Life is a gamble. There are no such things as destiny and fate. Whatever the purpose of the life is, if there is a purpose, it is not the happiness of individual human beings. No matter what path you choose in life you are choosing pain and suffering. There is more along that path, wherever it’s leading, that will cause you unhappiness than will give you a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. There are paths that are less dangerous, that are smoother, that include fewer mountains to climb and fewer to fall off, and that will carry you past prettier scenery, but how are you to know you to know which path that is? Even if you could know, how are you to know that you will enjoy traveling along it? It might bore the life out of you. Falling off mountains may be what you need to make you happy.
. . . there's good news in the fact that the Sask Party wants to let big business do the actual work in selling the HST. After all, the Wall government tried the same strategy when it came to nuclear power, and was forced to back down once it realized that it's people rather than dollars who ultimately get their say at the polls.Emphasis mine.
What Obama is saying here is that politics, rightly understood, is the very core of what makes this nation a nation. Not individualism, not religiosity, and certainly not ethnicity or the land itself, but politics. . . . We, in the United States, do not accept history, or live through history -- we have the capacity, Obama (and Biden) say, to make history, through collective action, whether it is in the Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, the civil rights revolution, or now, in tackling the challenges that face us in the 21st century. America, therefore, is self-created, and continues to be self-creating, by political action.Two years ago, I felt that the difference between the three democratic frontrunners could be summed up like this: John Edwards wanted to reform the economy, Hillary Clinton wanted to reform society, and Barak Obama wanted to reform politics. I am still not sure whether people who voted for Obama necessarily understood or supported what he wanted to do -- I'm not sure if changing US politics is actually possible, either -- but Obama took his election as a mandate and I believe he is doing it. He sincerely believes that Americans can do anything they want to do -- "Yes, we can" is the essence of his being. In the end, if he CAN reform American politics, then society and the economy will follow.
imagine you are a young gay Catholic teen coming into his sexuality and utterly convinced that it's vile and evil. . .Sullivan thinks the Pope is going to have to resign.
If this is the 1950s and 1960s, it's into the Church you go. You think it will cure you. In fact, it only makes you sicker . . .
They have never had a sexual or intimate relationship with any other human being. Sex for them is an abstraction, a sin, not an interaction with an equal. . .
They barely see these children as young and vulnerable human beings, incapable of true consent. Because they have never had a real sexual relationship, have never had to deal with the core issue of human equality and dignity in sex, they don't see the children as victims. Like the tortured gay man, Michael Jackson, they see them as friends. . .
In this self-protective environment, these priests do not even see the children as fellow humans. They remain like those solitary abstract images in their heads. So they cannot fully grasp the enormity of the crime they are committing and see it merely as another part of the vortex of their sexual sin.
Every time the country sees Barack Obama, he is gracious, earnest, measured in his words, passionate without being antagonistic, and almost supernaturally cognizant of the expectations of his office and his obligations to the people of the United states.Emphasis mine.
Every time they see Sarah Palin, she is making some kind of half-assed, hyperbolic, self-serving, reactionary pre-emptive strike on one or another topic of enormous complexity which her handlers have obligingly distilled into jaw-dropping, comic book moronisms that she can regurgitate on tape before her beehive unravels.
She is the embodiment of World Wrestling Politics—a loudmouth idiot with a folding chair, managed by banal, sleazy characters wearing sunglasses and swami hats. With stunts like this, she is practically demanding that America take her as seriously as a monster-truck rally and file her in the same part of the Public Brain that holds our fake restaurant receipts and snapshots of the Iron Sheik.
