Not only could nobody tell me, but nobody even had the sense that it was an interesting question. They looked at me funny. I asked my parents; I asked my parents’ friends; I asked other adults. None of them knew. My mother said to me, “Look, we’ve just got you a library card. Take it, get on the streetcar, go to the New Utrecht branch of the New York Public Library, get out a book and find the answer.”
~ Carl Sagan
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Other than photo ID, these are all things the Founders could have written into the Constitution, but they didn’t. And that should tell you something: Levin’s book isn’t about restoring anybody’s “original vision”; it’s about radically reshaping the American government into something it never was and was never intended to be.
Contrast this with the proposals in retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ new book Six Amendments. Only one of Stevens’ amendments — adding a phrase to the Eighth Amendment to define the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment — would change what Stevens’ argues was the Founders’ original intent. (Hanging and the firing squad were common in the founding era.) He composed the other five to reverse the drift of wrong-headed judicial interpretation.
~ Doug Muder from, Restoring the Constitution Is Now a Liberal Issue
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The short version is that as the climate degrades and fossil fuels become simultaneously more expensive and less useable, each generation inherits from its more prosperous ancestors an infrastructure that it can’t afford to maintain. Society muddles through from year to year — sometimes even seeming to advance — until some part of that poorly maintained infrastructure snaps and causes major destruction. The destroyed area may get rebuilt, but not to its previous level. The resulting community has less infrastructure to maintain, but is also less prosperous, and so the cycle continues into the next generation.
~ Doug Muder from, Infrastructure, Suburbs, and the Long Descent to Ferguson
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He draws heavily from John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent.
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(Part 9 of 72 in series, My Journey)
As you look back on the year that has just past, do you feel as though you spent another 12 months merely existing instead of truly living? Do you often go to bed at night with an anxious, sinking feeling that you wasted away another precious day of your limited time here on earth? One of my all-time favorite old books addressed this very concern better than anything else I’ve ever read.
~ Brett McKay from, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
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104 years old, still readable, and totally apropos of our lives today.
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One of the great myths in America is that sports build character. They can and they should. Indeed, sports may be the perfect venue in which to build character. But sports don’t build character unless a coach possesses character and intentionally teaches it.
~ Joe Ehrmann from, Joe Ehrmann – Wikipedia
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Yes! This just arrived…
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While others accused and attacked, he led by example. While others incited passion, he incited peace. While others were fighting battles, he won the war by teaching us that the entire conflict was based on a lie.
~ Rick Hutchins from, «http://blog.richmond.edu/heroes/2013/10/02/sidney-poitier-quiet-revolutionary/»
I highly recommend Sidney Poitier’s autobiographical, The Measure of a Man.
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Rule 1: Never be without a book.
Rule 2: Skip all Prefaces, Forewords and Introductions.
Rule 3: If you’re bored with a book, chuck it. There are millions of books you will never get to read, so if one doesn’t grab you, put it down.
Rule 4: You don’t have to finish a book. You can always come back to it.
Rule 6: You may read several books at once.
Rule 7: You may skip and skim. This is not a class, this is life.
Rule 8: Try and buy from your local bookshop while you still have one.
Rule 9: There is no rule 9.
Rule 10: Enjoy!
~ Eric Idle from, Eric Idle Blog » Editorial
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Eric Idle’s – yes, that Eric Idle – ten rules for reading, from Editorial.
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We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. There are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant; if we suppress all discussion, all criticism, saying, ‘This is it, boys, man is saved!’ and thus doom man for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.
~ Richard Feynman from, Richard Feynman on the Universal Responsibility of Scientists
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Feynman wrote several great, short books that are not hard science. This, and “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, are great places to start.
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BookMooch.com is a huge (as in: 100,000’s of books), free, book swapping site. Why buy a new book when you can save one from the landfill?
It’s free to join and create your account. You start out by posting up some books which you are willing to give away. If someone would like one of your books, they request to “mooch” it from you. If you accept the mooch, you simply ship it to them paying the postage. In return you get a bookmooch “point”.
If you see a book you want, you can request to mooch it. (If the owner accepts, they ship it to you and they pay the postage.) Each mooch costs you one point. You earn points when someone mooches a book from you; you get 1 point for within-the-U.S. mooches, and 3 points if you’re willing to ship internationally. You also get 1/10 of a point for each book you list in your moochable inventory.
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