Some Quotes

Just some quotes that may inspire:

--A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.     Carl Sandburg

--Education is the best provision for the journey to old age.     Aristotle

--Judge a man [and a woman] by their questions rather than their answers.   Voltaire

--Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.   John Updike

--Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.  Scott Adams

--The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.   John Kenneth Galbraith

--Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.  Jorge Luis Borges

--Never mistake motion for action.    Ernest Hemingway

--The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.   Ralph Waldo Emerson

--Life is brief, art is long.  Hippocrates

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Inequalities in the World

Recently the U.N. chief said the world is "at the breaking point" due to inequalities. Antonio Guterres said this at the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture. I believe in the past Mr. Guterres has said similar things.

I have a theory on why most of the developed world doesn't see this as an issue. It has to with the belief--not always expressed--that people in this world generally get what they deserve. This thinking allows helping others when catastrophes strike, but, in general, if someone is poor, or with few job possibilities, or seems to have few options to better their situation, then they no doubt brought that upon themselves.

I can understand this reasoning, but one of the problems I have with it is that this type of thinking says the world is essentially "as it should be." People get what they deserve, so if a billion people, let's say, are starving tonight, that's how it "should" be.

It reminds me of Leibniz's "this is the best of all possible worlds." Voltaire thought this ridiculous. I guess I am with Voltaire.

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Upcoming Book on President Trump

The president's cousin will be coming out with a book on the president. Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist and seems like just the right person to give America a deeper view of their Commander in Chief.

I do think most people who have been closely following Trump's actions for the past four years have a pretty good idea of his psyche. But sometimes more information can help with confirmation or negation of certain strands of a person's personality.

I view the president as having many traits like numerous dictators of the past. He is not technically a dictator, but that is only because his desires have been thwarted. He no doubt would have fit quite well with a number of familiar, and some not-so-familiar, names that live in infamy.

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About a Book Review

I was just reading a book review on James Carroll's Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. The book review itself was well written and the book reviewed appears to be an excellent book.

What made me think of the book was what I heard in church today. The priest said, if I understood him correctly, that Islam is called a religion of "peace," but in reality they are all about war. And that the reason there are so many adherents of Islam is because the children are brought up in the religion, so naturally they will gravitate to that faith.

The ironic thing, I thought, is the exact thing could be said of Christianity, if not more so. Didn't Christianity essentially say "convert to our faith or die," during the entire Crusades, and at other various places in its history?

I think Dr. Carroll's book is a good remedy for tendentious history.

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