I’ll never understand why people feel the need to scoff at prayer in times of tragedy, when that is the very thing requested by many of the suffering.
"Decency means never being tired or made haggard by others. There’s always some enjoyment in dealing with the world, whether you are dealing with people, with other sentient beings, or even with inanimate objects. You could be dealing with your garden; it could be your horse; it could be your dog, your cat, or your stove. No matter what you are doing, the sense of decency is being absolutely on the spot, without falling to the level of uncaring and crudeness."
- Chögyam Trungpa, “The Big No” in Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala, pages 136-137. (via dharmasimulation)
"We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news, from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million. They entrance us with their electronic hallucinations as we waiver, as paralyzed with fear as Odysseus’ sailors, between Scylla and Charybdis."
- Chris Hedges (via azspot)
"For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and give his life as a ransom for many."
- Mark 10:45 (via shneevon)
Not all those who wander are lost.: The Past.
broken hearts don’t heal
broken strings don’t mend
the pain was not only in the past
its phantom still lingers around
reminding us of our weaknesses,
making us weak in the knees
fragile marrow bones
they crack easily
the past has seen it all
watched us fall, tried to mold us in,
black…
"My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself."
- Philip Levine (via theparisreview)
"There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent."
- Chris Hedges (via azspot)
Guys. Google is 13 today. A teenager. We’re screwed.
“What is the capital of Peru?”
“How the fuck should I know? Go figure it out yourself, lazy ass.”
