Inner World

    "A chronic hatred or even a cherished grudge tears to pieces the one who harbors it.  A strong feeling of resentment is just as likely to cause disease as is a germ.  The worst thing one can do to oneself is to let resentment dig in and for hatred to become chronic.  … Fear is another indispensable element in the human make-up. Even in its simpler form we cannot dispense with it; on the streets of a modern city a fearless man, if the phrase be taken literally, would probably be dead before nightfall. And fear can be a powerfully creative motive. In a profound sense industry springs from fear of penury, medical science from fear of disease. But fear's abnormalities - hysteria, obsessive anxiety -  may tear a personality to pieces.

   Human life is full of secret fears, thrust into the dark corners of the personality.  Fear of the dark, of cats, of closed places, of open places, fear of responsibility, of having children, of old age and death; guilty fears, often concerned with sins long passed religious fears, associated with ideas of a vindictive God and an eternal hell; and sometimes a vague fearfulness, filling life with anxious apprehension - such a wretchedness curses innumerable lives. The disruptive effect of such secret, chronic fearfulness is physically based.  The adrenal glands furnish us in every frightening situation with a 'swig of our own internal fight-tonic.'  A little of it is stimulating; too much of it is poison.  Habitual anxiety and dread constitute a continuous false alarm, turning the invaluable adrenal secretion from an emergency stimulant into a chronic poison."   -  H. E. Fosdick

Please Read: "The Gettysburg Address"

  "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

   Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war.  We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

    But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate-we can not hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
  - Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863.

You Won't Be Snubbed

"If in speaking to a woman you reveal that you are primarily interested in her personally or as a member of the opposite sex, she will instantly resent it, as she has every right to do. In effect, you are insulting her by the assumption that her attention may be so cheaply won. But speak to her as one human being to another, as one interested in the same scenery, the same music, or the same social problems, and she will extend her ready fellowship. Both men and women love to use their minds, and women especially regard it as a distinct compliment to be met on the intellectual plane common to both sexes." - H.M. Robinson

A Merry-Go-Round

G. Whillikins was a writer bold
Who never lost a chance;
While good at many sorts of work,
His best hold was Romance.
He wrote a lively, stirring thing,
A tale of love and youth,
With a dashing maid and a clashing blade,
But never a word of truth.

G. Whillikins then headed home
To make another start.
He studied up psychology;
He took men's souls apart;
He learned the naïve, the morbid,
The crazy, quaint, and queer,
And wrote a book without a plot.
The time elapsed - one year.

Once more G. Whillikins set out
With economic lore
He soaked his very being full -
It oozed from every pore.
He proved all poverty a crime,
And chose a 'workingman'
For hero, one who ran a strike
Upon a novel plan.

G.Whillikins did some thinking,
And thought this time he'd wait
Until the wheel had made its turn,
Instead of chasing Fate.
"I'll bide my time," said Whillikins,
"Until Romance comes round,"
But when the cycle reached Romance,
It found him underground.
                       -  Tudor Jenks

Our World

"Yale Global Online reported that 23 nations stockpile chemical weapons of mass destruction or have the capacity to produce them: China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, the U.S. and Vietnam. The estimated number of nuclear weapons has fallen from 60,780 to 10,325. The United States is no longer in a race against the Soviet Union to produce a larger stockpile of warheads. But the U.S., Russia, China, Europe, Iran, other nations and even terrorists are still racing to produce newer, better and more effective weapons. It only takes one nuclear weapon to incinerate an entire city of human progress. And a nuclear war would not stop with one strike. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are in the hands of imperfect, flawed human beings with limited knowledge and capacities. Some of these human beings are some of the most unstable and radical minds on this planet.

Entire cities of advancements in sanitation, nutrition, health, commerce, thinking, liberty and law could disappear in a moment if Donald Trump, Theresa May, Benjamin Netanyahu, Emmanuel Macron, Narendra Modi, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Vladmir Putin, Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-un presses a button to deploy a nuclear arsenal. Thousands of people have died and will die in inhumane ways if Bashar Assad, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Ali Khamenei, Moon Jae-in or others launch biological or chemical weapons. We human beings have thousands of these fiendish advancements just waiting to detonate. This is a grim corollary to all the material progress." - J. Hilliker