Man's World

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role—but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

The question of direct or "naïve" realism, as opposed to indirect or "representational" realism, arises in the philosophy of perceptionand of mind out of the debate over the nature of conscious experience;^[2][3] the epistemological question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by neural processes in our brain. Naïve realism is known as direct realism when developed to counter indirect or representative realism, also known as epistemologicaldualism,^[4] the philosophical position that our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature virtual-reality replica of the world.

Timothy Leary coined the influential term Reality Tunnel, by which he means a kind of representative realism. The theory states that, with a subconscious set of mental filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets the same world differently, hence "Truth is in the eye of the beholder". His ideas influenced the work of his friend Robert Anton Wilson.

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America, and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamor. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today’s punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.

(MORE: Women in Federal Workforce Face More Obstacles Than Men)

It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling, or demonizing men. History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.

What is troubling in too many books and articles by feminist journalists in the U.S. is, despite their putative leftism, an implicit privileging of bourgeois values and culture. The particular focused, clerical and managerial skills of the upper-middle-class elite are presented as the highest desideratum, the ultimate evolutionary point of humanity. Yes, there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service-sector economy in which women, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive.

(MORE: Report: Younger Women Nearing Pay Equality With Men)

But the triumphalism among some, such as Hanna Rosin in her book, “The End of Men,” about women’s gains seems startlingly premature, such as when Rosin says of the sagging fortunes of today’s working-class couples that they and we had “reached the end of a hundred thousand years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back.” This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history’s far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected also become more vulnerable to collapse. The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role—but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role—but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

Dylan

The first two lines, which rhymed "kiddin' you' and 'didn't you,' just about knocked me out," he confessed to "Rolling Stone" in 1988, "and when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much." 

--- Bob Dylan

Free Will

In my view, the reality of good and evil does not depend upon the existence of free will, because with or without free will, we can distinguish between suffering and happiness. With or without free will, a psychopath who enjoys killing children is different from a pediatric surgeon who enjoys saving them. Whatever the truth about free will, these distinctions are unmistakable and well worth caring about. 

Might free will somehow be required for goodness to be manifest? How, for instance, does one become a pediatric surgeon? Well, you must first be born, with an intact nervous system, and then provided with a proper education. No freedom there, I’m afraid. You must also have the physical talent for the job and avoid smashing your hands at rugby. Needless to say, it won’t do to be someone who faints at the sight of blood. 

Chalk these achievements up to good luck as well. At some point you must decide to become a surgeon—a result, presumably, of first wanting to become one. Will you be the conscious source of this wanting? Will you be responsible for its prevailing over all the other things you want but that are incompatible with a career in medicine? No. If you succeed at becoming a surgeon, you will simply find yourself standing one day, scalpel in hand, at the confluence of all the genetic and environmental causes that led you to develop along this line. None of these events requires that you, the conscious subject, be the ultimate cause of your aspirations, abilities, and resulting behavior. And, needless to say, you can take no credit for the fact that you weren’t born a psychopath.

Of course, I’m not saying that you can become a surgeon by accident—you must do many things, deliberately and well, and in the appropriate sequence, year after year. Becoming a surgeon requires effort. But can you take credit for your disposition to make that effort? To turn the matter around, am I responsible for the fact that it has never once occurred to me that I might like to be a surgeon? Who gets the blame for my lack of inspiration? 

And what if the desire to become a surgeon suddenly arises tomorrow and becomes so intense that I jettison my other professional goals and enroll in medical school? Would I—that is, the part of me that is actually experiencing my life—be the true cause of these developments? Every moment of conscious effort—every thought, intention, and decision—will have been caused by events of which I am not conscious and over which I had no control. Where is the freedom in this?

Phd

If you think a Ph.D in Chemistry is a marketable skill, you've truly been indoctrinated with some nonsense. I just had a meeting in a building complex today that once housed 1000 employees and has maybe 100 today - chemical research industry. Pharmaceuticals is going through mass layoffs and all research being moved offshore.

Chemistry Ph.D. was marketable in 1990 perhaps, and certainly in 1950.

You professors lied to you. They needed the labor. There are less than no jobs for chemists, other than in academia where you can mislead another generation.

Friends

Our results clearly show that more sprawling regions make it harder and harder for people to have social interactions with each other.

Not. A Jew

Previously outspoken about the compatibility of cultural Judaism and atheism, Silverman found that, in trying to write his chapter on Jewish atheism, he … ultimately concluded that Judaism is, at its heart, a religion—one that is incompatible with atheism. He notes that much of what is defined as Jewish culture, such as music or food, is simply Judaism-the-religion “taking credit” for a geographically specific regional culture—Ashkenazic culture primarily being simply Eastern European, for instance. The only thing world Jewry has in common is the Torah, he says, and as a religious doctrine, the Torah cannot be reconciled with atheistic values. “I see Judaism more malevolently than I used to,” he said. “Judaism is no better than any other religion.” And so, the man who was once America’s most prominent Jewish atheist now says he is no longer a Jew.

Good habits?

Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man’s minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon. This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candour. If ever that abrupt appeal is made to us we may fail. A man can get used to getting up at five o’clock in the morning. A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his opinions; the first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected. I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an almost terrible virtue.

Sent from my iPad

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=435178179882019&set=a.420960534637117.98431.100001695221537&type=1&relevant_count=1

Without a racial element the trial would never have happened. Not just because George Zimmerman, like so many others, probably wouldn’t have registered a white teen-ager as a criminal threat but also because a brew of vicarious grief, common experience, and the history of race in this country is what drove the crowds to don hoodies and gather around the country. It’s not simply that if President Obama had a son he’d look like Trayvon—it’s that millions of us have sons, brothers, and cousins who already do.

George Zimmerman, like so many others, probably wouldn’t have registered a white teen-ager as a criminal threat.

Bullshit. White kids can scare the shit out of you.  See, this is just stupid. He definitely would have been suspicious of a white kid. This is batshit, and unfortunately too many people agree with it, that trayvon was profiled for his race.  Actually he was profiled for his age and appearance and activity.  Walking about in the dark in the rain, maybe high on drugs, up to no good.  I'm sorry, I'm right. 

Even the Economist got it wrong. 

Now, I don't know it, but I seriously doubt Mr Zimmerman needed to shoot Mr Martin, even though Mr Martin attacked him. And I seriously doubt Mr Martin would have been shot if he hadn't been a black kid. In my heart of hearts, I too think Mr Zimmerman did something terribly wrong.

Nope. Sorry. Needed to shoot? We'd never know if we had a thousand years. But I'd have shot him if he was black, white to polka dot. Shot him dead. And so would you. You would have feared for your life.

It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us. But this doesn’t entitle religious people to imagine that all their ideas about miraculous books, virgin births, and saviors ushering in the end of the world are remotely plausible.

Ghosts

Stefany Anne Golberg considers the rise of Spiritualism in the antebellum North:

Spiritualists fit weirdly in the story of America, less because of what Spiritualists believed than who the Spiritualists were: physicians, scientists, writers, politicians, industrialists — white, prominent, educated, wealthy, Protestant. Though men were its primary defenders, women dominated Spiritualism — mediums were mostly female. A medium’s power was more than political; the ghosts made her practically divine. (Divine and also wealthy. Mary Andrews earned $1,000 a week in her séance heyday; her husband was happy to encourage her.) Spiritualism spoke to America’s so-called enlightened, in other words, those in charge of America’s public conscience. …

When Mary Todd Lincoln moved into the White House she said she saw ghosts everywhere. She set up a room in the Presidential home for séances just a year before the Civil War’s start and the transformation of the country was sealed.

By the end of the Civil War in 1865, half of Americans were ghosts, and Spiritualism went mainstream.

.

I think it’s a bit dishonest to proclaim that Zimmerman confronted Trayvon without attempting to address the four-minute delay between the time Zimmerman told the dispatcher he lost sight of Trayvon and the start of the fight between the two.  Keep in mind, Trayvon was about two blocks from his house when Zimmerman lost sight of him, yet, almost four minutes later, a fight occurred closer to Zimmerman’s truck than to Trayvon’s house. This was one of the defense teams main arguments in trial, yet conveniently enough, it goes unmentioned by virtually every serious journalists and commentator.  And while this four-minute gap isn’t dispositive one way or another, it is pretty deceitful to leave it out of all analysis.

Glad to include it. Another:

That's Andrew Sullivan being creepy. 

Turns out that when a barely regulated industry injects highly pressurized wastewater into faults, things can go terribly wrong. 

—Michael Behar

I have a strong liberal arts background. In high school, I read Alexander Pope, Camus, and Sartre; I watched movies by Bergman and Kurosawa. In college I majored in philosophy at one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. And if I hear another advocate of the liberal arts proclaim the glories of the humanities, and wax oh-so-eloquent about how enlightening and inspiring it is to read the Great Books, I am going to scream.

First, about those stereotypes about philosophy majors who can’t get jobs. Guess what, they’re true. I have spent many years trying to figure out what to do with my life, and treading water financially, to the detriment not only of my own bank account and well-being, but that of my family, as well. The faculty and administration at my college bent over backwards emphasizing the social justice aspect of the education we were receiving. But the first requirement for being a socially responsible member of this – or any – society is being able to support yourself.

Second, there is far too much emphasis in the liberal arts on teaching people to write.

I’m a very good writer. But, again, guess what – that’s irrelevant for most jobs. Very few jobs – even jobs that require an advanced degree – actually involve writing. What they do require is the ability to organize information and communicate well. Writing is a form of organizing information and communicating – but it’s just one form of either. It’s entirely possible for someone to be very good at organizing information and communicating, but not have to write anything more complicated than an email. Look at the credits of any movie. That’s a list of hundreds of well-paid, highly competent professionals. And at best a handful are being paid for their ability to write.

Third, I was told that getting into a great college was key to getting a good job: the better the college/university you attended, the better the chance you would land a solid, well-paying job. Um, no. I have had dozens of job interviews over the years. I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning the college where I got my Bachelor’s degree. I don’t see a dramatic difference between the people I know who went to elite colleges and those who went to good state universities. Actually, I don’t see much of a difference at all.

Fourth, I can define the “crisis” in the humanities in one four-letter word: Dish. The Dish represents the crisis in the humanities. Why? Because it epitomizes a problem for the humanities for which the humanities themselves are responsible: they have created their own competition. When I read the Dish (which I usually do several times a day), I read articles about a wide variety of topics, almost all of which fall under the traditional definition of the humanities/liberal arts. Reading the Dish is, in effect, a way of continuing my liberal arts education. And yet I do so without coming anywhere near a liberal arts faculty member. I don’t think you even quote professors all that often. There are myriad examples of this. I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable about art, but I never took an art history class in college. Instead, I have spent lots of time in museums and galleries, and have read lots of newspaper and magazine articles about artists I like. If you want to develop an appreciation for Shakespeare, you can take a class in the English department of some university. Or you can watch any of the hundreds of movies that have been made based on the Bard’s plays.

The humanities are alive and well. They’re just not necessarily alive and well in the humanities departments of American colleges and universities. THAT is the crisis of the humanities.

Lying

 I consistently meet smart, well-intentioned, and otherwise ethical people who do not seem to realize how quickly and needlessly lying can destroy their relationships and reputations.

Vidal

Gore Vidal observed that the American free market system is “capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.”

Rich

2) CLAIM: “Rich people work harder, they deserve what they’ve earned!”

Example: David Brooks:

For the first time in human history, the rich work longer hours than the proletariat.

Today’s super-wealthy no longer go off on four-month grand tours of Europe, play gin-soaked Gatsbyesque croquet tournaments or spend hours doing needlepoint while thinking in full paragraphs like the heroines of Jane Austen novels. Instead, their lives are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled ”Beyond Unipolarity.” Meanwhile, down the income ladder, the percentage of middle-age men who have dropped out of the labor force has doubled over the past 40 years, to over 12 percent.

HOW TO RESPOND: Really? Jamie Dimon works harder than a single mom with two jobs trying to make ends meet? Gar Alperovitz argues that, in reality, the wealthy live off luck, not skill. As Bruce Bartlett, a former conservative, notes, “Only 61.8 percent of national income went to compensation of employees in 2012, compared with 65.1 percent in 2001.” Middle- and lower-class blue-collar workers are actually creating more, but getting less. While productivity has steadily increased by a total of 85 percent between 1979 and 2012, the inflation adjusted wage of the median worker rose by a paltry 6 percent and the value of the federal minimum wage fell by 21 percent. Richard Branson has said, “Yes, entrepreneurs may work hard, but I don’t think they actually work any harder than, say, doctors, nurses or other people in society …” The idea the right promotes is that poor people are lazy, rather than smart, hardworking people who never get a fair shake. Worse, they say that they are “dependent” on government, when it’s really the rich and their cronies who rely on public financing. The middle class that decries poor “welfare queens” is more and more reliant on government largess. Gore Vidal observed that the American free market system is “capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.”

July fourth

With the July 4 holiday upon us, you may find yourself gathering with family this long weekend. That might mean a barbecue and fireworks, but it may also mean something else: political conversations with your crazy relatives.

IT'S ONLY A LONG WEEKEND FOR THE ELITE.   BACK TO WORK ON FRIDAY.  

Crime

Lower-class youth commit four times more violent crimes than middle-class youth.

Religion

Probably the final word on religion:

It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us. But this doesn’t entitle religious people to imagine that all their crazy ideas about miraculous books, virgin births, and saviors ushering in the end of the world are remotely plausible.

Islamophobia

There is no such thing as “Islamophobia.” This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia

The truth is that the liberal (multicultural) position on Islam is racist. If a predominantly white community behaved this way—the Left would effortlessly perceive the depth of the problem. Imagine Mormons regularly practicing honor killing or burning embassies over cartoons…

The truth is that the liberal (multicultural) position on Islam is racist. If a predominantly white community behaved this way—the Left would effortlessly perceive the depth of the problem. Imagine Mormons regularly practicing honor killing or burning embassies over cartoons…

Sam Harris

You have got to be kidding…

A few points that it would be nice to get into your brain:

It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us. But this doesn’t entitle religious people to imagine that all their crazy ideas about miraculous books, virgin births, and saviors ushering in the end of the world are remotely plausible.

The State will be hard-pressed to show Zimmerman had the “ill will, spite, malice or hatred” needed to prove a “depraved mind.”

Success brings out the best in all but gloating bastards;  magnanimity, generosity, ease, confidence, joy, relaxation, energy, festivity, and a positive outlook. In contrast, failure naturally elicits bitterness, resentment, dolour, enervation, listlessness...

Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes

Read more at http://shortformblog.com/post/48213064835/scalia-voting-rights-act#LTRcohDhb1RpkAyp.99 

“Look, Trayvon Martin was a victim who shouldn’t have died and in my view there’s a lot of moral responsibility on the shoulders of Zimmerman. 

“The question is, is it a criminal responsibility? And if it is a criminal responsibility, of what degree? It’s certainly not the kind of murder charge that he’s now facing.’’

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/US/dershowitz-zimmerman-martin-defense/2013/02/26/id/492168#ixzz2XXuXAMoT 

Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!

HIROSHIMA 


The medical corps was expecting around 400,000 to 500,000 total casualties, about one-fourth of them dead. In fact, it was the position of the Japanese military that they would inflict such heavy casualties on any invasion force that the Allies would agree to precisely the surrender on terms the Allied governments wished to avoid, and there was substantial evidence of war weariness among the U.S. and British populations.

The failures here have to do with inviting persons into your country who are openly hostile to the prevailing customs and traditions of the host country or, more frequently the case, are slow to relinquish the ways of their homeland. 

Optimal immigration policy would be identical to hiring policy at any firm. How much can the candidate contribute and how good a fit are they into the company culture. The existing US immigration policy would be like a company basing hiring decisions based on how badly the candidate needed the job.

• "Just as buildings in California have a greater need to be earthquake­ proofed, places where there is greater racial polarization in voting have a greater need for prophylactic measures to prevent purposeful race discrimination."


• "Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court's opinion today. The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story. See supra, at 18–19. Without even identifying a standard of review, the Court dismissively brushes off arguments based on "data from the record," and declines to enter the "debat[e about] what [the] record shows"…One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation's signal piece of civil-rights legislation."


• "Given a record replete with examples of denial or abridgment of a paramount federal right, the Court should have left the matter where it belongs: in Congress’ bailiwick."

Ginsburg's dissent also rattled off these eight examples of race-based voter discrimination in recent history:

• "In 1995, Mississippi sought to reenact a dual voter registration system, 'which was initially enacted in 1892 to disenfranchise Black voters,' and for that reason was struck down by a federal court in 1987."


• "Following the 2000 Census, the City of Albany, Georgia, proposed a redistricting plan that DOJ found to be 'designed with the purpose to limit and retrogress the increased black voting strength…in the city as a whole.'"


• "In 2001, the mayor and all-white five-member Board of Aldermen of Kilmichael, Mississippi, abruptly canceled the town's election after 'an unprecedented number' of AfricanAmerican candidates announced they were running for office. DOJ required an election, and the town elected its first black mayor and three black aldermen."


• "In 2006, the court found that Texas' attempt to redraw a congressional district to reduce the strength of Latino voters bore 'the mark of intentional discrimination that could give rise to an equal protection violation,' and ordered the district redrawn in compliance with the VRA…In response, Texas sought to undermine this Court's order by curtailing early voting in the district, but was blocked by an action to enforce the §5 pre-clearance requirement."


• "In 2003, after African-Americans won a majority of the seats on the school board for the first time in history, Charleston County, South Carolina, proposed an at-large voting mechanism for the board. The proposal, made without consulting any of the African-American members of the school board, was found to be an 'exact replica' of an earlier voting scheme that, a federal court had determined, violated the VRA…DOJ invoked §5 to block the proposal."


• "In 1993, the City of Millen, Georgia, proposed to delay the election in a majority-black district by two years, leaving that district without representation on the city council while the neighboring majority white district would have three representatives…DOJ blocked the proposal. The county then sought to move a polling place from a predominantly black neighborhood in the city to an inaccessible location in a predominantly white neighborhood outside city limits."


• "In 2004, Waller County, Texas, threatened to prosecute two black students after they announced their intention to run for office. The county then attempted to reduce the avail ability of early voting in that election at polling places near a historically black university."


• "In 1990, Dallas County, Alabama, whose county seat is the City of Selma, sought to purge its voter rolls of many black voters. DOJ rejected the purge as discriminatory, noting that it would have disqualified many citizens from voting 'simply because they failed to pick up or return a voter update form, when there was no valid requirement that they do so.'"

Noam Chomsky:

The advertising industry is a huge industry, and anyone with their eyes open can see what it's for. First of all, the existence of the advertising industry is a sign of the unwillingness to let markets function. If you had markets, you wouldn't have advertising. Like, if somebody has something to sell, they say what it is and you buy it if you want. But when you have oligopolies, they want to stop price wars. They have to have product differentiation, and you got to turn to deluding people into thinking you should buy this rather than that. Or just getting them to consume - if you can get them to consume, they're trapped, you know.

It starts with the infant, but now there's a huge part of the advertising industry which is designed to capture children. And it's destroying childhood. Anyone who has any experience with children can see this. It's literally destroying childhood. Kids don't know how to play. They can't go out and, you know, like when you were a kid or when I was a kid, you have a Saturday afternoon free. You go out to a field and you're finding a bunch of other kids and play ball or something. You can't do anything like that. It's got to be organized by adults, or else you're at home with your gadgets, your video games.

But the idea of going out just to play with all the creative challenge, those insights: that's gone. And it's done consciously to trap children from infancy and then to turn them into consumer addicts. And that means you're out for yourself. You got the Ayn Rand kind of sociopathic behavior, which comes straight out of the consumer culture. Consumer culture means going out for myself; I don't give a damn about anyone else. I think it's really destroying society in a lot of ways. And education is part of it.

Zimmerman followed Trayvon, confronted him, and was punched in the nose, knocked flat on his back and jumped on, getting his head pounded, when he pulled his gun and fired. That Trayvon's body was found face down, not face up, would tend to support this. 

    

But, to Florida Congresswoman Federica Wilson, "this sweet young boy ... was hunted down like a dog, shot on the street, and his killer is still at large."

A strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) is a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.^[1]

The typical SLAPP plaintiff does not normally expect to win the lawsuit. The plaintiff's goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism. A SLAPP may also intimidate others from participating in the debate. A SLAPP is often preceded by a legal threat. The difficulty is that plaintiffs do not present themselves to the Court admitting that their intent is to censor, intimidate or silence their critics. Hence, the difficulty in drafting SLAPP legislation, and in applying it, is to craft an approach which affords an early termination to invalid abusive suits, without denying a legitimate day in court to valid good faith claims.

SLAPPs take various forms. The most common used to be a civil suit for defamation, which in the English common law tradition was atort. The common law of libel dates to the early 17th century and (unusual in English law) is reverse onus, meaning, once someone alleges a statement is libelous, the burden was on the defendant to prove that it is not. The Defamation Act 2013 removed most of the uses of defamation as a SLAPP in the United Kingdom by requiring the proof of special damage. Various abusive uses of this law including political libel (criticism of the political actions or views of others) have ceased to exist in most places, but persist in some jurisdictions (notably British Columbia and Ontario) where political views can be held as defamatory. A common feature of SLAPP suits is forum shopping, wherein plaintiffs find courts that are more favourable towards the claims to be brought than the court in which the defendant (or sometimes plaintiffs) live.

Nothing more to say:

There is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise ... without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

---- Thomas Jefferson

This little snapshot story simply puts an end to whatever Chomsky was saying. We were ready to commit troops to force Japan's surrender.  It's not rocket science.  Right or wrong, a costly invasion was ready to go. 

The news from Afghanistan is hardly the first time the United States has scrapped military hardware on an industrial level. After World War II, a similar (and far more aggressive) scrapping took place. My own grandfather was in the Merchant Marine in August 1945, bound for the Philippines with a ship full of M4 Sherman tanks destined for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. When the ship learned of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the unconditional surrender, they were ordered to dump the tanks into the ocean and head home. Because it was cheaper than transporting them to the Philippines.

All that's left is Nagasaki. Probably a horrible miscalculation. Admit it if that's the case. we should have waited 24 hours.  No excuse. Too bad. Shit happens.  Human beings are pretty fucked up. Or am I missing something?  24 hours. 

One of Samsung’s biggest additions to their ES8000 Smart TV this year is gesture control. Gesture control is activated by waving your hand in front of the television, then moving your hand to control the on-screen cursor. Selecting menu items and adjusting volume and other settings is handled by opening and closing your fist. Keeping your fist clenched will continually adjust the volume until you open your hand again. Web browser navigation can also be done by using your hand. Moving the cursor to the top or the bottom of the screen scrolls, while turning your hand in a counter-clockwise motion activates page back.

"It has served us well, this myth of Christ." - Pope Leo X

"It has served us well, this myth of Christ." - Pope Leo X

1. Joel: A very powerful quote by Barry Goldwater.

   There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.

   37 minutes ago

In particular, we’re stuck with the political inequalities built into the U.S. Senate, which have grown more grotesque with time. In 1789, the population ratio between the most and least populous state was 11 to one. Now it’s 66 to one. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton absolutely hated the idea that each state should be entitled to the same number of senators regardless of size. Hamilton was withering on the topic. “As states are a collection of individual men,” he harangued his fellow-delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, “which ought we to respect most, the rights of the people composing them, or of the artificial beings resulting from the composition? Nothing could be more preposterous or absurd than to sacrifice the former to the latter.” In the end, he and Madison accepted the deal only because without it the pipsqueak states like Rhode Island would have bolted. It gets worse. In the Constitution’s Article V, the one outlining the process for amendments, only one type of amendment is absolutely forbidden: “[N]o State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”

Reach out and touch faith

Your own personal Jesus

Someone to hear your prayers

Someone who cares

Your own personal Jesus

Someone to hear your prayers

Someone who's there

Feeling unknown

And you're all alone

Flesh and bone

By the telephone

Lift up the receiver

I'll make you a believer

Take second best

Put me to the test

Things on your chest

You need to confess

I will deliver

You know I'm a forgiver

Reach out and touch faith

Reach out and touch faith

Your own personal Jesus

Someone to hear your prayers

Someone who cares

Your own personal Jesus

Someone to hear your prayers

Someone who's there

Feeling unknown

And you're all alone

Flesh and bone

By the telephone

Lift up the receiver

I'll make you a believer

I will deliver

You know I'm a forgiver

Reach out and touch faith

Your own personal Jesus

Reach out and touch faith

PLAYBOY: Assume there is a god and you were given the chance to ask him one question. What would it be?

DAWKINS: I’d ask, “Why did you go to such lengths to hide yourself?”

PLAYBOY: Do you have any deeply religious friends?

DAWKINS: No. It’s not that I shun them; it’s that the circles I move in tend to be educated, intelligent circles, and there aren’t any religious people among them that I know of. I’m friendly with some bishops and vicars who kind of believe in something and enjoy the music and the stained glass.

PLAYBOY: Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking reference God in their writings. Are they using the word in the sense of an intelligent designer?

DAWKINS: Certainly not. They use god in a poetic, metaphorical sense. Einstein in particular loved using the word to convey an idea of mystery, which I think all decent scientists do. But nowadays we’ve learned better than to use the word god because it will be willfully misunderstood, as Einstein was. And poor Einstein got quite cross about it. “I do not believe in a personal god,” he said over and over again. In a way he was asking for it. Hawking uses it in a similar way in A Brief History of Time. In his famous last line he says that if we understood the universe, “then we would know the mind of God.” Once again he is using god in the Einsteinian, not the religious sense.

PLAYBOY: You’ve made the point that if Jesus existed and went to his death as described in the Bible, it was, as you put it, “barking mad.”
DAWKINS: There’s no evidence Jesus himself was barking mad, but the doctrine invented later by Paul that Jesus died for our sins surely is. It’s a truly disgusting idea that the creator of the universe—capable of inventing the laws of physics and designing the evolutionary process—that this protégé of supernatural intellect couldn’t think of a better way to forgive our sins than to have himself tortured to death. And what a terrible lesson to say we’re born in sin because of the original sin of Adam, a man even the Catholic Church now says never existed.

PLAYBOY: We hear constantly that America is a Christian nation and that the founding fathers were all Christians.
DAWKINS: They were deists. They didn’t believe in a personal god, or one who interferes in human affairs. And they were adamant that they did not want to found the United States as a Christian nation.

PLAYBOY: But you hear quite often that if you let atheists run things you end up with Hitler and Stalin.
DAWKINS: Hitler wasn’t an atheist; he was a Roman Catholic. But I don’t care what he was. There is no logical connection between atheism and doing bad things, nor good things for that matter. It’s a philosophical belief about the absence of a creative intelligence in the world. Anybody who thinks you need religion in order to be good is being good for the wrong reason. I’d rather be good for moral reasons. Morals were here before religion, and morals change rather rapidly in spite of religion. Even people who rely on the Bible use nonbiblical criteria. If your criteria are scriptural, you have no basis for choosing the verse that says turn the other cheek rather than the verse that says stone people to death. So you pick and choose without guidance from the Bible.
PLAYBOY: You’ve said that science is losing the war with religion.
DAWKINS: Did I say we were losing? I was just having an off day.
PLAYBOY: You are surprised science is still being challenged.
DAWKINS: I am surprised, but I’m not sure it’s a losing battle. If you take the long view of centuries, there’s an upward trend. Religious people like to point out that Isaac Newton was religious. Well, of course he was—he lived before Darwin. It would have been difficult to be an atheist before Darwin.
PLAYBOY: You might have been the guy who didn’t believe in Zeus.
DAWKINS: I would have been skeptical of the details of Zeus hurling thunderbolts, but I probably would have believed in some supernatural being. When you look around at the living world and see the complexity of a cell and the elegance of a tree—“I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree. / Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree”—I would have been moved by that. Darwin changed all that. He provided a simple, explicable, workable story about how you can get the complexity not just of a tree but of a human by physics working through the rather special process of evolution by natural selection. If only Newton had been alive to be told about that.
PLAYBOY: The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould viewed science and religion as——
DAWKINS: Non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA.
PLAYBOY: Completely separate.
DAWKINS: That’s pure politics. Gould was trying to win battles in the creation-evolution debate by saying to religious people, “You don’t have to worry. Evolution is religion-friendly.” And the only way he could think to do that was to say they occupy separate domains. But he overgenerously handed the domains of morals and fundamental questions to religion, which is the last thing you should do. Science cannot at present—maybe never—answer the deep questions about existence and the origins of the fundamental laws of nature. But what on earth makes you think religion can? If science can’t provide an answer, nothing can.
PLAYBOY: Some scientists say that you should stop talking about atheism because it muddies the waters in the debate over evolution.
DAWKINS: If what you’re trying to do is win the tactical battle in U.S. schools, you’re better off lying and saying evolution is religion-friendly. I don’t wish to condemn people who lie for tactical reasons, but I don’t want to do that. For me, this is only a skirmish in the larger war against irrationality.
PLAYBOY: You’ve said that if science and religion are truly NOMA, Christians must give up their belief in miracles.
DAWKINS: Absolutely. Miracles are a naked encroachment on science’s turf. If you ask people in the pew or on the prayer mat why they believe in God, it will always involve miracles, including the miracle of creation. If you don’t allow religion to have that, you’ve removed the reason just about everybody who is religious is religious.
PLAYBOY: Do you get discouraged by the continuing attacks on reason?
DAWKINS: No. I go on the internet quite a lot and read what young people are saying. I see a great upsurge of good sense, rationality, irreverence. America is split into halves. There’s the Sarah Palin know-nothing idiots on the one hand, and then there’s a huge number of intellectual, intelligent, educated people on the other. I find it hard to believe that the Stone Age types are going to win in the end. An awful lot of people who call themselves religious simply don’t know there’s any alternative. If you probe what they believe, it turns out to be pretty much the same—we all have a sense of wonder and reverence at the majesty of the universe.

According to Einstein, volition or free will, initiative and effort had NOTHING to do with his rise to great fame and fortune. It was DNA and the usual effort and hard work that just being a healthy person entails.  

Here's the Protestant Calvinist version of free will.  There isn't any. If god chooses you for earthly riches and admiration and success and happiness,  you are elected .  You don't earn it, you don't deserve it.    it's called election.  

Life is unfair.  

One of the most common objections to my position on free will is that accepting it could have terrible consequences, psychologically or socially. This is a strange rejoinder, analogous to what many religious people allege against atheism: Without a belief in God, human beings will cease to be good to one another. Both responses abandon any pretense of caring about what is true and merely change the subject. But that does not mean we should never worry about the practical effects of holding specific beliefs.

I can well imagine that some people might use the nonexistence of free will as a pretext for doing whatever they want, assuming that it’s pointless to resist temptation or that there’s no difference between good and evil. This is a misunderstanding of the situation, but, I admit, a possible one. There is also the question of how we should raise children in light of what science tells us about the nature of the human mind. It seems doubtful that a lecture on the illusoriness of free will should be part of an elementary school curriculum.

While political party affiliation in the United States is not a perfect indicator of religiosity, it is no secret that the 'red [Republican] states' are primarily red due to the overwhelming political influence of conservative Christians. If there were a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and societal health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don't. Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in 'blue' [Democrat] states, and 38 percent are in 'red' [Republican] states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, and 24 percent are in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the U.S. are in the pious state of Texas. The twelve states with the highest rates of burglary are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rates of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with the highest rates of murder, seventeen are red.*