petronius
petronius's JournalI'm going to nominate another: The Cloud, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174384I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
I don't think the government part of it should cost anything; only the aspects
that involve a private entity--a dealer administering a test, for example--should allow a fee (and there should always be a reasonable route to avoid the cost).
RKBA is a civil liberty, and there should be minimal/no arbitrary barriers to exercising a civil liberty. FOID requirements and such are already a barrier, which I agree is a legitimate one, but the issuance of permits can easily be done with no charge to the individual, and therefore it should be...
The GOP should be discussed in regular 'General Discussion'
(Here's a comment from Skinner in ATA to that effect: http://www.democraticunderground.com/12598164 )
Since the transition of 'Politics 2015' into 'GD: Primaries', the Host interpretation has been:
1) 'GD: Primaries' is for Dem primaries and nothing else (based on the SoP of GDP and the stop-screen),
2) Rep primaries are thus excluded from GDP and belong in 'General Discussion,' and
3) Dem primaries are excluded from GD and must be in GDP (based on the SoP of GD and the stickied info thread in GD).
(Edit to add a second ATA comment regarding renaming GD: Primaries, and/or including Republican primaries in GDP: http://www.democraticunderground.com/12598175 )
I agree, disqualifications and revocations of civil rights/liberties could be
more nuanced. There are non-violent felonies that really shouldn't affect RKBA, and some violent (or other) misdemeanors that should.
I'm also not in favor of life-time bans; IMO there should be a pre-determined sliding scale for restoring rights after a period of 'good behavior,' although I'd let judges over-ride that (in either direction) with a clear and articulated reason.
Nobody should ever lose the right to vote; even while incarcerated I think citizens should be able to vote absentee in their home precincts...
Amendment XYZ: Well-nourished children being essential for the productivity
of a modern state, the right of the people to plant and maintain backyard gardens shall not be infringed.
Queries for linguists, grammarians, syntacticians, high school and university English instructors: based on the phrasing of Amendment XYZ above,
- Is the right to plant and maintain gardens limited to those people who have children, or even to children themselves?
- Is the right to garden protected only when that garden is being specifically used for the feeding of children?
- Is the right to garden one which is held by individuals, or is it a right of the modern state (to be exercised through state-administered gardening programs, perhaps)?
- If a state-run system for the nourishment of children came into being (a really effective school lunch program for example), would the right to backyard gardening then evaporate?
- Does the right to plant and maintain a backyard garden come into being with Amendment XYZ, or does the phrasing of XYZ acknowledge an existing right and provide one (perhaps of many) reason to prevent infringement on that right?
Poll for entertainment purposes only, it doesn't relate to any of the above discussion prompts...
Continent's End, by Robinson Jeffers
wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary,
the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.
I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray,
the established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent,
before me the mass and double stretch of water.
I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava
and coral sowings that flower the south,
Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours
that has followed the evening star.
The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you,
you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb
and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline.
It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then
and you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness,
the insolent quietness of stone.
The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars,
life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye
that watched before there was an ocean.
That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation
of thin vapor and watched you change them,
That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down,
eat rock, shift places with the continents.
Mother, though my song’s measure is like your
surf-beat’s ancient rhythm I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire,
both our tones flow from the older fountain.
http://www.robinsonjeffersassociation.org/2010/08/continent%E2%80%99s-end/
Thanks for posting that! I'd never heard of Aivazovsky before (shameful, I know), but
I really like what I'm finding... 
I think your post is a modernized version of this:
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.
Now—for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart—
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless way.
The Haunted Oak, by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?
My leaves were green as the best, I trow,
And sap ran free in my veins,
But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird
A guiltless victim's pains.
I bent me down to hear his sigh;
I shook with his gurgling moan,
And I trembled sore when they rode away,
And left him here alone.
They'd charged him with the old, old crime,
And set him fast in jail:
Oh, why does the dog howl all night long,
And why does the night wind wail?
He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,
And he raised his hand to the sky;
But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,
And the steady tread drew nigh.
Who is it rides by night, by night,
Over the moonlit road?
And what is the spur that keeps the pace,
What is the galling goad?
And now they beat at the prison door,
"Ho, keeper, do not stay!
We are friends of him whom you hold within,
And we fain would take him away
"From those who ride fast on our heels
With mind to do him wrong;
They have no care for his innocence,
And the rope they bear is long."
They have fooled the jailer with lying words,
They have fooled the man with lies;
The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,
And the great door open flies.
Now they have taken him from the jail,
And hard and fast they ride,
And the leader laughs low down in his throat,
As they halt my trunk beside.
Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black,
And the doctor one of white,
And the minister, with his oldest son,
Was curiously bedight.
Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?
'Tis but a little space,
And the time will come when these shall dread
The mem'ry of your face.
I feel the rope against my bark,
And the weight of him in my grain,
I feel in the throe of his final woe
The touch of my own last pain.
And never more shall leaves come forth
On the bough that bears the ban;
I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,
From the curse of a guiltless man.
And ever the judge rides by, rides by,
And goes to hunt the deer,
And ever another rides his soul
In the guise of a mortal fear.
And ever the man he rides me hard,
And never a night stays he;
For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,
On the trunk of a haunted tree.
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