Category: quote of the day

It is hard to think of a thing more out of time than nobility. Looked at plainly it seems false and dead and ugly. To look at it at all makes us realize sharply that in our present, in the presence of our reality, the past looks false and is, therefore, dead and is, therefore, ugly; and we turn away from it as from something repulsive and particularly from the characteristic that it has a way of assuming: something that was noble in its day, grandeur that was, the rhetorical once. But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same. Possibly this description of it as a force will do more than anything else I can have said about it to reconcile you to it. It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

— Wallace Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”

[From Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: For Barack Obama]

No surprise Mr Ross was honored by the MacArthur Foundation, is it?

Talk To Action | Reclaiming Citizenship, History, and Faith:

There is no statewide elected leader, either as governor or U.S. Senator, that has more extreme right wing, violence-prone associations that Sarah Palin. John McCain has asked us to endorse her, but even if the ticket fails this time, he has elevated her to a contending position for the 2012, energizing and empowering the extreme right in the process. No wonder that even some informed elements of the Republican Party are abandoning him.

Why else would he drag someone like this out from under rock into national prominence? Read the whole thing: I don’t know if I believe there are active secessionists in 30 states, but if half that number are more than committees of correspondence or groups of emotionally-stunted RISK addicts, that can’t be good.

With the July 2007 release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate.^[46]

[From Scientific opinion on climate change – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

This of course excludes amateur climatologists of all stripes, varieties, and kinds.

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What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said “I do” to?
What if Obama were the candidate who left his crippled first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to pain killers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama were a member of the Keating-5?
What if McCain were a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

If the above questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

Continue reading “a friend writes”

[From Sane Design]

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Follow Peter Reinhart’s Napoletana Pizza Dough Recipe and use lots of heat — a gas grill at full blast will do — you’ll never be satisfied with most of the stuff you can have delivered or served. I’ve probably made this a dozen or more times and it’s just consistently good.

[From 101 Cookbooks]

9-9-08 sarah palin is my reason to wake up

This morning I was lying in bed unable to wake up, and NPR came on with Sarah Palin’s shrill voice berating democrats and “community organizers”…

I happen to be a “community organizer”, and I work over 80 hours a week and i have a HUGE amount of responsibility, and people who count on me every day. I used to be a procrastinator, but at this job I don’t even have time to procrastinate, because there is always some deadline and people who will be let down if I don’t do my part.

And I know Barack Obama’s job as a community organizer had MUCH MORE responsibility than mine, he was working with large groups of people, different organizations within the community: churches, unions, neighborhood groups, unemployed workers, factories cutting jobs, blacks, whites, latinos, etc….

I challenge Sarah Palin to work for 102 days in a row 13+ hours a day, because that is what my current job as a “community organizer” is. I do not have a day off until after the election. No weekends. No nothing.

So anyway, hearing her obnoxious voice made me so angry I was wide awake and ready to jump out of bed and start my work for the day!

I decided her smiling face would be good motivation for us here at the office. This is what we will get if we don’t work hard enough — Someone who thinks the idea of organizing diverse groups and trying to come to a consensus about how to deal with unemployment and social unrest is a completely laughable occupation.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Take that step today!” is taped to my laptop.

The work we do here will save us from leaders like McCain/Palin. They claim to be “regular people”, yet Palin makes fun of community organizers and is married to oil wealth, and McCain come from a long line of rich Navy men and also married into wealth, and doesn’t even know how many houses he has.

There is nothing wrong with their life stories or their wealth OTHER THAN the fact that they continually claim to be “just like regular Americans”, and make fun of a Democrat who actually grew up in poverty raised by a single mother, and devoted his early career to helping a troubled community on the South Side of Chicago. I don’t understand how the Republicans try to brand Obama as “elitist” and McCain as “just a regular guy”, considering their backgrounds.

And though Palin may have been a reformer in her own state, her addition to the national stage made her decide that community organizing — volunteering for a campaign, working at a homeless shelter, or any other community-based occupation — is completely laughable.

Republicans say they want to get rid of big government and let people work things out on their own — pull yourself up by your bootstraps, deal with your own problems, be responsible for yourself and your family rather than counting on government handouts. Fine. Great. I’m all for it. But someone like Obama who chose a low-paying and difficult job to improve the lives of ordinary Chicagoins — that is somehow not ok either, event though he was not part of government at that time.

So what IS ok? No government.. No community organizers. What are we — as a community or as individuals — supposed to do about our problems? Pray that they will go away? Stop trying to work out solutions and retreat to our bunkers with our guns and hope that we never have a problem that is too big for us to figure out on our own? Hope that we never need the help of our elected government or our community or our neighbors? Because apparently that is the world that Sarah Palin wants to live in. God bless her.

THIS IS WHY I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING.