My view on why “GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE” is flawed:
The reason why “Guns don’t kill people, People kill people” doesn’t work is because ‘People’ get drunk, ‘People’ get high, ‘People’ get emotional, ‘People’ get scared or ‘People’ get insane. (Or all of the above simultaneously) This leads to slaughter, carnage and pain (as well as many many many accidents). From my perspective, it seems that those standing on the right, or standing on a God Book, seem to be in denial of the above fact, and presume everyone to be somehow completely functional, all of the time, and somehow completely perfectional, all of the time. A society based on this flawed logic is distrustful and frightening. (and tragic from a Humanist perspective)
-rudhro
[VIDEO] HISTORY’S FORGOTTEN PHILOSOPHER KING OF PRUSSIA: FREDERICK THE GREAT
What a life. What a story. What a tragedy that he is now lost to history due to Nazi propaganda…
If only we had such leaders today.
written by Amanda Kay McVety
Frederick the Great remains one of the most famous German rulers of all time for his military successes and his domestic reforms that made Prussia one of the leading European nations. Frederick II (the Great) was king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, and he stands as one of the greatest of the Enlightened Despots. He was an absolute ruler, but he lived under the principle that he was the “first servant of the state.” He consequently did not rule by his own personal whims, but always under the guidance of what was most beneficial for Prussia, and he expected his people to possess the same devotion. Frederick devoted himself to building Prussia into a strong state and that meant both expansion and reform. When Frederick saw a chance to unify his kingdom geographically by taking over the Austrian province of Silesia, he quickly planned an invasion. This action went against an established treaty, but Frederick argued that agreements between nations became void when it was no longer beneficial to the state for them to exist. During the Seven Years War, Frederick successfully resisted opposition from France, Russia, and Austria despite a much smaller pool of resources. It was his military genius that saved his country and brought Prussia out of the war stronger than she had been before entering it. As king, Frederick issued a series of domestic reforms that modernized Prussia and built her up from within. He continued the work of his predecessors to consolidate power by giving the territorial princes a place in the governmental bureaucracy. He established universal religious toleration and granted freedom of the press. He established individual protections against the law by speeding up the legal process, abolishing torture, and making sentences of death legal only with his personal sanction. Prussian judges were educated and the courts gained a reputation as the most honest in Europe. He established the first German law code and enforced general education rules across Prussia. Frederick financed the rebuilding of towns through agricultural reforms and built thousands of miles of roads. Frederick built Prussia into one of the strongest nations in Europe and left a legacy of absolute devotion to the fatherland that continued to shape German history into the 20th century.
written by Amanda Kay McVety
Sources: Durant, Will and Ariel. The Story of Civilization: Part X. Rousseau and Revolution New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Ritter, Gerhard. Frederick the Great: A Historical Profile. Trans. Peter Paret. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Woloch, Isser. Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress, 1715-1789. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982.
THE EARTH AS VIEWED FROM A SPACECRAFT ON ITS WAY TO JUPITER
“Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right) as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on Aug. 26, 2011, when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million km) away. The photo was taken by the spacecraft’s onboard camera, JunoCam.” – NASA
Somewhere out there in the vast nothingness of space,
Somewhere far away in space and time,
Staring upward at the gleaming stars in the obsidian sky,
We’re marooned on a small island, in an endless sea
Confined to a tiny spit of sand, unable to escape,
But tonight, on this small planet, on earth
We’re going to rock civilization…
– Lyrics from “Prelude/Slam,” Pendulum
A NASA spacecraft cruising toward Jupiter glanced back and snapped a rare picture of Earth and the moon. Taken last week when Juno was 6,000,000 miles away, the image shows two white dots, one brighter than the other.
The solar-powered Juno blasted off earlier this month on a five-year journey to Jupiter. Though previous craft have visited the giant gas planet, Juno will get closer than ever before, flying within 3,100 miles of the dense cloud tops to learn more about Jupiter’s origins.
The $1.1 billion mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
“This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely,” said Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in a statement. “This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves.”
–news.discovery.com
[VIDEO] SO WE’VE HAD NAKED NEWS, FOX NEWS, THE COLBERT REPORT, AND THE DAILY SHOW–BUT HAVE YOU SEEN THE “RAP NEWS”? LIKE A TRUTH INJECTION TO THE BRAIN…
These videos may be the most incredible thing i’ve discovered online…(click under the first video to see the others–they get better each time–episode 9 is my favourite)
Daughter of ‘Dirty War,’ Raised by Man Who Killed Her Parents
Victoria Montenegro was abducted as a newborn by a military colonel. She testified last spring in the trial over baby thefts.
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
October 8, 2011
BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.
It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.
Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said. (more…)
[AUDIO] “OBAMA WAS NOTHING BUT A BRAND”: CHRIS HEDGES IN CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL ENRIGHT ON CBC RADIO’S SUNDAY EDITION: A COHERENT EXPLANATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF THE ‘OCCUPY WALL STREET’ MOVEMENT
HEDGES @ 8:30
CHRIS HEDGES
“It was the night that hope was re-born, Nov. 4th, 2008, Grant Park, Chicago.
That night the young President-elect told his country that everything was possible.
But one year from the next election, the fate of Barack Obama and his country is in serious doubt.
The U.S. teeters on the cusp of another recession; unemployment is up; home foreclosure rates are up; political dialogue is as divisive and diabolical as ever; the war on terror and resultant infringement of civil rights continue unabated.
For the writer and journalist Chris Hedges it is a time when hope turns to ashes in the mouth.
His all-consuming fear is that it is fast becoming too late to turn things around.”
–Michael Enright
_____________
After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck With Nietzsche — By Chris Hedges
CHRIS HEDGES: This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us
[VIDEO] CBC’s Kevin O’Leary to NYT’s Chris Hedges: “You sound like a left wing nutbar”
BBC: THE STORY OF INDIA – written and presented by historian Michael Wood
This was one of the best BBC documentaries I’ve ever seen, reminiscent of PLANET EARTH and just as in depth and in vivid colour, but rather than the natural world, it focuses on the civilizations that occupied the subcontinent since the time of the first humans to leave Africa. Superb–and I’m not merely saying that due to a DNA connection, I would have enjoyed this were it from any corner of the world. This is an intense study of the history of mankind, and the journey we’ve all taken thus far.
–rudhro
The Story of India is a BBC TV documentary series, written and presented by historian Michael Wood, about the 10,000-year history of the Indian subcontinent in six episodes.
An accompanying text was published by BBC Books.
As in most of his documentaries, Wood explains historical events by travelling to the places where they took place, examining archeological and historical evidence at first hand and interviewing historians and archaeologists, as well as chatting with local people. (more…)
Noam Chomsky on the Dangers of American Empire and Why the US Continues to be Bin Laden’s Best Ally
We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1st, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo.
A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. “He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” Eric Margolis writes. “‘Bleeding the U.S.,’ in his words.” The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap… Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction… may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States” (more…)
[VIDEO] I LOVE THIS SONG – “Syrian protest song that killed its writer: When Syrian musician Ibrahim Qashoush began singing his protest song calling on Bashar al-Assad to leave the country he could not have realised it would cost him his life.”
Alastair Good
10 Jul 2011
The lyrics to the song are simple, the meaning clear “It’s time to leave, Bashar,” its lyrics go. “Freedom is near.”
But according to a video circulating widely online, Mr Qashoush was found with his throat slit floating in the River Orontes in his home-town, Hama.
Hama has been the scene of large protests against the regime of President Assad and the Syrian leader has sent tanks and troops to quell the dissent.
In singing his song to crowds that gathered there, Qashoush made himself a target for the Syrian security forces who, local dissidents have confirmed, silenced him forever.
[FILM] Woody Allen’s response to the Norwegian Psycho – ‘Midnight in Paris’: The moral lesson against romanticizing the past
RUDHROISM
Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris entreats us to live in the present. To obsessively, sentimentally or romantically look to times past is fraught with biases in perspection, the film shows. If one considers the 1920s in Paris as the greatest time to have been alive, the people living in that present may have thought it the 1890s which were even better…and those of the 1890s may have leaned more toward the French Revolution.
In short, none of us may perceive the present as exhibiting the ‘magic’ they may read into earlier times, prior to their birth.
I think I realized something similar regarding the Sixties–the most recent ‘magic’ time we are recounted of. Greenwich Village, the poets, the rockers, the thinkers, and the protests. Was it really, though, any different then as it is today? Were contemporaneous people AWARE of the ‘magic’? Potentially not. They themselves may have in turn longed for earlier, ‘simpler’, more romantic times.
As I watched this film something occurred to me about the Norway massacre of a few days past. What Anders Behring Breivik was perhaps seeking was a return to his conceptualized ‘romanticized past’–before colonialization, before globalization, before immigration, before the world became so small, and before tribal identities were potentially perceived as ‘endangered’ due to one’s fear of dilution, segmentization and diminishment of what it meant to identify with one’s clansmen. (more…)
[VIDEO] BETWEEN GANDHI AND HITLER –> NETAJI SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE
This guy experienced more global intrigue than James Bond.
Sunday , June 5 , 2011
Excerpted with the permission of Penguin Books India from His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire by Sugata Bose
|
To Emilie, with love
|
|
| That Subhas Chandra Bose met and fell in love with Austrian Emilie Schenkl in Vienna in the 1930s is well documented. But in a new book on his granduncle, historian Sugata Bose explains why they chose to keep their relationship and marriage a closely guarded secret. Despite the ‘enormous, intense’ love that Bose felt for Schenkl, his ‘first love’ was his country. An extract | |
 WIFE AND DAUGHTER: Emilie and Anita, November 1948. Courtesy: Netaji Research Bureau From the second week of June 1934, [Subhas Chandra] Bose settled down in Vienna, since he had a contract from the publishing company Wishart to write a book on the Indian struggle since 1920. In the course of looking for clerical help with preparing the manuscript Subhas met a woman who would bring about a dramatic change in his personal life… It was June 24, 1934. A petite and pretty young woman named Emilie Schenkl arrived to be interviewed for the clerical job. Born on December 26, 1910, to an Austrian Catholic family, she knew English, could take dictation in shorthand and had competent typing skills. Jobs were scarce during the Depression. Her father, a veterinarian, was initially somewhat reluctant to let his daughter work for a strange Indian man, but in time her whole family — father, mother and sister — developed a warm relationship with Subhas. Emilie had a gentle, cheerful, straightforward and unselfish nature, which Su-bhas found appealing. He came to respect her strength of will and affectionately called her “Baghini” meaning “Tigress” in Bengali. “He started it,” Emilie states categorically about the romantic turn in their relationship. Their intimacy grew as they spent time together in Austria and Czechoslovakia from mid-1934 to March 1936… Subhas Chandra Bose, according to his close friend and political associate A.C.N. Nambiar, was a “one-idea man: singly for the independence of India.” “I think the only departure,” he adds, “if one might use the word ‘departure’, was his love for Miss Schenkl; otherwise he was completely absorbed. He was deeply in love with her, you see. In fact, it was an enormous, intense love.” … (more…) |
“According to the French intellectual and scholar Francois Burgat, there are two main types of intellectuals tasked with explaining the “other” to Westerners. He and Bourdieu describe the “negative intellectual” who aligns his beliefs and priorities with those of the state and centers his perspective on serving the interest of power and gaining proximity to it. And secondly, there is what Burgat terms as “the façade intellectual,” whose role in society is to confirm to Western audiences their already-held notions, beliefs, preconceptions, and racisms regarding the “other.” Journalists writing for the mainstream media, as well as their local interlocutors, often fall into both categories.”
WRITTEN BY Nir Rosen
I’ve spent most of the last eight years working in Iraq and also in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other countries in the Muslim world. So all my work has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror and has in fact been thanks to this war, even if I’ve labored to disprove the underlying premises of this war. In a way my work has still served to support the narrative. I once asked my editor at the New York Times Magazine if I could write about a subject outside the Muslim world. He said even if I was fluent in Spanish and an expert on Latin America I wouldn’t be published if it wasn’t about jihad.
Too often consumers of mainstream media are victims of a fraud. You think you can trust the articles you read, why wouldn’t you, you think you can sift through the ideological bias and just get the facts. But you don’t know the ingredients that go into the product you buy. It is important to understand how knowledge about current events in the Middle East is produced before relying on it. Even when there are no apparent ideological biases such as those one often sees when it comes to reporting about Israel, there are fundamental problems at the epistemological and methodological level. These create distortions and falsehoods and justify the narrative of those with power. (more…)
Maȟpíya Lúta
“Red Cloud (Lakota: Maȟpíya Lúta), (1822 – December 10, 1909) was a war leader and the head Chief of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux). His reign was from 1868 to 1909. One of the most capable Native American opponents the United States Army faced, he led a successful conflict in 1866–1868 known as Red Cloud’s War over control of the Powder River Country in northwestern Wyoming and southern Montana. After the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), he led his people in the important transition to reservation life. Some of his US opponents thought of him as overall leader of the Sioux, but this was mistaken. The large tribe had several major divisions and was highly decentralized. Bands among the Oglala and other divisions operated independently, even though some individual leaders such as Red Cloud were renowned as warriors.” –wikipedia
CHRIS HEDGES: This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us
“Human beings seem cursed to repeat these cycles of exploitation and collapse. And the greater the extent of the deterioration the less they are able to comprehend what is happening around them. The Earth is littered with the physical remains of human folly and human hubris. We seem condemned as a species to drive ourselves and our societies toward extinction, although this moment appears be the denouement to the whole sad show of settled, civilized life that began some 5,000 years ago. There is nothing left on the planet to seize. We are now spending down the last remnants of our natural capital, including our forests, fossil fuel, air and water.”
[VIDEO] Tenochtitlán: The Lost World of the Meshika/Mexica – ‘Aztecs’
Richard Hooker
Washington State University
It is not unfair to say that Aztec culture was overwhelmingly eschatological in a way that can only be rivalled by early Christianity. The Aztecs, like the Mayans, believed that the universe had been created five times and destroyed four times; each of these five eras was called a Sun. The first age was called Four Ocelot (for it began on the date called Four Ocelot). Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror) dominated the universe and eventually became the sun disk. The world was destroyed by jaguars. The second age was Four Wind, dominated by Quetzalcoatl (Sovereign Plumed Serpent); men were turned to monkeys and the world was destroyed by hurricanes and tempests. The third age was Four Rain, dominated by Tlaloc (the rain god); the world was destroyed by a rain of fire. The fourth era was Four Water and was dominated by Chalchihuitlicue (Woman with the Turquoise Skirt); the world was destroyed by a flood. The fifth era, the one we live in now, is Four Earthquake, and is dominated by Tonatiuh, the Sun-God. This age will end in earthquakes.
es·cha·tol·o·gy (
s
k
-t
l
)
n.
1. The branch of theology that is concerned with the end of the world or of humankind.
2. A belief or a doctrine concerning the ultimate or final things, such as death, the destiny of humanity, the Second Coming, or the Last Judgment.
From ‘End of History’ Author, Francis Fukuyama, a Look at the Beginning and Middle
By NICHOLAS WADE
March 7, 2011
Human social behavior has an evolutionary basis. This was the thesis in Edward O. Wilson’s book “Sociobiology” that caused such a stir, even though most evolutionary biologists accept that at least some social behaviors, like altruism, could be favored by natural selection
In a book to be published in April, “The Origins of Political Order,”Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University presents a sweeping new overview of human social structures throughout history, taking over from where Dr. Wilson’s ambitious synthesis left off.
Dr. Fukuyama, a political scientist, is concerned mostly with the cultural, not biological, aspects of human society. But he explicitly assumes that human social nature is universal and is built around certain evolved behaviors like favoring relatives, reciprocal altruism, creating and following rules, and a propensity for warfare.
Because of this shared human nature, with its biological foundation, “human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures,” he writes. It is these worldwide patterns he seeks to describe in an analysis that stretches from prehistoric times to the French Revolution. (more…)
