“We acknowledge the receipt of your order for five triple furnaces including two electric elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator..” –excerpt of letter from I A Topf and Sons, manufacturers of heating equipment to the commandant of Auschwitz concerning the new “heating system.” “…for putting the bodies into the furnace we…
Propaganda is an ostensible appeal to reason and to action which is in fact essentially irrational. We are all the more susceptible to its irrational appeal since we are subject to the same systematic irrationality in advertising. There is such a thing as a labyrinth of information; the information is truly abundant and complex,…
Thanks Dad !
Another morning. Its Wednesday and at least I am not in traffic on I-294 in the stampede to Chicago. Around 6AM yesterday before dawn I accelerated up the ramp into the stream of traffic with a massive chrome truck bumper in my rear view mirror. In the darkness the surreal stream of headlights, with…
A man of massive meditation
Is like a man looking at death,
Looking at death as at a bull’s –eye.
He watches before he crosses the tracks.
–Richard Eberhart
Life comes at us without warning. I cannot imagine what this day will bring. Yet I must “cross the tracks,” get on with the business of my life. I have my to-do list. There is the potential customer that I hope to see in Gurnee, and the meeting preparation to attend to later at my desk. This is what is meant by “the future.” Opportunity and risk are one and the same.
Strange the memories that present themselves in surprising detail. I remember falling in love with a Ford Mustang. It was 1965, my sophomore year in high school. An acquaintance who lived in the neighborhood was given a new Ford Mustang 2+2 fastback by his mother. It had a 289 ci motor and a four…
Though we have the power to destroy the whole world, life is stronger than the death instinct and love is stronger than hate. It does not make logical sense to be too hopeful, but once again this is not a matter of logic. One does not look for signs of hope in the newspapers…
A mixture of satiety, boredom, violence, and despair which characterizes our mass society— the impotence of well-fed bodies with empty and lost minds. The obsession with lust and with violent erratic forms of sex. Abstraction, confusion, pseudo passion— fabricated in the imagination and centered on fantasies Collect us together, give us a leader that…
Our last evening in Sister Bay we picked a restaurant called Chop. The place appeared to be newer by comparison to the other places we had dined during our stay. So close to Lake Michigan, but I had enough fish, so anticipated consuming something different for our last evening meal in Door County. The…
A monk said to Joshu” What is the way?” Joshu replied: “Outside the fence.” The monk insisted: “I mean the Great Way? What is the Great Way?” Joshu replied: “The Great Way is that which leads to the Capital.” The philosophy group gathered for a social evening last night. They came over to our…
