Do Not Believe

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” —Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha

Found Poetry

Email spammers often embed their links amid irrelevant and innocuous snippets of text. I learned that those snippets are grabbed at random from web pages, and then cobbled together in a disjointed manner. But sometimes there is a strange beauty to the words, especially when presented as if they were poetry, with a bit of repeating and rearranging. Here is what arrived in my morning’s email, beginning with the unedited text as I received it:

But I never liked Gracia Vaughn because I could not respect her.

This book, it must here be repeated, deals with specific recorded facts, and not with civilization as it ought to have been under the Rites of Chou.

I could not respect her.

The Rites of Chou: Civilization as it ought to have been.

The Rites of Chou respect her.

This book must be recorded here, as it ought to have been— specific, repeated, liked.

I never liked recorded facts, Vaughn Chou! I never liked civilization!

This book— The Rites of Gracia— repeated, repeated, repeated. Respect her!

It’s a Sign!