted his teachers' attempts to break his spirit and bend him to the will of his corporate masters."
--George Carlin,
proposed bumper sticker

Tuesday's Presidential Result

My reply to one of the many inane emails about the election results:


What, you're sad that we won't have HELLary Clinton invading even more countries for their natural sources in order to line corporate pockets?  That we won't have TPP and even lower wages in this country?  That we won't be borrowing billions more from our great grandchildren in order to boost the profits of insurance companies and drug companies while the health of this country gets much worse?

Just because California legalized MJ doesn't mean you have to smoke it until your brain is mush...

TLC

Strange III

"We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary."
--George Orwell,
Letter to The Tribune (December 20, 1940), later published in A Patriot After All, 1940-1941 (1999)

Offerings

THE DEATH OF THE OLD PLYMOUTH ROCK HEN

It was tragic when her time came
After a lifetime of laying brown eggs
Among the white of leghorns.
Now, unattractive to the rooster,
Laying no more eggs,
Faking it on other hens' nests,
Caught in the act,
Taken to the woodpile
In the winter of execution.

A quick stroke of the axe,
One first and last upward cast
Of eyes that in life
Had looked only down,
Scanning the ground for seeds and worms
And for the shadow of the hawk.
Now those eyes are covered
By yellow lids,
Closing from the bottom up.

Decapitated, she did not act
Like a chicken with its head cut off.
No pirouettes, no somersaults,
No last indignity.
Like an English queen, she died.
On wings that had never known flight.
She flew, straight into the woodpile,
And there beat out slow death
While her curdled voice ran out in blood.

A scalding and a plucking of no purpose.
No goose feathers for a comforter.
No duck's down for a pillow.
No quill for a pen.
In the opened body, no entrail message for the haruspex.
Not one egg of promise in the oviduct.
In the gray gizzard, no diamond or emerald,
But only half-ground corn,
Sure evidence of unprofitability.
The breast and legs,
The wings and thighs,
The strong heart,
The pope's nose,
Fit only for chicken soup and stew.
And then in March, near winter's end,
When bloodied and feathered wood is used,
The odor of burnt offerings
Above the kitchen stove.

--Eugene McCarthy

Significance II

No.2: "I assure you, that no matter what significance you may hold for me, to the Village and its Committee, you are merely Citizen Number Six, who has to be tolerated, and if necessary, shaped to fit."

No.6: "Public Enemy Number Six."

--The Prisoner,
"A Change of Mind"

Servitude

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."
--Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963) Author
Source: forward to Brave New World, 1946 edition

Ideal IV

"We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious."
--Philip K. Dick
"The Man in the High Castle" (1962)

Silence V

"When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."
--Yevgeny Yevtushenko,
Soviet Dissident

Next III

"The next generation will not charge us for what we've done; they will charge and condemn us for what we have left undone."
--Mother Jonesv

Spoken

"I would rather die having spoken in my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet in law ought any man use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death, if a man is willing to say or do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs deeper than death."
--Socrates

Gloss

"One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment, Potter."
--William O. Douglas,
"The Court Years, 1939-1975: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas" (1981).  Said to Justice Potter Stewart on the arrest of peacefully protesting Vietnam War veterans on steps of the Supreme Court.