howardpark

Note the poor oppressed Christian's post below the cartoon. Seems she can't take a joke if it isn't sufficiently worshipful of her superstitions and her need to feel victimized.

"Luxury, deadlier / Than any armed invader, lies like an incubus / Upon us still, avenging the world we brought to heel." (Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires)


Juvenal wrote those lines in the 2nd century C.E., at the apex of Roman glory. The Empire had reached its maximum extent, and the Roman military machine, surrounded by enemies it could no longer dominate, had taken a defensive posture (Hadrian's Wall was completed in 122 C.E.). The rest of the world had by then come to understand that Roman glory was paid for with blood, conquest, and depradation, and that Roman "values" were expressed in outrageous luxury and arrogance. It was the beginning of the end for Rome.

Juvenal was also the author of another famous quotation that rings out to us from across the millennia: "Who will watch the watchmen?"

"The Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land.... How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?... The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth." (speech commonly attributed to Chief Seattle, Skokomish tribe, 1854)


What's so important about respecting private property, when the people who originally sliced off that piece of the Earth and called it "their own" did so with a spear, a sword, a gun? Every inch of our Earth belongs to everyone, and we have just as much right to walk on "your" land as you do.

This is what our oil addiction is paying for in Dubai. The development includes 230 skyscrapers and will be completed in 2010, by which time the Iraq War will be in its eighth year.


(Thanks to woodturner99 for this idea.)

When Han Solo says, "Make the jump to lightspeed!" or when Captain Picard gives the order to "Engage warp drive!" you see the stars elongate into trails as they shoot past. Ever wonder what it would look like from on board a "real" cisluminal spaceship? Here's an astrophysicist's take on the subject.

Quotations from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. "The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."


(The painting is Tim Kirk's The Last Shore. It's not a literal representation of the scene quoted above, but to me the connection is nevertheless meaningful.)

This poem (Emily Dickinson's #1113) helped me get through many lonely, hopeless nights. "What are the sinews of such cordage for / Except to bear"?


(The painting is Diego Rivera's The Flower Carrier. To me, it's an eloquent statement about the burden placed on the poor by the rich. It says that even something as light and beautiful as a flower can become an instrument of oppression.)