Religeon

 "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People

It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Thomas Jefferson

Problem With Slavery

 Long Flourishing History

All down thru history governments accepted slavery as a matter of money and war. In Africa, different peoples as in others, practiced genocides against each other and sold different of their own neighboring groups into slavery.

Regardless of Intensions

The U.S. Constitution however is the first and only organized attempt, let alone successful attempt, to eliminate slavery and bondsman ship within their juristrictions. This was succeeded in a great civil war in which a historic death count was evidenced.

George Bernard Shaw

on Reactionaries

 Possibilities are numerous, once we decide to act and not react.

Learning I am more ignorant than I realized

 We cannot prove anything, except to each our own satisfaction. The wisdom of the ancients recognized this when they wrote that God did not want proof. Why? Because proof gives the false impression there is an alternative to faith. 

Speaking literally now, we all are thinking in faith with not all the complete facts yet available since when we learn something new it includes more we did not know that we did not know. What is gospel to one man is hearsay to another and inadmissible in regard to proof. 

Playbook for Presidents

 Never react to anything, especially the opposition. The weakest position is that of a reactionary. Let him tell his own story and others will tell theirs. 

Anyone who wants to be president usually is only comfortable in the center of attention. Make sure others react to you, but never the other way around. 

Anyone who insists he does not agree with you, is ignorant of your views. Bring his views up to date by attributing brilliance to his, in truth, agreement with yours. Always be pleasant. 

Selling the truth

When deciding the truth of anything, including the truth anywhere you read it, I find it is helpful to remember to deduce the motive as well. In the "political news" this is so obvious that it is more easily seen than anywhere else, and is sometimes not only humiliating, but starkly embarrassing as well, because partisans typically, I find, wear no clothes. 

Everyone Speaks for their own benefit

The Reactionary is Doomed

The reactionary is doomed! Doomed to repeat the ideas of their opponents. Play up and propagandize the views of anything that is wrong! Has anyone ever heard of any great deal of effort or of time, by those in political reactors explaining or advocating free market capitalism? Therefore, the political reactionary's views are starved from neglect and the endless ravages of opponents will turn them into ghosts in a wax museum. 

Something for reactionaries

 

 

The eye sees but not its' own reflection

     

From out of the heart the mouth speaks. Especially true in gossip and its' hearsay twin, politics. Strong minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Weak minds discuss people, usually credited to Socrates. 

Hearsay defines gossip.

 Over the Bar

at the Naked Eye

How to tone down reactionary barroom brawls. Individuals are mountains of various impressions and comments which result in millions of reactions, all mostly divisionary. Events are more profitable, without the actors in the mix. Issues and ideas are where ultimate lasting answers are found. 

Leaders and judges

 There was quite a crowd around the corner table recently. They were talking about politics in the Bible, about leaders leading and judges judging.

Unfortunately for us all, the original possibility of the discussion throughout, corruption, came from the specific Ecclesiastes 3:16 translation. 

 Corner Table is a round table

with only two legs.

Facing facts hard for some

According to Thomas Sowell, facts framed his decision making. This was his central word and he hit upon it when asked why he changed his mind from Marxism. Dramatically, with a so slight a pause, and a slow smile on his face, said simply facts . 

Often many only believe what they want the facts to be. I'd have to call it utopianism. I still today recall vividly a Harvard professor speaking on television in front of his class saying to the affect that if what I say does not agree with the facts then the facts are wrong!

Comment from a Corner Table

 

Seen Naked Eye Looking at the Unseen

 

The 

truth 

cannot 

be 

told 

by 

those 

who 

know. 

Late night at the Naked Eye

 Camus is called a philosopher and socialized with Sartre with WWII in the background. Camus and 

Albert Camus died in an auto accident at 46 in 1960.

Sartre were, in my view, very discouraging writers working discouraging novels. I've never read Sartre's No Exit but I wonder how, if there is No Exit, how did we ever get in here? Never the less, Camus had a hypnotic, for me, read in Happy Death and Sartre a totally off putting read. Why? This is the mystery of art, in the telling. 

Door too valuable for comfort

Where are they now?

Somerset Maugham paid $35 dollars for a door painted by

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin. Maugham hung it on his wall, but years later was forced to sell it for millions because it became too valuable for comfort. Meanwhile Gauguin, shown in 1891, had painted the door of his cabin because he could no longer afford canvas. Gauguin died in 1903 at 53 and Maugham at 91 in 1965. We really never own anything. We control it perhaps for a short spell, then it is all quickly over and soon reduced to images on someone's blog. 

Joseph Conrad

 Joseph Conrad was famous for his sea stories. One of the first "crossover" writers from my earliest reading years as I left Tarzan, Clemens and Stevenson etc, behind. 

From Down and Out in England

To Down and Out in Paris

At the moment I am fixed on George Orwell. Not sure entirely why. There are writers who are good at writing, I am thinking of Maugham. He can make the mundane seem secretive and mysterious. There is Hemingway who can make flesh and blood seem alive as the smell and sounds of crunchy gravel on a rainy wet morning walk. But when it comes to the sweep of life in the deepest spirit, Orwell can pinpoint in a small single moment of time into the widest and greatest ideas in humorous detail. 

One of favorite examples of this would be in Animal Farm when the pigs are confronted with the fact they are living in the deposed farmer's house while the other animals are still in the barn. It never gets old for me to read when the pigs say yes of course we are all equal it is just that some of us are more equal than others. 

Notice the heart of it? Anyone's inexact rendition catches the truth of the original words Orwell used. Anyway you put it, the idea works whatever way you say it. I can think of others. Like putting black shoe polish on his heel to cover up the hole in his black sox in, was it Aspidistra?