Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

The Very Best of 2021 (Part 2 of 7)

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Preface to all parts: It’s that time of year again. I have written over 30,000 posts during the long history of Slope, and at the end of each year, I gather up what I consider the best of the prior year’s offerings. At the end of every year, I assume I’m utterly out of material, and yet at the same time, I look back with amazement at all the terrific posts from the year that has just completed. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up, but my concerns of content exhaustion have been proved wrong since March 2005. For your reading pleasure, I offer the following Best of 2021 Posts:

Miracle of Miracles
A kind-hearted Sloper in a moment of need

Twenty Years Ahead of My Time
Probably best not even to say what this one’s about!

Varsity Impressions
I just can’t stop writing about the Varsity Blues scandal!

Sixteen Years
A video I made commemorating Slope’s long history

Recipe for Disaster
Thoughts about new, massively-wasteful government “investments”

Life Crushed Flat
A long essay is my attempt at a love letter to my wife

Waxing Poetic
The year wouldn’t be complete without a post about my honeybees

Butterflies of the Reich

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Although it was published nearly two-thirds of a century ago, I never read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich before. I just started reading it this weekend, and it’s a riveting read so far.

Most of us are familiar with the ‘butterfly effect” that is mentioned with chaos theory – – that is, how one tiny, inconsequential action can ultimately have huge effects. There are many examples of this in the Third Reich book because, let’s face it, had Hitler not been the leader of Germany, then the lives of tens of millions of people (actually more like hundreds of millions, or possibly even billions) would be affected.

Of course, most of us know how, as a soldier in World War I, Hitler almost died but was saved, ironically, by a member of the allied forces. And likewise, we realize that if the art academy in Vienna had accepted his application so that he could achieve his youthful dream of being a great artist, then this person name “Hitler” would simply have become a little-known Germany painter of the mid 20th-century.

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