Haiti

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“Private projects with high economic returns should be strongly supported” in preference to “public expenditures in the social sectors,” and “less emphasis should be placed on social objectives which increase consumption.” In contrast, the Taiwanese developmental state, free from foreign control, pursued radically different policies, targeting investment to rural areas to increase consumption and prevent the flow of peasants to miserable urban slums, the obvious consequence of the progressive policies dictated for Haiti—which remained Haiti, not Taiwan. Subsequent disasters, including the earthquake of January 2010, are substantially man-made, the consequences of these policy d
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Haiti was to import food and other commodities from the United States while working people, mostly women, toiled under miserable conditions in U.S.-owned assembly plants. As the World Bank explained in a 1985 report, in this export-oriented development strategy domestic consumption should be “markedly restrained in order to shift the required share of output increases into exports,” with emphasis placed on “the expansion of private enterprises,” while support for education should be “minimized” and such “social objectives” as persist should be privatized. “Private projects with high economic returns should be strongly supported” in preference to “public expenditures in

Why I do this

This is truly a vulgar insult. Unforgivable. 

Your arrogant certainty that you had found evidence to support your ignorant conclusion".



The poor man has obviously gone completely off his rocker. 

Nobody talks like that. Nobody. It's completely original. Utterly horrible, deeply evil verbal brutality.  Arrogant certainty, ignorant conclusion.  

Fucking CRAZY!! 

And THEN he said, "I don't care what these people think.  Neither of them has a Ph.D.  

Ok?  Done?  Understood.  Ridiculous, right?  Completely, unimpeachably ridiculous.  Just plain bat shit. Something a normal person wouldn't give a second thought.  I go over it because I think I can make a story out of it.  Find some deeper meaning in studying the cracked mind.  It's not my first choice, but it's what I do.  It's the only game I'm invited to play, the only game I'm pretty good at. There are plenty of other games in town, but I don't qualify for any of them. I'm stuck with introspection, which is for losers. 

Vampire cannibal capitalism

Slaves in the colonial era created a complex folklore about the southern master class, worrying that slave traders were cannibals. My research uncovered at least one case in Louisiana which newly imported slaves became convinced that the masters were witches and vampires (after watching them drink red wine). These tales of terror illuminate rather than obscure important truths. Slavery did represent a kind of dark magic in which legal fictions transmogrified the bodies of human beings into property. The institution of slavery did become a kind of cannibalism, swallowing millions from the African continent, digesting them in the rice and cotton fields in the relentless pursuit of wealth that characterized the alleged southern "aristocrats." America needed a vampire hunter in 1860.

Clavinsim and election

Perhaps this is consistent with Mattie’s theology of God’s predestined punishment of unbelieving humanity.
From pages 114-5 describing the schism between the Cumberland and Presbyterian Church:
They broke with the Presbyterian Church because they did not believe a preacher needed a lot of formal education. That is all right but they are not sound on Election. They do not fully accept it. I confess it is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it. Read I Corinthians 6″13 and II Timothy 1:9,10. Also I Peter 1:2,19,20 and Roman 11:7. There you have it. It was good for Paul and Silas and it is good enough for me. It is good enough for you too.
Is there any need to comment on how this longest and most detailed passage revealing Mattie’s theology is about God’s judgment of much of humanity to hell?

Non factual statements

After lampooning Kyl's comments on his show, Colbert took to Twitter with string of non-factual statements about Kyl. Other Twitter users followed suit, and a hilarious meme was born with the hashtag #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement. 

Here are Colbert's 10 best non-factual statements about Jon Kyl: 

1. Jon Kyl holds the Guinness World Record for "Largest Collection of Penis Enlargers." 

2. In 2009, Jon Kyl lost $380,000 wagering on dwarf tossing. 

3. Jon Kyl calls the underside of his Senate seat: "The Booger Graveyard." 

4. Jon Kyl has the world's most extensive catalogue of snuff films. 

5. Jon Kyl can unhinge his jaw like a python to swallow small rodents whole. 

6. Jon Kyl calls all Asians "Neil" no matter what their name is. 

7. Jon Kyl let a game-winning ground ball roll through his legs in Game 6 of the '86 World Series. 

8. Jon Kyl developed his own line of hair care products just so he could test them on bunnies. 

9. Once a year, Jon Kyl retreats to the Arizona Desert and deposits 2 million egg sacs under the sand. 

10. Jon Kyl is one of Gaddafi's sexy female ninja guards. 

Factual statement

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In response to Sen. Jon Kyl's false claim that "well over 90%" of Planned Parenthood's activity is devoted to abortion — and subsequent explanation that it was "not intended to be a factual statement" — Stephen Colbert began relentlessly mocking the fact-challenged senator this week. 

After lampooning Kyl's comments on his show, Colbert took to Twitter with string of non-factual statements about Kyl. Other Twitter users followed suit, and a hilarious meme was born with the hashtag #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement. 

Here are Colbert's 10 best non-factual statements about Jon Kyl: 

1. Jon Kyl holds the Guinness World Record for "Largest Collection of Penis Enlargers." 

2. In 2009, Jon Kyl lost $380,000 wagering on dwarf tossing. 

3. Jon Kyl calls the underside of his Senate seat: "The Booger Graveyard." 

4. Jon Kyl has the world's most extensive catalogue of snuff films. 

5. Jon Kyl can unhinge his jaw like a python to swallow small rodents whole. 

6. Jon Kyl calls all Asians "Neil" no matter what their name is. 

7. Jon Kyl let a game-winning ground ball roll through his legs in Game 6 of the '86 World Series. 

8. Jon Kyl developed his own line of hair care products just so he could test them on bunnies. 

9. Once a year, Jon Kyl retreats to the Arizona Desert and deposits 2 million egg sacs under the sand. 

10. Jon Kyl is one of Gaddafi's sexy female ninja guards. 

See Also:
• Best Stephen Colbert Quotes of All Time
• Jon Stewart: 'Buzzkill' Romney Ruins Otherwise Crazy GOP Primary Race
• Jon Stewart Praises Bill O'Reilly For Refuting Birthers
• Colbert: Tim Pawlenty Declares Candidacy Before He's Ready 

Get Political Humor on Facebook and Twitter

CASE CLOSED

God does not exist. Woton, Thor, Mithra, Isis and Osiris, never existed. Neither did Jesus and Yaweh. Only our desire to believe exists. Rationally, we all understand what lack of evidence means, what it entails, when the search is sufficiently thorough.

Colleg is mostly a waste

Tucker Carlson recently told a group of young people that both college and graduate school are essentially useless for a writing career. You can definitely hone those skills on your own, pitch stories, work with writers better than yourself, and build a career by doing rather than attending classes and completing school assignments.

Building websites and doing video editing are two highly valuable skills to employers right now. Both of those things you can teach yourself on evenings and weekends, or by watching online training videos, or attending workshops. You can also apprentice yourself to someone who can do those things so you can learn by shadowing them.

Many skills that are valuable to employers like myself can be self-taught or acquired by working hard and learning from smart people around you. That’s a much better use of your time than more school.

We can have ethical and spiritual lives without lying to ourselves and to others and without pretending to be certain about things we are clearly not certain about.

Pinker or Talmy

Bestselling Harvard psychology professor Pinker (The Blank Slate) investigates what the words we use tell us about the way we think. Language, he concludes, reflects our brain structure, which itself is innate. Similarly, the way we talk about things is rooted in, but not identical to, physical reality: human beings take the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them and package their experience into objects and events. Examining how we do this, the author summarizes and rejects such linguistic theories as extreme nativism and radical pragmatism as he tosses around terms like content-locative and semantic reconstrual that may seem daunting to general readers. But Pinker, a masterful popularizer, illuminates this specialized material with homely illustrations. The difference between drinking from a glass of beer and drinking a glass of beer, for example, shows that the mind has the power to frame a single situation in very different ways. Separate chapters explore concepts of causality, naming, swearing and politeness as the tools with which we organize the flow of raw information. Metaphor in particular, he asserts, helps us entertain new ideas and new ways of managing our affairs. His vivid prose and down-to-earth attitude will once again attract an enthusiastic audience outside academia. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Bookmarks Magazine
By examining our words, we can learn a lot about who we are. So argues Harvard academic and popular science writer Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought, a logical extension of his previous books. Pinker once again caters to a popular (though scientifically literate) audience, using accessible examples from jokes, Shakespeare, pop songs, and films to understand the science. One fascinating chapter explores the value of metaphors; another covers swearing (did you know that "gee whiz" is derived from "Jesus"?). A few critics tired of the myriad examples and pointed out a lack of unifying threads; others wanted more concrete answers; a couple challenged Pinker’s entire thesis that language is an accurate guide to our mind. According to them, it is as if Pinker was determined to combine his broad-based, popular science acumen with his in-depth linguistics expertiseâ€""the perfect storm" of his work. But if this book is not food for thought, then no other book of its kind is.

End of affluence

“There is no book so bad that some good could not be got out of it.” You’ll want to keep that charitable thought of the elder Pliny’s in mind as you skim through Jeffrey Madrick’s breezy account of America’s alleged economic decline, “The End of Affluence” (Random House, 223 pages, $22).

What’s wrong with this book? Mr. Madrick, a former economics reporter for NBC television, has succumbed to the occupational hazards of his old medium: a fascination with dramatic statistics, regardless of whether they mean anything, and an awe-inspiring lack of interest in ideas that conflict with his prejudices.

The American economy has not grown as rapidly in the two decades since 1973 as it did in the two decades before 1973. That much everybody knows. But Mr. Madrick stakes a bigger claim: that the American economy has grown more slowly since 1973 than it did in the previous hundred years. And this, he says, represents more than an economic problem: It is an imminent threat to American political culture. “Throughout our history we believed that we were a chosen people, a belief essentially sustained by our growing affluence. Now, we shall see who we are without it.”

That’s a pretty drastic conclusion. It’s even more drastic when you realize the flimsy basis on which it’s drawn. One of the many deceptively simple graphs that illustrate this book depicts a smooth flat line showing steady 3.4% average annual growth between 1870 and 1973. The line tumbles sharply downward thereafter. Alarming. But how does he know?

Until the 1930s, the federal government collected virtually none of the statistics that modern economists use. Projecting numbers like gross domestic product and per-capita income back into the past is a highly risky undertaking. Yes, the pre-1930 economy probably grew much faster than the economy does now. Much of that growth can be explained by the rapid rise in the U.S. population in the 19th and early 20th centuries. On the other hand, that swiftly growing economy regularly collapsed into slumps so harsh that they stagger the comprehension of modern Americans. Whatever the 1870s, ’80s and ’90s were, they were not a utopia of untroubled economic expansion.

Mr. Madrick must draw an oversimple picture of America’s economic past to prepare the way for his highly idiosyncratic analysis of America’s economic present. What he wants to believe is that the ultimate cause of America’s alleged decline is free trade and foreign competition. Until the 1970s, he claims, Americans enjoyed virtually exclusive access to the world’s largest free-trade area: the U.S. economy. To serve this vast continental economy, U.S. firms pioneered ultraefficient techniques of mass production.

But this monopolistic paradise has been lost. Foreigners have gained access to the huge U.S. domestic market. They have mimicked American mass-production techniques and eroded the supremacy of U.S. firms. Worse, American consumers have decided that Chevrolets and Wheaties and network TV entertainment are no longer good enough for them: They have begun demanding more specialized goods and services — goods and services not subject to economies of scale.

This specialized, internationalized economy cannot in Mr. Madrick’s view deliver rising standards of living. It is too competitive: “As rates of return are reduced, investment becomes riskier, and highly paid, permanent work forces are harder to sustain.”

What makes this strange argument stranger is Mr. Madrick’s refusal even to discuss a much simpler and more logical explanation for the post-1973 slowdown: the huge jump in the cost of government after 1965. The public sectors of all the major industrial economies have bloated since the early 1970s; at precisely the same time, all of them suffered dramatic dropoffs in growth. Might there be a connection here? Mr. Madrick spares just a few sneering sentences for this possibility: “The Republican Contract with America implicitly promised that if we relied less on government and reduced our taxes, our deficits would vanish and prosperity would return. . . . It is disheartening that after twenty years of slow growth Americans should accept such empty promises.” And that’s pretty much that.

Mr. Madrick argues instead that had economic growth continued at the torrid pace of the 1960s, the U.S. could now afford a much bigger welfare state. In much the same way an obese man might complain that if he hadn’t grown so fat he might have been able to take up exercise.

And yet, before putting “The End of Affluence” aside, remember Pliny. It is true that America has sacrificed much of its potential well-being because of the post-1973 slowdown. It is the one merit of this book that Mr. Madrick vividly reminds us how huge that loss has been. And he’s also probably correct that this forgone wealth lies behind many of the country’s social and political difficulties. Unfortunately, though, we’ll have to look elsewhere for a serious explanation of what went wrong.

Buchanin

Print
When Hillary Rosen said that Ann Romney had "never worked a day in her life," it was among the better days of the Romney campaign.

For Rosen -- present whereabouts unknown -- both revealed the feminist mindset about women who choose to become wives and mothers and brought Ann Romney center stage.

Before a Connecticut audience recently, Mrs. Romney spoke of her reluctance to see her husband pursue the presidency a second time and said she resisted, until she got an answer to one critical question.

"Can you fix it?" she asked Mitt. "I need to know. Is it too late?"

Mitt Romney replied, "No, it's getting late, but it's not too late."

Yet Ann's question lingers. Is it still possible to turn this country around? Or has a fate like that of Europe become inevitable?

If one focuses on the deficit-debt crisis, and what a president can do, the temptation is to succumb to despair.

Consider. The U.S. government spends a peacetime record 24 to 25 percent of gross domestic product. Most of that is expended on five accounts: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other Great Society programs, interest on the national debt, war and defense.

Now assume the best of all worlds for the GOP. Mitt wins, and the party captures the Senate and holds the House.

Would that assure a rollback of the federal budget? And, if so, how?

As Romney is committed to expanding the armed forces by 100,000 personnel, to growing the Navy by 15 ships a year, from today's nine, to raising defense spending to 4 percent of GDP from the present 3.8 percent, defense spending would not be going down but up.

What about interest expense?

Given the Federal Reserve's present policy of holding interest rates near zero, the only way interest on the debt can go -- is up.

Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the Great Society would have to sustain almost all of the cuts if the budget is to move toward balance.

But if the Republicans cut current benefits, they would antagonize 50 million seniors already on Social Security and Medicare.

If they cut future benefits, they will anger the baby boomers who are reaching eligibility for these retirement programs at a rate of 300,000 a month, 10,000 a day, and will continue to retire at that pace until 2030.

Would a President Romney and Republican Congress roll back benefits for scores of millions of seniors, raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare, reduce funds for Medicaid, Head Start, Pell grants, student loans, primary and secondary education, and shed federal employees by the tens of thousands?

Republicans argue that the corporate tax rate of 35 percent, highest among advanced nations, and the personal rate of 35 percent should be cut. The other piece of tax reform is the elimination of deductions and credits so a lower rate on a broader tax base will yield the same or additional revenue.

Looks good on paper.

But today 50 percent of all U.S. wage-earners pay zero income tax. Will that half of a nation reward a party that ensures that many of them, too, contribute? Free-riders on the federal tax code are voters, too.

Again, the crucial question: Does the Romney Republican Party have the courage of its convictions -- to carry out a fiscal program consistent with its conservative philosophy?

For when, ever, has the modern GOP done that?

Richard Nixon funded the Great Society. Gerald Ford bailed out the Big Apple. George H.W. Bush increased spending and raised taxes. George W. Bush gave us No Child Left Behind, free prescription drugs for seniors, two wars, tax cuts and the largest increase in domestic spending since LBJ.

Even Ronald Reagan ruefully conceded that he failed to do what he had set out to do in cutting federal spending.

Now, we are assured that this generation of Republicans has come home to the church and confessed its sins, and is prepared to face martyrdom in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Well, perhaps.

Yet, if it is difficult to see how the GOP advances toward a balanced budget, it is impossible to see how President Obama does.

Would the party of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, triumphant, scale back programs that are the pride of their party -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid? Would Pelosi, Reid and Obama cut the number of bureaucrats and beneficiaries of federal programs, thereby demobilizing the unionized armies on which they depend at election time?

When FDR came to power in 1933, after his running mate, "Cactus Jack" Garner, accused Herbert Hoover of taking us "down the road to socialism," the Federal government was spending 4 percent of GDP.

Today, it spends 24 percent. Under both parties, under every president since FDR, domestic spending has moved in one direction.

Ann Romney's question remains relevant.

Is the trend inexorable? Is there any turning back? Is it too late?

Romnesia

in a 1978 interview, "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit." When later news accounts questioned whether this had occurred, Romney said he had meant it as "figure of speech."

Rommey article.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/mitt-romney-history-problem

Romney the liar. A figure of speech.

in a 1978 interview, "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit." When later news accounts questioned whether this had occurred, Romney said he had meant it as "figure of speech.")

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For lyrics

I have climbed highest mountain
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you

I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips
It burned like fire
This burning desire

I have spoken with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone
{ From: http://www.elyrics.net/read/u/u2-lyrics/i-still-haven_t-found-what-i_m-looking-for-lyrics.html }

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
Well yes I'm still running

You broke the bonds and you
Loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Of my shame
You know I believed it


But I still haven't found what I'm looking for...

"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" was well-received by critics. It has subsequently become one of the group's most well-known songs and has been performed on many of their concert tours. The track has appeared on several of their compilations and concert films. From Wikipedia

I have climbed highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you
I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips
Burning like a fire
This burning inside her

I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes I'm still running

You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Oh my shame
You know I believe it

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for



Please Click here to submit the Corrections of I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For Lyrics

Please Click Here to Print I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For Lyrics

Thanks to M.T for submitting I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For Lyrics.

Send "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" Ringtone to your Cell
This Song | Reviewer: Anonymous | 6/13/12

I feel that this song means something different to each person. Seriously, I am a Christian and I even go to a Christian college. I feel like the song is portraying someone who WANTS to believe in God, but somehow can't manage to do so, thus they keep looking for more and haven't found what they wanted to yet. The artist is showing doubt and emptiness in religion, which we are all capable of, even as believers. This is my opinion...and we each have our own. Just because the song is "of the devil" to you does not set it in stone and make it the same way for everyone else. We all sin and we are not perfect, which is precisely why Jesus died for us. Doubt is NOT unbelief. Even Christians can doubt their religion and not feel completely content sometimes.

Honestly, when people preach so much and do not sympathize with others, you are bringing a very bad view upon yourselves and other Christians. You cannot force faith on people; they must accept it by themselves. Yes, I understand you can "plant the seed" in their minds about Christianity and accepting God into their lives, but beating it into them is no good and it does not benefit. You come off and harsh and unrelenting, and also unforgiving of the sins of others because they are not "believers." Is that REALLY what a Christian should appear to be?

A simple, short and effective message would work much better. I think the people get the point. And really, is all the fighting necessary? It's one song. This is pretty ridiculous.

As Said, This Song Promotes that Human Opinion is Greater than God's ORDERS, & that PLEASES MOST | Reviewer: Theresa1 | 6/11/12

As stated, this long-time internationally mass-media-ed song DOES promote and reinforce to God-defiant individuals (and those still ignorant of the Creator's scriptural mandates) - TO CONTINUE TO DISMISS, if not DEFY (and even FIGHT against) - LIFE VITAL scriptural life-and-survival instruction that IS being globally messaged by Jehovah/Yahweh the Creator through his loyal and obedient global people to their fellow human beings during these last of the pre-Armageddon days (just as prophesied). (Matthew 24:14; Isaiah 43:10; more.)

For that, it is a deathful song for the many who are using it as an ANTHEM to NOT LISTEN to and OBEY the Heavenly Father's OWN WORDS that HE is so purposely having put out throughout the whole earth at this critical time.

For those who do use this song as a theme song by which to fight God Himself by fighting his scriptural messages, this tune surely does become a fool's anthem.

It was Satan the Liar - not anyone nobel, true, just, loving, or righteous - that first implored mankind to DEFY GOD, ignore what
the Maker said, DISOBEY Him, aka "Do what thou wilt", "interpret" God Almighty's own orders yourself as you wish (however it suits individual humans), etc.

However, just as Satan's LIE of the above did result in bringing suffering and DEATH into the world beginning in Eden; so that LIE continues to cause immeasurable suffering and death among mankind. And, for those who are found still DENYING, DISMISSING, defying and disobeying Jehovah/Yahweh the Universal Sovereign's own clearly given true scriptural commands and warning words come Armageddon Day, which is VERY SOON, they will, by Divinely-given scriptural standards, permanently lose their lives, their whole eternal futures that could have been theirs....

to live here, for the most part, on this Earth made into a paradise - here, in peace and happiness forever, under the perfect global Rule of Jehovah's appointed perfect King, His Son, Jesus Christ - in the earthly part of the REAL, SCRIPTURAL "KINGDOM COME", which this song borrowed the term/allusion of, but has come to fail to do justice to: Many people have now used this song as their heart-and-mind soundtrack by which TO SHUT OUT the VITAL scriptural instruction their own Maker has purposely offered to them for their own good, the good of others, reconciliation with their own Maker, and the preservation of their lives - their answer back to their Maker has been (for their choices of words and action), "NO - it's [and You are) NOT "what I'm looking for", Creator of me."

Get over it | Reviewer: Fergi | 6/10/12

Religion has and always will be a subject that brings out passionate debate. Don't think for a second that what you think & "preach, is "gospel". It is merely your interpretation. If you get angry at people & the world about their interpretation, then you don't have a pure heart. This world has billions of individuals, & thus have the "God given" right to say & believe what they want without being judged by individuals who "think" they know better. You don't. By the way, gorgeous song, love it. Enjoy each precious day on this beautiful planet, because life is way too short. My love to you all.

One of my favorites! | Reviewer: Jon | 5/6/12

I've always loved this song, mostly because of the lyrics I think. I can relate to them because I'm still looking for that something in my life, and even Religion hasn't seemed to be it. I guess I'll keep looking, but it's nice to see that even big superstars like Bono sometimes feel the same way as little ole me!

wannabees | Reviewer: Austin S. | 4/30/12

The greatest part about this thread is the wannabe online preachers lol X) If you want to preach, keep it in da church man. Quit wasting your time on people who don't give a flying ef on what you have to say about a, SONG! Word up to the dude who said music is entertainment and they were just trying to look up the lyrics to a cool song, that's what i was doing, and then i scrolled down the page lol. How a wannabe preacher finds the time to put in freaking 50 bible messages in a thread about one song is repulsivly sad. I have't even read that many words in books. How does she not have carpel tunnle disease? Now you're all thinking this question to yourselves...... bam! I mind effed all of you!??!!?!??!!?!@#$%^&*^%$%

To the longwinded Know it all.. | Reviewer: w holmes | 3/30/12

I have NEVER seen such long winded OVER analyzation of a top 40 pop song in all my life! REALLY?!! You get all those paragraphs and scriptures outta ONE 3 and a half minute song?!! Are you INSANE?!! Do you always have to have it YOUR WAY whenever some one makes references to God's word?!! What makes you such an expert?! Bible college? Some other bible studies you've done? The bible is a LONG complicated book and only God has mastered it!!! If you don't like what Bono and U2 have to say then SHUT UP and TURN YOUR RADIO OFF!!!

Just A Thought | Reviewer: Outside the Box | 1/19/12

What an interesting thread dissecting the subtle undertones and meanings behind these lyrics. Do you not feel that having climbed highest mountains/run through fields/scaled city walls if Bono had only thought to check down the back of the sofa in the first place we may all have been spared this analysis. I so wish that in 1987 U2 had instead released the hit song, 'Great found it, it was down the back of the settee all along'

Stop Arguing! | Reviewer: Anonymous | 1/7/12

I just want to say, if you all are going to argue over a song and what it means to you, you dont have to say that other people are idiots just because they have different opinions. I mean not everyone thinks the same and you dont have to. I mean, i visited this site to see what one of my favorite songs' lyrics were, and i saw that people are arguing over the real meaning of the song and that there's Atheists who think that this song is stupid and Christians who think this is a disgrace. Well, if you dont like the song why are you here in the first place? You're just making people start to question if this is a good song or not. Music is for entertaining people and making them happy not making them bicker over the meaning of the song and life. Its just dumb to argue over these things.

Response to Paul | Reviewer: Gregory | 12/20/11

Seriously, religion gets the worst out of people. I feel a massive contempt for you. While I'm a massive religion hater...

Hilarious. No irony here. Clearly, religion is not needed to bring out the worst in people.

So Much HATE and SLANDER Towards Jah's Words and Messengers of Them - JUST as PROPHESIED, for NOW | Reviewer: theresa1 | 12/19/11

My life is DEVOTED to Jehovah [aka Yahweh] God, the Creator and Sovereign of the Universe. It is HIS EXPRESS WILL and COMMAND that his TRUE worshipers make HIS SCRIPTURAL TRUTH KNOWN - by preaching and teaching it TO THE "ENTIRE INHABITED EARTH." (Matthew 24:14)

That includes BOTH messages regarding his incoming heaven-based TRUE KINGDOM of God to this Earth, with all its hope, benefits and blessings; AND his OFTEN-HATED [as prophesied], disciplining, WARNING WORDS of HIS own already- made scriptural JUDGMENTS and CONDEMNATIONS of EVIL ways that HE and His Son will soon be destroying most of mankind dead forever for (at Armageddon) - for their UNRIGHTEOUS REFUSAL to LISTEN, LEARN and CHANGE their ways to meet the Creator's REQUIREMENTS, HIS KNOWN STANDARDS (from HIS OWN WORDS). (EZEKIEL 3:17-21)

That ALSO means pointing out to the world the death, spiritism, and injustice-producing LIES of the FALSE religious leaders of "Babylon the Great" - Satan's world empire of all FALSE [anti-whole-scriptural, spiritism-incorporating] religions.

And, when there are those that EXPLOIT God's gift of MUSIC to slickly mass-media those same old deadly - though POPular (and PREFERRED, by the many) - LIES into the ears of millions or billions, over time, so as to persuade people to stay ALIENATED from Jehovah and his spirit (and life); and REMAIN in the DARK, spiritually DUMBED-DOWN and CONTROLLED by the dominating spirit of this world system - that of Satan the Devil - then that creates a need to do as Jesus Christ did, and as God commands be done: Those LIES NEED TO BE EXPOSED.

And so TRUE worshipers of the LIVING GOD *DO* that, regarding ALL such LIES, in all kinds of situations, in many different ways, ALL OVER THIS WORLD, 24/7, just as prophesied - and all the more so as "the end" of Satan's increasingly wicked world system draws nearer every day. And, just as Jehovah/Yahweh has promised, there is NOTHING any man or men can do to stop than GLOBAL preaching and WARNING work from being THOROUGHLY ACCOMPLISHED. It WILL BE completely carried out - DESPITE all of the EXACTLY-as-PROPHESIED TYPE COMMON, HATEFUL, RIDICULING, MOCKING, SLANDEROUS, UNJUST trouble-provoking, and otherwise GOD-FIGHTING RESPONSES from THE MANY.

"There's an insect in your ear
If you scratch, it won't disappear
It's gonna itch and burn and sting
You want to see what the scratching brings?"

-From U2's "Staring at the Sun"

(Now look up Revelation 8:12 and 9:2,3)

It should be clear that the "luminaries" of this world that depend on spiritual LIES to sustain their "brightness" have now become dimmed. They have failed, disappointingly to the many, to be true guiding lights; and their lies and corruptions are being smoked-out by the spreading of Jehovah's words of truth all over this earth. Still, God's own rescuing truth is NOT what many people are "LOOKING FOR" - so, they keep "STARING AT THE SUN" (fading FALSE religions and FALSE "messiahs"), "happy to go blind", if just those "luminaries" could flash-up to bring forth their "saving" promises. But, THEY CAN'T, and NEVER WILL....That's what people need God for - and why they need to obey HIM - just like he said.

"Can't see for the smoke.
I think of you and your Holy Book
While the rest of us choke.

(From "When I Look at the World", U2)

People can keep "Staring at the Sun"; "choking"; publically FIGHTING GOD in unjust and prophesied ways; etc., but none of that will stop God's will for HIS SCRIPTURAL TRUTH TO BE MADE KNOWN - URGENTLY - all over this earth.

No amount of wickedly-crafted, deceptive, unjust, etc. trouble-making to try to STOP, SILENCE, OPPRESS, or BAN SPEECH of God's words of truth and messengers of them will succeed in thwarting God's will from being carried out earth-wide, either.

And as for those who would try to stop or interfere with the Almighty's will from being carried out - who would attempt to usurp God himself and try to enforce what would be IN DIRECT OPPOSITION to the will of God, namely, insisting that those Jehovah has commanded to preach HIS life-saving WORDS "keep their beliefs to themselves" - would do well to HEED THESE WARNINGS from The Universal Sovereign (someone infinitely "higher up" than your Bono, with that "convenient" and "U2-hip", unoriginal, but rather idolatrously-mimicked "religious nuts" labeling towards those daring to speak out words of God against what is POPular [for being morally-slack, etc.]):

[Jehovah the Creator, to his loyal servants]:"'Any weapon whatever that will be formed against you will have no success, AND ANY TONGUE AT ALL THAT WILL RISE UP AGAINST YOU in the judgment you will condemn. This is the hereditary possession of the servants of Jehovah, and their righteousness is from me', is the utterance of Jehovah." (Isaiah 54:17)

"For God's WRATH is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who are SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH IN AN UNRIGHTEOUS WAY.....Although these know full well the righteous decree of God, that those practicing such things are deserving of death, they not only keep on doing them but also consent with those practicing them." (Romans 1:18,32)

And look up 2Thessalonians 1:6-8.

It's God himself (and his Son, with his heavenly army of spirit beings) that will soon be taking vengeance upon those who fight God by fighting His messengers of his words.

OPPOSITELY of being antiquated, obsolete, mockable and useless - as so many mere words of men become - Jehovah's scriptural words are "ALIVE and EXERT POWER." (Hebrews 4:12) They are guiding to truth, righteousness, wisdom, peace, happiness, love, hope, life, and friendship with God in every way; and also WARN against the foolishness and unrighteousness of defying and rebelling against the Creator and his standards.

God's words are for NOW, and they are for LIFE.

"Man must LIVE, not on bread alone, but on every utterance coming forth from Jehovah's mouth." (Jesus Christ, at Matthew 4:4)

They - not every utterance coming forth from Bono, or a "preacher" of Christendom, agnosticism, etc.'s mouth IS WHAT PEOPLE NEED TO BE LOOKING FOR [URGENTLY].

It's high-time to get LEARNING. (John 17:3; 2Peter Chapter 3.)




Wow | Reviewer: Paul | 12/18/11

Wow, it's actually amazing how stupid religious nuts can get. Look at your life, you're devoting it to some fake scripture from the times where people were afraid of sea monsters and thought earth was flat. You really must have less common sense than a freaking tablespoon to sit there writing mindless essay about apparent U2 propaganda. Seriously, religion gets the worst out of people. I feel a massive contempt for you. While I'm a massive religion hater, I still can respect people that keep their beliefs to themselves but you claiming that you know what your "god" is saying and what he means... wow. So, so incredibly sad I have to share space with a waste of oxygen like you.

This Song was Used as a Device to try to "Un-Do" People's "Pre-Conceived Ideas" About God and Truth, Whether False OR TRUE | Reviewer: theresa1 | 11/15/11

Yes, this song was mass-media used, for that purpose, during a peak Devil-"hour" of this world, during these last days.

The work this song attempted, to huge audiences, was to suggest-recommend to them to question whether they have found the truth about God - whether they are satisfied with what they "found" or not; but, besides that, the song worked to seduce/ persuade people to give up TRUTH about God that they may have acquired, or surely would come into contact with if they were, indeed, honest-heartedly "LOOKING FOR" God's truth (that people DO NEED).

This occurred during the same time when, as one example, the educational system of (at least part of) the U.S. and others were trying to accomplish the same "un-doing."

Why? Why did all these parties (Bono included, evidently) do this? Why did they all make huge efforts to UN-DO people's "pre-conceived" ideas, really, very much in particular - about God and spirituality, and, EVEN MORE POINTEDLY, any grip persons held on SCRIPTURAL SPIRITUAL TRUTH?

The first and foremost, bottom-line REASON is because these ARE the very "last days" of this world system, which is dominated by the ENEMY of God and Jesus Christ, Satan. (Satan the Devil is the-SLANDERER of Jehovah and Jesus; and the MAN-SLAYER of humankind.) And, as Revelation 12:12 reveals, Satan IS VERY ANGRY, knowing that he has ONLY A SHORT TIME LEFT to DECEIVE and MISLEAD PEOPLE *AWAY* from God and life and *to* paths of LIES and death.

"A short time" - thus the voracity of the battle - for each person's HEART, MIND, and LIFE.

"The whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one" - those without the heart-and-mind protection of knowing and living in accordance with Jehovah's scriptural truth, that is. (1John 5:19, contrast John 8:32 and 17:17.) If you doubt that, pause a moment to consider the world around you...

So, what happened after people - millions of them - were concert-(and-recording-)"PREPPED" by this song?

Well, then, with "their own ideas" WEAKENED or put to sleep (or even thrown-out) by the "step" of THIS SONG (and more), the PURPOSED IDEAS - TEACHINGS OF MEN, BASED ON THE DEVIL'S SAME-OLD ORIGINAL DESTRUCTIVE and GOADING LIES to mankind - were "presented" - POWER-DRIVEN *AT* AUDIENCES, as WHAT SHOULD OVER-RIDE, replace, or at least infiltrate-to-hopefully-make-defunct the former "IDEAS" people had "about God." And, of course, the Devil's SPECIAL target would be against any ideas REALLY OF GOD'S OWN TRUTH.

Do you think that did not happen?

During the Vertigo Tour era - the same time that Bono conveyed to the world through the media that he would "HAVE LUNCH WITH THE DEVIL" in order to achieve his social-justice goals; evidently, he did - and brought food from that "table of the demons" to share, with his audiences world-wide (and as perpetuated by recordings of these events, as well as continual "fan" promotion of the same).

During this same "hour", a special "committee" was formed in conjunction with the United Nations. Keep in mind that the organization that claims to be the highest ruling entity over the affairs of mankind; and it has also been hailed by leaders of the world's FALSE religions as mankind's last and biggest "hope" for world "PEACE" ("and Security"). [Better "not" look up 1Thessalonians 5:3 right now - it might "scare" you. (LOOK it up.)]

WHAT was that committee's "findings", that it wanted you, the world, to know (ESPECIALLY "young people")?

ESSENTIALLY, THE SAME MESSAGE THAT BONO PUT OUT TO (at least) MILLIONS OF PEOPLE DURING THE VERTIGO TOUR:

"JESUS, JEW, MUHAMMUD, it's true - All sons of Abraham"

- the very same idea that the UN'S Alliance of Civilizations' High Level Group, with their "spiritual experts" "concluded" and also sought to mass media - to promote "PEACE" among people based on that so-claimed commonality.

The FACT IS, however, that CHANT BONO REPEATED TO HIS MASSIVE AUDIENCES - and that same idea put out by that UN special group IS, SPIRITUALLY, SCRIPTURALLY 100% FALSE, FALSE, *FALSE* -

Just as God's own words - THE spiritual Authority [NOT Bono, NOT all of the FALSE religious leaders of Christendom that use him and U2 for their poster boy(s) for the selling of LIES, and NOT the UN's "experts"] - teach, ONLY THOSE who "belong to the Christ" are "Abraham's seed", Abraham's "SONS", SPIRITUALLY - WHICH IS THE WAY THAT HERE *MATTERS* (the TRUE spiritual sense, since what is being BROACHED *IS* of spiritual nature and claims to such).

So, that means that those still affiliated with Christendom (apostate, anti-scriptural, Christ-DIS-obedient, antichrist, Christ-and-God-disloyal and dis-owning, counterfeit "Christianity); modern Judiasm; and Islam are, absolutely not "Abraham's sons"/ "Abraham's seed". [The UN group was promoting, under the guise of "expert" "intelligencia" (or, "falsely called knowledge", as the Scriptures put it) that those three religious groups comprise the world's "three great Abrahamic religions".]

Therefore, no one should have expected any REAL and LASTING "PEACE" to have resulted - from what was merely a spiritually FALSE grouping of three of the world's biggest FALSE religions (parties of "Babylon the Great.")

Nevertheless, at the same these "chips" were being thrown in, bargaining with Satan the Liar - for FALSE "peace" (based spiritual LIES) and support for "social justice" [as "true religion]that could come from a spiritual vacuum created by these efforts - SURELY the Heavenly Father and his Son, Jesus Christ (God's ONLY "way" for mankind to be reconciled to God, so as to be allowed to keep on living) were VERY HURT and ANGERED over being SO MISREPRESENTED, VIOLATED and BLASPHEMED, these ways, to MILLIONS of people.

ADD to the losses the PAIN WROUGHT to those anguished over hearing God's known truth MALIGNED to the masses - and, of course, any who actually swallowed the whole bait/"cool-aide" of these light-and-sound-dazzled-up-to-the-max LIES, and then proceeded TO TURN THEIR BACK on Jehovah and his Son and God's KNOWN SCRIPTURAL WILL to pursue the mis-leadings of the Devil with all of the fall-out from spiritual LIES and FALSE PROMISES that occurs along that delusionally "free" path to death.

WHAT A ROTTEN "LUNCH." Try ipecac.

Yes, at concerts after this song, audiences were spiritually pulmulgated with one angry (but railing at the wrong persons - it should NOT have been against Jehovah/Yahweh or Jesus Christ) Bono (with band behind him), pounding as if with temper-tantrum on a drum, with a headband on, bearing the now infamous

"COEXIST"

sign (with all three symbols of those aforesaid major FALSE religions of the world included in it) - and with Bono yelling: "NO MORE! NO MORE!...even getting innocent little children to join him in this; and REPEATING the LIE claim of the "hour": "Jesus, Jew, Muhummad, its true - all sons of Abraham!" [NOT true.]

[And also, before anyone writes that's not what he REALLY said, I want you to know I was there, myself, and heard and saw it. (12 times that tour.) Any minute variation of that quote between shows was insignificant - the message was THE SAME.]

Also, during these shows, as a great big, "Here's some cake, Satan - thanks for the 'lunch'", BONO -and those with him, including his so-called tour "preacher" - offered up a great big shiny plate of global mass-BLASPHEMY of God's own personal, holy name, to the world - by streaming huge, lit up IMAGES of PAGAN and SPIRITISTIC SYMBOLS/ICONS (and polishing that off, towards the end, with "blowing up" clouds saying "God" on them - but replacing that with a "global governance"-istic "Gaia, Mother Earth"/goddess idol/image, which came to be wrapped in the beloved "co-exist" [oh false religions] - idol icon image....ALL AT THE EXPENSE OF MISREPRESENTING and BLASPHEMING God Almighty Himself - and his Son - and the loss of the eternal lives of any persons misled by those LIES, who do not snap out of them and turn around from them before Armageddon soon arrives.

Further, Bono speeches during this same time period worked to REINFORCE and promote the deadly spiritual LIE teachings of FALSE religions/religionists that showed interest in helping him with his "social justice" projects.

[It was never necessary or excusable, though, to God, to do so.]

U2 and Bono also never spoke out, but, rather SUPPORTED, to, the rash of Jezebellian FALSE "Christian" "U2 Worship Services", "U2-Charists", "U2-Eucharists" that sprung up from and spread from the Anglican-Episcopalien churches either. No! Never stopped them! INSTEAD - this was "allowed" - SO LONG AS THE FOCUS OF THESE EVENTS WAS PUT ON SUPPORTING THE UNITED NATIONS "MILLENIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS" - you know, via the "One" Campaign, etc.

In fact, so as to affront Jesus Christ (and so also his Father) directly - even with the prophesied entity of "the scarlet-colored wild beast", i.e., "the disgusting thing that causes desolation", Bono went as far down the road of "dark" as any death-metal band person as ever gone - perhaps, yes, even farther, to, on top of all the above and more, mass-media-pronounce the UN's MDG's as being "the beatitudes for the new millenium."

I hope you all can "get ready" by way of Jehovah and his Son, and go "LOOKING FOR" and GRAB ON TO and DO what God's truth says REAL, REAL QUICKLY, because for not only this stuff, but more as well, the end is nearer than you think.

And as far as the "Magnificent" song goes, its nice - only it has a major FLAW that can, again, give people a deadly sense of FALSE security: Nobody is "justified" unless they have submitted themself and their life to Jehovah the Creator, in "exclusive devotion", to obey Him and do his will - which includes rightly honoring and obeying his Son as Ransomer (and more) - according to God's own scriptural words of truth and his spirit.

Also, the time will soon be here when death will be no more - so "until we die" is a downing-over-constriction. People should want to magnify Jehovah's magnificence FOREVER.

Other than that, "Magnificent" is a very nice song. I hope people will turn to speaking TRUTH about God, so as to be able to LIVE-out such praise.

What?!? I'm Confused. | Reviewer: Lars | 11/13/11

I love this song and don't think Bono has ever said or sung anything in any of U2's songs or publicly AGAINST God's or Jesus' love for us.

Just a thought but have you listened to and read the lyrics for 'Magnificent' on the album No Line on the Horizon yet?

the journey | Reviewer: caleb | 11/5/11

Lady, you just don't quit, do you? Let me explain something to you so you don't look like an idiot. This song simply explores and mirrors the experiences and choices that were made by many people worldwide, and also mentions who Jesus is and what He has done for us. We fail. We have, and always will fail. Otherwise, we wouldn't need Jesus. This song was not designed to brainwash people with an unrepenting spirit of the devil like a fucking virus. It's a positive message with subtle clues.

Anthem for Those Wanting "Support" for the REJECTION of God's Truth | Reviewer: theresa1 | 11/4/11

NO - that is NOT "what God wants": God HATES FALSE "peace" and FALSE "love" that IS MERELY BASED ON A COMMON REBELLION TOWARDS HIM and A HATRED OF HIS LAWS BY THE MANY.

That kind of FALSE "love" and FALSE "peace" ALWAYS FAILS - AND IS WHY OUR WORLD IS NEARLY COMPLETELY RUINED. It is why there is so much INJUSTICE; and why so many lives have been damaged and destroyed - with WICKED persons feeling "free" to harm their fellow man however it suits THEM: They work their EVIL, and then proclaim themselves and others in agreement with their evil to be "peaceful", "loving", as "brothers" - even "in the name of God."

However, that FALSE "peace" and FALSE "love" based on a hatred for and rejection of God's own scriptural truth ONLY PRODUCES A FALSE "BROTHER-and-SISTERHOOD".

That has been PROVEN, for many centuries now.
As a classic example - when those of only a FALSE spiritual "brotherhood" get called upon by their countries or tribes to go kill (or support the killing of) their so-called spiritual "brothers" who happen to live in another country or be from an opposing tribe, that is what they have done. In doing so, though, they have FOREVER INDICTED their "ways" of so-called "peace", "love", and "brotherhood" - and their claims of being loyal and obedient to the Creator - as BEING HYPOCRITICAL and FALSE.

Since Jehovah God the Creator and Universal Sovereign SAYS that LOVE..."rejoices with the TRUTH" [1Corinthians 13:6], THOSE WHO REJECT, MALIGN, and TRY TO SILENCE the teaching of that TRUTH (which many HONEST-HEARTED PERSONS *ARE* "LOOKING FOR") not only DO NOT KNOW or PRACTICE TRUE LOVE, but work AGAINST IT - and AGAINST God's will.




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Basic Income

he is not tackling the real problem because he doesn't have a clue what it is. The pursuit of full employment is a ludicrous task; he and we have to face the fact that in the modern world there will never be full employment again, and we should welcome this as a good thing. This means that as Major Douglas said, the dividend must progressively replace the wage/salary as a form of purchasing power, in short there must be a Basic Income for all. Unless and until we recognise this instead of pursuing policies that amount to the persecution of those less fortunate than ourselves through workfare and similar crackpot schemes, we are sewing the seeds for more social unrest.

Unless and until IDS and his masters acknowledge this simple truth, neither he nor they will make any progress solving the real problems facing especially the poor but increasingly even graduates in the 21st Century western world, and other advanced nations like Japan. Namely, the distribution of purchasing power, not the creation of work for work's sake or the bludgeoning of the underprivileged into workfare or similar schemes.

People who sit on the boards of companies lead extremely comfortable lives, the work they do hardly counts as work, and their remuneration is legendary. 

More recently, America has produced its own original Social Credit advocate. Like Major Douglas, James Albus was an engineer. In 1976, Albus, who died last year, published People's Capitalism: THE ECONOMICS OF THE ROBOT REVOLUTION, in which he advocated a similar solution to distribute the fruits of society's labours to all and sundry. Although he used different terminology, there is not a cent's worth of difference between the National Dividend advocated by Major Douglas and the National Mutual Fund of James Albus.

governments would rather spend a million dollars to create one job than pay the unemployed and theunemployable any sort of Basic Income as a right.

Unemployable means literally that; advances in technology mean that large tranches of people are literally unable to find employment that will pay them a living wage. Let us take the case of a newspaper seller; for argument's sake we will call him Ian Tomlinson. Although he had a family, at the time of his death he was living in a hostel for the homeless and eking out a few coppers by distributing a newspaper. He was also an alcoholic. It is fair to say that a man who has fallen so far down the ladder cannot earn a living wage. In the 19th Century, yes, even at some point in the 20th after a fashion, but as technology advances, men who have drink problems and no marketable skills are not in high demand, and are likely to be even less so with the next release of Windows. Nor are those with other problems such as serious mental health issues or criminal records any more employable, although there is always room for the dishonourable exception.
The collective psychosis of full employment has been and continues to be disastrous for such people, young and old, and of course the older they get, the less employable they become. We see the result of this collective psychosis in our inner cities everyday, where it is interpreted as institutional racism, social deprivation, or some other chimera. Major Douglas and his acolytes have shown us the way forward: a Social Credit, National Dividend or Basic Income is the common cultural inheritance of us all.

There is one and only one alternative to Social Credit. We can see this already in a society increasingly polarised between the haves and the have-nots. In the future, automation will cripple those taxpayers who survive, while the main source of new employment will be for apparatchiks of the emerging total surveillance state, including as police officers, and jailers for those who are denied the right to livelihood through no fault of their own.

Unintended consequences

the Lancet, found not only an increase in insecticide-resistant mosquitoes, but also rebound infections in older children and adults. That troubling trend suggests that some Senegalese may have lost their acquired immunity in the years they’d been sleeping under pesticide-treated nets, which the Gates Foundation has been distributing by the millions in Africa. 

motivated reasoning,” which Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, defines as “when a person is conforming their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy.

Motivated reasoning. Lying you mean. What bull SHIT!

Amnesty

If and as the Affordable Care Act becomes the law of the land, they will want the benefit of that law's protections and subsidies as well. One reason there has been so much resistance in the United States to universal health coverage is the vague awareness on the part of citizen voters that state-subsidized coverage will disproportionately benefit migrants, many of them originally illegal. About 27% of the uninsured are foreign born. If you are looking to build a wider consensus in favor of universal coverage—and I think we should be so looking—then anything that invites further large-scale migration by people who will pay less in taxes than they will require in subsidies is destabilizing and unwise.

Which means that today's policy decision settles nothing. It only opens the way to further contention over further rounds of amnesty-in-all-but-name.

In sport

The full transcript: “”I met a guy yesterday, 7 feet tall… I figured he had to be in sport, but he wasn’t in sport!”

It seems like a silly thing to be bothered about, but the simple act of dropping that final “s” in sports is the Uncanny Valley of athletic syntax, just off slightly enough from what an actual human would say that it sounds like a little creepy,  like a subtle signal an alien is trying to pass himself off as one of us. None of the people I’ve known in sportssssssssss (emphasis for Romney’s benefit) would say “is your kid playing sport” instead of “is your kid playing sports,” anymore than they would follow up their question by taking a drag through their jeweled cigarette holder, and adjusting their monocle.

Richard Dawkins

"I don't care who you are or what community you come from or what church you go to or anything else. I want to talk to you, have a dialogue with you, about the evidence one way or the other. We'll have a friendly conversation about it and I'll win the argument."

- Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins

 
When asked whether science and religion will ever be compatible, Dawkins said, "Religion is a system of beliefs founded on ignoring the evidence; science is the opposite, systematically designed to disprove faith."

Gary Gillmore

The Executioner's Song By Norman Mailer
t is one of those testimonies to the tenacity of self-regard in the literary life that large numbers of people remain persuaded that Norman Mailer is no better than their reading of him. They condescend to him, they dismiss his most original work in favor of the more literal and predictable rhythms of "The Armies of the Night"; they regard "The Naked and the Dead" as a promise later broken and every book since as a quick turn for his creditors, a stalling action, a spangled substitute, "tarted up to deceive, for the "big book" he cannot write. In fact he has written this "big book" at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with "The Deer Park" and he wrote it a second time in 1963 with "An American Dream" and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with "Why Are We in Vietnam?" and now, with "The Executioner's Song," he has probably written it a fourth.

"The Executioner's Song" did not suggest, in its inception, the book it became. It began as a project put together by Lawrence Schiller, the photographer and producer who several years before had contracted with Mailer to write "Marilyn," and it was widely referred to as "the Gary Gilmore book." This "Gary Gilmore book" of Mailer's was understood in a general way to be an account of or a contemplation on the death or the life or the last nine months in the life of Gary Mark Gilmore, those nine months representing the period between the day in April of 1976 when he was released from the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, and the morning in January of 1977 on which he was executed by having four shots fired into his heart at the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, Utah.

It seemed one of those lives in which the narrative would yield no further meaning. Gary Gilmore had been in and out of prison, mostly in, for 22 of his 36 years. Gary Gilmore had a highly developed kind of con style that caught the national imagination. "Unless it's a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it," Gary Gilmore said when he refused legal efforts to reverse the jury's verdict of death on felony murder. "Let's do it," Gary Gilmore said in the moments before the hood was lowered and the muzzles of the rifles emerged from the executioner's blind. Gary Gilmore's execution in 1977 was the first in the United States in ten years, and the last months of his life were expensively, exhaustively covered, covered in teams, covered in packs, covered with checkbooks and covered with tricks, covered to that point at which Louis Nirer was calling Provo in a failed attempt to add some class to David Susskind's bid for the rights, covered to that pitch at which the coverage itself might have seemed the only story.

What Mailer could make of this apparently intractable material was unclear. It might well have been only another test hole in a field he had drilled before, a few further reflections on murder as an existential act, an appropriation for himself of the book he invented for "An American Dream," Stephen Rojack's "The Psychology of the Hangman." Instead Mailer wrote a novel, a thousand-page novel in a meticulously limited vocabulary and a voice as flat as the horizon, a novel which takes for its incident and characters real events in the lives of real people. "The Executioner's Song" is ambitious to the point of vertigo, and the exact extent of its ambitiousness becomes clear at the end of the first chapter, when a curious sentence occurs, a sentence designed as a kind of Gothic premonition. Brenda Nicol, a forthright woman in her thirties who "hadn't gone into marriage four times without knowing she was pretty attractive on the hoof," has gotten a call from the penitentiary at Marion saying that her cousin Gary Gilmore was coming home--by way of St. Louis, Denver, Salt Lake--to Provo. "With all the excitement," Chapter One of "The Executioner's Song" closes, "Brenda was hardly taking into account that it was practically the same route their Mormon great-grandfather took when he jumped off from Missouri with a handcart near to a hundred years ago, and pushed west with all he owned over the prairies, and the passes of the Rockies, to come to rest at Provo in the Mormon Kingdom of Deseret just fifty miles below Salt Lake."

Against the deliberately featureless simple sentences of "The Executioner's Song," sentences that slide over the mind like conversations at K-Mart ("Gary was kind of quiet. There was one reason they got along. Brenda was always gabbing and he was a good listener. They had a lot of fun. Even at that age he was real polite."), the relative complexity and length of this sentence at the end of Chapter One is a chill, a signal that the author is telling us a story of some historical dimension. Notice the intake of breath on the clause "and the passes of the Rockies," notice the long unbroken exhalation that ends in a fall on "just 50 miles below Salt Lake."

It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story. His sentences do not get long or short by accident, or because he is in a hurry. Where he does or does not put the comma is a question of considerable concern to him: his revisions on "The Deer Park" are instructive in the extreme. Brenda Nicol may not have been taking into account that handcart, those prairies, those passes of the Rockies, but Mailer was, and, in that one sentence, the terms of the novel had laid themselves out: a connection would be attempted here, a search for a field of negative energy linking these events and these people and the empty melancholy of the place itself.

"The Executioner's Song," then, was to be a novel of the West, and the strongest voices in it, as in the place itself, would be those women. Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories. "Well, I am the daughter of the very first people who settled in Provo," Gary Gilmore's mother, Bessie Gilmore, said once to herself when Gary was 22 and sentenced to 15 years for armed robbery in the state of Oregon. She said it again to herself on the July morning in 1976 when her niece Brenda and her sister Ida called to say that Gary was under arrest in Provo on Murder One, two counts. "I am the granddaughter and great granddaughter of pioneers on both sides. If they could live through it, I can live through it." This is the exact litany which expresses faith in God west of the 100th meridian.

I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in "The Executioner's Song," is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down. The very subject of "The Executioner's Song" is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting. Beneath what Mailer calls "the immense blue of the strong sky of the American West," under that immense blue which dominates "The Executioner's Song," not too much makes a difference. The place at which both Gary Gilmore and his Mormon great-grandfather came to rest was a town where the desert lay at the end of every street, except to the east. "There," to the east, "was the Interstate, and after that, the mountains. That was about it."

In a world in which every road runs into the desert or the Interstate or the Rocky Mountains, people develop a pretty precarious sense of their place in the larger scheme. People get sick for love, think they want to die for love, shoot up the town for love, and then they move away, move on, forget the face. People commit their daughters, and move to Midway Island. People get in their cars at night and drive across two states to get a beer, see about a loan on a pickup, keep from going crazy. It is a good idea to keep from going crazy because crazy people get committed again, and can no longer get in their cars and drive across two states to get a beer. Nicole Baker, Gary Gilmore's true love, got committed the first time at 14. April Baker, Nicole's sister, had been a "little spacey" ever since she got bad-tripped and gang-banged when her father was on leave in Honolulu. "I am a split personality," April said when she was asked about the July night in Provo when she went to the Sinclair service station and the Holiday Inn with Gary Gilmore and he seemed to kill somebody. "I am controlling it pretty good today."

"The Executioner's Song" is structured in two long symphonic movements: "Western Voices," or Book One, voices which are most strongly voices of women, and "Eastern Voices," Book Two, voices which are not literally those of Easterners but are largely those of men--the voices of the lawyers, the prosecutors, the reporters, the people who move in the larger world and believe that they can influence events. The "Western" book is a fatalistic drift, a tension, an overwhelming and passive rush toward the inevitable events that will end in Gary Gilmore's death. The "Eastern" book is the release of that tension, the resolution, the playing out of the execution, the active sequence that effectively ends on the January morning when Lawrence Schiller goes up in a six-seat plane and watches as Gary Gilmore's ashes are let loose from a plastic bag to blow over Provo. The bag surprises Schiller. The bag is a bread bag, "with the printing from the bread company clearly on it . . . a 59-cent loaf of bread."

The women in the "Western" book are surprised by very little. They do not on the whole believe that events can be influenced. A kind of desolate wind seems to blow through the lives of these women in "The Executioner's Song," all these women who have dealings with Gary Gilmore from the April night when he lands in town with his black plastic penitentiary shoes until the day in January when he is just ash blowing over Provo. The wind seems to blow away memory, balance. The sensation of falling is constant. Nicole Baker, still trying at 19 to "digest her life, her three marriages, her two kids, and more guys than you wanted to count," pits Gary Gilmore, plus Gary Gilmore's insistence that she meet him beyond the grave, reads a letter from Gary in prison and the words go "in and out of her head like a wind blowing off the top of the world."

Control is fugitive. Insanity is casual. The love-death seems as good a way of hanging on as any other. Gary and Nicole make wishes on a falling star and Nicole has "a rush of memories then like falling down in a dream." Gary's mother Bessie, sitting alone in her trailer in Oregon, gets a call about the murders from her sister Ida and she feels "vertigo at the fall through space of all those years since Ida was born." A sister-in-law of Nicole's thinks of sinking "right into the swamp of misery." A friend of the family is trying to sleep one night when she hears Gary, whose visit she has declined, shatter her car with a tire iron. "She let it go. It was just one more unhappiness at the bottom of things."

These women move in and out of paying attention to events, of noticing their own fate. They seem distracted by bad dreams, by some dim apprehension of this well of dread, this "unhappiness at the bottom of things." Inside Bessie Gilmore's trailer south of the Portland city line, down a four-lane avenue of bars and eateries and discount stores and a gas station with a World War II surplus Boeing bomber fixed above the pumps, there is a sense that Bessie can describe only as "a suction-type feeling." She fears disintegration. She wonders where the houses in which she once lived have gone, she wonders about her husband being gone, her children gone, the 78 cousins she knew in Provo scattered and gone and maybe in the ground. She wonders if, when Gary goes, they would "all descend another step into that pit where they gave up searching for one another." She has no sense of "how much was her fault, and how much was the fault of the ongoing world that ground along like iron-banded wagon wheels up the prairie grass." When I read this, I remembered that the tracks made by the wagon wheels are still visible from the air over Utah, like the footprints made on the moon. This is an absolutely astonishing book.

Joan Didion is the author of "The White Album," "A Book of Common Prayer," "Play It as It Lays" and other books.



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Ignorant conclusion

Your arrogant certainty that you had found evidence to support your IGNORANT CONCLUSION.  Ignorant conclusion.  Do you realize how demented that kind of talk is?  Completely nuts.

An ignorant conclusion?  I was quoting chin Kung and Allan Watts. They may be wrong  but not  ignorant.  WHAT A FUCKING CHEESE-BRAINED PIECE OF TURD.

THINK ABout it.  My certainty that I had found evidence?

And what was my ignorant conclusion?  That Buddhism doesn't need any para normal beliefs while Christianity would fade away without it?  Thats not an ignorant conclusion.  It's good reasoning. It might be wrong, but it's not ignorant.  Any more than Allan watts or Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins  or Sam Harris are ignorant.  

.

Atheism

Anyone who thinks he knows for sure that Jesus was born of virgin or that the Qur'an is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe is lying. Either he is lying to himself, or to everyone else. In neither case should such false certainties be celebrated.

Sam Harris

Hi Andrew--

I think we basically understand one another, and yet we disagree on many points of importance-so we're off to a good start. You are right to say that my view of faith doesn't really allow for "solid distinctions within faiths," while yours "depends on such distinctions." This summarizes our disagreement very well. I recognize, of course, that there are many important differences between religious moderation (your "Christianity as it can be") and religious fundamentalism. And I agree that these differences have something to do with doubt and the progress of reason on the one hand and a hostility to both doubt and reason on the other. But, as you expect, I don't view the boundary between moderation and fundamentalism as "solid," or even principled, and I hold a very different view of many of the topics you raised-Pascal included. (I do think Nietzsche had it right when he wrote, "The most pitiful example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the corruption of his reason through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his Christianity.")

First, on my frustration with religious moderates, to which you alluded: It is true that your colleagues in the religious middle have taught me to appreciate the candor and the one-note coherence of religious fanatics. I have found that whenever someone like me or Richard Dawkins criticizes Christians for believing in the imminent return of Christ, or Muslims for believing in martyrdom, religious moderates claim that we have caricatured Christianity and Islam, taken "extremists" to be representative of these "great" faiths, or otherwise overlooked a shimmering ocean of nuance. We are invariably told that a mature understanding of the historical and literary contexts of scripture renders faith perfectly compatible with reason, and our attack upon religion is, therefore, "simplistic," "dogmatic," or even "fundamentalist." As a frequent target of such profundities, I can attest that they generally come moistened to a sickening pablum by great sighs of condescension. Present company excluded.

But there are several problems with such a defense of moderate religion. First, many moderates assume that religious "extremism" is rare and therefore not all that consequential. Happily, you are not in this camp, but I would venture that you are in a minority among religious moderates. As you and I both know, religious extremism is not rare, and it is hugely consequential. Forty-four percent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. This idea is extreme in almost every sense-extremely silly, extremely dangerous, extremely worthy of denigration-but it is not extreme in the sense of being rare. The problem, as I see it, is that moderates don't tend to know what it is like to be truly convinced that death is an illusion and that an eternity of happiness awaits the faithful beyond the grave. They have, as you say, "integrated doubt" into their faith. Another way of putting it is that they have less faith-and for good reason. The result, however, is that your fellow moderates tend to doubt that anybody ever really is motivated to sacrifice his life, or the lives of others, on the basis his heartfelt religious beliefs. Moderate doubt-which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certitude in most respects-often blinds its host to the reality and consequences of full-tilt religious lunacy. Such blindness is now particularly unhelpful, given the hideous collision with Islamic certainty that is unfolding all around us.

Second, many religious moderates imagine, as you do, that there is some clear line of separation between extremist and moderate religion. But there isn't. Scripture itself remains a perpetual engine of extremism: because, while He may be many things, the God of the Bible and the Qur'an is not a moderate. Read scripture more closely and you do not find reasons for religious moderation; you find reasons to live like a proper religious maniac-to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, etc. Of course, one can cherry-pick scripture and find reasons to love one's neighbor and turn the other cheek, but the truth is, the pickings are pretty slim, and the more fully one grants credence to these books, the more fully one will be committed to the view that infidels, heretics, and apostates are destined to be ground up in God's loving machinery of justice.

How does one "integrate doubt" into one's faith? By acknowledging just how dubious many of the claims of scripture are, and thereafter reading it selectively, bowdlerizing it if need be, and allowing its assertions about reality to be continually trumped by fresh insights-scientific ("You mean the world isn't 6000 years old? Yikes"), mathematical ("pi doesn't actually equal 3? All right, so what?"), and moral ("You mean, I shouldn't beat my slaves? I can't even keep slaves? Hmm"). Religious moderation is the result of not taking scripture all that seriously. So why not take these books less seriously still? Why not admit that they are just books, written by fallible human beings like ourselves? They were not, as your friend the pope would have it, "written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost." Needless to say, I believe you have given the Supreme Pontiff far too much credit as a champion of reason. The man believes that he is in possession of a magic book, entirely free from error. Here is the Vatican's position (from the Vatican website), in the words of Pope Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus (his 1893 encyclical on the Study of Holy Scripture):

[I]t is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage, we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it-this system cannot be tolerated. For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, solemnly defined in the Councils of Florence and of Trent, and finally confirmed and more expressly formulated by the Council of the Vatican. These are the words of the last: "The Books of the Old and New Testament, whole and entire, with all their parts, as enumerated in the decree of the same Council (Trent) and in the ancient Latin Vulgate, are to be received as sacred and canonical. And the Church holds them as sacred and canonical, not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without error; but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author." "
"This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church"-of course it does change a little from time to time. Being bogus to a remarkable degree, it has to. The fact that the current pope freely uses terms like "reason" and "truth" does not at all guarantee that he is on good terms with the former, or would recognize the latter if it bit him. Starting with the (utterly unjustified) premise that one of your books is an infallible guide to reality is not a particularly promising approach to inquiry-be it physical, ethical, or spiritual.

Please consider how differently we treat scientific texts and discoveries, no matter how profound: Isaac Newton spent the period between the summer of 1665 and the spring of 1667 working in isolation and dodging an outbreak of plague that was laying waste to the pious men and women of England. When he emerged from his solitude, he had invented the differential and integral calculus, established the field of optics, and discovered the laws of motion and universal gravitation. Many scientists consider this to be the most awe-inspiring display of human intelligence in the history of human intelligence. Over three hundred years have passed, and one still has to be exceptionally well-educated to fully appreciate the depth and beauty of Newton's achievement. But no one doubts that Newton's work was the product of merely human effort, conceived and accomplished by a mortal-and a very unpleasant mortal at that. And yet, literally billions of our neighbors deem the contents of the Bible and the Qur'an to be so profound as to rule out the possibility of terrestrial authorship. Given the breadth and depth of human achievement, this seems an almost miraculous misappropriation of awe. It took two centuries of continuous ingenuity to substantially improve upon Newton's work. How difficult would it be to improve the Bible? It would be trivially easy, in fact. You and I could upgrade this "inerrant" text-scientifically, historically, ethically, and yes, spiritually-in this email exchange.

Consider the possibility of improving the Ten Commandments. This would appear to be setting the bar rather high, as these are the only passages in the Bible that the Creator of the universe felt the need to physically write himself. But take a look good look at commandment #2. No graven images? Doesn't this seem like something less than the-second-most-important-point-upon-which-to- admonish-all-future-generations-of-human-beings? Remember those Muslims who recently rioted by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons? Many people wondered just what got them so riled up. Well, here it is. Was all that pious mayhem nothing more than egregious, medieval stupidity? Yes, come to think of it, it was nothing more than egregious, medieval stupidity. Almost any precept we'd put in place of this prohibition against graven images would augment the wisdom of the Bible (Don't pretend to know things you don't know? Don't mistreat children? Avoid trans fats?). Could we live with all the resulting problems due to proliferating graven images? We'd manage-somehow.

Of course, people of faith are right to insist that there is more to life than being reasonable-which is to say there is much more to life than merely understanding the world and getting one's beliefs about it to cohere. But we can have ethical and spiritual lives without lying to ourselves and to others and without pretending to be certain about things we are clearly not certain about. Anyone who thinks he knows for sure that Jesus was born of virgin or that the Qur'an is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe is lying. Either he is lying to himself, or to everyone else. In neither case should such false certainties be celebrated.

Religious moderates-by refusing to question the legitimacy of raising children to believe that they are Christians, Muslims, and Jews-tacitly support the religious divisions in our world. They also perpetuate the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence in order to have an ethical and spiritual life. While religious moderates don't fly planes into buildings, or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy, they refuse to deeply question the preposterous ideas of those who do. Moderates neither submit to the real demands of scripture nor draw fully honest inferences from the growing testimony of science. In attempting to find a middle ground between religious dogmatism and intellectual honesty, it seems to me that religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

I've gone on at such length, and I still haven't addressed your claim that "God is truth" or your apparent attempt to ram through some hybrid of the ontological and cosmological arguments ("since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe"). But I'm not sure what you mean by "God," or what exactly you believe about reality that requires the framework of Christianity. Feel free to spell it out in your next email, if you care to.

Best,

Sam

 

Piers Morgan

“I want to just pile into something … Viglen”; “There is something big coming on the Internet”; and, “It’s imminent, very imminent, so I want to get into these. It’s a rather convoluted route I’ve heard about it, but it’s kosher.”

When later asked to explain this formulation, spoken the day before the column appeared and the stock doubled, Morgan actually said:

‘Imminent’ to me is a bit like ‘long-term’. I would not hold too much weight to the final definition of the word.

He makes Bill Clinton look like the Dalai Lama. And somehow we're all supposed to maintain the fiction that he is ethical enough to be CNN's senior interviewer.

In sport.

I thought he was in sport. But he wasn't in sport.
www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0
Sport - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sport (or, in the United States, sports) is all forms of competitive physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim to use, maintain or ...

It's as foreign as saying "maths".  How did an American come up with this very unusual britishism?  

By fate, I don't mean divine preordination. I mean uncontrollable fortune.

---- Steven Pinker

Steve Martin

Be dull and boring and omnipresent. Criticize things you don’t know about. Be oblong and have your knees removed. Be sure to stop at stop signs, And drive fifty-five miles an hour. Pick up hitchhikers foaming at the mouth, And when you get home get a master’s degree in geology.

Movie re releases

There’s a whole generation of people who haven’t seen [Titanic] in theaters at all.”

---- James Cameron

Yes. Another business culture failure. Great films should regularly be re released. Please don't argue!

Gangs of New York

''Gangs of New York'' is an important film as well as an entertaining one. With this project, Mr. Scorsese has made his passionate ethnographic sensibility the vehicle of an especially grand ambition. He wants not only to reconstruct the details of life in a distant era but to construct, from the ground up, a narrative of historical change, to explain how we -- New Yorkers, Americans, modern folk who disdain hand-to-hand bloodletting and overt displays of corruption -- got from there to here, how the ancient laws gave way to modern ones.

Pat Buchanin

Utopian Dreams
America is losing control. Why? A failure to understand human nature and the lessons of history -- and the mindless pursuit of Utopian dreams.

We wagered the wealth of a nation on a Great Society gamble that through endless redistribution from top to bottom, we could create a more just, equal and productive society.

After the Cold War, we embraced the idea that using our immense power, we could remake this world into a more egalitarian, cooperative and democratic place.

Long after reality caught up to us, we continue to chase the dreams.

Steve Jobs

Also much addressed is Jobs's notorious mean streak and willingness to be rude and belittling even to those closest to him. Jon Ive, Apple's head of design and one of the closest people to Jobs during his career at Apple, recounts examples of Jobs being hurtful, something that puzzled Ive, since Jobs was also a very sensitive person. "His way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don't apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that."
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Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs. A deeply deeply flawed human being and bungler. One legacy is the iPad, with all it's faults. No stereo, no multi tasking, limited word-processing, no USB, no flash drive, no stylus or handwriting recognition, no phone, no camera... What possessed him to do such a meager job outfitting this instrument.

Ray Bradbury

When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

Piano drinking

The piano has been drinking

And the bar stools are all on fire
And all the newspapers were just fooling
And the ash-trays have retired


The frightening truth is that the forces of “the future” without the reins of strong human moral will become a socioeconomictechnological Frankenstein, a global mechanical monster assimilating humans into its ahistorical, acultural, omnipotent soulless sovereignty. mutilated spirit. The non-human principles of technological advance have trumped all merely human values.

The non-human principles of technological advance have trumped all merely human values, as the beauty of traditional human culture has fallen under the heels of an alien mechanical aesthetic of harsh noise, violence and anarchic spiritual brutality, as a shambles of civilizational ruin theaten to emerge as the true legacy of “modernity,The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; And now the long simmering tension between human values and techne’, the Enlightenment world of technology, seemed to erupt in the ugly triumph of a technology that molded human beings in its image, digesting bits of culture into its non-human alimentary canal, spitting our ever new cyberdevices from computers to cell phones to digital cameras and iPods, toys through which Patriot Americans and the world following in its footsteps was able to find distraction from the pain of lost hopes and sensibilities of a truly human heart. Increasingly the authentic prophet of the contemporary age has seemed to be Aldous Huxley who, in the classic “Brave New World,” depicts a triumphant technology creating humans in accordance with a hierarchy of five genomes—a role reversal in which the human spirit has been all but completely suffocated by the machine. Mutilated spirit. The non-human principles of technological advance have trumped all merely human values. As the beauty of traditional human culture has fallen under the heels of an alien mechanical aesthetic of harsh noise, violence and anarchic spiritual brutality, young citizens of the United States seem to be sinking into a quagmire of barbarism devoid of cultural and aesthetic sensitivity, embracing a pseudo-aesthetic that reflects the mutilated spirit of humans raised under the tutelage of an alien cyberworld with which they have identified—and thereby all but destroyed—their very soul.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death,



UGLY TRIUMPH??

NO.

SORRY.

I CAN'T READ ANY MORE.

IT IS COMPLETELY ALIEN TO MY VISION OF REALITY, .


WE CANNOT CLING TO OUR DARKEST FEARS. WE NEED TO SEE PAST THEM. ENOUGH TALK OF MUTILATED SPIRITS. OF HUMANS RAISED UNDER SOME NON EXISTANT HUXLIAN TUTELAGE OF AN ALIEN CYBERWORLD.THAT HAS ALL BUT DESTROYED OUR VERY SOULS.

beautiful writing. right up there with yeats and ginsburg, dylan and dylan thomas and leonard cohen. nobody pays attention to the meaning, its sonorities, soaring poetry. detached from meaning. of course the ceremony of innocence is drowned, and the second coming is at hand. somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. slouches toward bethlehem to be born.

apocalyptic poetry is all very fine. but there is no apocalypse. just poetry about it.



I WON'T BUY THAT.

PROGRESS, PROSPERITY, TECHNOLOGY, MEDICINE, SPACE TRAVEL, COMFORT AND HEALTH, COMMUNICATION, EDUCATION, PRODUCTIVITY, TOLERANCE, CURIOSITY, COURAGE, PATRIOTISM, LOYALTY, FAIR PLAY, LOVE, THESE ARE THE BONDS AND THE VALUES THAT CAPTURE THE ESSENSE OF THE EVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT.

LOVE IS THE ONLY ENGINE OF SURVIVAL. LOVE IN ALL ITS FORMS. LOVE OF LIFE, LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE, LOVE OF ADMIRATION AND PRESTIEGE, LOVE OF FAMILY, THESE ARE THE VALUES THAT HAVE ALWAYS MARKED THE UPWARD SURGE OF MANKIND.


FORGET WHAT YOU THINK reflects the mutilated spirit of humans raised under the tutelage of an alien cyberworld with which they have identified—and thereby all but destroyed—their very souls

I'M SORRY. THAT JUST DOES NOT, AS THEY USED TO SAY, DOES NOT COMPUTE. I SEE NOTHING OF THE KIND. TRUMPED ALL MERELY HUMAN VALUES??
AN ADORING FATHER WATCHES, AND DREAMS. YES, HIS HEART AND SOUL DREAMS AND EXPECTS A WONDERFUL NEW LIFE TO BLOSSOM AND LIVE LONG AND PROSPER .. HE SAYS "YES WE CAN" HE SAYS "WE CAN DO THIS". HE SAYS I LOVE YOU. HE PROMISES THE WORLD TO HIS WIFE AND NEWBORN SON. PROMISES HIS VERY SOUL TO PROTECT AND CHERISH AND PROSPER AND LIVE AND THRIVE AND BE PRODUCTIVE, COURAGEOUS AND LOVING.

I WAS THAT SON. SO WERE YOU. THE WORLD IS NOT HARSH, NOISY AND SOULLESS. THE HUMAN SPIRIT HAS NOT ALL BUT COMPLETELY BEEN SUFFOCATED. HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT!?

THERE IS NOTHING IN THAT SCENE OF HARSH NOISE AND VIOLENCE AND ANARCHIC SPIRITUAL BRUTALITY. IT IS THE QUITESSENTIAL TRUE SPIRITUAL MOMENT OF LOVE AND HONOR AND BEAUTY AND TRUST AND HOPE, AND THE LIVING BREATHING SOUL. NOT TRUMPED BY TOYS THAT FILL THE NOW HOPELESS WORLD OF CRUSHED SOULS. HE CALLS HIS MOM ON THE CELL PHONE, NEVER HAVING TO LEAVE THE BEDSIDE. HE SNAPS A THOUSAND PICTURES ON HIS DIGITAL CAMERA, STILLS AND MOVIES. FOR FREE. AND YOU CALL THAT A TOY. THAT FILLS OUR SAD AND RUINED SOULS.

I'M SORRY. THAT IS NOT A TOY. AND THAT IS NOT A SOUL IN RUINS. WHERE IS THE BARBARISM??? UNDER THE HEELS OF AN ALIEN MECHANICAL AESTHETIC OF HARSH NOISE VIOLENCE AND ANARCHIC SPIRITUAL BRUTALITY.

ANARCHIC SPIRITUAL BRUTALITY. UNDER THE HEELS?? THAT IS AN IMAGE, SET AGAINST THE PICTURE I PRESENTED, THIS TRUE WORLD OF LOVE AND HAPPINESS, OF HOPE AND TRUTH AND SINCERITY AND REAL VALUES AND GOOD. YES GOOD. WE ARE NOT UNDER ANY HEELS, NO ALIEN MECHANICAL AESTHETIC OF HARSH NOISE, AND VIOLENCE, AND ANARCHIC SPIRITUAL BRUTALITY. DON'T LAY THAT ON ME OR ON MILLIONS OF STRANGERS, WHOSE HEARTS YOU DO NOT KNOW, CANNOT KNOW.


I KNOW THIS GUY, HAS HIS OFFICE PAPERED WITH THOUSANDS OF PICTURES OF HIS GRANDDAUGHTER. SO MUCH LOVE, CAPTURED AND AMPLIFIED BY THIS "TOY". SO MUCH PROSPERITY, SO MUCH HOPE... NOT SOME DREAM OF A NEW AGE. A CONTINUATION OF THE DAY TO DAY LOVING AND LIVING REALITY.

CHUCK. C'MON! LOOK AROUND. SEE THE GOOD WORLD, THE PASSIONATE, LIVING WORLD. NOT OF CRUSHED SOULS WITH NO ACCESS TO CULTURE. THAT IS A DARK AND TERRIBLY INACCURATE DEPICTION, OBSERVATION OF REALITY. THAT'S THE THIRD WORLD.

YOU WRITE WITH GREAT ELOQUENCE AND GRANDEUR. BUT NOBODY WILL SEE IT YOUR WAY. IT IS NOT THAT BAD. YOU HAVE NO ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE THAT GIVES ANYV CREDENCE TO YOUR THEORY OF THE END OF DAYS.

IT'S POETRY. THE CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE IS DROWNED. A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.The frightening truth is that the forces of “the future” without the reins of strong human moral will become a socioeconomictechnological Frankenstein, a global mechanical monster assimilating humans into its ahistorical, acultural, omnipotent soulless sovereignty. mutilated spirit. The non-human principles of technological advance have trumped all merely human values.

The non-human principles of technological advance have trumped all merely human values, as the beauty of traditional human culture has fallen under the heels of an alien mechanical aesthetic of harsh noise, violence and anarchic spiritual brutality, as a shambles of civilizational ruin theaten to emerge as the true legacy of “modernity,The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; And now the long simmering tension between human values and techne’, the Enlightenment world of technology, seemed to erupt in the ugly triumph of a technology that molded human beings in its image, digesting bits of culture into its non-human alimentary canal, spitting our ever new cyberdevices from computers to cell phones to digital cameras and iPods, toys through which Patriot Americans and the world following in its footsteps was able to find distraction from the pain of lost hopes and sensibilities of a truly human heart. Increasingly the authentic prophet of the contemporary age has seemed to be Aldous Huxley who, in the classic “Brave New World,” depicts a triumphant technology creating humans in accordance with a hierarchy of five genomes—a role reversal in which the human spirit has been all but completely suffocated by the machine. Mutilated spirit. The non-human principles of technological advance have trumped all merely human values. As the beauty of traditional human culture has fallen under the heels of an alien mechanical aesthetic of harsh noise, violence and anarchic spiritual brutality, young citizens of the United States seem to be sinking into a quagmire of barbarism devoid of cultural and aesthetic sensitivity, embracing a pseudo-aesthetic that reflects the mutilated spirit of humans raised under the tutelage of an alien cyberworld with which they have identified—and thereby all but destroyed—their very soul.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death,


Destroy another fetus now We don't like children anyhow I've seen the future, baby: it is murder. Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned the order of the soul.

Don't push me 'cause I'm close -To the streets, the bitches, the niggas,the women, the children, the workers,the killers, the addicts, the dealers the quiet, the livest, the realest and that's close
Don't push me, 'cause I'm closeTo the edge, back, middle and frontStrong back shit liftin' it up From the big and the small



The piano has been drinkingAnd the bar stools are all on fire And all the newspapers were just fooling And the ash-trays have retired
And I've got a feeling that the piano has been drinking It's just a hunch, The piano has been drinking and he's going to lose his lunch.The bouncer is this Sumo wrestler Kinda cream puff casper milk toast And the owner is just a mental midgetWith the I.Q. of a fencepost. And you can't find your waitress with Geiger counter.


ABLE TO FIND DISTRACTION FROM THE PAIN OF LOST HOPES AND SENSIBILITIES OF A TRULY HUMAN HEART.

My necktie's asleepThe combo went back to New York, and left me all aloneThe jukebox has to take a leak Have you noticed that the carpet needs a haircut?And the spotlight looks just like a prison break And the telephone's out of cigarettes As usual the balcony's on the make And the piano has been drinking, heavilyThe piano has been drinking And he's on the hard stuff tonight.

.white spades hangin' on the telephone wire, gamblers reevaluate along the dotted line, you'll never recognize yourself on heartattack and vine.doctor lawyer beggar man thief, philly joe remarkable looks on in disbelief,if you want a taste of madness, you'll have to wait in line, you The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense Take what you have gathered from coincidence The empty handed painter from your streets Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheetsThis sky, too, is folding under you And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

A CAREENING AMERICA LED THE WORLD INTO ANARCHIC SPIRITUAL BREAKDOWN.A QUAGMIRE OF BARBARISM DEVOID OF CULTURAL AND AESTHETIC SENSITIVITY THAT REFLECTS THE MUTILATED SPIRIT OF HUMANS RAISED UNDER THE TUTELAGE OF AN ALIEN CYBERWORLD WITH THISH THEY HAVE IDENTIFIED AND THEREBY ALL BUT DESTROYED THEIR VERY SOULS.

I'll probably see someone you know on heartattack and vine. boney's high on china white, don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just god when he's drunk, well this stuff will probably kill you, let's do another line, what you say you meet me down on heartattack and vine. Small Change got rained on with his own thirty-eight,And nobody flinched down by the arcadeAnd the marquees weren't weeping, they went stark-raving mad,And the cabbies were the only ones that really had it made.

I now find myself dealing with a constant barrage of argumentativeness, bickering, abuse, arrogant self-righteousness and adamant defensiveness. Think about it. Look at your behavior. See why no self-respecting human being can tolerate such abuse. Whatever the cause, the behavior is intolerable. When you've had some insight and are able to acknowledge that a conversation isn't all about you, we'll be ready to talk about some protocols to minimize/avoid such behaviors in future. Please meditate on this and learn the lessons of how acrimony often starts flying between us. And work on limiting it. Only a child has footstomping fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence--and that you can take not as a putdown but as a sober observation of behavior that all of us should seek to avoid, as I'm sure you'll agree. Arrogant self-righteousness and adamant defensiveness. Overbearingly intimidating. Meanspirited.childish. Infantile, rude, ill-mannered and ungracious? Incapable of understanding elementary etiquette or of taking responsibility for your misbehavior. beyond rude, cruel and hostile belittling, deprecating and insulting" ... ill-mannered and ungracious How about "Look jerk, you're talking to someone who knows somethingI've truly had it with your penchant for arguing and your conviction that you're invariably right by definition. No more bullshit.When you've had some insight and are able to acknowledge that a conversation isn't all about you, we'll be ready to talk about some protocols to minimize/avoid such behaviors in future.
Anyone who's convinced that they're perfectly
decent is in for a shock--not only you, dear boy.

SUCH POETRY. SHEER NONSENSE. DISGUSTING CRAP. THE CEREMONY OF SHMINNOCENCE IS DROWNED. A CAREENING AMERICA LED THE WORLD INTO ANARCHIC SPIRITUAL BREAKDOWN.A QUAGMIRE OF BARBARISM DEVOID OF CULTURAL AND AESTHETIC SENSITIVITY THAT REFLECTS THE MUTILATED SPIRIT OF HUMANS RAISED UNDER THE TUTELAGE OF AN ALIEN CYBERWORLD WITH THISH THEY HAVE IDENTIFIED AND THEREBY ALL BUT DESTROYED THEIR VERY SOULS. AND THE FIRE HYDRANTS PLEAD THE FIFTH AMENDMENT. CAUSE THE DREAMS AIN'T BROKEN DOWN HERE, THEY'RE WALING WITH A LIMP. AND THE SPOTLIGHT LOOKS LIKE A PRISON BREAK. AND YOU CAN'T FIND YOUR WAITRESS WITH A GEIGER COUNTER. AND ANYONE WHO'S CONVINCED THAT THEY'REPERFECTLY DECENT IS IN FOR A SHOCK. AND WHEN YOU'VE HAD SOME INSIGHT AND ARE ABLE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT A CONVERSATION ISN'T ALL ABOUT YOU, WEL'LL BE READY TO TALK ABOUT SOME PROTOCOLS TO MINIMIZE/AVOID SUCH BEHAVIORS IN THE FUTURE. AND I'VE TRULY HAD IT WITH YOUR PENCHANT FOR ARGYING AND YOU CONVICTION THAT YOU'RE INVARIABLY RIGHT BY DEFINITION.

IT'S SHEER POETRY, AND TOTAL NONSENSE.


And his cold trousers were twisted, and the sirens high and shrill,And crumpled in his fist was a five-dollar bill And the naked mannequins with their Cheshire grins,And the raconteurs and roustabouts said "Buddy, come on in, 'cause
'Cause the dreams ain't broken down here now, they're walking with a limp Now that Small Change got rained on with his own thirty-eight"And nobody flinched down by the arcadeAnd the burglar alarm's been disconnected,And the newsmen start to rattle
And the cops are telling jokes about some whorehouse in Seattle
And the fire hydrants plead the Fifth Amendment
And the furniture is bargains galore
But the blood is by the jukebox on an old linoleum floor
And what a hot rain on Forty-Second Street,

SEEMED TO ERUPT IN THE UGLY TRIUMPH OF A TECHNOLOGY THAT MOLDED HUMAN BEINGS IN ITS IMAGE.


truly human heart. Increasingly the authentic prophet of the contemporary age has seemed to be Aldous Huxley who, in the classic “Brave New World,” depicts a triumphant technology creating humans in accordance with a hierarchy of five genomes—a role reversal in which the human spirit has been all but completely suffocated by the machine. The frightening truth seems to be that the forces of “the future” without the reins of strong human moral will become a socioeconomictechnological Frankenstein, a global mechanical monster assimilating humans into its ahistorical, acultural, omnipotent soulless sovereignty.

mutilated spirit. The non-human principles of technological advance have trumped all merely human values.

as the beauty of traditional human culture has fallen under the heels of an alien mechanical aesthetic of harsh noise, violence and anarchic spiritual brutality,

NO IT HASN'T!

A QUAGMIRE OF BARBARISM??!! DEVOID OF CULTURAL AND AESTHETIC SENSITIVITY??!!! THAT REFLECTS THE MUTILATED SPIRIT OF HUMANS RAISED UNDER THE TUTELAGE OF AN ALIEN CYBERWORLD WITH THISH THEY HAVE IDENTIFIED AND THEREBY ALL BUT DESTROYED THEIR VERY SOULS.

A CAREENING AMERICA LED THE WORLD INTO ANARCHIC SPIRITUAL BREAKDOWN????

ERUPTING IN THE UGLY TRIUMPH OF A TECHNOLOGY THAT MOOLDED HUMAN BEINGS IN ITS IMAGE, DIGESTING BITS OF CULTURE INTO ITS NON HUMAN ALIMENTARY CANAL, SPITTING OUT EVER NEW CYBERDEVICES FROM COMPUTERS TO CELL PHONES TO DIGITAL CAMERAS AND IPODS, TOYS THROUGH WHICH AMERICANS ANBD THE WORLD FOLLOWING IN ITS FOOTSTEPS WAS ABLE TO FIND DISTRACTION FROM THE PAIN OF LOST HOPES AND SENSIBILILTIES OF A TRULY HUMAN HEART??!!!