What's Being Done

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Global Warming

Go ahead, pick a fight with Mother Nature; see who wins.

Stormo 2005

Elected Law Makers

Congress has a terrible communicable disease and desperately needs to be quarantined.

Anonymous

Humans

Don't expect much of them, they're just people.

Stormo 2000

Seem Familiar?

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor - he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation - he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city - he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, 42 B.C.

Not much has changed.

Tragedy or Comedy

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Horace Walpole

Inspiration

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Jack London

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

If You Haven't Earned It,

Don't Take It.

No one is owed anything they haven't first earned.

If you didn't make a constructive contribution, if you didn't do the work, if you were not the creator or the originator of the successful idea, then don't take the money.

If you've done nothing, then you've earned nothing. Just being is not doing.

If you don't own it, or you aren't owed it because you've loaned it out, then do not accept it.

If you need help and you have earned the privilege to be helped to become self-sufficient, then only accept help with a firm commitment to pay it back.

Lost self esteem is a very expensive price you pay taking things you haven't earned.

If you're ignorant, get educated. If you're lazy, get busy. If you're stupid, you're not reading this. If you're poor, you're both ignorant and lazy.

If you've earned it and can't find it, it's not someone else’s fault. If you've wasted it, it's your fault. 

If you've used it unwisely, don't expect it back. If you didn't save some for the unexpected, you are ignorant.

Think ahead, prepare for disappointments, and don’t waste what you earn.