Art sculptures - Gundi Dietz

 

Sharing with Thankful Thursday and Alchemy of Clay

--------------------

Tears are as natural to us as breathing and there is beauty in allowing yourself to be open to the pain of tears.

Time for Yellow

 Middle of the grey times, time to bring some yellow into our lives!

Amazing all the shades of yellow on vehicles!

Witch-hazel 

Sharing with Wordless Wednesday

-------------------

Walk for Peace

------------------

It takes two years to

learn to speak and

sixty to learn to keep quiet.

Ernest Hemingway

 

NC Governor Josh Stein gives recognition to the Venerable Monks in Walk for Peace! (Second photo of the only governor to do so (so far!!)

Why the constant, often blatant lying?

How do we stop this madness? Maybe someone who's studied the Third Reich methodology would help.

How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder?

Hannah Arendt looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member… is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders.” So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this “mixture of gullibility and cynicism… is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements”:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”—writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy—including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.… Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”

Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless.” She also recognized the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as “gaslighting”:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.”

Arendt wrote Origins of Totalitarianism from research and observations gathered during the 1940s, a very specific historical period. Nonetheless the book, Jeffrey Isaacs remarks at The Washington Post, “raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead.” Arendt’s analysis of propaganda and the function of lies seems particularly relevant at this moment. The kinds of blatant lies she wrote of might become so commonplace as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrelevant sideshow. This, she suggests, would be a mistake.

Thanks Open Culture newsletter.

------------

-----------------

...complete fabrication.

The President is always right.

Evening news on Monday Jan. 26, 2026 on NBC had a lead story about the Minneapolis ICE killing of Alex Pretti...with all the slow motion versions of the videos! Finally the national news has succumbed to popular interest and gone against the goon-editors to show the truth.  Now this makes more than the millions with internet access to include those who just have TVs. I was astonished.

Statement following the Trump/Biden debate.

----------------

January 27, 2026 is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It's all connected.

------------------

Open Yesterday's Pages talks about Corrie ten Boom, part of the Nazi resistance in saving Jewish lives.

Non-storm Fern in my neck of the woods

First  thing Sunday there’s a coat of ice on everything. Not going anywhere. That’s my car with the laundry room behind it.

All the salt which had been spread on Friday before the maintenance man went home has melted away.

A bit of snow may have fallen sometime but by 4 pm it had turned to light rain.

Made a stew of beans, left overs and spices- delighting in having elec.

At 4:30 there was only rain falling and no ice on walks, so I went to car where more ice was forming on top of old ice. I just cleared the keyhole and was grateful to start engine and run defroster a while.

Windshield view at 4:30 

Windshield view at 4:50. I remembered that time to raise the wipers.

Sunset with temps still above freezing and puddles around, but no ice except on cars.

 Forecast said about 10% chance of snow or sleet through the night.

Monday morning the sun came out and all is dry here but won't be above freezing for most of several days straight. There were a few flurries mid-afternoon Monday, while the blue sky was above and sun shining. Some clouds continue to slide over the southern ridge of the valley, we'll see what happens next!

Meanwhile the Walk for Peace continues east of Raleigh NC.

I finally found this photo, which I knew I'd saved! Governor Josh Stein, of NC, gave some recognition to the Venerable Monks.

A prayer shared by the Unitarian Universalists

Maybe the Angry Women - 8

Moonlit Dance by Sheryl Luxenburg

 Today's goddess:

MACHA

From Girl God Books FB 2024

Art by Lucy Pierce

"The Great Mother Goddess Macha vanished from the stage of Irish history following her downfall at the hands of the king and his warriors. The disappearance of Macha symbolized the elimination of the possibility of any woman-centered social system, philosophy, or religion. The Male Word, rather than Female Womb, would take responsibility for ensuring the continuation of the social order, albeit that this Word was reinforced and sustained by a discourse on, and the threat of, death rather than life...

The Triple Goddess would be replaced by the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a Trinity created by means of will, and obedience no longer dependent upon the fertility of womanhood to fulfill its designs. As Christianity took hold in Ireland, it would make alliances and compromises with the warriors and provide alternative occupations for the old male religious leadership. But women and the energies they represented were a fundamental threat to the new religious consciousness...

Remember in the Macha story we heard her final cry, 'A mother bore each one of you.' To a matricentered society this would have been the ultimate plea...this plea recalled people to their responsibilities toward their creator and their common origins through the Great Mother."

~ Mary Condren, "The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland"

-----------

---------------
I ask for justice.

Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed a US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, Jan 7, 2026. There is not enough  legal effort going  on to examine his actions still!

--------------------

Last week, on Jan. 22, was the anniversary of passage of the Supreme Court's

... landmark Roe v. Wade ruling (1973). The plaintiff was “Jane Roe,” a woman who was forbidden to seek an abortion in Texas, but couldn’t afford to travel to a neighboring state. The defendant, Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, argued that life begins at conception and therefore the state had a compelling interest in protecting that life.

Justice Harry Blackmun, who had once served as counsel to the Mayo Clinic, wrote the decision. He wrote: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” Therefore, the court based its decision on the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments and the right to privacy, and ruled seven to two in favor of Jane Roe.

The decision forbade states from outlawing abortions in the first trimester and set limits on regulation of abortion in the second and third trimesters. The court also required that exceptions to any regulations be made when the health of the mother was at stake.

-----------------

The Walk for Peace continues

In Charlotte NC

------------

Grateful eyes look at each thing as if they had never seen it before and caress it as if they would never see it again.

BR. DAVID STEINDL-RAST ---------------------- "Please join me and many others in making the six compassionate vows of: environmental sustainability, gender equality, socioeconomic justice, participatory governance, cultural tolerance, and nonviolence and peace." Barb Rogers (Thanks, Robertson Work for stating this first.)