P. D. James
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P. D. James by Michael Taylor (1996), National Portrait Gallery, London[/caption]
I did ask him during a break if he was intending to make me look sinister or mysterious, to which he replied, "I have enough problems putting down what I see without trying to see something else." He has put down precisely what he saw: an elderly, much-lined woman with, I suppose, a certain authority. It is the painting of a seventy-five-year-old woman by someone still young, and is literally wart and all. It is a powerful painting which I much admire and, like all powerful paintings, provokes controversy. Some of my friends complain that it verges on caricature, but no one says it isn't like me.
— P. D. James, Time to Be in Earnest
via heresy and schism
I believe that it is in the question of schism rather than heresy that the key to the problem of the disunity of Christendom is to be found. For heresy as a rule is not the cause of schism but an excuse for it, or rather a rationalization of it. Behind every heresy lies some kind of social conflict, and it is only by the resolution of this conflict that unity can be restored.
— Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations (1942)
counting my blessings
The very best thing about having been born into an economically marginal family in Birmingham, Alabama, having been raised largely by my grandmother while my mother worked and my father was in jail, and having worked a minimum of 25 hours a week to pay my way through an undistinguished public university, is that now I get to enjoy the boon of hearing people whose parents sent them to Ivy League schools constantly lecture me about how privileged I am.
Wars, hot or cold, are also missing from standard science fiction versions of the future. Interplanetary wars don’t count, and neither do wars with robots or zombies. I mean wars among nation-states or global alliances or regional blocs. George Orwell’s 1984, inspired in part by James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, imagined a world divided among three totalitarian blocs: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. I can’t think of any other well-known examples of geopolitics in science fiction.— Michael Lind. Everything that Lind says is missing from SF may be found in, to cite just one example among many possible ones, the work of Ursula K. LeGuin. Given that LeGuin is one of the most famous SF writers in the world, and Lind appears not to be familiar with her work, then perhaps his declarations about what SF does and does not do should be taken with a truckload of salt.
thingsmagazine: Hoxton Square, by Adam Dant
the conspiracy is real
W/the unprecedented & now documented corruption at the dark heart of HRC campaign, why would ANYONE accept the results till they're proven?
— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) October 20, 2016
So the assumption here is that Hillary Clinton has a giant secret army of operatives assigned to thousands of polling places around the country to alter our votes? Plausible! But no more plausible than the assumption that that very same giant secret army is working with known Communists to control our minds through the fluoride in our drinking water. Prove to me that she’s not doing it, if you can.
But for anyone who’s serious about the threats to our social order, and our precious bodily fluids, this is the real worry:
So, you don’t think that space alien baby, now grown up and entered into its full powers, is even now preparing the scheme that will ship Trump voters to the asteroid belt to wear out their lives as slave labor in the mineral mines. Can you prove to me that it’s not gonna happen?
Didn’t think so.
and then when it's convenient they'll change back
No group has shifted their position more dramatically than white evangelical Protestants. More than seven in ten (72%) white evangelical Protestants say an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life—a 42-point jump from 2011, when only 30 % of white evangelical Protestants said the same.
— PRRI