Central Rim

There isn't a particular group deciding and enforcing a cover-up.  Everybody simply avoids looking at the problem.  Why upset the whole machine? - French Air Force intelligence officer from Jacque Vallee's Messengers of Deception

Mountain Cove

Still, along with the easy happiness I had come to associate with the country, I was aware of a new and perhaps less superficial sensation - that sense of familiarity and alienation that comes to one who knows a place well, but who can never hope to become a part of it - Wade Davis

McCall
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth - Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/u/umberto_eco.html#OM8yrfJ8CMRUueUH.99

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/u/umberto_eco.html#OM8yrfJ8CMRUueUH.99

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/u/umberto_eco.html#OM8yrfJ8CMRUueUH.99

Deer Creek

Will those feet in modern times
Walk on soles that are made in China?
Through the bright prosaic malls
And the corridors that go on and on and on

- from "Love is Noise" by The Verve

Boise - Fall

If your lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company - Jean-Paul Sartre

Near Cassia Park

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end" - Ernest Hemingway

Lucky Peak

It seems that when it comes to views about the aliens' purposes in seeking to preserve life on this planet, the truth, as with so many aspects of the alien abduction phenomenon, seems to lie in the perception or consciousness of the beholder - John E. Mack

Anderson Ranch Reservoir
 

Punk rock really influenced me, the basic metal bands, Zeppelin, Stones and Floyd, and Southern rock bands. I think I was pretty well-rounded - Al Jourgensen

Idaho City

“Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god.” - Wade Davis

Shafer Butte

The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves -

CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian

Downtown

Gwangju convinced a new generation of young [Koreans] that the democratic movement had developed not with the support of Washington, as an older generation of more conservative Koreans thought, but in the face of daily American support for any dictator who could quell the democratic aspirations of the Korean people. The result was an anti-American movement in the 1980s that threatened to bring down the whole structure of American support for the ROK. American cultural centers were burned to the ground (more than once in Gwangju); students immolated themselves in protest of Reagan's support for Chun - Bruce Cumings

Sawmill Gulch, Lost River Range

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal - Aleister Crowley

Downtown Boise

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered - Martin Luther King Jr.

I-80 Summit, Wyoming

 

I don't know of any cases where as a result of religious precepts a population have found themselves enjoying less food than they would have if they didn't follow this particular religion - Marvin Harris

Cahokia Mounds, Illinois

The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents - H. P. Lovecraft

Columbus, OH

In a state where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous - Publius Cornelius Tacitus

Ohio

Perception is created and twisted so quickly - Louis C.K.

Des Moines, IA

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection - The Bhagavad Gita
 

Deadman Pass, Oregon

When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness - Alexis de Tocqueville

Boardman, OR

It has been said, 'the truth will make men free.' The truth alone has never made anyone free. It is only doubt which will bring mental emancipation - Anton Szandor LaVey

Thompson Peak

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 

Shafer Butte

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion - Noam Chomsky

Caldwell

Human beings are the only animals who are happily lied to by our own minds about what is actually happening around us - Cesar Millan

Kuna

Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control and it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realised that you either became a power or you were crushed. - Joe Strummer

Cottonwood Creek

 

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.  - Walter Lippmann

Stanley

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor. - Aldous Huxley

Lucky Peak, Boise

Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.

 

- Reinhold Niebuhr

Boise

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. - Edgar Allan Poe




Robie Creek

What a great way to start this blog!  This tree is near Robie Creek Park, east of Boise.  With each entry I will provide an image of an iconic tree here in the lovely state of Idaho.  Twisted, beautiful, gnarled or ancient, the criteria are varied but hopefully the image will speak for itself!

This tree puts me in mind of something George Orwell once wrote: "A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial.  That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud."