neal umphred dot com - Page 3 of 52 - a blog about ratiocinations out of thin air and elsewhere

PatrickChappatte PolarBear SUV 12 29 2007 1500

patrick chappatte and will eisner and graphic journalism

I DON’T FOLLOW EDITORIAL CARTOONING, although I certainly appreciate the fact that we may be living in its golden age. There are so many brilliant individuals who combine political and social insight with intelligence and with along with the ability to draw! [Continue reading]

I just launched a new publication on medium all about elvis

WE LAUNCHED our new publication Tell It Like It Was on Medium on January 1, 2019. The articles within address popular music, primarily rock & roll from the ’60s. “We” are John Ross (my favorite music blogger), Lew Shiner (my favorite novelist), and myself. [Continue reading]

about the bleeding heart liberal petitions page on facebook

I HAVE A FACEBOOK PAGE titled Bleeding Heart Liberal Petitions. Most days, I receive a slew of emails with petitions for various causes such as saving an endangered species, urging my representatives in state and federal government to vote for or against a particular bill, protest an injustice, etc. [Continue reading]

is white man messing around with red man’s poo-poo?

I WOKE UP and plopped myself down in my chair and opened my email. Bleary-eyed, I skimmed over the various subject titles and saw one that made me rub those bleary eyes: “Sign the petition: Apache holy shit threatened …” and the rest was cut off. [Continue reading]

you don’t appreciate a lot of stuff until you get older

I MAY BE GETTING UP THERE IN YEARS, but sex remains a topic of interest, both in its arousing forms an in its humorous forms. I was recently emailed a collection of quotes about sex and marriage and found many of them rather fun. [Continue reading]

is there money to be made selling books on the internet?

THE POPULATION OF THE U.S. is approximately 330,000,000. Of course, Amazon reaches around the planet, so the potential market for just about anything you might want to sell is in the billions! If you’re into books and think you might want to dabble a little in buying and selling them to pick up a few bucks, my advice consists of two words: “Think again.” [Continue reading]

CarlBarks ScroogeMcDuck painting diving 1500

just another rhetorical question about God

THE SPORT OF TYCOONS is the title of the 1974 painting of Scrooge McDuck by legendary artist Carl Barks. Barks was a Disney Studio artist who made his way into comics in the early 1940s. Like other artists who worked for Disney at the time, his work was unsigned and so he was known only as “The Good Duck Artist” to fans. [Continue reading]

DonaldTrump caricature Oddonkey Hoppmann 1500 crop

we might wonder what benefits impeachment is likely to yield

WE MIGHT WONDER what benefits impeachment is likely to yield, ponders Andrew Bacevich in “The Real Cover-Up: Putting Donald Trump’s Impeachment in Context.” As to the benefits of impeachment, Bacevich believes that answering that question “requires examining four scenarios that describe the range of possibilities awaiting the nation.” [Continue reading]

first they came for the black-spotted newts

First, they came for the black-spotted newts but I did not speak out because I was not a black-spotted newt.

Then they came for the spotted owls but I did not speak out because I was not a spotted owl.

Then they came for the butterflies but I did not speak out because I was not a butterfly. [Continue reading]

FAVORITE QUOTES

"You don't fight fascism because you're going to win. You fight fascism because it is fascist." – Jean-Paul Sartre

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.” – Frank Zappa

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." – James Baldwin

"If women learned to read there seemed to be a possibility that some day some good man might come home and find his wife reading, and the dinner not ready—and nothing could be imagined more horrible than that! That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind—that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man’s comfort." – Nellie L. McClung

"What people call the Christmas spirit [is] a kind of dream or hope we carry with us from childhood. But as adults ... we're imbued by the pragmatic routines of life, which makes it difficult for us to regard anything with childlike wonder. But, you know, it's alright for us to try. We put on silly hats and drape trees with sparkly lights and wrap gifts in garish paper and that's good for us. It's not only alright for us to allow children the transient experience of innocence and joy, it's our responsibility." – Lance Sweets

"When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." – Anonymous

"‘What saves a man is to take a step ... then another step." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The old dreams were good dreams. They didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them.'" – Robert Kincaid

"Fascists in a democracy demand the right of free speech, but once in power will absolutely, definitively, not grant it to anyone other than themselves. That's their trick and they know it perfectly well." – William Gibson

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" – Carl Sagan

"Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” – Avi Loeb

"If you value the wrong things, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're going to end up in the wrong place. If you ask the wrong questions, it doesn't matter how much data you collect, your answers will be meaningless." – Mark Manson

"You are better off trying something and having it not work and learning from that than not doing anything at all." – Mark Zuckerberg

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That's why it's important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are." – Maya Angelou.

"Sometimes fear needs fearing more than the things we fear." – Elizabeth Bligh

"If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you see the cost of hiring an amateur." – Nealism

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should, therefore, claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." – Karl Popper

“A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.” – Edward Gibbon

"Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” ~ Lao Tzu

"So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old." – John Stuart Mill

"Clearly, any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness, and duration." – H.G. Wells

“When you speak truth to power, power fights back." – Alexandria Octavia-Cortez

"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind." – Virginia Woolf

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." –Albert Einstein

"Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." – M. Scott Peck

"The future has a way of arriving unannounced." – George F. Will

"Right now, I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." – Steven Wright

“How did it get so late so soon?” ― Dr. Seuss

"While all acronyms are initialisms, most initialisms are not acronyms." – Q (lol)

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble—it's what you know that just ain't so." – Mark Twain

"I don't trust anybody I'm not close enough to kill." – Kelly Burkhardt

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” – Philip K. Dick

"I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats." – Eckhart Tolle