The Cynic’s Word Book P – R
What follows are selections from The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce. TDD began as a newspaper column, and was later published as The Cynic’s Word Book. TDD is in the public domain. TDD is a dictionary, going from A to Z. Today’s selection covers P to R. More selections are available. (A – D E – G H – I J – L M – O ) Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
PAINTING The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
PEACE In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
PHILOSOPHY A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
PIETY Reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed resemblance to man.
The pig is taught by sermons and epistles, To think the God of Swine has snout and bristles.
PREJUDICE A vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
PROPHECY The art and practice of selling one’s credibility for future delivery.
QUILL An implement of torture yielded by a goose and commonly wielded by an ass.
QUOTATION The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
RASCALITY Stupidity militant. The activity of a clouded intellect.
RATTLESNAKE Our prostrate brother, Homo ventrambulans.
RADICALISM The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day.
RECONSIDER To seek a justification for a decision already made.
REFORM A thing that mostly satisfies reformers opposed to reformation.
The Golden Calf
When PG was a kid in sunday school, he heard about the the golden calf. It turns out that, splendid allegory aside, he didn’t really know much about the story. With the help of google and Bible Gateway, the text of Exodus 32 showed up. God bless public domain, and copy paste. The Bible is the main source for this tale. It doesn’t really matter if it is the inerrant word of God, it is a pretty good story. And much of the message rings true today.
1 And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. 2 And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me. 3 And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. 4 And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.
This is a modern story. The church is begging the people for gold. The sons are wearing golden earrings. The church takes these ill gotten gains, and forge a make believe God. This time, it looks like a cow. Billy Graham will come much later.
7 And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves: 8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. 9 And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people:
Moving down a few verses, the story gets good. 19 And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. 20 And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it. 21 And Moses said unto Aaron, What did this people unto thee, that thou hast brought so great a sin upon them? 22 And Aaron said, Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief. 23 For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. 24 And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf. 25 And when Moses saw that the people were naked; (for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies) 26 Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the Lord’s side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. 27 And he said unto them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. 28 And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: there fell that day about three thousand men.
Lets get this story right. Moses comes back from somewhere, and sees a naked party by the golden calf. He has a hissy fit, threw the golden calf into the fire, and tells people to start killing each other. Over three thousand men are killed. This is a repost. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
Gender Cultists Forget
The display of a link on this page does not indicate approval of content.
There’s nothing ‘homophobic’ about the word ‘homosexual’ – gender cultists forget …
@OldRoberts953 I wrote this for @spikedonline about the use of the word homosexual –
Will Iranian-Saudi détente bring Hezbollah closer to the Kingdom?
STOP USING SEPARATORS, START THIS FELDENKRAIS-STYLE TOES MOBILITY
ABC Tried to Bury This James Baldwin Interview. Four Decades Later, It’s Blisteringly …
Thursday Debate Breakdown: Coleman Hughes vs. Jamelle Bouie on Color-Blindness
Live from the Table: Philip Bump Debrief with Michael Moynihan, Mike Pesca Eli Lake
California Passes Law Requiring Men To Sit When They Pee
A Very Important Post About…. Laughing in the Face of Absurdity I can’t believe I ….
A Scientist Explained Why Mary Todd Lincoln’s Behavior Was So Strange
10-Minute Guided Meditation for Beginners with a Buddhist Monk – Part 1
When People Cease To Believe in God, They Do Not Believe in Nothing, But in Anything
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Oliver Anthony Responds to the Burning Man Drama
Andrew O’Hagan joins D. Treisman to discuss “An Actor Prepares” by Donald Antrim
68 Terms That Describe Gender Identity and Expression Medically reviewed by …
Why The Free Press Exists, in Three Stories – do Americans still want real journalism?
How redistricting trial could redraw Georgia’s political map
What Men Are For When Lone Ranger masculinity bottoms out
ABC Tried to Bury This James Baldwin Interview. Four Decades Later, It’s Blisteringly …
Debating History, Media, and Politics | Glenn Loury & John McWhorter | The Glenn Show
Former Eagle Hugh Douglas’ son killed in crash outside Atlanta
[ __ ] ~ [ __ ] ~ history in color ~ nazbol ~ lynching
aswan3 ~ alex swan ~ breath ~ breathwoek ~ diacritics
katie ~ peloton ~ sol reader ~ cop city ~ cop city
juneteenth ~ dilbert ~ congress districts ~ rico
turnip truck ~ mambo #5 ~ j 3:16 ~ a’s ~ ram dass yt
wilkie ~ heroin ~ mama dragon ~ Xaviant Haze ~ marta
glenn/john ~ n-wrod ~ [ __ ] ~ wtf ~ ta-nahesi coates
repost ~ marion stokes ~ turtle ~ turtle ~ part one
virgin suicides ~ c13 ~ Introduction to Reality ~ meher baba ~ emma loving
gravitas ~ ram dass ~ wilkie ~ turtle ~ turtle
this commentary is a bit of britishism about the eternal question, what do we call ourselves. This is the moment I felt the need to copy: “Worse still, we now have the whole LGBTQetc alphabet to contend with. Amusingly, you will sometimes see individuals described as being ‘LGBTQ+’, or even describing themselves as such, for instance, as ‘an LGBTQ+ man’. Can you be all of those things at the same time? This is a bit like describing a cow as ‘a cow-horse-chicken-window-volcano+ bovine quadruped’.” The author likes “homosexual.” With 10 letters, and either four or five syllables, homosexual is to long for casual use. The pronunciation can be clunky. Rest assured, someone will come up with a new expression, that dare not speak its name. – It keeps getting longer. I’m no seeing 2SLGTBQIA+ (2SpiritLesbian GayTrans BisexualQueer/Questioning IntersexAsexualPlus) by the time you get through saying all that it’s time to say goodbye! – Maybe we should just say “alphabets” In current vernacular, an alpha man is the macho-toxic masculinity bastard. OTOH, a beta man is the politically correct, passive bitch. Many of us have a healthy dose of both alpha and beta ~ @mwgarbett I’ve taken a brief break from twitter besides a few snarky posts and replies but I’ve been meaning to post about our area’s big 3 WTF are we doing? and it may surprise you that #1 is the new Fulton County Jail. Which, honestly, dwarfs #copcity and #MARTA in WTF? Let’s discuss. /1 ~ “there remains a considerable amount of uncertainty beyond Day 3 on the track of the storm.” ~ this one is slipping under the radar. Emory Healthcare has dropped Christmas Eve as a paid holiday. This will be offset my making Juneteenth a paid holiday. ~ Manuel Esteban Paez ~ @FaithfullyBP “According to the state of Georgia, buying $11.91 worth of glue can land you on a RICO indictment, if the glue is used to protest the police.” -@JoshuaPHilll But they won’t charge police who murdered Tortuguita—shot 57 times, unarmed, hands up. – @chamblee54 Tortuguita had a rifle, that he bought – @pixfiber Are you suggesting that justified the 54 bullets through him with his arms in the air? – @chamblee54 I am not sure about either 54 bullets or arms in the air i am a resident of Dekalb County, where the facility is located. I never heard any of those things about Turtle before. I could could look it up, but my gut sense is that it is not true. this whole thing stinks 1/2 – @pixfiber On that we agree. I read it from several sources I consider reliable, but I’d love to find out what you might discover – @chamblee54 for one thing, i seem to remember there is no body cam of the shooting. I really don’t want to look into it. this is a discouraging subject, and i have the sense that the facility is going to be built no matter what – @pixfiber My reaction is exactly opposite: brutal assassination and prosecution/persecution of citizens for exercising their rights isn’t something we can afford to look away from. Neither is authorities going ahead in spite of huge public outcry, “no matter what.” – @chamblee54 i was been following this since before it became a national story i have known about the prison farm literally all my life i know that Turtle did have a rifle in his possession – HE WAS NOT UNARMED – @pixfiber My information is different. I’d appreciate a source to follow up. It still does nothing to justify any of it. – @chamblee54 you have access to the same google i do … this might be a good time to try duckduckgo, if it has not imploded yet … hiking at the prison farm was on my to-do list for years. sadly, it is too late now … – @pixfiber You took your move to strike from “but he owned a gun” to “he was armed” and when source was requested, shifted to “look it up yourself.” I didn’t ask for advice on search engines, just a factual basis. You won’t blame me for taking your suggestion with a hefty grain of salt. ~ i am serious about one thing… while america’s problem of color persists … both racism, and the dim witted efforts to fight racism aka wokeness … the endless talk about this malady is BORING ~ while america’s problem of color persists … both racism, and the dim witted efforts to remedy racism … the endless talk about this malady is BORING ~ I googled “gsv mission statement” This is what came up: “Our mission is to create a world in which ALL people have equal access to the future and we believe that scaled innovations in the delivery of education and workforce skills are critical to achieving that end. … The ASU+GSV Summit, co-founded by Michael Moe and Deborah Quazzo, began in 2010 with a collaboration between Global Silicon Valley (GSV) and Arizona State University (ASU).” ~ @BabaRamDass Alchemy of the Heart by @davidstarfire delivers a powerful musical meditation that honors @BabaRamDass deep connection to music while also providing listeners with a tool to bypass the thinking mind & be welcomed with open arms into Soul Land. ~ @MediocreJoker85 Son: Dad, have you seen my sunglasses? Dad: No, have you seen my dad glasses? ~ This is a repost from 2017 ~ “Worse still, we now have the whole LGBTQetc alphabet to contend with. Amusingly, you will sometimes see individuals described as being ‘LGBTQ+’, or even describing themselves as such, for instance, as ‘an LGBTQ+ man’. Can you be all of those things at the same time? This is a bit like describing a cow as ‘a cow-horse-chicken-window-volcano+ bovine quadruped’.” ~ This is a repost from 2021. Glenn and John continue to do bi-weekly shows, now hosted by glennloury.substack.com. Racism continues to be a convenient distraction, with numerous advantages to unscrupulous individuals. It gets more boring every day. ~ I just got back from walking to LAF. This requires the cooperation of the weather, my left foot, my right knee, and my L5S1 disc. I am grateful ~ the suppressed history of American banking : how big banks fought Jackson, killed Lincoln, and caused the Civil War ~ villanelle dream fuck ~ have you ever noticed how the criticisms that both mainstream US political factions make about their opposition tend to be cartoonish exaggerations and whole cloth lies with little or no grounding in reality? – It’s the strangest thing. Since 2015 Democrats have been insisting that Trump’s election would spell the end of American democracy and would turn the United States into a Nazi dystopia with goose-stepping brownshirts rounding up minorities for concentration camps. On top of that they began insisting that Trump is a secret agent working for the Kremlin and that Vladimir Putin was secretly operating as the de facto president of the United States. – On the right side of the aisle it’s even more ridiculous. They’re constantly babbling about a hostile takeover of the United States by socialists and communists, as though the Democrats are anything other than the same garden variety neoliberal capitalists that Republicans are. The more extreme factions prattle on about satanic plots to legalize child molestation, turn children transgender and make everyone eat bugs, which Americans will be powerless to resist because their guns will have been confiscated and their mandatory estrogen jabs will have made them too soft and feminine to fight back. – It’s just ridiculously bogus drama queenery from both sides, but they push it anyway, day after day, year after year, each year with more sensationalist melodrama and hyperbole than the year before. They do this for a couple of reasons, the first being that if they started criticizing each other for the actual things they are actually doing, people would start to notice that there’s not much meaningful difference between the two parties in terms of actual governance. If Americans started to notice that the US government behaves more or less the same way regardless of which party is in power, the illusion of the two-party puppet show would be shattered, and empire managers would lose a crucial means of social control. – Secondly, both parties criticize each other for fictional offenses because criticizing each other for their actual offenses would draw attention to just how evil they both are in real life. The warmongering. The starvation sanctions. The ecocide. The soaring authoritarianism. Making their citizenry poorer and poorer so their donors can get richer and richer, and then destroying social safety nets and imposing crushing austerity on their poverty-ravaged populace. Facilitating a mind-controlled dystopia in which everyone is brainwashed by propaganda to align their thoughts, speech, labor, actions and votes in accordance with the will of the powerful. – The basic, mundane, ordinary status quo is a waking nightmare that should make us all scream in terror; the only reason we don’t is because we don’t notice it, and the only reason we don’t notice it is because we’re used to it. We’ve never known anything besides this abusive dystopia, so we’ve got no perspective on what a healthy society would look like and how very, very far we are from it. But if someone was transported from an alternate universe where human civilization was functioning in a healthy way, they would fall to their knees and bawl at what they saw here. – They make up fictional horrors because they don’t want you looking at the real ones. They don’t want you looking at the suffering of the homeless on the street. At the working poor flailing in endless toil unable to get their heads above water and relax for a minute. At the families in nations like Venezuela, Syria, North Korea and Iran struggling to obtain food and medicine because of imperial economic warfare. At the emaciated bodies of Yemeni children. At the shredded corpses of drone bombing victims. At the inconvenient facts behind the horrors in Ukraine. At Julian Assange languishing in a maximum security prison for the crime of good journalism. At the indoctrinated masses marching blindly to the beat of the imperial drum while being trained to believe they are free. At the biosphere we depend on for survival being poisoned and fed into the machine of global capitalism. At the nuclear holocaust dangling over our heads by an increasingly tenuous thread. – Those are the real horrors. Not the imaginary ones the politicians and propagandists train you to fixate on, but the real ones they train you to overlook. The mundane horrors. The everyday horrors. The horrors we were born into, and got used to over time. – Stop focusing on the threat of some future hypothetical dystopia and pay attention to the dystopia we’re living in right now. That’s where the real tyranny is at. And that’s what the real tyrants work continuously to prevent us from noticing. The more they can keep us shaking our fists at imaginary problems, the longer they can keep us from solving the real ones. ~ Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library ~ selah
Schmoozing My Religion
This is a repost from 2009. Pictures are from Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library Abraham Piper sold twentytwowords to some terrible people, who ruined it.
Abraham at twentytwowords wrote… “When I asked about churches last week, some of you reminded me you’re not Christian.So…Non-Christian readers, what (non)religion are you?” That is 23 words. The original premise of twentytwowords was that all posts would be 22 words or less.
PG answered the original post “home churched”. He decided to answer the follow up question. Unlike most of the others to answer, PG wanted to keep this under 22 words.
There probably is not a religion that PG could fit into without a lot of shoehorning. Atheist is out, because PG suspects that there is a God. What form she takes is a matter of dispute. As for belief, PG questions that belief is the optimal approach to God.
Agnostic sounds like something you would blow out of your nose. Judaism is a party that PG is not invited to. Buddhism makes some good points, but PG is awfully occidental. As for Christianism, PG sees Jesus in the words and deeds of his believers … not a pretty picture.
As for the Christian obsession with life after death, PG feels pity and disgust. This is not a good focus for a religious practice, nor does it excuse verbal abuse. PG has ideas about life after death, but they are waaay over 22 words. Finally, PG decided to sum up his God-thoughts in 22 words.
1. My beliefs are my business. 2. Practice>belief. 3. God probably exists. 4. God does not write books. 5. Jesus has nothing to do with life after death. This is 24 words. Three words need to go. Part 4 states that God does not write books. This implies that God does, indeed, exist. Part 3 can be eliminated, and the answer reduced to 21 words.
[ __ ] Head Rock
@GlennLoury and @JohnHMcWhorter are the “Black guys at Bloggingheads dot tv.” PG has been an enthusiastic fan for years, with several posts resulting. (051815 032016 091416 112018 101119) Lately, the show is not as much fun as it used to be. Wokeism is officially boring. There are endless examples of logical ineptitude in America’s racial rectuming. The face that PG largely agrees with BGAB does not make it any more interesting.
Episode 62569 was more engaging. Glenn and John said the magic word 9 times, between 5:08 and 20:17. Youtube’s transcribing bot rendered the phrase-that-pays as [ __ ]. John uttered the hard r eight times, while Glenn was content with one. (one – five six seven eight – nine)
[ __ ] has a special place in America’s problem of color. Glenn and John have the “right” to say the magic word, by virtue of their melanin content. PG’s caucasity forbids him to say, think about, or have opinions about [ __ ]. Many discussions of racism begin with soul stirring denunciations of systemic oppression, only to quickly devolve into “soandso said [ __ ].” Glenn and John have n-word privilege, so it is ok. [ __ ] puts the privy back in privilege.
PG has written two posts about the magic word, which sum up a lot of what he thinks. The Ta-Nehisi Coates Video deconstructs the “perfect answer” to why white people shouldn’t say you-know-what. In James Baldwin And The Word, there is a video. The author has a few common sense observations about the magic word. Later, PG substitutes “racist” for [ __ ], with amusing results.
The Racist Rock of Wisconsin is a key player in today’s drama. “The University of Wisconsin was removing a 70-ton boulder from its Madison campus on Friday at the request of minority students, who view the rock as a symbol of racism. Chamberlin Rock … was referred to as a derogatory name for Black people ([ __ ] head) in a Wisconsin State Journal story in 1925 … University Chancellor Rebecca Blank approved removing Chamberlin Rock in January but the Wisconsin Historical Society needed to sign off because the boulder was located within 15 feet of a Native American burial site”.
@JohnHMcWhorter wrote an opinion piece about the rock, for the paywall happy New York Times. He thought the students were a bunch of pathetic snowflakes. Why be triggered by a rock, which someone called [ __ ] head 96 years ago? Dr. McWhorter had a few choice words for the UW-Madison administration, which he saw giving into the demands of entitled children. To him, the decision to remove [ __ ] head rock was “racist.”
“… you use the r word in reference to her and i wanted to be clear I am not saying Rebecca Blank is a racist because one I don’t know and two she almost certainly is not under any sense of the word that makes sense …” John was careful to make the distinction between “doing something racist” and “racist.” This was generous of BGAB. In social justice jihad, you get called racist for any transgression, no matter how minor. You are guilty until proven innocent. If you don’t like being called racist, then quit being a racist. How hard is that?
Rebecca Blank is a professional acquaintance of Glenn’s. Throughout the discourse, BGAB took greats pains to says that they were not calling her a racist. As it turns out, her twitter handle is @BeckyBlank. Before Karen, Becky was America’s favorite racial slur for white women. Rebecca Blank may not be a racist, but she is a Becky.
This is a repost from 2021. Glenn and John continue to do bi-weekly shows, now hosted by glennloury.substack.com. Racism continues to be a convenient distraction, with numerous advantages to unscrupulous individuals. It gets more boring every day.
Seven Brilliant Quotes
There is a little graphic floating around, Seven Brilliant Quotes. Some find these sayings to be inspirational. PG smells a rat. Here are the seven quotes:
William Shakespeare – Never play with the feelings of others because you may win the game but the risk is that you will surely lose the person for a life time.
Napoleon Bonaparte – The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people.
Albert Einstein – I am thankful to all those who said NO to me. Its because of them I did it myself.
Abraham Lincoln – If friendship is your weakest point then you are the strongest person in the world.
Martin Luther King Jr. – We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools.
Mahatma Gandhi – The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Abdul Kalaam – It is very easy to defeat someone, but it is very hard to win someone.
If nothing else, research into the veracity of these quotes should provide some amusing text to go between the pictures. When you go looking in the land of google, there is no telling what you will find. During this expedition, the first page rule will be in effect. Only results on the first google page will be considered. The NB quote has 1.7 million results, which is too much work.
Lets begin with Willie the shake. Did he really say “Never play with the feelings of others because you may win the game but the risk is that you will surely lose the person for a life time.”? Or, as they say in the Yahoo village, Does anyone know where this Shakespeare quote comes from?
hugeshantz Does anyone know where this Shakespeare quote comes from? I’ve seen this quote all over the internet, always attributed to Shakespeare, but I can’t find a legitimate source of where it comes from (i.e. a specific sonnet, play, speech, etc.): “Never play….” Can anyone help me out here?
Dude the Obscure This is 20th/21st century psychobabble. Shakespeare never wrote anything remotely resembling that. Please never trust any of these idiotic “internet quote sites.” They are all, all, all crap. I can’t believe that any intelligent person could think for a minute that this was written by Shakespeare. Really. Get some critical-thinking skills, child.
The next quote is by Napoleon Bonaparte, not Napoleon Dynamite. “The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people.”
Before we consider the veracity of this quote, lets consider two things. NB did not speak english, so there is likely to be translation confusion. Second, the wars NB started caused widepread suffering. Little of this suffering was caused by the silence of good people.
The sources on page one do little except show the quote, usually with the credit going to NB. No one shows when or where he said it, or in what context. Brainyquotes doea not show it on the NB pages.
Number three is from Albert Einstein.” I am thankful to all those who said NO to me. Its because of them I did it myself.” According to Shelly Winters, Marilyn Monroe did not say no to Dr. Einstein. Google has a doozy of a forum, Misquoting Einstein?.
Jimmy Snyder says the quote has been attributed to Dorothy Parker, Yogi Berra, William Shakespeare, The Bible, Benjamin Franklin, and Groucho Marx. This is a clue that the quote is bogus.
zoobyshoe’s I just found this an another wiki page discussing the quote page: “I am thankful …” This is being attributed to Einstein on the Internet, but it appears to come from Wayne W. Dyer’s book You’ll See It When You Believe It, page 54, according to Google Books. Dyer does not attribute it to Einstein, but mentions Einstein in the same paragraph. “In my office I have two framed posters. One is a picture of Albert Einstein, beneath which are the words “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” The other poster is made up solely of words: “I am grateful to all those people who said no. It is because of them I did it myself.” Great thoughts!”
Ryan_m_b’s “Never believe quotes you read on the internet” – Winston Churchill zoobyshoe’s His actual words were: “The internet has nothing to offer, but blood, tears, toil, and misquotes.”
It should not be surprising that Winston Churchill finds his way into this discussion. He has a taste for the spotlight, even 47 years after his demise. He is an example of how truthiness is sometimes all you need. His most famous speech was a radio address during a bad part of World War Two. The speech was read by an actor. England was inspired, and went on to win the war. Why should anyone worry if an actor gave his speech for him?
This is enough fun for one day. There will be a part two soon, and it will probably be full of number two. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
Welcome to part two of the Chamblee54 due diligence report on the Seven Brilliant Quotes. In part one, we checked out the first three. At no time was a source for the quote found. All three are suspect, with “misunderstanding” indicated in the Albert Einstein quote. It is amazing how quickly accepted these sayings are by the inspiration hungry public.
Getting back to business, did Abraham Lincoln say “If friendship is your weakest point then you are the strongest person in the world.” There are lots of links to this quote, in a variety of fonts and colors. Some have spectacular photography in the background. However, none of these links has a source for this quote, or any indication of the context.
Wikiquotes has 43,444 words about Abraham Lincoln. PG copied these words, and did a search for the word “friendship”. The quote from the poster was not found. The meme is missing. This wikiquotes test has been very useful for checking out quotes. It is not authoritative, but is a good place to start.
This type of research can be frustrating. Being inspired by beautiful words can give you strength and purpose. It can also make you feel foolish, when the lovely words are revealed to be lies. Being a cynic gets lonely. Children of all ages don’t like to be told that there is no Santa Claus.
The good news is that number five is for real. Martin Luther King gave a speech at Western Michigan University in 1963. There is a probably his standard speech, given many times. The second section of the speech is “Call for action.”
“The world in which we live is geographically one. Now we are challenged to make it one in terms of brotherhood. Now through our ethical and moral commitment, we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools. This is the great challenge of the hour. This is true of individuals. It is true of nations. No individual can live alone. No nation can live alone.”
“I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. [W]e’re challenged after working in the realm of ideas, to move out into the arena of social action and to work passionately and unrelentingly to make racial justice a reality.”
“[W]e must never substitute a doctrine of Black supremacy for white supremacy. For the doctrine of Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy. God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men but God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race, the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers.”
PG has written about the problem of quoting Mohandas Gandhi before. Supposedly he said “I love your Christ, but I dislike your Christianity.” PG thinks this is a fabrication.
The quote on the poster is “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” Wikiquotes has a link to Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Online. The next stop is page 302 of this section. Mr. Gandhi gave an “Interview to the press” in Karachi, on March 26, 1931. A freedom fighter named Bhagat Singh had been executed by the British three days earlier.
Do you not think it impolitic to forgive a government which has been guilty of a thousand murders?
I do not know a single instance where forgiveness has been found so wanting as to be impolitic.
But no country has ever shown such forgiveness as India is showing to Britain?
That does not affect my reply. What is true of individuals is true of nations. One cannot forgive too much. The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
The bottom line is from Dr. Abdul Kalam. (The name is misspelled on the poster.) The phrase is “It is very easy to defeat someone, but it is very hard to win someone.” Many viewers have no idea who this person is. Once again, Wikiquotes comes to the rescue. “Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam (born 15 October 1931) Indian scientist and engineer; 11th President of India; generally referred to as Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.” The quotes are from Wings of Fire: An Autobiography of APJ Abdul Kalam.
A search for the word “defeat” did not show results. A search for “win” shows a few, but not the poster child. The phrase on the poster is also credited to John Keats. There is also the story of the student who argues with an atheist professor, and ultimately wins. The student is sometimes said to be Albert Einstein. In this version, Argumnent : What, Who is GOD?, the coda is “This seems to be a true story, and the student was none other than APJ Abdul Kalam, the former President of India “.
The research for part one consisted of entering the quote into a search engine. It was not until the Lincoln investigation that the method of copying wikiquote, and searching for a key word, was discovered. Out of a sense of fairness, the first three quotes will be investigated using this method.
For William Shakespeare, the search word was risk. There were no results. For Napoleon Bonaparte, the search word was violence. There was one result. “There is no such thing as an absolute despotism; it is only relative. A man cannot wholly free himself from obligation to his fellows, and not the one on the poster. For Albert Einstein, the search word was thankful. There were no results.
So, there are seven quotes in the motivational poster. Only two of the seven have a apparent source. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost. This version is edited, out of concern for the attention span of the audience.
Greeted As Liberators Part Two
Paul Wolfowitz has been a government player for years. After finishing his education, he got a job in the Nixon Administration, and worked with Ford and Reagan. He became a star under GHWB and GWB. Mr. Wolfowitz never served in the military.
Under George W. Bush, Mr. Wolfowitz was Deputy Secretary of Defense. After 911, he became a forceful advocate of War in Iraq. He is regarded by some as the “Architect of the War in Iraq”.
On February 27, 2003, Mr. Wolfowitz testified before congress. “There has been a good deal of comment—some of it quite outlandish—about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take … to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army…”
The conquest was the easy part. The occupation, the act of putting humpty dumpty back together, has been the tough part. More than a few people saw this in 2003.
Mr. Wolfowitz gave an interview to Vanity Fair magazine May 9, 2009. The interview had a quote about WMD. “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.” The possession of WMD by “next Hitler” Saddam Hussein was one of the leading reasons for the invasion. Iraq was known to have used poison gas against the Kurds (while he was an ally of the United States). The warehouses of WMD have never been found.
In 1941, The United States was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor. A declaration of war was issued within a week. There was no settling on an issue for bureaucratic reasons.
PG found a transcript of the complete interview. The link no longer works. HT to Tom Dispatch. Apparently, Mr. Wolfowitz likes to talk. The part that interested PG concerns the Cruise missile, and other “smart” weapons. It seems as though the research on these weapons was almost suspended. The United States was negotiating arms control with The Soviet Union. The Cruise missile was almost abandoned as a concession to the Soviets. The Navy supported this, as they felt that the torpedoes on submarines were taking up too much room already.
This is a repost. Here is part one. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. The pictures were taken in Omaha NE, in November 1938. The photographer was John Vachon.
How To Choose A Guru
PG has reread How to choose a guru, by Rick Chapman. The book is a look at spirituality of all sorts, with a special emphasis on Meher Baba.
HTCAG can be a frustrating book. The main focus is on finding a “perfect master”, and the path to enlightenment under his guidance. If one is not inclined to this level of dedication, you can be left feeling inferior. This is similar to the despair people feel when they think they are going to go to hell, because they don’t have the correct ideas about Jesus.
The book takes a look at spirit from the perspective of all religions. A central concept is the avatar, the idea of God become man. (This was long before the movie with a similar title.) The avatars of recorded history include Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad. Some say Meher Baba is the modern avatar.
Mr. Chapman has a knack for phrasing. There are expressions that PG remembers from reading HTCAG in 1978. They are still there 45 years later.
Creation “First, there was God. Then, there’s you. Then, there is God.”
Speculation “The average persons speculation about consciousness…has “the stink but not the weight of his turd”
Evangelism “An authentic Master will encourage you to let your life itself be his message.”
Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds “Don’t be sidetracked by elaborate creeds and doctrines- the truth is as simple as it is profound. From the ancient teachings of Zoraster to today, these three principles have been the heart of the message of every God realized Master.”
Books “Excellent guides until you find the Way.” Abu Sa’id
Books Part Two “… the scriptures of the past compare to the writings of a present-day Perfect Master just about the way that dust compares to honey.”
Satan Worship“If you have been toying with the thought that any form of Satan worship can lead you to higher consciousness, sober up by reading the story of Dr. Faustus. There are many paths to enlightenment, but this back alley isn’t one of them.”
Sex “A real guru never has any form of sexual relations with his followers. If a person posing as a guru tries to seduce you in the physical sense, then you can have no clearer indication that he is a phony, a pathetic and hypocritical collection of unresolved desires.”
Truth, Old and New “One time the Buddha was approached by a young man who was skeptical about Gautama’s renowned divine status. “Does the Blessed One teach a path that is new and original?” he asked. One of the Buddha’s close disciples, Sariputta, turned his gaze from the Master to the skeptic and replied, “If the Blessed One taught a path that was new and original, He would not be the Blessed One!”
Several of these quotes are available in copy/paste form at Meher Baba Information, for which this reporter says thank you. This site says that Rick Chapman is a follower of Meher Baba, and met him in 1966. This relationship is never made explicit in HTCAG. A glowing chapter is devoted to Meher Baba, and this information is not surprising. Still, HTCAG might be a bit more upfront if this connection was clearly spelled out. UPDATE: The link above no longer works. Meher Baba Information has a slick website today, which might include those quotes. HRCAG has been republished as Introduction to Reality.
Meher Baba was born February 25, 1894 with the name Merwan Sheriar Irani. The name Meher Baba means “compassionate father”. From July 10, 1925 until his death January 31, 1969, he maintained silence, and communicated by gestures that were interpreted by his followers. Meher Baba believed that he was the avatar of our age.
With all of it’s human imperfections, HTCAG is a valuable book. It is easy to read, will expose you to ideas about spirit, and get you to think. When you grow up in a Jesus Worship tradition, one can be aware of a spirit within. At the same time, you get tired of the obsession with life after death. You learn that there is more to God than scheming to live after you die. HTCAG shows one path.
This is a repost. It was written like Vladimir Nabokov. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
Meet Oliver Anthony
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What if Your Neighbor Asks You to Call Her a Him? Andy Naselli
Journalism fails miserably at explaining what is really happening to America
I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is plane crashed nobody checked the bodies
Meet Oliver Anthony: The New Voice of America’s Working Class
No Nobel Prize for Math … mathematician carrying on an affair with Alfred Nobel’s wife?
Vous dites que je suis une énigme de l’attribution des prix Nobel de 2014
Understanding Gender Radicalism and White Racial Guilt as Ersatz Religious Movements
Ram Dass | Methods to Consciousness Part 2 [Black Screen/No Music]
A crackdown on ‘woke’ coverage is tearing Atlanta magazine apart
Backroom deals and elasticity clause increase public cost of Cop City
history of anti-immigrant bias, starting with Benjamin Franklin’s hatred of Germans
The Supreme Court Is Infected With the ‘Most Damaging’ Human Bias
wendell wilkie ~ jre nobel ~ abb ~ briarcliff rd ~ burning nan
lgf ~ fracking ~ guide to tom waits ~ mermaids ~ Philology
lexicographer ~ aphotic ~ paranoid ~ mantra ~ maja nin
Anaïs Nin ~ Anaïs Nin ~ oliver anthony ~ quotidian ~ nobel
nobel ~ gadsen flag ~ oxycodone ~ peter berg ~ nyc
cannabis ~ dear colton ~ cop city ~ diane vail ~ commentary
ar15 ~ quotidian ~ merchant of death ~ Peter Berg ~ nobel ~ nobel
o’connor on mccullers ~ carson mccullers ~ lift him up ~ abpw ~ jimmy buffet
cary grant ~ Miss Welch ~ Mister Ed ~ nobel obituary ~ nobel prize
nobel prize ~ alfred nobel’s will ~ waits ~ idiotie ~ wokeism flaw ~ famous people ~ blusky
The problem with the Alfred Nobel Story The story about Nobel has a problem. The newspaper clipping is from a publication called “L’Idiotie Quotadine” The headline is in English. reddit rejected this twice ~ galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” ~ is the Bible #nonbinary ? Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” ~ @MasterTimBlais Let me tell you the story of this still of stephen colbert wearing meat goggles, my buddy Frank, and how I learned to distrust science journalism 1/ ~ the “AR” in AR-15 stands for “ArmaLite Rifle” … The AR-15 is closely related to the military M16 and M4 Carbine rifles, which all share the same core design. Invented by infantry rifle designer Eugene Stoner in 1956 …in 1956 for use in the 7.62 NATO caliber ArmaLite AR-10 battle rifle Jesse “do they mean giving rides to furry events, or rides on a furry horse” Katie “that’s your fantasy Jesse” ~ SPAM Filtering – Karma and Account Age Minimums You must meet Karma and account age minimums to post to this subreddit. This rule is in response to massive amounts of SPAM we’ve been receiving. WE DO NOT DISCLOSE THE MINIMUMS FOR ACCOUNT AGE OR KARMA. When we did disclose those numbers, spammers simply bought accounts that met those requirements and continued to spam the subreddit. Increase your karma by visiting other subreddits that do not have minimum requirements and make posts and comments that contribute positively to that forum. ~ L’Idiotie Quotadine ~ “The causes and consequences of America’s opioid epidemic unfold in this drama following its perpetrators, victims and an investigator seeking the truth.” ~ quotadine The word you’ve entered isn’t in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the search bar above. ~ quotadine Sorry, no results for “Quotadine” in the French-English Dictionary. ~ Suggestions proposées par le correcteur quotidien aquitaine aquitain quatrain quittaient quotidienne quêtaient quittai quota quêtai ~ Apparently, the word quotadine, with that spelling, does not exist in either french or english ~ pictures are from The Library of Congress ~ selah
How To Start A Fight
One year, I decided to buy my mother-in-law a cemetery plot as a Christmas gift… The next year, I didn’t buy her a gift. When she asked me why, I replied, “Well, you still haven’t used the gift I bought you last year!”
My wife and I were watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire while we were in bed. I turned to her and said, ‘Do you want to have Sex?’ ‘No,’ she answered. I then said, ‘Is that your final answer?’ She didn’t even look at me this time, simply saying, ‘Yes..’ So I said, “Then I’d like to phone a friend.”
I took my wife to a restaurant. The waiter took my order first. “I’ll have the rump steak, rare, please.” “Aren’t you worried about the mad cow?” “Nah, she can order for herself.”
My wife sat down next to me as I was flipping channels. She asked, “What’s on TV?” I said, “Dust.”
My wife was hinting about what she wanted for our upcoming anniversary. She said, “I want something shiny that goes from 0 to 150 in about 3 seconds .” I bought her a bathroom scale.
My wife and I were sitting at a table at her high school reunion, and she kept staring at a drunken man swigging his drink as he sat alone at a nearby table. I asked her, “Do you know him?” “Yes”, she sighed, “He’s my old boyfriend…. I understand he took to drinking right after we split up those many years ago and I hear he hasn’t been sober since.” “My God!” I said, “Who would think a person could go on celebrating that long?”
When our lawn mower broke and wouldn’t run, my wife kept hinting to me that I should get it fixed. But, somehow I always had something else to take care of first, the shed, the boat, making beer. It was always something more important to me. Finally she thought of a clever way to make her point. When I arrived home one day, I found her seated in the tall grass, busily snipping away with a tiny pair of sewing scissors. I watched silently for a short time and then went into the house… When I came out again I handed her a toothbrush. I said, “When you finish cutting the grass, you might as well sweep the driveway.” The doctors say I will walk again, but I will always have a limp.
Saturday morning I got up early, quietly dressed, made my lunch and slipped quietly into the garage. I hooked up the boat up to the van and proceeded to back out into a torrential downpour. The wind was blowing 50 mph, so I pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio and then I discovered that the weather would be bad all day. I went back into the house, quietly undressed and slipped back into bed.. I cuddled up to my wife’s back, now with a different anticipation and whispered, “The weather out there is terrible.” My loving wife of 5 years replied, “And, can you believe my stupid husband is out fishing in that?”
After retiring, I went to the Social Security office to apply for Social Security. The woman behind the counter asked me for my driver’s License to verify my age. I looked in my pockets and realized I had left my wallet at home. I told the woman that I was very sorry, but I would have to go home and come back later. The woman said, ‘Unbutton your shirt’. So I opened my shirt revealing my curly silver hair. She said, ‘That silver hair on your chest is proof enough for me’ and she processed my Social Security application. When I got home, I excitedly told my wife. She said, ‘You should have dropped your pants. You might have gotten disability, too.’
These human interest stories are borrowed from Expressing Myself. This is a repost, with pictures from The Library of Congress. “Halloween party at Shafter Camp for migrant agricultural workers. Shafter, California.” November 1938. Photographer: Dorothea Lange.
Was Mae West A Man?
August 17 is birthday 130 for Mary Jane “Mae” West. Of course, she died in 1980, so the party is off. PG saw a note on facebook, and made the comment “She was rumored to be a man.” One right click google search later, this post started to take shape. This is a repost.
There is a blogspot site, maewest.blogspot.com. It is still published. Five years ago there was a post, Mae West: Penis Rumors. It seems as though Miss West liked to say, to the press, “When I die, you are going to be very surprised!”
A hollywood gossipmonger had a story, Was Mae West … A Man?! Much of her information comes from the tasteful findadeath site. The story here is that Mae West died in 1950, and the death was kept quiet. Her brother made appearances in her place, until the final death in 1980. This would have been quite a feat, considering that John Edwin West died in 1964. That doesn’t stop people from talking.
“…the real Mae West died somewhere around 1950, give or take a couple years, and rather than let the show stop, it was announced that not Mae, but her brother, died. Of course, the brother then became Mae West and carried on until November 1980. If you look carefully at photos from around 1950 on it definitely looks like a different person not to mention the big hands and masculine features, bone structure, etc. I may not have all the details 100% correct but I would almost put money on the fact that the ‘Mae West’ ‘who died in 1980 had a weenie!!”
The hands were mentioned by Raquel Welch. The two were in Myra Breckinridge, the first movie Miss West had made in 27 years. (Miss West appeared on Mister Ed in 1964.) Miss Welch appeared at a film festival in 2012, and had stories to tell.
“When I went over to say hello to her (one day) I said, ‘Hi, it’s Raquel, remember?’ She sort of extended her hand to me and I went to kiss the ring and one false fingernail painted silver fell to the floor. I looked at the hand and I thought, ‘Oh, I’m getting a vibe.’ I really think she’s a man! At this point in her life all bets are off and you’re not going to be able to doll it up that much. I would say it’s pretty accurate that she resembled a dock worker in drag.” …
“I had this beautiful dress and it was black with a big white ruffle around the neck and a black velvet hat … Apparently Mae got wind of the fact that I was wearing this exquisite dress and I went to the studio that day for our scene together. I got coiffed, got my hair done and went to the closet to get the dress and it wasn’t there. I asked my dresser what happened to the dress and she said, ‘It’s been confiscated. Mae does not want you to wear that dress. You can wear the red dress that you wore in the last scene!’ … Welch was so outraged that she stormed off the set and refused to return until the dress was back in her closet. … “For the scene, we never appeared in a two-shot together. She left after she did her lines and I had someone off-camera reading her lines and I had to pretend she was there.”
Pictures from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
Chamblee54 
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