Laura > Recent Status Updates

To be fair Oscar didn’t like me much either. Whenever I approached, the car stopped what he was doing and stared for a few seconds. If I tried to touch him, he shrank back and moved the other way. I found this strangely reassuring. It seemed to mean that someone still knew I existed. Even if it was just an orange tabby.

Okay so now the cat is an orange tabby?

I heard a clattering noise behind me and turned in time to see a little calico cat scurry into the garage through the cat door.

Remember this…a calico cat.

“Ode to my spork” by Sparrow
O spork! With your spoon face
And your spiked lips
You are the centaur of utensils
What’s for dinner?
Never fear.
Spork: you scoop AND spear.
Brave, useful spork!
Backcountry soldier,
Stalwart, winner.
But like a lot of us,
You are a freak in the front country,
Where no one invites you to dinner.

But when you spend your life in the pursuit of knowledge, knowledge matters a great deal, and mattering is a life force. People were always asking her, “Studying? What are you studying for? The question galled her. “I’m studying because I’m curious. Why aren’t you studying? Why don’t you want to know the name of that raptor in the sky? Why don’t you want to taste that dooryard violet?”

“The very people who, three years ago, crouched at their master’s feet, on the accursed soil of Virginia, now marsh in a victorious column of freedmen, over the same land.”

When our world feels chaotic, we seek leaders who exude strength and control, presuming that they’ll be able to set things right. In truth, these leaders are precisely the ones who sow instability thanks to their aggress, impulsive, and self-serving behavior.

Senator John Sherman, he of the Sherman Act, famously said in support of his bill: “If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and fix the price of any commodity.”

“Amazon brags about this technique, which it calls ‘the fly-wheel.’ It brings in users with low prices and a large selection. This attracts merchants who are eager to sell to those users. The merchants’ dependence on these customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts….”

The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again3 When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?

“Factory workers had their greatest influence, and were able to exact their most substantial concessions from government, during the Great Depression, in the years before they were organized into unions. Their power during the Depression was not rooted in organization, but in disruption.”

“ The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.”