RELIGION of the FOUNDING FATHERS
(for some reason I thought this was going to be a topic today):

We can see the spirituality of the Founders, in their words (for support of separation of church and state)..

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ed_buckner/quotations.html

http://www.americainprophecy.com/famous-presidential-quotes-separation-c...

bobbler
Freethought Society

This comes from the Society of Professional Journalists website:
http://www.spj.org/gc-index.asp

Geneva Conventions
collateral damage

Weapons, projectiles and methods of warfare that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering are prohibited. (Protocol I, Art. 35, Sec. 2)

See carpet bombing, civilian population, civilian property, environment.

collective penalties

Civilians must not be punished for offenses that they personally did not commit. Collective penalties, intimidation and penalties against civilian populations are prohibited. (Convention IV, Art. 33)

***********************************

Even if our wars were legal under international law, which they are not, our methodology is illegal. We have dileberately bombed hospitals, power stations and transmission lines, bridges, tv and radio stations and broadcast towers, and other civilian infrastructure.

As Thoreau said "Government is best that governs least." Its obvious he lived in a time prior to the Supreme Court declaring corporations People.

He also told a friend who came to visit him in jail because of his act of Civil Disobedience, "Why are you in here?", Thoreau's reply "Why are you not."

Some theologian whose name I forget sid "Despair is the one sin that cannot be forgiven: not because God will not forgive it, but because the sinner will not accept forgiveness."

The parallel in politics is left as an exercise for the reader.

Trust in the insurance companies everyone. I believe that the moment we're mandated to buy insurance is the same moment health insurance prices will sky rocket like never before. I doubt that any serious enforcement of price caps will ever take place.

I completely trust in the insurance companies.... I trust them to act as they have always acted... greedy, self-indulgent, conscienceless $&^%^!!s all of them.

For those interested...
Deist Links
http://www.tvftm.com/

God gave us reason, Not religion.
www.deism.com

The filibuster didn't stop the invasion of Iraq. When it came time for the self-proclaimed "Greatest Deliberating Body in the World" to actually look at the evidence and to choose wisely, it bowed to the known lies of the Executive.

The filibuster didn't stop W from putting crazy judges on the bench. The famous "nuclear option" fight ended up with the Senate approving several nutcases, and promising to filibuster only if someone was nominated who actually drooled on his bib at a hearing.

The filibuster protects a minority only when that minority is willing to use it, and liberals don't use it effectively. So send it back to the pro-slavery hellhole it came from!

Maybe the most important thing we can do as progressives is push and fight for Instant Runoff Voting. Locally as well as at the Federal level. It seems to me that I.R.V. will provide the lubricant for all subsequent issues for the progressive movement.

As I promised yesterday, I am going to talk about how the current state of Africa cannot be separated from the effects of European contact, and how it is useless to try to extrapolate from that what North America would be like without European contact—since we have already seen the effect of about 500 years of European contact has had on Native Americans and their way of life. Yes, we can look at the Mayans and Aztecs and say, yes they were not without faults, engaging in human sacrifices; but then again during the same period Europeans were “sacrificing” people in the name of the Inquisition. We can also point to the lack of technological progress; but as noted in Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” inventions such as the wheel, arguably the most important single technological development in history, did not occur everywhere at once, but traveled east to west and vice-versa across Europe and Asia, not south into “darkest” Africa, and certainly not across two oceans.

On the other hand, we know that Native Americans on the eastern seaboard and woodlands did develop fairly sophisticated civilizations independent of Europe, just as the Mayans, Aztecs and others did. We can only conjecture how the absence of European contact would have effected those civilizations and the ones that would have succeeded them, although limited contact that aided in the development of the land’s natural resources and introduction of “western” ways quite dissimilar to what occurred in Africa likely would likely to have seen further advancement into what we would regard as a “modern” state. Japan is evidence of a country that existed in isolation for centuries in a feudal state before the arrival of U.S. warships under Mathew Perry in 1852; it soon adopted the machinery of Western ways, but without sacrificing its cultural identity.

In regard to Africa, I once heard right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza compare the development of India under colonial rule to African states. His comparison was fraudulent for a variety of reasons. For one thing, India (from the east-to-west perspective) was repeatedly over the many millennia in contact with many civilizations and the current technological advancements. It was advanced enough that the British colonialists could not completely ignore the populations’ nationalism and personal aspirations, nor could it govern such a large populace on its own. The British were obliged to rule through a sophisticated Indian civil service, which they trained in the “western” mode. The British, alone among the European colonialists, did attempt this is in Kenya, which does enjoy rather more stability than other African nations. This effort to “civilize” Africans through the development a native civil service did not occur elsewhere in Africa where Europeans tread.

We can take, for example, the case of the Congo under the “caretaking” of King Leopold of Belgium. Like other Europeans ruling other made-up African “states,” Leopold saw the Congo as a repository of natural resources which he could use to enrich himself and his countrymen (curiously, despite the Congo’s wealth of mineral resources, the principle export was rubber). He didn’t give a tinker’s damn about “civilizing” the natives. We can’t understand the assaults on human dignity going on in the Congo today unless we understand that the Congo has been in this state for more than a century, thanks to its “civilized” European ruler. What Leopold and other colonial rulers were indifferent to was that the Africa was not made-up of “states” in the Western-understood version of the word; it was a vast amalgamation of tribes and tribal territories that had its own system of “governance,” which the Great Powers of Europe disrupted while it exploited the land and people as a “commercial enterprise.”

By “governing” the Congo in the European “method,” King Leopold and his henchmen did as much of the rest of colonial Africa was doing: torture, mutilation, murder, massacre, genocide, and general mayhem; Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” is a good place to start if one wants to understand this from the European “perspective.” Far away from home, Europeans operated on the “If we don’t say anything, who will know?” brand of administration. Unlike in India, which had a large population in which to extort taxes to pay for a large bureaucracy, goods and services were simply stolen from the natives, so there was no need for governance save at the point of a gun, sword or cannon. Europeans couldn’t do it all alone, of course, so they might enlist one tribe through bribery to brutalize or massacre another, and vice-versa. The naked use of power through violence was the “blessing” of civilization handed down from Europeans to Africans. Everywhere in Africa these “blessings” were bestowed, during a time when non-whites were considered brutes and beasts destined to Darwinian extinction anyways.

Europeans taught Africans that “greed is good,” thus we see the powerful few hoarding the wealth of a nation’s resources instead of using it develop a nation’s society or economy on more equitable lines. Europeans also taught Africans “modern” agricultural and herding methods that flew in the face of many millennia worth of experience on a continent with an environmentally-sensitive arid or tropical forest ecology. We don’t need to see this as just the cause of the Sahara’s movement ever further south; Ethiopia, perhaps the only black African country to develop a recognizable-to-Western-eyes civilization on its own because of its proximity to the cradle of civilization, saw the introduction of an alien Western concept—Marxism—prove to be utterly disastrous for the country (Zimbabwe’s “Marxism” failed as well, for different reasons). The nation fell into famine, starvation and chaos because the attempt to break-up large farms into smaller plots meant that peasant farmers had to produce more on less land, quickly exhausting already weak soil instead of allowing some to lay fallow as they had done for thousands of years, and throwing millions into utter destitution.

The first things rich people purchase with their wealth is insurance against the the loss of wealth. Protection of their wealth so that they need not share with others. Sure there are exceptions but look at who contributes to campaigns, it is mostly the top fraction of 1%. (a) they have the most purchasing power (b) they achieve the best bang for their buck.

> At the begging of the broadcast Tom mentioned watching a lecture before
> seeing the movie Avatar (great movie by the way). Does anybody remember
> the name of the person that gave the lecture?

I "think" it was Noam Chomski..
There was something about Obama on this link too (I didnt know Noam was still active).. Horray!

http://www.chomsky.info/

bobbler