I've NEVER agreed with you, Nick. But you definitely have a point here.

The blessed 14th July. Today.

I remember 11th grade, high school, I was about 15 or 16, studying English Lit: Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities". We were able to watch the black-and-white movie "A Tale of Two Cities".

I remember sitting next to a friend, Mary, crying as Madame Defarge knitted while the tumbrels crrying scores of aristocrats and dissidents rumbled by on their way to the guillotine.

The first stirrings inside me of a philosophical outlook was beginning, and perhaps attempts at solutions...to what? The depravities of mankind?
How could ochlocracy be checked? The fostering and use of independent thinking is one way. And THAT requires a self-sufficient ego.

Interestingly, Mary and I became best friends because we "shared tears" sitting next to each other during that movie. And later we were roommates at Colorado State University.

Also interestingly, Lafayette, a hero to Americans is a t*****r in the eyes of France. He was a moderate Frenchman in a time of extreme fanaticism.

(By the by, it wasn't until last year that I discovered the great French chemist, Lavoisier, was guillotined in that bloody revolution---or should I say massacre?---because he was a tax collector.)

And this is the revolution the French glorify and was the basis for liberalism and modern Socialism? This most bloody of events?

There are ways and means to evoke change without total destruction.

So don't go around telling everyone that a woman is a private being with the right to destroy new souls.

But I know I'll never find another YOU---after you have been aborted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmactMIhrRM

It's "liberal math", archie. It's not supposed to make sense. Forgedda bout it.

(This is a pretty awful thought, but maybe it's the wipers for the elimination of the "waste" some "private beings" have a right to dispose of. See Ron Vrooman's topic: "Roe vs. Wade")

She may be a "private being", but she is making a decision for two "private beings." And that second one does not yet have a voice.

I suppose in your mind, if he does not have a voice, he is not really a person.

Go sit in the corner with Barbara Boxer, who actually claims a "private being" is not a person, until he is taken home from the hospital.

Where are you going to draw the line, Ronnie?

Oh, poor Kevyn!!

I can see it happening, npp. But there are many more contributing factors, besides the L***Q's.

Heard that one of the Supreme Court Justices is retiring.

Thank you, Justice Kennedy!!!

And thank YOU, CarolSeer!

Peewee, this is a test: What do you think of my media comment?

Let me know how you feel about the topic "Paris Notes*. When you get a brain, that is.

Peewee, read my lips, or at least listen very carefully. No one, including myself, said Joan of Arc was a Frenchman.

And who cares whether you like me or not? Anybody?

Note from the introduction to "The Autobiography of Mark Twain", edited and arranged by Charles Neider, published 1959:

"Bernard DeVoto believed that Twain's failure to write a coherent autobiography was due to a certain dread. 'When he invoked Hannibal [that is, his early years] he found there not only the idyll of boyhood but anxiety, violence, supernatural horror, and an uncrystallized but enveloping dread. Much of his fiction, most of his masterpiece [Huck Finn], flows from tht phantasy-bound anxiety.
I think that the impulse to write his autobiography was in part an impulse to examine and understand that dread. And I think that the impulse was arrested short of genuine self-revelation because the dread was so central in him that he could approach it only symbolically, by way of fiction".

The editor, Neider, adds: "The associatons streamed out from it in a million directions and it was his quixotic hope to capture most of them with the irony and humor and storytelling gift which were his own way of REGARDING THE HUMAN DRAMA.

Perhaps the dread was due to his fear that the human species was, indeed, a race of psychopaths.

Lady Laughs Alot

Slat suggested this topic deserves a thread of its own.

Some of you were intelligent enough, or maybe humble enough (who knows?) to catch the (chilling?) parallels between the American and the Frenchman. The American being a Frenchman sans flair (elegance, smartness, sophistication) and history.

Fascinating isn't it, that the initial post was made on the day following the blessed 4th July?



Another jewel from the mind of the master wit:

"Paris Notes

--[Crowded out of "A Tramp Abroad" to make room for more vital statistics.--M. T.]

The Parisian travels but little, he knows no language but his own, reads no literature but his own, and consequently he is pretty narrow and pretty self-sufficient. However, let us not be too sweeping; there are Frenchmen who know languages not their own: these are the waiters. Among the rest, they know English; that is, they know it on the European plan --which is to say, they can speak it, but can't understand it. They easily make themselves understood, but it is next to impossible to word an English sentence in such away as to enable them to comprehend it. They think they comprehend it; they pretend they do; but they don't. Here is a conversation which I had with one of these beings; I wrote it down at the time, in order to have it exactly correct.

I. These are fine oranges. Where are they grown?

He. More? Yes, I will bring them.

I. No, do not bring any more; I only want to know where they are from where they are raised.

He. Yes? (with imperturbable mien and rising inflection.)

I. Yes. Can you tell me what country they are from?

He. Yes? (blandly, with rising inflection.)

I. (disheartened). They are very nice.

He. Good night. (Bows, and retires, quite satisfied with himself.)

That young man could have become a good English scholar by taking the right sort of pains, but he was French, and wouldn't do that. How different is the case with our people; they utilize every means that offers. There are some alleged French Protestants in Paris, and they built a nice little church on one of the great avenues that lead away from the Arch of Triumph, and proposed to listen to the correct thing, preached in the correct way, there, in their precious French tongue, and be happy. But their little game does not succeed. Our people are always there ahead of them Sundays, and take up all the room. When the minister gets up to preach, he finds his house full of devout foreigners, each ready and waiting, with his little book in his hand--a morocco-bound Testament, apparently. But only apparently; it is Mr. Bellows's admirable and exhaustive little French-English dictionary, which in look and binding and size is just like a Testament and those people are there to study French. The building has been nicknamed "The Church of the Gratis French Lesson."

These students probably acquire more language than general information, for I am told that a French sermon is like a French speech--it never names a historical event, but only the date of it; if you are not up in dates, you get left. A French speech is something like this:

Comrades, citizens, brothers, noble parts of the only sublime and perfect nation {GET THAT? ...the most sublime and perfect nation}, let us not forget that the 21st January cast off our chains; that the 10th August relieved us of the shameful presence of foreign spies; that the 5th September was its own justification before heaven and humanity; that the 18th Brumaire contained the seeds of its own punishment; that the 14th July was the mighty voice of liberty proclaiming the resurrection, the new day, and inviting the oppressed peoples of the earth to look upon the divine face of France and live; and let us here record our everlasting curse against the man of the 2d December, and declare in thunder tones, the native tones of France, that but for him there had been no 17th March in history, no 12th October, no 19th January, no 22d April, no 16th November, no 30th September, no 2d July, no 14th February, no 29th June, no 15th August, no 31st May--that but for him, France the pure, the grand, the peerless, had had a serene and vacant almanac today!

I have heard of one French sermon which closed in this odd yet eloquent way:

My hearers, we have sad cause to remember the man of the 13th January. The results of the vast crime of the 13th January have been in just proportion to the magnitude of the set itself. But for it there had been no 30 November--sorrowful spectacle! The grisly deed of the 16th June had not been done but for it, nor had the man of the 16th June known existence; to it alone the 3d September was due, also the fatal 12th October. Shall we, then, be grateful for the 13th January, with its freight of death for you and me and all that breathe? Yes, my friends, for it gave us also that which had never come but for it, and it atone--the blessed 25th December.

It may be well enough to explain, though in the case of many of my readers this will hardly be necessary. The man of the 13th January is Adam; the crime of that date was the eating of the apple; the sorrowful spectacle of the 30th November was the expulsion from Eden; the grisly deed of the 16th June was the murder of Abel; the act of the 3d September was the beginning of the journey to the land of Nod; the 12th day of October, the last mountain-tops disappeared under the flood. When you go to church in France, you want to take your almanac with you--annotated."

I suppose that maybe, just maybe, you all are entitled to an explanation: (This for the most part, is for those in the media)

It is not "how" people say "what" they say that annoys Us, it is "what" they say, for it tells me that at best they are engaging in superficial thinking, and at worst, in no thinking at all. Take proud republican, for example, who trolls for Douglas Feith, the arch-psychopath. [Hahahahahaha,I knew it...You have no clue!!!!.......Oh,Gheeze!!!!!...Should i thank you for not being rude????..... ----proud republican's comment of 5-24-2018] PLEASE take her---somewhere else, another planet, maybe!

And "media people" who believe writing what I say influences others annoy me tremendously. Not because I am wrong, but because unfortunately they are still "laboring" under the illusion that what is promulgated in the media SHOULD influence others, for after all aren't these people not only more beautiful than the rest of us. but also more intelligent?

"You heard him say it? 'Pain's the only evil I know about'...And that society is the only thing which determines whether an act is wrong or not?...Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time?" (A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr., 1061)

"The Edge of Seventeen": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojGKSgug_FM

What Stevie is really singing is this: "Just like the 'way we were'...sing a song about like she's singing...and the days go by". I was on the edge of seventeen when I first read "A Canticle for Leibowitz", just as Brother Francis was when he encountered the blessed documents.

Ever hear of Social Cognitive Theory? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cognitive_theory

But then wasn't it James Q. Wilson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Q._Wilson) who said: "Government shapes character". Yeah, like Hitler Youth shaped character.

Can you follow me here people?

Who said she was a man? Your comment is undeserving of reply.

Actually it was because she continued to dress in men's harness and clothing that the English convicted her of heresy, and burned her at the stake, igniting young Frenchmen's latent patriotism, and boosting their morale; thus the French were able to ward off any attempt at an English Empire.

Any other questions?

Did you read my introductory remark, BB?

Did I not say that when I start to believe that when God made mankind, he created a race of psychopaths, I read Mark Twain?

I choose not to like psychopaths.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SncFSkq0XDg