Some folks beg to differ, including John Steinbeck.

Herewith some hard-hitting lines from Section 1, Chapter 13 of East of Eden, which I had reread recently and couldn’t put down, so brilliant a tome it is:

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man.  It happens to nearly everyone. … And then – [comes] the glory – so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes.  Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.  And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories.  It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world.  It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know.  Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.  It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the4 complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass of collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea G-d.  This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions.  What do I believe in?  What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man.  Nothing was ever created by two men.  There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy.  Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extent it, but the group never invents anything.  The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.  By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged.  It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.  And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.  And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.  This is what I am and what I am about.  I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system.  Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts.  If the glory [of the free mind] can be killed, we are lost.

Thus a Nobelist who had to work hard for everything, to another Nobelist who has had everything handed to him, including the Prize.

California’s contribution:

South Florida’s:

And, not to be outdone, Philadelphia’s:

All I can say to the caption is: Yeah, right.

The statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, Afghanistan were destroyed not by war but in peacetime. In 2001, the Islamist Taliban had blown them up because they allegedly represented idols. I am not sure of the fate of this particular statue (i.e. I can’t find it on the Internet), but if it has indeed been destroyed, I seriously doubt it was “by war.”

Little by little, the lies keep piling up…

Wonderful wedding, and wonderful memories of four months’ TAD in 1976. The old BOQ is still there, looking the same.

I cannot think of a better reason for the democratic nations, including a post-Obama (I say again, post-Obama) USA, to say good-bye to the “United Nothing,” boot the schmucks out of their hyper-comfortable and hyper-expensive Manhattan digs, take away their diplomatic immunity and start our own “Real United Nations” organization.

Likewise, is it no surprise to me that someone like Kathleen Sebelius would be tasked with defining who and what is – and isn’t – religious, so that Obama’s diktat has some illusion of logical reasoning behind it. Charles Krauthammer ably dissects this travesty here, so I need not go into it. What is of interest to me, however, are the consequences of the criterion that exempt institutions must primarily employ, and primarily serve, persons who share its religious tenets.

Right. Let’s see now. With very few exceptions, neither Jewish nor Christian charitable institutions, medical or otherwise, care overmuch about the faith of the people they employ or serve.  This might not have been so three hundred years ago, but it certainly is today. One might say that Jewish and Christian religious institution have evolved beyond such an exclusivist stance, and good for them.

Islam, however…

My guess is that Islamic charities prefer to keep it “in the house.” That means that they will easily qualify as religious organizations under this criterion.

Thus, organizations that are so often moneybags for Islamic terrorism and imperialism will get full protection from the Obamite decrees on religion. I’m not saying that this was the intent (though given the Islamophilia that pervades the Obama administration, anything is possible), but it certainly seems to be a very interesting consequence.

As Wolfgang the valiant German soldier used to say on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In: “Verry interestink, but shtupid!”

Sometimes I think that brain research is a bit hyped up, and that many of the conclusions are more enthusiastic than scientifically accurate.  Apparently, I am not alone.  Here is a clever spoof that speaks for itself.

This is my favorite recording, with Gabriela Beňačková as Fidelio/Leonora, Josef Protschka as Florestan, and the rest, all fantabulous.

Mrs. Green joined the Women’s Royal Air Force in September 1918, at the age of 17, and spent the last two months of the Great War as a server in RAF canteens.  She left the WRAF about a year later, but remained proud of her service for the remaining 93 years of her life.

The next-to-last known World War One veterans, the Australian Claude Choules and the American Frank Buckles, died within one week of each other at the end of February 2011, both at 110 years of age.

May they rest in peace, and may their contribution be never forgotten.