Category Archives: 100 words or less

Facebook Page for wehearyou.net

The idea of it always put me off.   I saw this great video the other day, highly recommended.  A wonderful TED talk where an artist, perplexed by the seeming inevitability of war, takes a bold step against it.   The talk provides  yet another instance of a creative person stating that friends didn’t seem to care, but that strangers seemed much more receptive.  

Overcoming my resistance to “social media” I put up a page for the nonprofit.   Won’t you have a look, friend it, like it, follow it and send it to everyone you know?

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Soul on Fire

I had the odd thought, and true, that my soul is on fire. Feeding the blaze all the skills I’ve loved, and nurtured, burning in a deep, bright flame.  Though it takes all my strength, sometimes, not to call things by their name, I am also amazed, sometimes, at this incandescence.

Sphinxes and Monosyllabs

The speed of modern electronic communication somehow makes the silence of Sphinxes and the e-grunts of Monosyllabs harder to bear.  You may get a dozen emails from somebody you’re waiting to hear back from with no reference at all to the question you may have sent them.   Clearly, Sphinxes and Monosyllabs must be suffered gladly, but, damn…

As I get down off my soundproofed soapbox, I offer this little bit of amusement for the childish side of y’all:

animation workshop, second season

Dig it.

For Shame

To avoid shame, some people lie.  The lie may cause them to feel shame, about lying.  No problem, though, because a lie can be told about lying.   Though this may cause yet more shame, it can’t be helped, which is a shame.

Is It Just Me?

In this age of information, it’s only a matter of typing a few words and hitting ‘enter’.

US Federal Deficit $1.09 trillion

Cost of Iraq and Afghanistan wars  $1.4 trillion

Cost of Bush tax cuts over first twelve years  $1.28 trillion

Is nobody else doing the math as we argue about cutting social programs?  

I leave it to you to check the accuracy of these figures.   They explain, in part, why that speechifying wartime president has been scarce since leaving the White House, except when he nips out to earn $100,000 or more to speak English, after a fashion, to cheering corporate audiences.

 

Your Proverbial Slippery Slope

Development of the concept

According to the author of Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, the policy went through a number of iterations and modifications:

Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the principle of “life unworthy of life,” coercive sterilization was the first. There followed the killing of “impaired” children in hospitals; and then the killing of “impaired” adults, mostly collected from mental hospitals, in centers especially equipped with carbon monoxide gas. This project was extended (in the same killing centers) to “impaired” inmates of concentrationand extermination camps and, finally, to mass killings in the extermination camps themselves.[1]