"When, years ago, I puzzled over the strange research for my book American Cosmic, I came to a recognition that Nietzsche had predicted a new form of something other than secular, Darwinian evolution. To open my book, I quoted Nietzsche’s proverbial question, posed in The Antichrist, to frame the issue: “Two thousand years have come and gone, and not a single new god!” I thought that the answer to Nietzsche’s question/observation was best stated by David Bowie’s statement, “The Internet is an alien life form.” Therefore, this new religion or order posited humanity as technologically transformed by non-human intelligence."  --D. W. Pasulka "2001: A Space Odyssey, Nietzsche, and the Nuclear Weapons-UFO Connection, Part Two of a Series."

https://dwpasulka.substack.com/p/2001-a-space-odyssey-nietzsche-and

Like the conservative movement more broadly, the [Heritage Foundation] organization wants young women to believe this is all being done for their benefit: that work is soulless and unfulfilling, that feminism has made women miserable, and that the real path to happiness is being a stay-at-home mom. The latest right-wing mantra for women? “Less burnout, more babies” 

...

This isn’t some fringe effort. From the tradwife explosion to MAHA disinformation about birth control, conservatives are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into convincing the next generation that the rapid erosion of their rights isn’t a political and moral crisis—but a lifestyle upgrade.They want our daughters and granddaughters to have zero information about their bodies and sex, no ability to protect themselves from pregnancy, limited choices for an intellectual and professional life, and—once our girls have been corralled into early marriages—few opportunities to leave.

Push them into the home, force them to get pregnant, rinse and repeat.

And while it’s certainly easier for the Heritage Foundation and their allies if American girls fall in line, conservatives in power are just as happy to force them onto that narrow path. As with all coercive men, the fact that young women don’t want this is part of the appeal.

The truth is that the next generation is as ambitious as ever. The futures they want for themselves are broad and bright. Sometimes that includes husbands and children, sometimes it doesn’t. The most recent studies show that young men are actually far more likely to name children as their top marker of personal success. (Women cite financial independence and their careers.) It’s young men who are having a hard time finding partners, and it’s young men who are lonely.

In other words, despite years of cultural messages to the contrary—it’s men, actually, who are desperate for marriage and babies.

I suppose that’s what Heritage’s roadmap and the conservative agenda is really about: building the world that men want, and forcing women to live inside it.

I’m far more interested in the big, bright life my daughter wants, and ensuring it stays her own.

Jessica Valenti "They're Coming for Our Daughters: The conservative plan to shrink girls’ futures"

https://jessica.substack.com/p/theyre-coming-for-our-daughters

 

"We’re watching a deliberate conservative cultural push designed to undermine women’s rights ... treating our [females'] humanity like a thought exercise makes it that much easier to legislate away ... But you know what actually makes women happy? Bank accounts. Voting rights. The ability to leave a bad marriage, and not have a miscarriage kill us."  --Jessica Valenti "Debating Away Our Humanity"

https://jessica.substack.com/p/cbs-news-feminism

"Music doesn't express any specific feelings. It only constitutes the formal framework in which, while listening, everyone experiences their own emotions according to their own personality."  --Witold Lutoslawski

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."  --Albert Einstein

"Music in any generation is not what the public thinks of it but what the musicians make of it."  --Virgil Thomson

 "It is surprising how easily one can become used to bad music"  --Felix Mendelssohn

"Why Don't We Do It In The Road?"  --Billy Shears after being asked about the "Abbey Road" album cover.

 "Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that makes the flowers grow, not thunder."  --Rumi

 “Ah, but if less is more, then just think how much more more will be."  --Dr. Frasier Crane

I didn’t suddenly become reckless when I stopped believing in God. I became more intentional.

And in some ways, more afraid — because now there was no cosmic excuse waiting for me if I got it wrong.

Losing my belief in an afterlife has only intensified this sense of responsibility. When I believed eternity was guaranteed, suffering in this life felt temporary. Tragic, yes — but ultimately part of a larger, divinely ordered story.

Now, this life is all I believe we have. And that makes other people’s pain feel unbearable in a new way.

It makes injustice feel urgent instead of theoretical.

It makes kindness feel like a moral emergency instead of a spiritual bonus point.

I feel more obligated now — not less — to help people, to show up, to reduce harm where I can, because there is no heavenly reset button waiting on the other side.

If something matters, it matters here.

If someone is suffering, it matters now.

And if I make a harmful choice, I can’t outsource responsibility to God, fate or a divine plan.

I have to own it.

That’s the part no one warned me about when I left religion:

Morality doesn’t get lighter.

It gets heavier.

--Sami Garrison 

On her way to work one morning

Down the path along the lake

A tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake.

His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew.

"Oh well," she cried, "I’ll take you in, and I’ll take care of you."

"Take me in oh tender woman

Take me in, for heaven’s sake

Take me oh tender woman," sighed the broken snake.

She wrapped him up all cozy in a curvature of silk

Then laid him by the fireside with honey and some milk

Now she hurried home from work that night as soon as she arrived,

She found that pretty snake she’d take in had been revived. She was happy.

"Take me in, oh tender woman.

Take me in, oh heaven’s sake.

Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the broken snake.

Now she clutched him to her bosom, "You’re so beautiful," she cried.

"But if I hadn’t brought you in by now, heavens, you might have died."

Now she stroked his pretty skin and then she kissed him and held him tight.

But instead of saying thank you, that snake gave her a vicious bite!

"Take me in, oh tender woman,

Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the vicious snake.

"I saved you," cried that woman,

"And you bit me heavens why?

You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die!"

"Oh shut up, silly woman," said the reptile with a grin.

"You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in."

--Al Wilson, The Snake

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

--Billie Holliday, Strange Fruit

Be calm; for only by calmly considering our lives can we achieve our purpose to live together — be calm — love me — Today — yesterday — what tearful longing for you — for you — you — my life — my all — all good wishes to you — Oh, do continue to love me — never misjudge your lover’s most faithful heart.

every yours

every mine

ever ours

--Beethoven to his Immortal Beloved

“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”  --Seneca

When empathy thins, division pays

One of the first casualties of structural overload is our collective emotional intelligence. Empathy is not a soft add-on or a private virtue. It is intensive work for the brain and basic infrastructure for any humanist society. It demands time, safety and a certain inner spaciousness to imagine another person’s reality and let it matter.

When people live in mental survival mode for years, that space collapses. The nervous system quietly reorders its priorities. Protect your own. Shrink your circle. Save energy. You do not stop caring in principle, but in practice there is less left over. Everyday kindness becomes harder. The benefit of the doubt becomes rarer. The social fabric that once held different lives together wears down thread by thread.

This is the emotional ground modern populism builds on. When empathy is weakened, it becomes far easier to sort people into “us” and “them”, to blame rather than understand, to see your own security as dependent on someone else’s loss. The same forces that drain our cognitive capacity also drain our willingness to see complexity in other human beings.

Populism does not need to create fear and anger; those feelings are already produced by economic insecurity, climate anxiety and the attention economy. What populism does is give these feelings a target. Migrants. “Elites”. Welfare recipients. Environmentalists. Brussels. Any group will do, as long as it can be painted as the reason why you feel unsafe and exhausted.

The rise of polarization is not a bug in the system. It is a business model built on exhausted minds. A population with weakened empathy will not instinctively search for common ground. It will look for someone to blame.

For climate and justice politics this is disastrous. Any serious transition requires trust, patience and a willingness to share burdens in a way that feels fair. A society running on thin emotional and cognitive margins will not automatically choose fairness. It will choose apparent simplicity. It will choose whoever promises quick relief and a clear scapegoat.

--Frode Kjærvik, excerpt from When a Civilization Wears Down Its Own Mind 

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”  --Ocean Vuong

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”  --Ursula K. Le Guin

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.

They said, Really?

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.

[…]

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

--Grace Paley

"In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down."  --Kahlil Gibran

"The first [quality of growing older] is humility. Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.

The other quality is curiosity. If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I’ve grown older I’ve learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world. Having a conversation with someone I may disagree with is, I have come to find, a great, life embracing pleasure."  --Nick Cage

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

[…]

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch… keeping those lines open to ourselves."  --Joan Didion

"If you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power… If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked."  --Henry Miller

"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being."  --Bertrand Russell

People ask: “Would you or would you not like to be young again?” Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible. You cannot be — you that are — young again. You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no “you” except your life — lived. But apart from that, when you rise from what somebody calls “the banquet of life,” flushed with the wine of life, can you want to sit down again? When you have climbed the hill, and the view is just breaking, do you want to reclimb it? A thousand times no! Anyone who honestly wants to be young again has never lived, only imagined, only masqueraded.  ---Jane Ellen Harrison

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.”  --Terence McKenna

“It is only within the human world that nature’s cyclical movement manifests itself as growth and decay. Like birth and death, they, too, are not natural occurrences, properly speaking; they have no place in the unceasing, indefatigable cycle in which the whole household of nature swings perpetually”  --Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 97.

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge."  --Stephen Hawking