RantsCounterRants:  Left-wing liberal press my eye…

For anybody that claims the press is liberal:  BITE ME. 

The press is going brain-dead, becoming a hybridized Fox News cum Entertainment Tonite (note the house cleaning at CNN to this end).  They’re abandoning that which made the Fourth Estate noble.  Since when is it the mission of the press to be a mouthpiece or a propaganda machine?

How do you explain this pablum from TIME magazine on Cheney?  Bullhockey if this man doesn’t know how to manage spin; that’s the lamest excuse I’ve heard to date for Cheney’s refusal to turn over documents.

“Garage-floor quirky”??  More like “garage-floor shifty” – and it’s an insult to garage floors everywhere to mention Cheney in the same sentence.

Thanks, Salon, for continuing to point out the Emperor and his trust side-kicks Dubya and TIME aren’t wearing clothes.

7:39:15 PM    comment []

ThinkingAhead: Remarkable human, remarkable thoughts…

Excerpt from his essay, "The World As I See It":

"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

-- Albert Einstein

More interesting tidbits on this incredible human being, in case you’d like a refresher or an introduction.

When we think of the future ahead of us, perhaps it helps to look back from the past and attempt to see from our predecessors’ eyes what they saw as they looked about and looked ahead.  Did they see us, as we are today?  Did they see calm or calamity?  How did their vision affect the path that led humanity here?

And what constructive lessons can we realize in this process?  I think there are countless lessons – but we must look, and we must apply.

We are all as the dead, useless or extinct, without both the lesson and the application.

2:18:41 PM    comment []