1.29.2023 – the friendship made her

the friendship made her
realize respect and trust don’t
require agreement

“Wrong things bother her,” Mr. Perkins told me. “And wrong things bother me.”

So writes Farah Stockman quoting Tony Perkins (not that Tony Perkins) in the guest opinion piece, One of the Strangest Friendships in Washington (Jan. 29, 2023 – New York Times).

Ms. Stockman writes: Given their résumés, one might think that Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, and Anurima Bhargava, who worked in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, would be adversaries — if they ever crossed paths at all. Yet, over the past five years, they have managed to forge a bond that transcends politics and proves that you don’t have to agree on values here at home to promote basic human rights abroad.

But they found common ground.

“Wrong things bother her,” Mr. Perkins told me. “And wrong things bother me.”

Ms. Stocmman quotes Ms. Bhargrava, “He’d treated her with respect from the first moment she met him, Ms. Bhargava told me. He made an effort to learn how to pronounce her name, even as another Republican commissioner refused to do so. They sat next to each other at a dinner retreat in North Carolina and started chatting.“

The friendship made her realize that “respect and trust don’t require agreement,” she [Anurima Bhargava] said.

Friendship.

Respect.

Trust.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, the Romans liked to say.

In its most common usage the saying is used to disprove an argument.

‘With this, therefore because of this’ is the translation and it usually means event B followed event A so event B MUST HAVE BE CAUSED BY event A.

But in this case.

Friendship.

Trust.

Respect.

Not only can they depend on each other, but the parts in the equation, they might be interchangeable.

Maybe it is better to say of three things, it is hard to have any of one of these three without the other two.

Perhaps the key here is that while all of these there things need the other, none of the three require agreement.

Ms. Stockman closes with the comment:

[Mr. Perkins’] friendship with Ms. Bhargava hasn’t changed his core beliefs, he told me.

He still fights for Bible-believing Christians, whom he views as under attack in the West. But he has changed how he expresses himself.

In an age when others write over-the-top tweets just to outrage their political opponents, he chooses his words more carefully and imagines his good friend is listening.

1.28.2023 -times when picture worth

times when picture worth
thousand words – what happened to
Great in Great Britain

It was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, the Irish writer, who said, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life“.

Mr. Wilde felt that the reason life imitated art was the, “… result not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.”

I have no problem with this.

And I suppose there are no rules or guidelines as to which art to imitate.

And it seems that Great Britain has decided to skip ‘The Thick of It’ and ‘Yes Minister’ and go straight to imitate Monty Python.

I feel that all I have to say or can say on the subject is illustrated in the above photo.

Who are these people?

From what slime at the bottom of a genetic gene pool were they scrapped up and presented to the world as viable political leaders?

Oh Boy Howdy, but do I love this photograph.

It says it all.

All you need to know about what happened to the Great in Great Britain.

I put it to you that you had been able to take this photograph to Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin and asked, can you come up with a sketch that presents these two as the leaders of Great Britain, they might have said it was possible, but even in the World of Monty Python, who would believe it?

According to Wikipedia, “[The British Empire] At its height, was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, 23 per cent of the world population at the time, and by 1920, it covered 35.5 million km2 (13.7 million sq mi), 24 per cent of the Earth’s total land area.”

Great Britain WAS Great.

There were leaders who put the GREAT in Great Britain and it was felt all around the world.

Not arguing here if that was good or bad but I will say this.

I remember talking with a friend years ago who had just spent time in Canada and Australia and I asked her what she felt those folks thought about the US and the relationship with Britain and those countries.

Her response was that the people she met regarded the US as the country that was able to get out, but I digress.

As I was saying, one time Britain had a hand in the live of a quarter of the worlds peoples and a say over a a quarter of the lands available in the world.

Now they make deals where they don’t even know if they are or aren’t or maybe might be in charge of Northern Ireland.

The picture illustrated the article, Why is British politics a raging bin-fire? Don’t ask the misunderstood heroes who held the torches, by Marina Hyde.

Ms. Hyde writes that these leaders fell they failed because their, ” … visions have been betrayed by someone or other in one way or another, when the reality is they were undone by such trifles as “the voters”, “reality” and “the consequences of their own actions”.

Ms. Hyde finishes with “it’s possible – just possible – that the real victims of betrayal are not all these politicians, but the public.”

As the Pythons would say, “Now … for something completely different …”

Notice, they didn’t say better.

1.27.2023 – fascinating thing

fascinating thing
practitioners of these kinds
of fabrications

is how easily
disprovable their falsehoods
turn out to be so

Adapted from:

The fascinating thing about Santos, and other practitioners of these kinds of fabrications, is how easily disprovable their falsehoods turn out to be.

If compulsive lying has its roots in something deeper and more complicated than mere self-advancement, you assume the risk-taking is part of the appeal.

Psychologically, Santos’s claims appear akin in scale, impulse and thrill-seeking to a man running across a football field naked, each more lurid and exposing than the last.

As it appeared in the article, George Santos’s lies are so big you almost have to admire them by Emma Brockes in the Guardian.

Ms. Brockes closes with:

It’s a serious thing to mislead the electorate and lie to members of Congress, with a much more damaging fallout than the lies of a fake heiress trying to score a free holiday.

Still, in both cases, the fascination with the workings of compulsive liars is the same.

Scrutinising photos of Santos’s blank and babyish face triggers the vertiginous possibility inherent in all really big grifts – and one, possibly, deserving of sympathy, although who knows – that he has come to believe all this stuff himself.

There are a lot of $5 dollar words in this article and I have to admire how Ms. Brockes weaves them into the narrative with seemingly so little effort.

As for the subject of the piece, well, with so many liars in America, don’t they deserve someone in Congress too?

1.26.2023 – sugar cinnamon

sugar cinnamon
cayenne red pepper on toast
mistake this morning

According to quoteinvestigator.com, The 1662 edition of “The history of the worthies of England” by Thomas Fuller attributed King James as saying, “he was a very valiant man, who first adventured on eating of Oysters; most probably meer hunger put men first on that tryal.”

I had something new for breakfast today.

Not oysters.

And not by choice.

My coffee and two as in two slices of toast was new by mistake.

And when I say mistake, I truly mean mis take as I mis took the wrong spice from the kitchen cupboard to spinkle on my toast.

I know what you are saying.

And if you aren’t saying it, you are thinking it.

Didn’t I notice the color?

Didn’t I notice the smell?

CAN’T YOU READ for cry’n out loud?

All good questions and all suppose a level of awareness in the morning that I rarely achieve nowadays until about noon or later.

I think I was a very valiant man if maybe not the first to try cayenne red pepper on toast.

I may not be the last.

But it was the only time for me.

At least, so I hope.

1.25.2023 – President has more

President has more
absolute executive powers
than any ruler

The important words that I could not hammer into place in this haiku are, “… in theory.”

Today’s haiku was adapted from a paragraph in Nelson’s History of the War (Vol. IX) (Thomas Nelson, London,  1915) by John Buchan where Mr. Buchan worked towards explaining The American Philosophy of Politics on the chapter titled, THE STRAINING OF AMERICAN PATIENCE.

(GOSH, 9 Volumes already published as of 1915 and three more years of war to go? BTW, it does run to 24 volumes all together!)

Mr. Buchan wrote:

These reasons decided public opinion, and, since in America public opinion is the true sovereign, President Wilson was loyal to his master.

The President of the United States has in theory more absolute executive powers than any ruler in the world.

But he is bound to an unseen chariot wheel.

He dare not outrun the wishes of the majority of the citizens.

His pace is as fast as theirs, but no faster, or he courts a fall.

A true democracy is a docile follower of a leader whom it has once trusted.

But an incomplete democracy such as America demands not a leader but a fellow-wayfarer who can act as spokesman.

Hence it was idle to talk of President Wilson’s policy as if it were the conclusions and deeds of an individual.

It was his business to interpret the opinion of America at large, and there is no reason to believe that he erred in this duty.

I have heard this explained more than once, in more than one book, in more than one lecture, by more than one writer or Professor.

The most important job any President has is to EDUCATE THE PEOPLE, one of favorite Professors pounded into my brain.

Once educated, the people will understand what the President means to do.

Once the people understand that, they will also support what the President means to do.

Search on YOU TUBE for FDR’s fireside chat on February 23, 1942.

The White House would ask the Newspapers to print a World Map so that listeners could follow along with the President as he traced around the world and focused on trouble spots and where American military forces were in action.

I always thought to myself, can it be this simple?

How can it be this simple?

How can it be this simple and still almost impossible to do?

How can it be this simple and still almost impossible to do today?

Then I re-read that paragraph I quoted today.

There is that one word in there.

The word at the end of this sentence.

A true democracy is a docile follower of a leader whom it has once trusted.

Trusted.

Trust.

So simple.

And I do love that line that reads, “But an incomplete democracy such as America demands not a leader but a fellow-wayfarer who can act as spokesman.“

I have been watching these reports of everyone taking Top Secret documents home as home work, I guess, and I see that these folks look to live in some really nice homes.

Not like much anything like most of my fellow-wayfarers get to live in, but I digress.