moon phases

Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

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There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]

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(and my Wish List)

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What Lessons from a War Memorial?  

Sydney Morning Herald Letters, Monday June 28th, 2004
One thing I am missing in this flag debate: why is it good to be patriotic?
Matthew Roberts, Normanhurst, June 23.
www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2004/06/24/1088046225916.html (plain text)

Sydney Morning Herald Letters, Monday June 28th, 2004
Matthew Roberts asks "why is it good to be patriotic?". If he were to stand near the Pool of Reflection and the Eternal Flame below the Roll of Honour, inscribed with the names of Australia's 100,000 war dead, in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, he would find his answer.
Charlie Lemaire, Murwillumbah, June 26.
www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/27/1088274625358.html (plain text)

Yes, Charlie Lemaire, the Australian War Memorial does show the consequences of patriotism's dark side . A patriotic Serbian assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28th ninety years ago, starting a terrible engine of war that, fueled by appeals to patriotism (see Oh, What a Lovely War), reaped a four-year bloody swathe across the world that scarred the rest of the century.

Other Balkan patriots gave us more recent memories of Sarajevo.

On June 6 we remembered the results of intense patriotism in Germany & Italy in the years after that. The dead of the USSR, for instance, equal to the entire current population of Australia. It was the militant patriotism of Japan, however, that most closely affected Australia in that war.

As Wilfred Owens called it eighty-four years ago: "The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori."
[permalink] posted by Mez at 11:08 pm