Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
‘Well, if you say, ‘Who gets fired?”, it always has to be the top. I mean these problems always start from the top, and they have to get solved from the top, and the President’s the leader, and he’s got to get everybody in a room and he’s got to lead, and he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t like doing that. That’s not a strength, and that’s why you have this horrible situation going on in Washington - very, very bad thing, and it’s very embarrassing worldwide.”
- Donald Trump, 9/20/2013
[...]
I was on the freeway when, out of the blue, there was Dio: Black Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell” crashing through a bright afternoon:They say that life’s a carousel
Spinning fast, you’ve got to ride it well
The world is full of kings and queens
Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
It’s heaven and hell, oh well
And they’ll tell you black is really white
The moon is just the sun at night
And when you walk in golden halls
You get to keep the gold that falls
It’s heaven and hell, oh, no. Fool, fool
For once, I was broke and I was laughing. How could I listen to a song so many times and only now really hear it? All along, Dio was saying what a fool’s game it is to measure your value on the standards of a society that was never meant for you. Gold is never free, and to get it, you’ve got to bow before a master. “God and the devil are inherent in each of us, and it’s our choice to make,” Dio said in one interview, late in life. “The optimum way to go is to do the good thing.”
I think he wanted to leave this as his legacy: a reminder that home is a place inside your own mind. There will always be new wizards to follow, new rings to kiss. But there, too, will always be rejects and castaways. And there’s victory in the realization that there will always be more of us than there are of them. That in our anger, together we are all home.
- Leah Sottile
https://youtu.be/HV_kxc9PxrQ
I wanted (children) to know that I could use the computer, but that I could also turn it off. It takes a strong person to be able to turn off the computer.
I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could’ve rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line.
But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.
You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.
Joni Mitchell
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