Imprisoned

"The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear.  This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand.  We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think."  ~Richard Buckminster Fuller (source)

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"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery,  none but ourselves can free our minds."  ~Bob Marley

Frederick

 

My favorite book as a child was Frederick by Leo Lionni.

It made me happy when they put him on a stamp.

There He Is

 

(clicking imbiggens)

Pearls Before Swine by Steven Pastis is one of the most consistently good comics still being made.  You can read it online HERE, and read his derelict blog HERE.

Why not?

 

(clicking Imbiggens)

Blondie isn't typically one of my favorite comics.  I'm convinced that it has lasted not because it is funny, but because it's safe; a newspaper editor can slip a Blondie in a slot and never have to worry about an angry letter from the public.

But the strip above is a cut above, and it has stuck with me.

Clean the Atmosphere

 

A double-decker bus appears out of the London fog in the cold winter of 1952.

Photograph from The Daily Mail

Back in the 1950s, London used to have a lot of fog. When the fog combined with the smoke from thousands of coal fires, it created what the Londoners called ‘a real pea-souper’ because they experienced it to be just like the local pea soup!

Have you ever been in such a thick fog? Sometimes you can’t see in front of your eyes for more than a few feet. Any object coming towards you, like a horse, a walking man, or this double-decker London bus, can only be seen as a blurred shape until its very close. It can be difficult to find your way in such a fog. Sometimes you can even become completely lost.

People can generate fog too. Its not made up of ‘pea soup’ or even particles of water. Its made up of particles of conversation, emails, and website posts. When people come together to form groups, and groups come together as larger organisations the ‘cyber-fog’ can be really dense sometimes. Either the members speak so much about the organisation - or other people speak about it - that it forms a communications ‘fog’ so thick that its possible the entire organisation - rather like a London bus - can be completely obscured. Only when up close can you really see what its like.

In the Srimad Bhagavatam, Srila Prabhupada comments that all the lies in the world - especially coming from lawyers, politicians and the like - who routinely speak what they know to be untrue simply for personal advantage - can travel as vibrations into the atmosphere and come down again as subtle pollutants.

Every human being therefore has a duty to speak in such a way as to help clean the atmosphere. And devotees of Krishna in this wonderful movement for Krishna consciousness have an extra duty to spend their time glorifying Krishna and the Vaishnavas. Particularly they must not waste time in employing electronic gadgetry in broadcasting their less than helpful comments on the lives of others. Otherwise the fog thus generated will tend to obscure our movement. People will see a distant, vague shape but be unable to see our movement for what it is. They will see the fog first - and may miss the bus completely. 

(I found this on an old backup disk, and unfortunately I failed to save the source.  If anyone knows, drop me a line so I can credit the author.)

It's not what it looks like.

 Craig's List has an image for no image:

Which reminded me of this:

Nothing Too Much

"Few people know how to take a walk. The qualities are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good silence, and nothing too much."  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson (via)

Lift Up Thine Eyes

 

(clicking imbiggens)

Christmas Blessing

 

The video above was posted by my late friend Nick Temple of Sometimes Saintly Nick many, many years ago.

Andy Warhol's "Nativity"

 

(clicking imbiggens)

Scout Oath

 

(Clicking Imbiggens)

This was my father's, and dates to the late 1930s/early 1940s.

Flame Fractals

 

 

Clicking the thumbnail imbiggens.

All were created by me with the free, open-source software program Apophysis, available HERE.

I Have No Home

"For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come."  ~Hebrews 13:14

Dorothy Day is said to have taken comfort in that quote when she got older and began to lose friends.

It reminded me of this song:

..

Full lyrics HERE.

Nothing Compares

Full lyrics HERE.

Walls

 

"When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt." ~Leviticus 19: 33-34

You have to do some fancy footwork to make that mean "Build a wall to keep those filthy drug-addicted disease-ridden foreigners out."

But I've seen pictures of Donald Trump holding a bible (albeit upside-down) and Joe Biden makes a point of going to mass every Sunday, so I guess there's a way.