The subject of loss affects us all in 2025.

I’m reading Stacy Schiff’s book about Samuel Adams prepping for Ken Burns doc re: our Revolution. “If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” ― Samuel Adams

"The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts. When people are divided into "loyalists" and "criminals" a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling." ― Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind

"The public is lied to every day by the President, by his spokespeople, by his officers.” ― Daniel Ellsberg

"Now does he feel his title Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe Upon a dwarfish thief.” ― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than to polish." -- Anne Bradstreet [1622-1672] "Thirty-three Meditations"

“A puritan culture’s conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism. Nothing else.” ― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat

Twenty years since Katrina… www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyj7...

"Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind.” ― William Shakespeare, King Lear

"There's a strong message of divine righteousness in dictatorships. Every megalomaniac has to believe his actions are sanctioned by God.” ― Eric Gamalinda, The Descartes Highlands

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.” ― Émile Zola

"Where are now the glorious hours Of a nation's gather'd powers? Like the setting of a star, In the fathomless afar; Time's eternal wing Hath around those ruins cast The dark presense of the past.” ― Letitia E. Landon [1802-1838]

"The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it.” ― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"Few Germans in 1933 imagined Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or death marches… last months of WW2. It’s hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them…” ― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy

Is FLABBY TRUMP afraid of all the names of the JOHNS in the SEXTRAFICKING FILES who were members at MAR-A-LARDO? Enquiring minds ask on behalf of the Epstein victims, on behalf of the American people, and curious how #HANDSOMEGAVIN2028 will meme the fuck out of it all?

I absolutely love this painting. It breathes with calmness. Yes, it is Ukrainian art. Ivan Pylypenko, The River of Time, 2020

“Exile’s around, my love A journey in a circle’s ring, Your weary feet heels down, my love, the jet is close to landing….” Years ago, w/a collaborator who died in Greece, we wrote a song in NY about exiles. Resonates in my memory for today’s world of exiles. www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIYw...

Gavin is SO HANDSOME!!! Gavin is SEXY, SMART, VIRILE and COOL!!! Compared to TINY HANDS TRUMP, always in the same DRAB blue suit to cover his FLAB, OUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR GAVIN is MODERN, VERY STRONG (no COVFEFE) and a GENIUS (HIGH IQ)!!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!!

“Life is short, and we have but a brief time in which to explore, to learn, to experience, and to create. Let us make the most of that time, and let us burn brightly, like meteors across the night sky, leaving behind us a trail of light and inspiration for those who come after us. ~Jack London

"His life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and this poison did not weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.” ― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

"Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

“A tyrant's trust dishonors those who earn it.” ― Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

"When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.” ― Émile Zola

“Science tells us the more intelligent a person is, the less conservative and more liberal they become, which doesn't say anything good about violent, hate-mongering conservatives.” ― Christina Engela, All That Remains

That's how you do it! Scotland holding no punches. Trump heads to Scotland: What to expect from his visit? www.bbc.com/news/videos/...

"For time, and time alone, will show the just man, though scoundrels are discovered in a day. ” ― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

Trump brought a convicted murderer back to the USA. Why? Because Trump is a liar, a hypocrite, a fraud who loves criminality and always has. Why else would this man have gotten a free ride from prison? www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/w...

President Obama could easily sue felon Trump for defamation, but it’s going to be fun seeing Trump’s corrupt DOJ flounder in their willful stupidity and subservience to Trump’s endless lies about Obama.

“A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.” ― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

"The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice." ― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

happy bday writer Cormac McCarthy, b.1933, Providence, RI. “Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.” “Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

"Integrity is the lifeblood of democracy. Deceit is a poison in its veins.” ― Edward M. Kennedy

"A state that employs torture invites barbarism and deserves nothing better than to suffer the harvest of its own excesses.” ― Steven Erikson, Dust of Dreams

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.” ― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

"The Czar was always sending us commands - you shall not do this and you shall not do that - till there was very little left that we might do, except pay tribute and die." -- Mary Antin [1881-1949]

“Come! Let us lay a lance in rest, And tilt at windmills under a wild sky! For who would live so petty and unblest That dare not tilt at something ere he die; Rather than, screened by safe majority, Preserve his little life to little end, And never raise a rebel cry!” — John Galsworthy

happy bday German/Swiss writer Hermann Hesse, b.1877. "Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.” “I have been and still am a seeker,...

A song I wrote in collaboration with a Peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo [1892-1938] more than 30 years ago, “Los Heraldos Negros” about the blows in life that make someone speechless… Remixed in 2025. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMMZ...

Cartoon of 1896 Reminding Republican Presidential Candidate William Mckinley And His Supporters Of The Bad Effects Of The 1890 Tariff Act Bearing His Name

“Conservatism is less a set of ideas than it is a pathological distemper, a militant anger over the fact that the universe is not closed and life is not static.” ― Bill Moyers

“We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking.” ― Jacques-Yves Cousteau

"Beware the nation in which one man rules, for it is a nation of slaves.” ― Simón Bolívar

“How dreadful the knowledge of the truth can be When there’s no help in truth.” ― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

He’s a disease that must be cut away.

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” ― C.G. Jung

“I assumed I was an idiot.” ― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Happy Juneteenth!, "on this day in 1865, Union soldiers arrive in Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War is over and slavery in the United States is abolished." “Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater.” George Washington Carver

“Concentration camps were a laboratory for the Nazis. They put minorities & intellectuals in there because the general population wouldn't mind losing those people. Nazi leaders knew people needed targets for their own self-hatred.” ― Wendy Hoffman, White Witch in a Black Robe