“You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help
January 30, 2012
Elephants have been known to die of broken hearts if a mate dies. They refuse to eat and will lay down, shedding tears until they starve to death. They refuse all human help. Scientists are beginning to believe that animals do have emotions and that their feelings may be more intense and unfiltered than our own. Emotion rises from the old brain, the limbic system, which birds and reptiles as well as dogs, humans, and other mammals share. Humans have additional brain structures and symbolic language to process our feelings and a complex array of psychological defense mechanisms that allay or soften the impact of our emotions. We repress, deny, subjugate, dissociate, and use all kinds of conscious and unconscious machinations to separate ourselves from our feelings, but animals have no such recourse, so their emotions are likely to beraw and strong. In fact, this may be one of the reasons we find them so attractive: they wear their hearts on their sleeves, so to speak. People seem to deny the existence of animal emotions so that they can continue to justify inhumane treatment and exploitation and avoid the fact that our actions have a deep emotional impact on our fellow beings, a deep one …
Unknown (via cosive) This is really tragic if it is true. There will be no elephants left sooner than we think.Francis Fukuyama on the Financial Crisis
There is also this problem that both you and Jeff Sachs have written on, that if you’re constantly critical of government, and say you don’t like government, the government you get is going to be of lower quality because it gets deprived of talent and resources. This, in turn, confirms your view of government as incompetent and it becomes a vicious circle.
It’s what’s an economist would call a low-level equilibrium trap. You don’t want to pay taxes to get better government services because you’re convinced the government will waste any money that you give them. So you’re never in a position to get out of that. A lot of Latin America is basically in that situation, and I’m afraid that the US has now been in this situation for some time.
-Interview by Sophie Roell
January 19, 2012
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. It is the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead
January 18, 2012
000055250014 on Flickr.
Yours duly. Either on our way to the epic mutton murtabak or on our way back to the hotel.
January 5, 2012
And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer’s ancient green lawns.
Rocket summer.
The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses.
Rocket summer.
The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.
Rocket summer.
People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.
-Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
“Do you ever wonder if—well, if there are people living on the third planet?’
‘The third planet is incapable of supporting life,’ stated the husband patiently. ‘Our scientists have said there’s far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
“Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. “Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“with short hair you begin to crave pearl necklaces, long earrings, and a variety of sunglasses. and you brush your teeth more often. short hair removes obvious femininity and replaces it with style. when it starts growing out a little and losing its style, you have to wear sunglasses until you can get it to the hairdresser. that’s why you need a variety. short hair makes you aware of subtraction as style. you can no longer wear puffed sleeves or ruffles; the neat is suddenly preferable to the fussy. you eye the tweezers instead of the blusher. what else can you take away? you can’t hide behind short hair… you may look a little androgynous, a little unfinished, a little bare… but your face is no longer a flat screen surrounded by a curtain: the world sees you in three dimensions.”
- joan juliet buck for american vogue, c.1988
