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”Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children"

Address given by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 16, 1953, speaking only three months into his presidency. The Cold War deepened during his administration and political pressures for increased military spending mounted. By the time he left office in 1961, he felt it necessary to warn of the military-industrial complex.

"A symbolic moment of peace, grace, and humility amidst one of humanity’s most violent and disgraceful events".
"In December of 1914, a series of grassroots, unofficial ceasefires took hold of the Western Front in the heat of WWI. On Christmas, soldiers from an estimated 100,000 British and German troops began to exchange seasonal greetings and sing songs across the trenches",........ Continue Reading

"I am not and have never been a reviewer of books — a person who surveys the landscape of literature with the goal of evaluating its features. I am and have always been a solitary sojourner who relishes curious excursions hither and dither, guided by a thoroughly subjective inner compass, wandering the wilderness of words by pleasant deviations from the common trail."

These are my footsteps.

The plane traveled 120 ft (36.6 m) in 12 seconds at 10:35 a.m. at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Orville Wright was at the controls, lying prone on the lower wing with his hips in the cradle which operated the wing-warping mechanism. Wilbur Wright ran alongside to balance the plane, and just released his hold on the forward upright of the right wing in the photo. The starting rail, the wing-rest, a coil box, and other items needed for flight preparation are visible behind the machine. This was considered "the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air, powered flight"

The Wright brothers’ flight on December 17, 1903 remains one of the most important moments in aviation history. Explore what happened on this day in history by browsing other events from December 17, or view the full historical record of the Wright brothers’ first successful powered flight and its lasting impact on human travel.

The Nobel Prizes were established by the will of Swedish industrialist, inventor, and armaments (manufacturer  Alfred Nobel. The Will established five Prize categories: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace.

In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) established The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. 

Khalil Gibran (1883 - 1931) Lebanese-American poet and writer. He was the author of The Prophet, The Broken Wings , Beloved, The Three Ants and many others (His name is sometimes spelled Kahlil)

I was out in the outbacks of Stanwoodopolis today, down a dirt road I’d never traveled, one no doubt soon to be paved and developed, but for now 35 acres off the highway, down a dead end, where a buddy was clearing out a recently deceased friend’s shop, house and outbuildings to the highest bidders. Actually, to anyone who would take the stuff, pay the daughters of the deceased what you thought was fair.

First time through I rummaged around, took some maple and walnut lumber, shielded my eyes from the siren call of power tools I really don’t need any more of, and was about to take my leave when the old parlor stove caught my eye back in the far corner of a crammed shop. Now … for those who think a thermostat, the kind with a dial and a graduated temperature setting, is an antique compared to the new digital, individual areas with timed on and offs controlled by a smart phone … for those of us who have avoided moving into the late 20th Century, a wood parlor stove is a tempting item. And … if you have a 1930’s stove that heats your woodshop with a gaping crack in the cast iron body, you better believe a 1900 intact, fully functional, nickel top stove would be hard to resist as the perfect replacement in your shop. Which explains why it’s in the back end of my truck waiting until daylight to unload the beast, drag it into its proper place on the throne and keep me warm these cold damp days. With style!

I guess I live an antique life, I know that. And as the world accelerates exponentially, I realize I’m falling farther and farther back, an object no longer closer than it seems in the rearview. Even these — these scribbles on a page written by hand in the upstairs of my old shack — are old school anachronistic musings few people will read and no one will remember. And why would they? This particular past in the digital future will look as obsolete and irrelevant as, oh, I don’t know, heating with wood cut and split and stacked and burned by some old fart in a stove you might see in a museum. You know, if we still had museums by then.

Visit the Skettle Daddle Site

Christopher C. Krebs -   American attorney who served as the Director of Cybersecurity Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  in the United States Department of Homeland Security. He previously worked in the private sector as Director for Cybersecurity Policy for Microsoft.
As CISA's Director, he played a major role in creating a CISA "Rumor Control website to debunk election-related disinformation.  On November 17, he tweeted "On allegations that election systems were manipulated, 59 election security experts all agree, "in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.". He was fired by President Donald Trump the next day.

“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” ...Continue reading 

A lush serenade to the patience and fortitude of living with uncertainty and letting life unfold on its own terms.............Read More

James Bryce (1839 -1922) Irish-born academic, historian, jurist, Liberal politician and British Ambassador to the United States.

Source: From a 1909 speech before the Fifteenth Annual Conference on International Arbitration on the subject of "Allegiance to Humanity" held at Lake Mohonk, NY