Quotes, Poems, & Sayings...

[Reach *BANNED*]

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” ― Rumi

[Reach *BANNED*]

"Whatever lifts the corners of your mouth, trust that." - Rumi

[Reach *BANNED*]

"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." - Rumi

[Genesis]

And you?

The years,
what did they bring?

And were you filled?

Was it enough?

And would you go that way again?

Almost a lifetime we have lived apart.

And they who brought me news are long dead now.

They said you’d found a quiet town,
quite near the sea, and settled down.

I think of this.

Of the salt on your lips.

The years go by so quickly here.

The days.

And I have learned to lean against the pull.

It is a small pain now, but I shall not lose it.


And all is well, and I wish you well.

[Reach *BANNED*]

“Whoever you end up with, you shouldn't be changing a thing for them. Nothing. Don't be with anyone if you can't be you. Because you're bang on just as you are. ” ― Lucy Robinson

[Genesis]

[Genesis]

”Wear your strongest posture now,

and see your hardest times as more than just

the times you fell

but a range of mountains

you learned to climb.”

– Morgan Harper Nichols

[Genesis]

”She wears strength and darkness equally well,

the woman has always been half goddess, half hell.”

– Unknown

[homoe]

[CherryWine]

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet. - Aristotle

[Kätzchen]

“Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue,”
― Robert K. Merton (In, Social Theory and Social Structure).

Social Theory and Social Structure (STSS) was first published in 1949, and revised again in 1957 & 1968. In 1998, STSS was listed by the International Sociological Association as the third most important sociological book of the 20th century.

[homoe]

[Kätzchen]

From the introduction section of Preet Bharara's recently released book... Doing Justice: A Prosecutor's Thoughts On Crime, Punishment, And The Rule Of Law (March 19th, 2019):

In connect the dots, so long as you know how to count, you can draw the picture. Even a child can drag a crayon from the first little dot numbered one to the next one numbered two and so on and so forth until some jagged picture of a cow or a barn or a house or a dog emerges. No such luck in a real investigation. There's no foolproof guide or order, no guarantee that any of the work that you're doing --- dragging not a crayon across the page but your feet all over town interviewing witnesses, issuing subpoenas, looking into financial documents --- will yield a clear, accurate, actionable picture.

The same with "follow the money," another gross oversimplification. This facile phrase was not ripped from the headlines of Watergate as popularly assumed but coined by the late screenwriter/storyteller William Goldman for the film version of All The President's Men. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein themselves never used the phrase. It was invented by a brilliant Hollywood screenwriter and has become part of the popular lexicon, but is not as easy as it sounds.

Since the dawn of financial crime, investigators have known that you follow the flow of money to whom and from whom, and for what. The problem with phrases like "connect the dots" and "follow the money" is that they dramatically underestimate the difficulty and complexity, and the length of standard criminal investigation, especially one that involves what's in peoples minds.

The difficulty in investigation is not just complexity. Let's take something infinitely more complex than connect the dots. My younger son, Rahm, is obsessed with solving what my generation knew as the Rubik's Cube. I take him to cubing competitions on many weekends. He can solve a three-by-three standard multicolored cube in an average of eleven seconds, which, though not world class, is super impressive. The thing about cubing, though, is this: No matter how much you scramble it, there is a mathematically predictable solution. Depending on how many algorithms you've memorized, you might solve it in more or fewer moves, but the point is that it is always solvable if you have enough resolve, memory, and practice. And there is a preferred, mathematically determined ordering of steps to complete the puzzle. This is not true for criminal investigations. There are guidelines, sure, and best practices of course, but there is no predetermined and universal order of steps to take. More important, not every criminal mystery has a solution.

Back to follow the money. People think you find a check, you see who wrote it, you see who cashed it, and you're done. It's rarely so simple. Sophisticated people trying to hide their tracks use lots of accounts, lots of intermediaries. They favor cash, they falsify documents, they create shell companies and fraudulent paper trails. Often there is no record or trace of incriminating transactions at all. That's the heart of money laundering, which can be especially difficult crime to prove. Many of us have a hard enough time figuring out what's in our own heads, never mind ferreting out what illicit sparks are flaring in someone else's noggin. But that is what exactly the challenge in almost every white-collar or corruption case (pages 1-5 of The Introduction) -- Preet Bharara.

This is just a taste of how Preet Bharara sets up his spellbinding book on the years he spent as a Prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. In the next few following pages of the introduction, Bharara recounts his first lasting impression of how his best highschool friend (a family type friend) was destroyed emotionally over the Menendez Brother's parricide crime.

This is such a good book. I hope more people read it, so they understand more fully that crimes of corruption, white-collar or not, are never as easy as arm-chair personalities would have most people believe.

[homoe]

[Kätzchen]

Antonio Gramsci's doctrine of Hegemony:

The rule of one class over another is not dependent on economic or physical power alone, but on persuading the ruled to accept a system of beliefs belonging to the ruling class (James Joll, UK, 1977).

[Kätzchen]

I finished Preet Bharara's latest book and he ends his book the way he began his book, with this quote:

"The law is an amazing tool, but it has its limits. Good people, on the other hand, don't have limits. The law is not in the business of forgiveness or redemption. The law cannot compel us to love each other or respect each other. It cannot cancel hate or conquer evil; teach grace or extinguish passions. The law cannot achieve these things, not by itself. It takes people -- brave and strong and extraordinary people," -- Preet Bharara, in Doing Justice: A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and The Rule Of Law; Alfred A Knopf Publishers, NY, NY 2019.

I can't help but think of the only Supreme Court Justice of the late 20th Century, SCJ Thurgood Marshall, when Bharara asks the reader to contemplate the notion of the type of people it takes to make a difference in our country. Thurgood Marshall was, to me, a rarity among contenders of those nominated to serve the US as an Supreme Court Justice.

[VintageFemme]

every morning i wake up in the wrong place, at the wrong time, feeling the wrong things, wanting what i can't have, loving what's not good for me and then i have some sweetass coffee on the porch overlooking the rest of my miserable life and i say fuck it

i'll always have the sky

[VintageFemme]

Ninety-nine and half just won't do.

[Orema]

Anger prevents love and isolates the one who is angry. It is an attempt, often successful, to push away what is most longed for—companionship and understanding. It is the deal of the humanness of others, as well as a denial of your own humanness.

Anger is the agony of believing that you are not capable of being understood and that you are not worthy of being understood.

It is a wall that separates you from others as effectively as if it were concrete. Thick and very high.There is no way though it, under it, or over it. Certainly.

—bell hooks

[Orema]

A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women. Sexism as a system of domination is institutionalized, but it has never determined in an absolute way the fate of all women in this society. Being oppressed means the absence of choices. It is the primary point of contact between the oppressed and the oppressor. Many women in this society do have choices (as inadequate as they are); therefore exploitation and discrimination are words that more accurately describe the lot of women collectively in the United States. Many women do not join organized resistance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices. They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppression. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme restrictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed.

—bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center