Uh-huh


We perceive what we understand,
and no more.

09.29.06 @ 00:32PDT Sunday, September 17th

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09.17.06 @ 00:57PDT Saturday, September 16th

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09.16.06 @ 10:10PDT Thursday, September 14th

Words to live by


even if our current government does not agree:


"The test of our progress is not whether we add
more to the abundance of those who have much;
it is whether we provide enough for those who
have too little."


FDR

09.14.06 @ 00:01PDT Saturday, September 9th

Nostomania

An overwhelming desire to return
home or to a familiar place.

09.09.06 @ 12:35PDT Friday, September 8th

Robert Kennedy 1968


"Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that -
counts air pollution and cigarette advertising. It counts special locks
for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the
destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in
chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead,
and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts
Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which
glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.


"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our
children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It
does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our
marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of
our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage;
neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor
our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except
that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America
except why we are proud that we are Americans."


Robert Kennedy, 1968

09.08.06 @ 10:35PDT Saturday, September 2nd

Mervin Willett Gonin DSO


An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel
Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first
British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.


Camp
I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men
and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren
wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge
piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took
a little time to get used to seeing men women and childen collapse as you
walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance.
One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count.
One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day
were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the
slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death
from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it,
one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak
to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread
purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell
the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak
to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given
her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in
the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their
bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue
soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was
shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection,
that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men
wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and
I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who
did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe
nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed
with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering
about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips.
I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was
a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals
again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm.
At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to
give them back their humanity


Source: Imperial War museum

09.02.06 @ 19:55PDT Friday, September 1st

Collaboration, not compromise....


"The perfect place to be is to care
what people think, but not let it
dictate what you do, because the
"I don't give a fuck" thing is a bit
of bullshit if you're trying to express
something.
- Mike Mills -

09.01.06 @ 00:45PDT