COMIC RELIEF plus THE BEST SPEECH I EVER READ

FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS "THREE WAY".... BRET and JEMAINE are HILARIOUS!






THE BEST SPEECH I'VE EVER READ *

JK Rowling's speech at Harvard yesterday is absolutely the most transformative, inspiring speech I've ever read. It's worth the read. We should all sign up to join Amnesty International.


By the way, everyone in my family thinks I'm incredibly childish and immature. But at least I'm never bored; there are too many marvelous adventures to go on. (I don't believe in age anyway.) As a big Harry Potter fan, I am absolutely mesmerized by Hogwarts, and gothic castles in general. I also have a morbid fascination with the ruins of Angkor Wat and anything 12th Century Cambodia. What all this means, I have no idea, but I get a chill whenever I think of these places, both real and imaginary. And this includes the historical majesty of Harvard University.

JK ROWLING'S COMMENCEMENT SPEECH AT HARVARD

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of
Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all,
graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have
to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British
philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling
experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something
on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in
modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of
fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at
all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime
stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory
capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to
them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my
life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is
what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

________________________

Let's get this party started. The Democratic Party, that is...

The House sent articles of impeachment against President Bush to the Judiciary Committee Wednesday on a mostly party-line vote: 251-166. Speaking to Veteran Activists, after today's historic vote, Kucinich said that if the Judiciary Committee does not act within 30 days, he intends to introduce another, longer version of the articles of impeachment, with 60 counts instead of 35.

“I am not going to let this go. I am not going to let it go. I’ll just keep coming back and they can pile these things up in committee but I’ll keep coming back,” Kucinich said. “I’ll bring it up again, and there will be more. There will be more.”

We need more lawmakers like Kucinich — who has the highest integrity of anyone in Congress. We've had him and his beautiful wife Elizabeth on our show several times.

On June 11, Veterans in DC delivered 23,000 petition signatures in support of Congressman Dennis Kucinich's 35 Articles of Impeachment. Impeachment Champion Mike Ferner, another of the U.S. Vets presented John Conyers with even more petitions demanding that Congress respect our Oath to Protect & Defend our Constitution v. Domestic Enemy, George Bush.

"While most of the 20 some Veterans were conciliatory and pleased to hand our 23,000 pro-IMPEACH petition signatures to Chairman Conyers, both Iraq Veterans Against the War Board of Directors Co-Chair, Adam Kokesh, and Delaware Valley Veterans Executive Director, Bill Perry, made it clear to Judiciary Chair Conyers that we felt betrayed by Conyers failure to advocate for Impeachment, as he had done earlier, ever since the Downing Street Memos, in April, 2005."

On our radio show The Basham and Cornell Show I have had the honor of interviewing some of the greatest minds in the world (including some conservatives) and what rises to the top is one main point: we have to take our country out of the hands of very misguided — if not sinister men. McCain's irrational war lust will signal the end of America as we know it. Despite his tepid response to the troops, make no mistake, McCain has secretly vowed to continue the Bush agenda, which is to keep America in perpetual war. To continue the "war on an abstract noun." To enrich his cronies in the oil industry. To draft our young sons. We must not allow this flip-flopping, brain-addled, self-serving, manipulative unstable neocon to ever steal the presidency. Even Pat Buchanan — the traditional conservative's conservative says that McCain makes Cheney look like Gandhi.

We are in Yahoo News as WXB102 adds our Vegas radio show to their lineup, the award-winning Basham and Cornell Show. Check last week's post below for podcasts and Mp3 links to a few of our recent interviews with John Edwards, Bill Press, Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage, Pat Buchanan, Valerie Bertinelli...

Gas Wars

Kucinich to Speak for Full Hour on House Floor on Iraq Oil LawMay 22nd, 2007

May 22nd, 2007
We encourage you to comment on this press release, and the impact this may have on the presidential race for 2008. This is the first time Congress has had a full discussion on the privatization of Iraq’s oil since the beginning of the war. http://blog.pdamerica.org/?p=1117
WASHINGTON DC - WEDNESDAY, MAY 23, 2007 - At approximately 11:00 a.m. today, Congressman Dennis Kucinich will invoke a rarely used procedure to offer a privileged motion claiming one hour of time to speak on the floor of the House of Representatives about current legislative plans to privatize Iraq’s oil.
This will be the first time in Congress that there has been a full discussion of the covert efforts to accomplish privatization of Iraq’s oil through the supplemental spending bill.
Kucinich has alerted his colleagues to this concern in the past. Today he will do so on the floor of the House.
Kucinich argued against invading Iraq prior to the 2003 vote that authorized it. He published his case against it and helped persuade many of his colleagues to vote No. Kucinich challenged the legality of the war in court in an effort to prevent it. He proposed a detailed plan to end the occupation of Iraq over three years ago. His current plan is found in his bill HR 1234, which includes these findings:
“Any attempt to sell Iraqi oil assets during the United States occupation will be a significant stumbling block to peaceful resolution. There must be fairness in the distribution of oil resources in Iraq.”
Kucinich has voted against every new funding bill for the occupation, including the recent Supplemental. He supports using the power of the purse to end the war. He opposes any attack on Iran and proposes formally forswearing the use of so-called preventive war. He has proposed the creation of a Department of Peace to address international and domestic violence.
As with all House sessions, this speech will be televised on C-Span.

The increase in gas prices has cost U.S consumers an extra twenty billion dollars so far this year according to the Government Accountability Office. This added cost has taken money out of the economy that normally would have been spent on consumer products.

The GAO told Congress that a large amount of oil refining capacity and lower inventories have led to the rise in gas prices. Many feel the Iraq war has caused oil to be withheld from U.S consumers. Gas prices have risen $1.05 since early February. U.S gas prices are at an all time high and getting higher.

The Energy Departments reports that gasoline prices have risen 50% since January, which ranks as one of the largest ongoing increases recorded in U.S history. The high price of gasoline has hurt retail as sales have fallen 1.5% week by week.

Many are calling for the breaking up of oil companies and undoing the mega-mergers which may bring about more competition within the industry. Calls from consumers and business alike have fallen on deaf ears in the Bush administration.

Americans have watched oil prices rise as the Texas Oil Man became President. They have watched Exxon and Chevron rake in record profits while gasoline prices continue to rise. They have seen the economy increasingly slow to a limp, while U.S Corporations continue to flourish.

One of the many promises the Bush administration made when they overtly invaded Iraq, was that gas prices in the U.S would be much lower. These promises along with many other insincere boasts have never stimulated into truth.

If gasoline prices are to ever return to affordable levels, Congress must stop the Iraq war, force U.S oil companies to lower prices and limit profits that oil companies can make without major relief to the consumer.

The most crucial thing Americans can do to bring gas prices down rapidly is to simply remove the current "Commander In Chief and his catalog of corruption from office. The final step will be to keep oil men from residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

THE TRICKLE UP THEORY

The political catch phrase of the 1980's was something Ronald Reagan called "Trickle Down Economics." This brand of economics was said simply to make the richer even richer, and their wealth would trickle down through the economy to the less fortunate class of people.

Throughout the Reagan years, the poor and middle class waited patiently for the trickle down to get to them, but it seldom did. Trickle Down Economics worked very well for the wealthy Americans, but it had an adverse reaction for the rest of society.

Today there is a new version of the Trickle Down Theory. This version also involves the Republican party, the same party Ronald Reagan was so proud of. This theory is called Trickle Up Economics and like cream, it always rises to the top.

One example of the Triple Up theory involves Jack Abramoff. Abramoff never held an office in the White House but his bribery and scandals rose from the visitors area that Abramoff occupied, to the President's closet ally.

Next in the Trickle Up scenario is Scooter Libby. Libby was the close confidant to the Vice President, and helped his ally spread the name of a covert CIA agent for political gain. This scandal has slowly "trickled up" to the hallway of the President of the United States.

The Trickle Up theory raised eyebrows again as Alberto Gonzales became embroiled in firing U.S attorneys because they wouldn't indict Democratic candidates before an election. As the evidence unfolds the deeds once again have risen to the Presidents door.

As more and more revelations unfold, from the scandals of Republican Congressmen, or the disappearance of millions of dollars meant for the people of New Orleans and of Iraq, the cream always rises to the top of the U.S government.

The lying and trickery that brought a war in Iraq to the wounded soldiers lying in blood and urine at Walter Reed, the evidence once again "trickles up" to the Oval office.

The past six years have brought lies and wars, death and deception to a country that was once unified as one. Some call it treason, some call it shame, but the past six years have brought the Republican version of Trickle Up Economics, from the lowest of White House aides to the occupant of the nations highest office.

Our soldiers will not be safe and America will not be secure until those in Congress allow impeachment proceedings to "Trickle Up" to the top two people in the United States government.

Trickle Down Effect cartoon copyright: copyright socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/Cartoons.html


Deb & Lyd at Ray & Sharon Courts Hollywood Collectors Show last weekend

THE GIFT OF FOG

Fear is like fog: you can still drive through it, even though you can’t see your way. But it will always lift. (continued below, but first this...

BREAKING NEWS: In Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, Rupert Murdoch was asked if News Corp. (FOX "News") had managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq. His answer?

“No, I don’t think so. We tried.” Asked by Rose for further comment, he said: “We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East…but we have been very critical of his execution.”

Let me repeat this: “We Tried!”

FOX NEWS, including Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, have deliberately PROMOTED the war in Iraq! The fact that Murdoch virtually admits FOX is a propaganda network should be FRONT PAGE NEWS. This is unconscionable, illegal, shameful. It took an act of Congress to make Murdoch a citizen so he could buy a U.S. TV network -- in order to sway and manipulate Americans. If the news, which is supposed to be "Fair and Balanced" can be bought and sold, then anyone with enough money can come in and do this. http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/index.php?p=341

And he owns MYSPACE!!!

Heard a great review yesterday on Harrison's show: Howard Zin's new book "Voices of a People’s History of the United States." The voices are loud and clear — and our vision is becoming clearer. I personally feel that I am coming out of a fog in my own life, on many converging levels. As I lift the blinders and come out of anesthesia, I am becoming more resolute. We can't allow these destructive people to hold our country hostage any longer. What kind of message does it send to the world that the most powerful democratic nation in the world — a government by the people, for the people and OF THE PEOPLE — allows a dictator to remain in office? On principle alone, we should start impeachment proceedings now. If Bush and Cheney were out, Pelosi would be President, but of course this won't happen; there's not enough time. I wonder if it's possible to launch impeachment proceedings and freeze the decider's war powers? Wishful thinking.

In my view, Gore, Edwards, Obama and Hilary are all great candidates. But I believe Gore and Edwards have the best chance of winning the actual election. I am thrilled that Gore has received both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar nomination for bringing global warming to the attention of the world.

Bush is not doing things half-assed, he’s doing them full-assed.

WHY WE MUST IMPEACH BUSH and CHENEY

Found these tidbits from Doug Thompson of the conservative Capitol Hill Blue back in 2005:

GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the [Patriot] act could further alienate conservatives...

“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President
and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”

“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

"I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”

Attorney General Alberto [Geneva Convention is "rather quaint"] Gonzales, while still White House counsel, wrote that the “Constitution is an outdated document.”

Aside from the below classic quote, don't forget that Bush said back on the 2000 campaign trail, "There oughta be limits to freedom."

I like the question posed to Gonzalez last week, when Congress asked him what Bush thinks the role of Congress is during war time. Does Bush realize Congress is a co-equal branch of government? Is he again going to dismiss the Constitution?

By the way, smirking while sending more troops to their death should be a high crime and misdemeanor. The horrifying thing is, Bush actually believes he’s right. He believes his policies are working. He believes he’s abiding by a higher moral law that will prove him right in the long run. This is the scary. He must be impeached because he lied over and over again. And because his agenda, his framework, his entire way of looking of things, his frame of reference and his definition of life, lying, truth, responsibility, civility, and human interaction is in opposition to the will of the people. He frames everything according to an archaic and very dangerous “Us vs. Them” mentality – and it’s primitive and dysfunctional. It is not only NOT progressive, it’s regressive, positively Paleolithic.

Here's a quote that reminds me of the administration's belief system:

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship...

...the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Herman Goering from his cell at Nuremberg, April 18, 1946

And here's a great quote by my wonderful mother:

"I used to think, and still do, that it would be so wonderful if one never ever spoke of one's belief system but instead lived in such a way that people would ask, 'What is it that makes you so loving and kind?'"

Is that a utopian thought?"