Orts #887

   If you would be convinced how differently armed the squirrel is naturally for dealing with pitch pine cones, just try to get one off with your teeth. He who extracts the seeds from a single closed cone with the aid of a knife will be constrained to confess that the squirrel earns his dinner. It is a rugged customer, and will make your fingers bleed. But the squirrel has the key to this conical and spiny chest of many apartments. He sits on a post, vibrating his tail, and twirls it as a plaything.
   But so is a man commonly a locked-up chest to us, to open whom, unless we have the key of sympathy, will make our hearts bleed.
        — Thoreau, Journal, January 1856

   At his trial for treason in January 1649, King Charles I of England had denied the authority of the court set up by Parliament on the grounds that “no earthly power can justly call me (who am your King) in question as a delinquent.” Yet the court insisted on its authority to try him and he was convicted of “a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will.”
     — David Armitage, in Trump and the Return of Divine Right, New York Times, July 12, 2018


To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.
     -- Susan Sontag

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for anyone following the U.S. scene, an article which pretty much obliterates any case for optimism:    https://nyti.ms/2AU37VT