Rantin' bout Thomas Jefferson & a butterfly flappin its wings!
coreyryanforrester.substack.com
May 26 • 14M
Rantin' bout Thomas Jefferson & a butterfly flappin its wings!
Appears in this episode
Corey Ryan Forrester
I walk in the park every day and I bring my podcast equipment with me just in case I have a random thought, or, more likely, want to bitch about something:)
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Hey, y’all! I wanted to share a fascinating history nugget I just learned with yall!
I also wanted to thank y’all because I genuinely believe that being active in this group has made me read more since y’all are always giving me suggestions and are most all clearly nerds like me 😂
Hope yall have a great weekend, and il see you later!
‘Corey
PS. new episode of Puttin On Airs is out! Go watch it at WatchPOA.com or wherever you get your podcasts! Leave us a review and rate us 5 stars if ya don’t mind!
Rantin' bout Thomas Jefferson & a butterfly flappin its wings!
off topic
Rising Fawn, GA
I will definitely read "Understanding Jefferson."
I used to be a member of the now-defunct Quality Paperback Book Club. Members were offered a selection each month. If you didn't want the book -- you checked the box saying "cancel selection" (or whatever) and either checked the books you DID want or went new-book-less that month.
Some of the best books I ever read were the ones I didn't cancel in time "A Nervous Splendor"* being one, and especially "The Powers That Be"**.
As for the Butterfly Effect -- if you get a chance, read Ray Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder." It starts the day after a national election -- much to everyone's relief, an intelligent and honest progressive is now the president of the United States and the protagonists feel like they can go on their planned hunting trip.
This being the future, time-travel has been perfected and these bozos want to kill a dinosaur. (Jerks) However, the people who designed the time-travel technique are painfully aware that the tiniest change to the past can radically affect the present. So these hunters are supposed to keep to a certain path, kill nothing but the one particular dinosaur which has been so designated because research has shown that it was going to die anyway after being hit by a falling tree. Otherwise, kill nothing. Because.
They go on their trip and of course one of the bozos panics and wanders off the official path. They manage to return to the present only to find that the country has been populated by barely literate ignorami and that the new president is (wait for it) a loud-mouth, viciously corrupt blowhard. Golly, sound familiar? Didn't know Ray Bradbury wrote non-fiction, didja!!!
Why? The bozo who wandered off the path had accidentally stepped on a butterfly which is still clinging to the sole of his shoe -- and they can't go back and redo the time-travel hunting trip because there are no scientists who can create time travel any more.
I'm sorry to have given away the plot like that, but I had to, in order to make a point.
*"A Nervous Splendor" by Frederic Morton -- sort of a multi-layered biography of all the people (Freud, Emperor Franz Josef, Brahams, etc.) who were alive in Vienna during the months before and after the suicide-murder pact of Crown Prince Rudolf & his teenaged mistress Mary Vetsera.
**"The Powers That Be" by David Halberstam. Also a multi-layered biography and history of The New York Times, The LA Times, the Washington Post, TIME magazine, CBS and the men and women who created these mass-media; plus how these newpapers, magazines and TV influenced war, politics, etc.