We Practice It

“We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.”
― William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

William Faulkner

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

Hemingway

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Slowly

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
CONFUCIUS

Gabriel Fielding

The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write.
GABRIEL FIELDING

David Nessle

https://soundcloud.com/david-nessle

blog https://davidnessle.wordpress.com/

Harley Davidson 4:30 AM

We have a new alarm clock in the 'hood. A Harley Davidson parked on the street gets turned on at 4:30AM and wakes up the whole neighborhood. The owner lets it run a while before launching off to work.

Cottage cheese and peaches.

My breakfast today was exactly what I'd eat in 9th grade as an after school suburban snack. Cottage cheese and peaches.

Pooches and Pregnancies

Yesterday I ran into the young girl who used to be my neighbor.
When are you due?
Halloween. My child's father lives 2 hours away. He lives with his mother, he has a good job.
Is this baby number five? I asked.
Number four, she said.
We didn't know we were having a baby. Now we're back together.

My neighbors suddenly have a huge scary dog. This makes dog number four in the 3 family house. The yard stinks because nobody walks or leashes their dog. Yelling and barking is the norm. Each neighbor faults the other. This corner of the city is inundated with flies urine and dog-shit. We live next to a dog kennel.

I am amazed at the baby making and dog adoption that goes on as if it was as easy as buying a bag of potato chips.

failure to defend press freedom around the world.

Morning Mix
Egypt planned to arrest a New York Times reporter. The Trump administration reportedly wanted to let it happen.

FILE - This Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011 file photo shows the New York Times building in New York. Two people familiar with the matter said private research shows that the hacking group Fancy Bear sent phishing emails to roughly 50 employees at the Times in late 2014. The Times confirmed in a brief statement that its employees received the malicious messages but declined further comment. (Mark Lennihan, File)
By Teo Armus
September 24 at 7:09 AM

In late 2017, The New York Times received an urgent warning from a U.S. official. Egyptian authorities were looking to arrest Declan Walsh, the newspaper’s reporter in Cairo, according to its publisher. It’s not unusual for a large media organization to get tipped off about threats to its journalists overseas, particularly those reporting on authoritarian governments.

But what was striking is what the official said next: The Trump administration had tried to keep the warning about Walsh from ever reaching the Times. Officials “intended to sit on the information and let the arrest be carried out,” Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote in an opinion column on Monday.

This incident, described publicly by Sulzberger for the first time in a talk at Brown University earlier on Monday, adds a chilling new episode to the administration’s trend of attacking the press and diminishing the rights of journalists as they come under threat around the globe, the publisher wrote.

Where the United States was once seen as the top defender of press freedom, Sulzberger suggested that Trump has inspired the opposite around the globe, citing recent threats made in an address by the Cambodian prime minister, a social media blackout in Chad, and attempts to arrest foreign journalists in Egypt, whose autocratic president Trump once jokingly called his “favorite dictator.”

“These brutal crackdowns are being passively accepted and perhaps even tacitly encouraged by the president of the United States,” Sulzberger said.

President Trump has refused to acknowledge that the Saudi government ordered the assassination of The Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, as international investigators have found. And the president’s frequent use of the phrase “fake news” has resulted in more than 50 foreign government leaders to adopt similar calls, the publisher charged.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Walsh, The Times’ Cairo bureau chief, penned articles in early 2017 about the country’s crackdown on human rights groups, the expulsion of a prominent critic of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the largely ineffective efforts to hold the country’s former president Hosni Mubarak accountable. He also led a live web event from Cairo in March 2017 about the tight press restrictions placed on visual journalists in Egypt.

Later that year, the Times got a call from the U.S. official, who said Walsh had a target on his back. That’s when the call took a “surprising and distressing turn,” Sulzberger wrote on Monday.

The Trump administration wanted to sit on the warning and let Egyptian officials carry out the arrest, the official said. In fact, the official feared being punished for alerting the Times of what was about to play out.

So the newspaper instead turned to Walsh’s home country of Ireland for help. Almost immediately, officials from the Irish Embassy in Cairo escorted the journalist from his home to the airport, Sulzberger wrote.

The Irish Embassy in Cairo referred a request for comment to the Irish Foreign Ministry, which did not immediately return multiple calls and emails. Walsh also did not immediately respond to messages.

In his talk at Brown, Sulzberger used the incident to illustrate the repercussions of Trump’s failure to defend press freedom around the world.

“I’m sounding the alarm because his words are dangerous and having real-world consequences around the globe,” Sulzberger said.

Reporters without Borders, a nonprofit that fights for press freedom, has noted a sharp drop in the number of countries where it is safe for journalists to work. Only 8 percent of 180 countries evaluated by the organization in 2019 have a media climate considered “good” for journalists, amid a tightening grip from government and increased violence. The U.S. came in at 48th, and Egypt was 163rd.

Later in his speech, Sulzberger mentioned an incident last February, in which another one of the newspaper’s journalists was targeted by the Egyptian government. This time, their efforts were successful.

David D. Kirkpatrick, a Times international correspondent and former Cairo bureau chief, had written a book, “Into the Hands of the Soldiers,” that was critical of the Egyptian government. Upon landing in Cairo in February, Kirkpatrick was placed in custody for hours without food or water. He was then ordered on a flight back to London, where he’s based.

[In latest blow to press freedom, Egypt bars, then deports New York Times reporter]

Sam Werberg, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, later said the office was “concerned” about the incident and raised the matter with Egyptian officials.

Privately, however, the embassy’s reaction to the incident seemed to differ. After the Times’ leadership spoke out, Sulzberger heard from a senior official at the embassy.

“What did you expect would happen to him?” the official said, according to Sulzberger. “His reporting made the government look bad.”

Sulzberger’s column prompted one of Trump’s most outspoken critics in Congress to compare the president to an “authoritarian.”

“This is what authoritarians do,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)

Leap!

If you want to be a doctor, look before you leap. If you want to be in show business, leap before you look.
STEVEN SPIELBERG

Toby Litt

"To write competently is to do a few magic tricks for friends and family; to write well is to run away to join the circus…”

To go from being a competent writer to being a great writer, I think you have to risk being – or risk being seen as – a bad writer. Competence is deadly because it prevents the writer risking the humiliation that they will need to risk before they pass beyond competence. To write competently is to do a few magic tricks for friends and family; to write well is to run away to join the circus. Your friends and family will love your tricks, because they love you. But try busking those tricks on the street. Try busking them alongside a magician who has been doing it for 10 years, earning their living. When they are watching a magician, people don’t want to say, “Well done.” They want to say, “Wow.”

TOBY LITT

Vacuum Entire House

Vacuum entire house. Reorganize all closets and drawers. Paint exterior of house. Ask neighbors if they would like their house painted. Re-vacuum house. Write lead.
Susan Orlean

Write Scared

When I was a member of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team, my editor, Gerry O’Neill, urged me to “write scared.” That is, push yourself beyond what you think is possible or safe, to the outer limits of your research and your ability, to the point where it feels exciting and a little scary. When it works, it’s exhilarating for you and for the reader.

MITCHELL ZUCKOFF

Dream

I dreamed I was pregnant with a huge belly and a live white rat was on my chest facing me like a hood ornament. He must be hungry, I thought.

The Keys for Getting Free

re-posted from Sunday, September 29, 2013

When my neighbors were moving their last box out I rushed over to the fence and gave their 12 year old daughter a hardcover copy of my first book: Avi's Punch with Judy, as a goodbye gift. I asked her if I could write in a dedication with a drawing of Sammy and Lily? "Are you ready for your new school," I asked.
"I hope I can make new friends - figure out who to trust, and they don't abandon me," she said. I feel like through this book I am giving her messages of hope hidden woven inside like a prayer rug in Sufi tales. These are the keys for getting free. Serena loves to read and we often talk about books when we are not talking about Lily Sammy and glucose monitors and the latest neighborhood drama. Serena's dad Mickey told me his ex wife abandoned Serena last year running away with a truck driver to travel the highways of Florida with him. Serena now lives full time with her father and step mother Lanie. They have fun. They just bought their own house in the suburbs and they have a pool and acres of land and Mickey drives a sit down lawn mower that came with the house. Serena told me she has celiac disease and is allergic to everything with wheat or milk and she has diabetes. She is slender petite and blonde with clear blue eyes. She lifted her shirt to show me she has scars on her stomach and thigh from having to wears a glucose monitor pump attached to her skin but under her clothes. She goes to a special summer camp for diabetic kids every year. Lanie came out to show me the special corn pasta they buy at a gourmet store. I wished I could bring over my pasta machine to show her how to make her own healthy corn noodles. I told her having to be careful about your food will make her a great cook and she will continue to have perfect skin when everyone else is getting zits. There's a plus side to everything. I said and we laughed.

I Walk my Dog Early

I walk my dog earlier now because the eee virus is out there carried by mosquitoes. The local kids have sports and outdoor games earlier too. Climate effects everyone. Think about ways you can help.

Don't buy liquid soap.
Don't buy anything in plastic small containers.
Use water from the faucet.
Eat mostly vegetarian.
Recycle.
Pick up trash on your streets.
Walk more drive less.
Use public transportation when possible.
VOTE!!!

Electric Pressure Cooker

Our butcher retired but two brothers bought the shop. They are doing a nice job of carrying on the tradition of the best place in town.

My friend gave me an electric pressure cooker and I plan to make this.

Instant Pot Pork Stew
Yield: 6
Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 25 minutes
Additional Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 45 minutes

This easy spicy Instant Pot pork stew makes a hearty weeknight dinner.

Ingredients

1 T oil
1 1/2 pounds pork, cubed
1 cup water
1 onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup cornmeal
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 Tablespoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon salt
1 can pinto beans or black beans, drained
1 can diced tomatoes, undrained
2 cups frozen corn, thawed

Instructions

Put the Instant Pot on Saute and add the oil. Brown the pork in the oil for 5 minutes.
Turn the Instant Pot off, and then use the water to deglaze it. Stir well and scrape the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon to make sure there are no brown bits left on bottom.
Add the onion, garlic, cornmeal, cumin, chili powder, oregano, salt, and beans to the Instant Pot and mix well.
Dump the can of tomatoes on top but don't stir it into the other ingredients. (Not stirring it in reduces the chance you will get a burn error.)
Cover, bring to pressure on High pressure or the Stew/Meat setting and cook for 25 minutes.
Let the pressure release naturally for 10 minutes, then release the rest of the pressure and stir in the corn. Cover and let it sit for 5 minutes to heat the corn.

Michelle Goldberg

Opinion
Nancy Pelosi’s Failure to Launch

The House speaker’s hesitation on impeachment empowers a lawless president.


By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Sept. 23, 2019

Elizabeth Warren on Friday evening sent out a series of tweets that, in addition to calling out Donald Trump for his criminality, rebuked Congress for enabling him. “After the Mueller report, Congress had a duty to begin impeachment,” wrote Warren. “By failing to act, Congress is complicit in Trump’s latest attempt to solicit foreign interference to aid him in U.S. elections. Do your constitutional duty and impeach the president.”

Warren was not impolitic enough to refer directly to the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, but the implicit criticism was clear. It was also well deserved. Pelosi’s calculated timidity on impeachment is emboldening Trump, demoralizing progressives, and failing the country.

The House speaker is a master legislator, and by all accounts incomparable at corralling votes. But right now, Democrats need a brawler willing to use every tool at her disposal to stop America’s descent into autocracy, and Pelosi has so far refused to rise to the occasion. As Representative Jared Huffman tweeted, “We are verging on tragic fecklessness.”

Part of Pelosi’s rationale for not impeaching after the release of the Mueller report was that such a move didn’t have majority support in the country or bipartisan support in Congress. Her allies worried that were Trump to be impeached in the House but not convicted in the Senate, he could emerge stronger than ever. Many Democrats in swing districts wanted to steer clear.

These were reasonable concerns, but inaction signaled to Trump that he would face no consequences for obstructing justice or for seeking a foreign power’s help in undermining a political opponent.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

Now Trump has used the power of the presidency to do just that. We don’t yet know all the details in the whistle-blower report filed by a member of the intelligence community, which is now being kept, possibly illegally, from Congress. But there’s little question that the president tried to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden; both Trump and his ranting disgrace of a lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have admitted as much on television.

The idea was to try to force Ukraine to provide grist for a thoroughly debunked right-wing conspiracy theory that as vice president, Biden targeted a Ukrainian prosecutor on his son’s behalf. While Trump was strong-arming the reformist Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, his administration had frozen $250 million in security aid that the country desperately needed to defend itself against Russia, which invaded in 2014. It doesn’t matter if there was an explicit quid pro quo; Zelensky knew what Trump wanted from him. Trump deployed American foreign policy to extort a vulnerable nation to help his re-election campaign.

Trump’s latest defilement of his oath of office has pushed some previously reluctant Democrats, like the House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff, toward impeachment. Schiff reportedly coordinated his recent pro-impeachment comments with Pelosi, yet she remains resistant to moving in the same direction. One of Pelosi’s advisers told the CNBC reporter John Harwood that her impeachment calculus hasn’t changed, saying, “See any G.O.P. votes for it?” It was almost as if the adviser was trying to troll scared, desperate Democrats, rubbing their faces in the speaker’s baffling determination to give Trump’s party veto power over accountability.

The most Pelosi has done is to write that if the whistle-blower’s complaint is kept from Congress, the administration “will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.” Given the impunity Trump has enjoyed so far, this does not seem like a threat with teeth.

Ultimately, no one can know the political consequences of impeachment in advance. I find it hard to imagine how months of televised hearings into a widely hated president’s comprehensive corruption could help him, but I can’t see the future. Perhaps impeachment in the House without removal in the Senate would allow Trump to convince some voters he’s been exonerated, though so does the failure to impeach him at all.

Polls show that impeachment doesn’t have majority support, so there’s a political risk for Democrats in trying to lead public opinion rather than follow it. But surely there’s also a risk in appearing weak and irresolute. Already, frustration with Pelosi in the Democratic base is threatening to curdle into despair. “I see the grass-roots activists who helped build the wave last year really wondering what they built that wave for,” Ezra Levin, co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible, told me.

In the end, our system offers no mechanism besides impeachment to check a president who operates like a mob boss. It’s true that Democrats will remove Trump only by beating him in 2020, but he is already cheating in that election, just as he did in 2016, and paying no price for it.

A formal impeachment process would, if nothing else, give new weight to Democratic claims when they go to court to enforce subpoenas or pry loose documents the administration is trying to hide. It would show that Democrats are serious when they say that Trump’s behavior is intolerable, and potentially allow them to seize control of the day-to-day narrative of this rancid presidency. Trump does not want to be impeached — a Monday Politico headline says, “Trump’s team is trying to stop impeachment before it starts.” It’s hard to imagine why any Democratic leader would assist them.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn

When the sage points to the moon

“Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”
― Anthony de Mello

“These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.”
― Anthony de Mello

“‎"I have no fear of losing u, for you aren't an object of my property, or anyone else's. I love you as you are, without attachment, without fears, without conditions, without egoism, trying not to absorb you. I love you freely because I love your freedom, as well as mine.”
― Anthony de Mello

“You see persons and things not as they are but as you are. ”
― Anthony de Mello

“The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.'

Said [author:Diogenes|3213618, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king".”
― Anthony de Mello

“People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.”
― Anthony de Mello

“When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don't have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don't you experience it? Because you've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else.” “I know. An overwhelming passion for it.” “No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.”
― Anthony de Mello

“Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.”
― Anthony de Mello

“When you get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding... you can be yourself. Relaxed. You'll no longer be driving with your brakes on.”
― Anthony De Mello

“The tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.”
― Anthony de Mello

“When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“Don't ask the world to change....you change first.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.”
― Anthony de Mello

“Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“I have no fear of losing you, for you aren’t an object of my property, or anyone else’s. I love you as you are, without attachment, without fears, without conditions, without egoism, trying not to absorb you. I love you freely because I love your freedom, as well as mine.”
― Anthony de Mello

“Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”
― Anthony de Mello

“The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.”
― Anthony De Mello

“The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awakening: Conversations with the Masters

“As the Arabs say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

“the greatest learning of the ages lies in accepting life exactly as it comes to us.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Prayer Of The Frog, Vol. 1

“The Master made it his task to destroy systematically every
doctrine, every belief, every concept of the divine, for these
things, which were originally intended as pointers, were now
being taken as descriptions.

He loved to quote the Eastern saying "When the sage points
to the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger.”
― Anthony de Mello

“The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“The world is right because I feel good.
― Anthony de Mello