Children of my Days

The Marshall plan only worked in certain countries of northern Europe, and northern Italy. Other countless failures of little Marshall plans.

1. People can be helped to do something, can be taught.
2. People can’t be helped, can’t be taught. So we will do nothing.
3. People can only help themselves, learn for and by themselves.
4. People can be helped to help themselves, can be helped to teach themselves, and this is when the Marshall plan succeeded, but where it did not succeed, there were people, as in southern Europe, who could not be helped to help themselves.

No-one ever develops anyone else:

people and societies develop themselves. International aid, whether for development, or in response to an emergency, cannot bring development. However, it can either support and promote development or, unfortunately, undermine and delay it

J. Bittner to Guntner Grass:

Your generation has had it pretty easy, I wanted to blurt out. You grew big in times when strong ideology and determined judgment counted more than the hard work of examining what is actually going on around us. The way you saw the world counted more than the way it actually was. And there was always a lot of self in your righteousness.
J

Reward for lost sea lion:

A $5,000 reward is being offered for information on the whereabouts of a sea lion pup taken from Dockweiler Beach. “This seal pup has already suffered greatly from the trauma of being separated from his or her mother and is most likely terrified, lacking proper nutrition, and in desperate need of rescue,” according to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Los Angeles Times

Al Husseini, the Palestinian blogger, recalled his journey after he decided to leave Islam.

“I began reading the books I could get my hands on,” he said. “The discovery of the elementary notion of evolution was mind-blowing. Books like Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Darwin’s The Origin of Species opened my eyes to a whole new paradigm.” The 24-year-old Moroccan atheist activist Imad Iddine Habib told me that he read books by American astrophysicist Carl Sagan.

Raj Chetty, a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, while at Harvard has made this astounding discovery, “that where you grow up can profoundly affect your life in real, measureable ways.” Really Raj!!! You didn’t know this? Did you just get off the boat? Where have you been hiding out?

[from See How Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Amplify Racial Inequality. PBS NewsHour, September 1, 2015]

Kim Davis, a county clerk in Morehead, Kentucky, will go to jail

for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples—an act of unlawful defiance that has made her a hero to the religious right and a villain to progressives. She was asked, whose law are you following? And she answered, God’s law. At one time it might have been the correct response. No longer. September 2, 2014.

“Kurdish militias regained full control of the northern Syrian town of Kobani on Monday.”

What struck me about the recapture of Kobani? One thing, the number of air strikes, 700 of them, that were necessary to secure this up until now completely unremarkable piece of real estate between Syrian Kurdistan and Turkey. That is, the cost of the operation. Would President Obama have ever allowed this to happen if he had known the cost beforehand? Something you could have asked, I suppose, about many of our major wars. Don’t we go into them because we don’t know what they’re going to cost us?Go here to read about it:
“…CLEARING THE TOWN WAS NO GREAT VICTORY,”