Thought

Which requires a stronger will and a finer character, tolerance or condemnation?

Gila monster

Just saw this little guy outside:

Thought

Capitalism is merely utilitarianism + marketing.

Bird on a wire

Meal

Chicken with balsamic-honey-butter sauce,

chipotle-cumin beans with molasses, and jazar bi zeit.

Idleness (Stevenson)

Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Awaken (Nin)

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.

Anaïs Nin

(Reposted from Jonathan Carroll's blog.)

Thought

Of all the religious, surely the fundamentalist is most correct in his error.

Publication notice

Shadowtrain online magazine has accepted my poems "Accompanied By Body" and "The Flaw" for publication in their next issue, due out in April or May.

Liars or lunatics

A new Harris poll reveals Republican attitudes about President Barak Obama: Two-thirds think he's a socialist, 57 percent a Muslim—and 24 percent say "he may be the Antichrist."

Even sleepers (Heraclitus)

Even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the Universe.

Heraclitus

Preparation (Fulton)

I like to prepare the heart
by stuffing it with the brain.

Alice Fulton, from "The Permeable Past Tense of Feel"

Thought

The comforts of ritual are mostly illusory, yet this doesn't diminish their popularity.

Even MORE from Mencken (Mencken)

In brief, the teaching process, as commonly observed, has nothing to do with the investigation and establishment of facts, assuming that actual facts may ever be determined. Its sole purpose is to cram the pupils, as rapidly and as painlessly as possible, with the largest conceivable outfit of current axioms, in all departments of human thought—to make the pupil a good citizen, which is to say, a citizen differing as little as possible, in positive knowledge and habits of mind, from all other citizens....

This central aim of the teacher is often obscured by pedagogical pretension and bombast. The pedagogue, discussing himself, tries to make it appear that he is a sort of scientist. He is actually a sort of barber, and just as responsive to changing fashions...On all hands, he is told plainly by his masters that his fundamental function in America is to manufacture an endless corps of sound Americans. A sound American is simply one who has put out of his mind all doubts and questionings, and who accepts instantly, and as incontrovertible gospel, the whole body of official doctrine of his day, whatever it may be and no matter how often it may change. The instant he challenges it, no matter how timorously and academically, he ceases by that much to be a loyal and creditable citizen of the Republic.

H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

Yet more from Mencken (Mencken)

No one who has given any study to the development and propagation of political doctrine in the United States can have failed to notice how the belief in issues among politicians tends to run in exact ratio to the popularity of those issues.  Let the populace begin suddenly to swallow a new panacea or to take fright at a new bugaboo, and almost instantly nine-tenths of the masterminds of politics begin to believe that the panacea is a sure-cure for all the malaises of the Republic, and the bugaboo an immediate and unbearable menace to all law, order and domestic tranquility.

H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy