Days Volume Two

* People feel the democratic compact between voters and government has been shattered. They are fleeced by record levels of taxation, only to see billions poured down various sinks. Politicians are interfering more and more in their lives, telling them not just how to behave but how to think, rewarding the irresponsible and punishing the dutiful — while failing to deliver the absolute essentials of providing security against crime and conserving the nation’s identity.... The decay of religion...has given rise to moral relativism, which regards all beliefs and principles as being of equal value and truth as a relative concept. This has given rise to multiculturalism, which masquerades as the promotion of equal rights but is actually a disguised form of cultural and national self-loathing. This in turn lies behind the idea that nations are illegitimate or passé, and that the world’s problems can all be solved by everyone on the planet coming together to harness the power of reason to arr...

* Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it's queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there's some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost Oh tell the truth, that there were voices in ancient rooms, that the chequered floor spread out into infinity, that he was bleeding on to the tiles after the beating, that his hatred and contempt for his persecutors would never die. The room had no walls that he could see, no ceiling in visual range. He simply sensed, or assumed, that some where this world came to an end. Oh cold glass...

* "By the last year of the Bush presidency, growing numbers of former administration insiders had abandoned the government with the conviction that in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way. Many had fought valiantly to right what they saw as a dangerously wrong turn. With Bush, Cheney and Addington still firmly in power, it was hard to declare their efforts a success. Still, with change in the air, there was a sense that history might be on their side." She mentions by name Jack Goldsmith, Matthew Waxman, Alberto Mora and Phillip Zelikow. Zelikow had warned that the Bush Administration's descent into torture would be seen in the same light as Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He put it this way, "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools." Jane Mayer The Dark Side ... Deception, incompetence and social indifference have led the Bush administration to breach ethical and legal boundaries in its an...

* http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-8181329/One-day-in-the-life.html The pub catered to the standard contingent, the front bar with its handful of old timers and long-haul drinkers, yellow-cab couriers and short-tempered security men (for fifty bucks you could hire a standover man), and a clutch of blue collar workers - while the back bar, which gave access to a bare room set aside for pool tables, attracted the local grunge element, a few Sydney University students, welfare recipients, minor public servants from government departments (looking for an identity) and generally, the requisite agitating core of speed freaks, loners, downright shifty dudes and blow-ins. A Rabelaisian democracy, the usual suspects and standard cliques. To me the establishment always generated an edgy 'vibe' and that probably had as much to do with my paranoia as anything else. I actually felt like a foreigner smuggled into the camp. If you got landed with a nickname, this pretty much represente...

* "What a shocking bad hat!" was the phrase that was next in vogue. No sooner had it become universal, than thousands of idle but sharp eyes were on the watch for the passenger whose hat showed any signs, however slight, of ancient service. Immediately the cry arose, and, like the what-whoop of the Indians, was repeated by a hundred discordant throats. He was a wise man who, finding himself under these circumstances “the observed of all observers,” bore his honours meekly. He who showed symptoms of ill-feeling at the imputations cast upon his hat, only brought upon himself redoubled notice. The mob soon perceive whether a man is irritable, and, if of their own class, they love to make sport of him. When such a man, and with such a hat, passed in those days through a crowded neighbourhood, he might think himself fortunate if his annoyances were confined to the shouts and cries of the populace. The obnoxious hat was often snatched from his head, and thrown into the gutter by so...

* IN READING THE HISTORY OF NATIONS, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity. At an early age in the annals of Europe its population lost their wits about the sepulchre of Jesus, and crowded in frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land; another age went mad for fear of the devil, and off...