This week we have a good old mix of topics.
We start reviewing our weekends. Greg went to a Basia concert. Simon went flying, in the clouds, and we both had Sunday lunch down at the pub. Nice!
Simon has recently finished the most recent book in one of his favorite ongoing sagas, the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold. The book is called Cryoburn. He's about to start on Terry Pratchett's latest, "I Shall Wear Midnight."
We stray into talking about war heros and we discuss some of them we've spoken to over the years.
We talk about the US holiday of Thanksgiving, as that's coming up and that leads us into the topic of travel and the recent TSA debacle that has created a massive backlash by travelers within the US. We explore whether it's just good old fashioned incompetence or whether it's the ongoing march towards a 1984 type world.
We throw in some excellent quotes for good measure, which were taken from this list.
" Fascism will come to America in the guise of national security." ~ Jim Garrison in 1967, the only man to bring a suspect to court for the Kennedy assassination The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable." ~ H.L. Mencken (American Writer 1880-1956) "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins - all of them imaginary." "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending to small degree of it." ~Thomas Jefferson. "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" ~ Martin Luther King Jr "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." ~ Tacitus, Roman senator & historian c.55 - c.117 AD " Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to know that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers." ~ John Adams "We tell the people what they need to know, not what they want to know." ~ Frank Sesno, CNN News "Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." ~ Richard Salent, Former President CBS News. "Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..." ~ General Douglas MacArthur, 1957 "The news and truth are not the same thing." ~ Walter Lippmann, American journalist, 1889-1974 "I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." ~ Thomas Jefferson Letter to William Ludlow, 1824 "Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." ~ Julius Caesar "He who would give up essential liberty in order to have a little security deserves neither liberty, nor security." ~ Benjamin Franklin "The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or by instilling fear of foreign aggression, try to make us accomplices to their plans." |
BMSMA.
G&S
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