Grayson

@TefftNina Yes, I believe so.

@ggraysonc "If they are shooting at you, kid, you must be doing something right." Absolutely! Opposition can be a sign that we are standing for something worthwhile.

They could not refute Charlie, they could only shoot him. He spoke the truth that evil cannot abide. Extinguishing his lamp will not spread their desired darkness, but will inspire and widen the glow of light as other lamps burst into flame. Good bless Charlie.

@Pergament_F Yes, it does. Whether planned with anticipation and foretaste sweet, or a stolen opportunity, like a kiss, to indulge.

"It matters a great deal where you read." Walt Whitman

@OldWest1453 @NoahRevoy Amen.

@NoahRevoy We rarely spanked. But we did calmly and physically make the kids do what we told them to do. You're a lot bigger than them, so it isn't hard to do and doesn't have to be "violent." Absolute obedience, taught at a very early age, can save your kid's life -- and it did with mine.

All children start with poor impulse control because the parts of the brain responsible for self-regulation are still developing. You cannot teach a two-year-old the same level of self-control as a ten-year-old because the necessary neural circuits do not yet exist in the same form. Development takes time. When you hit a child, you trigger a powerful stress response. Stress hormones surge, the brain shifts into survival mode (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) and the child's ability to think clearly, remember lessons, and practice self-control drops. The child is focused on avoiding pain not learning. And since you the parent are the source of the pain, they learn to avoid (flight) or appease you (fawn reaction). The irony is that many parents say they use physical punishment to teach self-control, yet self-control is a capacity that must first develop before it can be trained. Around age seven, most children begin developing enough neurological capacity that deliberate self-control training becomes effective. Before that, physical development matters more than discipline. After that, development and training begin working together. A child's self-control grows in two stages. First, the brain develops the capacity. Then the child can be taught the skill. Punishment just delays the time it takes to physically develop the capacity.

@TefftNina True. But, Charlie boldly chose to debate with those who would choose murder. Paradoxically, violence revealed that Charlie prevailed. In the aftermath the strands of this song wove thru my mind. youtube.com/watch?v=QPCl7i…

@ggraysonc Violence may end a life, but it can not settle an argument. RIP Charlie 😓

@Pergament_F Alas, the day's obligations prevent me from lingering this morning.

Thinking Zone. Afternoon. The Black Sea. Today I am in my little village at the edge of the world. I am sitting on the shore with a cardboard cup of coffee in my hand, watching the sea. Last night it rained, a long, nourishing rain, one of those rains that do not arrive to impress anyone but simply to do the work for which they were sent. Today the air is clean, the sky is bright, and a gentle breeze comes from the sea, moving through the grass and sand the way Steinbeck moved his characters through the pages, without unnecessary noise, without theatre, with the dignity of things that simply exist. The sea is calm. Not happy. Not sad. Simply calm. And the older I become, the more I begin to regard calmness as one of the most underrated forms of happiness. I sit here thinking that I endured another year of life. Another school year has come to an end. My son has finished second grade. And I survived. Which, at first glance, may not seem like a particularly impressive achievement, but every parent knows that between the first school bell in September and the last one in May, a person experiences enough worries, homework, colds, parent-teacher meetings, forgotten notebooks, and existential crises to deserve at least a small medal for endurance. And inevitably my thoughts drift toward Steinbeck. Toward that beautiful letter to his son, in which he writes that if you are in love, that is a good thing, that there is no reason to be ashamed of your feelings, that love is perhaps the finest thing that can happen to a human being, provided you do not allow anyone to belittle it. How rare such wisdom is. How unusual it is for an adult not to explain life, but simply to understand it. Somewhere in the distance someone has put on ABBA. "The Winner Takes It All" drifts across the beach together with the scent of the sea and the smell of wet earth. And suddenly I find myself smiling. Because I have never particularly liked the idea that the winner takes it all. Life does not work that way. Sometimes victory is much smaller. Sometimes it has no audience. No medals. No applause. Sometimes victory is simply reaching the end of another school year. Watching your child grow. Sitting on the shore of the Black Sea with a cup of coffee in your hand. Feeling the wind upon your face. And wanting nothing more. Honestly, today I want nothing more. I do not want a bigger stage. I do not want a greater victory. I do not want another sea. I have this one. I have this shore. I have this coffee. I have this afternoon. And if a person is wise enough, sooner or later they understand that sometimes this is precisely the moment when the winner takes it all.

@Pergament_F Owl be waiting to read that.

People often ask me when I am finally going to write a novel. A real novel. Not a text. Not an essay. Not a philosophical reflection that somehow slipped its leash and wandered into social media. A novel. One of the big ones. With characters who live lives of their own. With plotlines intertwining like Byzantine diplomacy. With character development. With conflicts. With internal logic. With dramatic structure. With symbols, motifs, subtext, and all the other literary instruments that make literary scholars look as though they are deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. Honestly, I do not know whether I can. I know that I can write a hundred pages in an afternoon if a subject grabs me by the throat. I know that I can turn a cup of coffee into a metaphysical problem and a seagull into a literary character. But a novel is a different animal. A novel requires discipline. Consistency. Patience. Planning. And this is where my ancient hereditary enemy appears. Procrastination. In my family it is not a habit. It is a cultural inheritance. It flows through generations with such force that if UNESCO knew about it, it would probably place it on the list of Intangible World Heritage. I do not postpone things. I observe them carefully from a distance until the necessity of being done begins to experience existential anxiety itself. And so I suspect that if I ever write a novel, it will not be one of those majestic literary cathedrals in which generations of critics lose themselves like tourists in Florence. It will be short. Very short. Suspiciously short. And it will probably realize one of my favorite ideas attributed to Wittgenstein, namely that it is entirely possible to write a book composed entirely of jokes. Now that, I can certainly do. Without effort. With a little inspiration. And with the assistance of several cups of coffee. Because if one cannot explain the world through philosophy, history, literature, and metaphysics, there always remains the final refuge of the intellect: a well-told joke. And sometimes, if we are honest, it contains more truth than entire libraries.

@Pergament_F The indispensable Chesterton. I return to him again and again.

On 29 May 1874, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born, the man who managed to prove something almost impossible: that common sense can be profound, amusing, paradoxical, and dangerous to ideologues all at the same time. He entered the world in a comfortable middle-class London family, filled more with kindness than drama. His father, Edward, was a man of rich imagination who drew, built things, and invented small wonders for the sheer pleasure of it, while his mother, Marie Louise, created that calm domestic atmosphere in which curiosity can grow without fear. And perhaps that is precisely why Chesterton never lost the most precious quality of childhood: the ability to be astonished. Later he would write: “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” And his entire life became proof of that idea. The young Chesterton studied art, immersed himself in literature, philosophy, and history, but above all he began observing people with that rare talent that allows a writer to see the obvious more deeply than everyone else. Because Chesterton understood something intellectuals often forget. “Intellectuals are divided into two categories: some worship the intellect, while others use it.” He belonged decisively to the second category. His books are filled with paradoxes not because he enjoys confusing people, but because he understands that truth rarely travels in a straight line. The Man Who Was Thursday is simultaneously a spy novel, a philosophical parable, and an intellectual hallucination in which reality constantly changes its masks. Orthodoxy is one of the most brilliant defenses of joy, common sense, and spiritual freedom ever written. And Father Brown, the small priest-detective, solves crimes not because he is a genius like Sherlock Holmes, but because he understands the human soul. And that is precisely Chesterton’s great philosophy. Human beings are imperfect. The world is imperfect. And that is exactly why both are so interesting. While many philosophers search for the ideal society, Chesterton continues to like actual people. With all their flaws. Especially their flaws. In his personal life, the most important figure was Frances Blogg, who later became his wife. Calm, intelligent, and practical, she accomplished one of the greatest feats in English literature: she organized Chesterton’s life. This may sound like an administrative detail, but anyone who has ever encountered great writers knows that such a task often borders on heroism. Without Frances, we would probably have had fewer books and considerably more lost manuscripts. The more I read Chesterton, the more he seems to me a kind of literary antidote to modern self-importance. He is not afraid of being intelligent. But he is even less afraid of laughing. At himself. At society. At politicians. At philosophers. At all of us. And perhaps that is precisely why he continues to sound so contemporary. Because in an age when people constantly complicate simple things, Chesterton reminds us that sometimes the deepest thought is also the most human one. And sometimes it is simply the funniest. And as only he could properly conclude an evening: “Music during dinner is an insult both to the cook and to the musician.”

@AmandaMashburn That good bottom land looks to get some rain.

Wild turkeys in the field and clouds over Wayah.

@Lorelei1861 @GaryHaubold Give'em hell, Belle! One of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors.

@GaryHaubold David Hackett Fischer doesn’t publish fables. Idiot. You probably don’t even know who he is.

During World War II, for example, three German submariners escaped from Camp Crossville, Tennessee. Their flight took them to an Appalachian cabin, where they stopped for a drink of water. The mountain granny told them to "git." When they ignored her, she promptly shot them dead. The sheriff came, and scolded her for shooting helpless prisoners. Granny burst into tears, and said that she would not have done it if she had known they were Ger-mans. The exasperated sheriff asked her what in "tarnation" she thought she was shooting at. "Why," she replied, "I thought they was Yankees!"9

@nogooddeed2 Queen Knee's riparian reign.

Buffalo Trace and soda with a bit of lime for some lake life kneeculture.

@jasonwhitlock Amen.

It's a language of conflict. Power of the tongue. God spoke the world we live in to existence. We're speaking the world into destruction, chaos and conflict. How we communicate matters.

@OldWest1453 @NormanBrennan Amen.

@NormanBrennan One guy says he was stabbed, the other guy is crying racism. Doesn't take a lot of brains to know that checking for a stab wound comes before checking for racism. This long word salad is pure BS.

Folks Many have commented on the Murder of Henry Nowak without knowing the Full Facts; Police arrived on blue & twos to a very fast moving & confusing situation & were greeted with a False Allegation & acted on that Lie; hindsight is a gift none of us have & certainly not the police; It’s right & appropriate that @HantsPolice responded with the full facts when they could & as were seen by the responding officers; we live in a world of the Blame game; often with minimum facts or accurate information some immediately apportion blame; @HantsPolice were unable to respond to the criticism during a live criminal trial due to the Sub-judicial law; ie you cannot comment about a trial in any negative way when it’s ongoing trial; so nothing was being hidden as legally they could not respond in anyway; despite the media reporting on the case daily which they are entitled on doing so on evidence given in an ongoing case; ie only the facts given in open court; Put yourself in the shoes of those responding officers turning up at a chaotic scene with someone shouting allegations (now known as lies) & not being aware that a man had been stabbed; they were probably acting on instinct as they tried to fathom what had actually happened; Have the public got the right to ask questions of this incident? absolutely as the police are accountable to the public for any actions that they take be they rightly wrongly or in an honest belief that they were acting in trying to protect the public & making split second decisions with little to no information all of these questions & superstitions will now want & need answers; The suspect here was Not the victim but in fact the Individual who lied to the police who clearly did not know that that was the case in the initial seconds that they arrived; they were deceived; What was the Immediate concern of the officers? that there had been a racial attack? & if so was that their over riding concern? Could they have dealt with this matter differently? & if so how? These are the type of questions the @policeconduct will now Independently investigate; Those wishing to see the Officers BWC Footage will be disappointed at this stage as that is with the @policeconduct & that is right we cannot have the Social Media Jury giving their verdicts on just a short video clip without reading & hearing from all of the witnesses in this matter; The attending officers have been subject of a huge amount of abuse & condemnation & that should be reserved until we know the full facts of this matter as the dreadful headlines probably haven’t told the True Story just the salacious condemning parts; When the public are told of true facts probably by @policeconduct then that’s the time for comments & views when all the true facts & circumstances are known; The person we should all be condemning is the Murderer; the Lier along with his mother who took the knife the Murderer used in this monstrous & pointless killing & hid it in her house; He has been convicted of Murder & his Mother of assisting an offender & I hope that they each receive very long & appropriate sentences; I also saw many negative comments of when the judge gave the Jury his directions; he gave them the offence of Murder or Manslaughter to consider; I can tell you that alongside every Murder charge will also be the alternative charge of Manslaughter; the first requires an Intent to Murder & the other is a Killing without Intent! The Jury in the end absolutely got the verdict right; that of Murder where a fixed term of Imprisonment is passed & I’d suggest that will be in the region of 23/26yrs as the aggravating factors are high & the mitigating factors are low in this case in my opinion! The Murderer will have to serve the entire sentence that is passed called a Tariff as there is no early release when a person is convicted of a murder! I hope my overview helps put this case into some sort of perspective! Thanks & God Bless Mr Henry Nowak & his Family😞

@Pergament_F I like it.

@nogooddeed2 Brava, Queen Knee!

No matter how old I get, it will never get old when I suggest something while we are working on a project, and my dad tells me it’s a great idea.

@bandy1803 Yes, he is. I recall those passages when they would sometimes take only the buffalo tongue in times of plenty, or run hundreds over a cliff killing far more than they could use at once.

@ggraysonc He is an even-handed observer. There is a lengthy passage where he debunks the progressive notion that the Indians were environmental conservationists, for example.

The author has scathing words for the US Army's leadership. He compares Sherman to Adolf Eichmann and says he resembles a "buzzard with scrofula". Alfred Terry, commander of the Department of Dakota, is "calmly dumb."

@realcountry1953 Young Waylon.

@TPNdustries Ditto. Haven't had a car payment in over 20 years. Last new car purchase was '04 model that I saved to pay cash for. Drove it 270K miles before replacing it with a well-maintained used vehicle that I purchased from the original owner.

I call bullshit. I've only had one new automobile in my life. Never will buy another one. Wife drives the newest vehicle and it's 9 years old. My daily driver is a '98 Wrangler. I've been driving it for 10 years. Haven't had a car payment in 20 years.

@realcountry1953 Yes, in the NC portion.

I live in this region, and will till the day I die. Do you?

@HandyGingerGal The older I get the more I prefer the upright seating position and the larger greenhouse of a car like the Maybach. Had the pleasure of riding in a Maybach a few years ago. It was quite impressive.

My husband & I both LOVE cars. But we also fundamentally disagree on car styling. He likes supercars that look light, like a leaf on the wind. But I get nervous at the idea that my car could take flight at any moment, in an uncontrolled fashion. My favorite car is the Maybach, precisely because it looks like a tank, but it's FAST.