The Traveller: Personal Update: general

Quotes

George Orwell
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Stephen Biko
"The oppressors' most powerful weapon is the mind of the oppressed."

Kevin A. Carson
"Ideological hegemony is the process by which the exploited come to view the world through a conceptual framework provided to them by their exploiters."

C. Spurgeon
“While I regarded God as a tyrant I thought my sin a trifle; But when I knew Him to be my Father, then I mourned that I could ever have kicked against Him. When I thought God was hard, I found it easy to sin; but when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, I smote upon my breast."

Madeleine L'Engle
"Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous."

Troy Wisdom
"The truth needs no defense; it only needs witnesses."

Mark Horne
"There is no pleasure as exquisite as being told by someone with more income than you have ever had in your life that your politics are wrong because you don't have solidarity with the poor."

JRR Tolkien
"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

Augustine of Hippo
"What are kingdoms without justice? They're just gangs of bandits."

Mark Horne
"The Bush-Obama killing continuum shows that there are no reformers; each successor builds on the power grab of the predecessor."

Robert A. Heinlein
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

BECAUSE IT STARTS WITH THE TRIVIAL LIKE THE ABOVE, BUT LEADS TO THE FOLLOWING:

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

Neal Stephenson
"The ancients who wished to demonstrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things....From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides. "

Monday, December 29, 2008

Personal Update: general

The week leading up to Christmas week was hectic and I found myself too tired and uninterested in any thing but a break. The last day of that week, Saturday, before Christmas week I had lighting check duty on the airfield and my tool-partner and I found ourselves shoveling snow off of the edge lights on the third runway because the knuckle draggers that run the snow plows left a three foot berm right on the edge light line. So, no rest for the wicked.

Christmas week I have been "off the air" because I wanted to goof off with my family. We also did some marathon movie watching in our cozy house with the snow piled up outside. I received the DVD sets of seasons 1, 2.0, 2.5, & Razor of Battlestar Galactica for a Christmas present so I have been wasting the final hours of my time off with some serious couch potato action. I haven't been as guilty for staring into the vacuous grimoire as much as I ordinarily would as I know that when work starts Monday night it will begin another long period of servitude to the Port (Port of Seattle). When I'm back to work, the only self improvement I tend to have time for is reading through some work of literature for our literary group, the occasional magazine article, and my BSF lessons. Well maybe I'll have a little internet surf time, and I'll try to post a few comments on the piece we are reading. And if the Lord wills, Janie and I may try to take a long weekend at the end of February to celebrate our anniversary (our 18th).

Happy new year!