Saturday, September 13, 2008
State of Power...
To believe that everyone should think and believe like you is immature and very Hitleresque. We all have different values in our life, sooner or later those values begin to clash. Right now we solve it by proving whose right and oppressing the values of whose wrong. But wouldn't it be nice if we could move where the local values fit more like our own, while still remaining under the same system? That way, if you're for marijuana, you won't get upset when your neighbor sits on his front porch smoking a big fatty.
Don't forget, America is built on the idea of freedom, not the oppression of he who is wrong.
Don't forget, America is built on the idea of freedom, not the oppression of he who is wrong.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Torture, right or wrong?
I was recently posed the question of whether or not torture in Iraq was wrong. After a great deal of comparing real information with misinformation that could be devised from torture I came up with a question of greater significance.
All I know is that when military action is dictated by popular opinion, the military is almost always defeated. Popular/Mob mentality is never rational when it comes to the military and tactics. The average person is all about instant gratification and adversely tactics are all about patients. Personally I think the largest hindrance to US efforts abroad is interference by the American people. Could the US have won VietNam? Of course. If it hadn't been for leaders being more concerned about their own popularity then the outcome of the war, the US could have crushed the communist North Vietnamees and the world would be a different place. But that was not to be.
If the people of Rome had stayed out of military dealings during the Second Punic War and allowed Fabius to defeat Hannibal they wouldn't have been completely crushed at Cannae. Fabius knew Hannabal was the better general when Hannibal was able to choose his own battle field. Unfortunately the people saw Fabius' tactics as indecisiveness instead of patients. If Fabius had been allowed to continue what the people chose him to do, it's my opinion that he would have defeated Hannibal long before Cannae as he nearly did at Campania. But instead popular opinion elected Marcus Vera consol in 216BC on the promise of a grand army crushing Hannibal once and for all. Because of that Rome suffered it's greatest defeat ever at Cannae. At Cannae the Romans had amassed an army of nearly 100,000 men to confront Hannibal's much smaller armyof around 25,000. In the end the Romans were routed with losses between 50,000 and 70,000 men. If it hadn't been for Hannabal's indecision after Cannae, Rome would have been no more.
Islam is not fighting a war of IUDs and bombs. It's fighting a war of popular opinion orchestrated by fundamentalist Islam and accessorized by the western media. They know if they can shift American popular opinion against the war that America will eventually be forced to pull out of Iraq by its own people. Use the ignorance of the people against themselves, what a brilliant tactic.
Is torture right or wrong? I don't know, I leave that to the philosophers to debate. The real question is, what did more harm to a favorable outcome in Iraq, the act torture itself or the fact that the media lambasted the population with the images of torture?
All I know is that when military action is dictated by popular opinion, the military is almost always defeated. Popular/Mob mentality is never rational when it comes to the military and tactics. The average person is all about instant gratification and adversely tactics are all about patients. Personally I think the largest hindrance to US efforts abroad is interference by the American people. Could the US have won VietNam? Of course. If it hadn't been for leaders being more concerned about their own popularity then the outcome of the war, the US could have crushed the communist North Vietnamees and the world would be a different place. But that was not to be.
If the people of Rome had stayed out of military dealings during the Second Punic War and allowed Fabius to defeat Hannibal they wouldn't have been completely crushed at Cannae. Fabius knew Hannabal was the better general when Hannibal was able to choose his own battle field. Unfortunately the people saw Fabius' tactics as indecisiveness instead of patients. If Fabius had been allowed to continue what the people chose him to do, it's my opinion that he would have defeated Hannibal long before Cannae as he nearly did at Campania. But instead popular opinion elected Marcus Vera consol in 216BC on the promise of a grand army crushing Hannibal once and for all. Because of that Rome suffered it's greatest defeat ever at Cannae. At Cannae the Romans had amassed an army of nearly 100,000 men to confront Hannibal's much smaller armyof around 25,000. In the end the Romans were routed with losses between 50,000 and 70,000 men. If it hadn't been for Hannabal's indecision after Cannae, Rome would have been no more.
Islam is not fighting a war of IUDs and bombs. It's fighting a war of popular opinion orchestrated by fundamentalist Islam and accessorized by the western media. They know if they can shift American popular opinion against the war that America will eventually be forced to pull out of Iraq by its own people. Use the ignorance of the people against themselves, what a brilliant tactic.
Is torture right or wrong? I don't know, I leave that to the philosophers to debate. The real question is, what did more harm to a favorable outcome in Iraq, the act torture itself or the fact that the media lambasted the population with the images of torture?
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
So True!
I know it's long, but everyone should read this.
By Dennis Prager
The day the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced, I said to my then-teenage son, "David, please forgive me. I am handing over to you a worse America than my father handed over to me."
Unfortunately, I still feel this way.
With the important exception of racial discrimination -- which was already dying a natural death when I was young -- it is difficult to come up with an important area in which America is significantly better than when I was a boy. But I can think of many in which its quality of life has deteriorated.
When I was a boy, America was a freer society than it is today. If Americans had been told the extent and number of laws that would govern their speech and behavior within one generation, they would have been certain that they were being told about some dictatorship, not the Land of the Free. Today, people at work, to cite but one example, are far less free to speak naturally. Every word, gesture and look, even one's illustrated calendar, is now monitored lest a fellow employee feel offended and bring charges of sexual harassment or creating a "hostile work environment" or being racially, religiously or ethnically insensitive, or insensitive to another's sexual orientation.
Meanwhile, all employers in California are now prohibited by law from firing a man who has decided to cross-dress at work. And needless to say, no fellow worker can say to that man, "Hey, Jack, why not wear the dress at home and men's clothes to work?" An employer interviewing a prospective employee is not free to ask the most natural human questions: Are you married? Do you have a child? How old are you? Soon "How are you?" will be banned lest one discriminate on the basis of health.
When I was boy, what people did at home was not their employer's business. Today, companies and city governments refuse to hire, and may fire, workers no matter how competent or healthy, who smoke in their homes. Sarasota, Fla., the latest city to invade people's private lives, would not hire Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy if they applied for a job.
When I was a 7-year-old boy, I flew alone from New York to my aunt and uncle in Miami and did the same thing coming back to New York. I boarded the plane on my own and got off the plane on my own. No papers for my parents to fill out. No extra fee to pay the airline. I was responsible for myself. Had I run away or been kidnapped, no one would have sued the airline. Today, fear of lawsuits is a dominant fact of American life.
When I was a boy, I ran after girls during recess, played dodgeball, climbed monkey bars and sat on seesaws. Today, more and more schools have no recess; have canceled dodgeball lest someone feel bad about being removed from the game; and call the police in to interrogate, even sometimes arrest, elementary school boys who playfully touch a girl. And monkey bars and seesaws are largely gone, for fear of lawsuits should a child be injured.
When I was boy, I was surrounded by adult men. Today, most American boys (and girls, of course) come into contact with no adult man all day every school day. Their teachers and school principals are all likely to be women. And if, as is often the case, there is no father at home (not solely because of divorce but because "family" courts have allowed many divorced mothers to remove fathers from their children's lives), boys almost never come into contact with the most important group of people in a boy's life -- adult men. The contemporary absence of men in boys' lives is not only unprecedented in American history; it is probably unprecedented in recorded history.
When I was a boy, we had in our lives adults who took pride in being adults. To distinguish them from our peers, we called these adults "Mr.," "Mrs." and "Miss," or by their titles, "Doctor," "Pastor," "Rabbi," "Father." It was good for us, and we liked it. Having adults proud of their adulthood, and not acting like they were still kids, gave us security (as well as something to look forward to in growing up). Today, kids are surrounded by peers twice, three, four times their age.
When I was a boy, the purpose of American history textbooks was to teach American history. Today, the purpose of most American history texts is to make minorities and females feel good about themselves. As a result, American kids today are deprived of the opportunity to feel good about being American (not to mention deprived of historical truth). They are encouraged to feel pride about all identities -- African-American, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay -- other than American.
When I was a teenage boy, getting to kiss a girl, let alone to touch her thigh or her breast (even over her clothes) was the thrill of a lifetime. Most of us could only dream of a day later on in life when oral sex would take place (a term most of us had never heard of). But of course, we were not raised by educators or parents who believed that "teenagers will have sex no matter what." Most of us rarely if ever saw a naked female in photos (the "dirty pictures" we got a chance to look at never showed "everything"), let alone in movies or in real life. We were, in short, allowed to be relatively innocent. And even without sex education and condom placement classes, few of us ever got a girl pregnant.
When I was a boy, "I Love Lucy" showed two separate beds in Lucy and Ricky's bedroom -- and they were a married couple. Today, MTV and most TV saturate viewers' lives with sexual imagery and sexual talk, virtually all of which is loveless and, of course, non-marital.
When I was boy, people dressed up to go to baseball games, visit the doctor and travel on airplanes. Today, people don't dress up even for church.
When I was a boy, Time and Newsweek were well written and relied little on pictures and illustrations. Today, those magazines often look like adult comic books by comparison. They are filled with large illustrations and photos, and they dumb down the news with features like "Winners and Losers" and "Who's Up and Who's Down." And when I was a boy, it would have been inconceivable for Time to substitute anything, let alone a tree, for the flag planted by the marines on Iwo Jima.
One might argue that these are the same laments that every previous older generation has expressed -- "Ah, when I was young" But in America, that has not been the case. In America, the older generations tended to say the opposite -- "When I was a kid, things were worse."
Can we return to the America of my youth? No. Can we return to the best values of that time? Yes. But not if both houses of Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court move the country even further leftward. If that happens, many of the above noted changes will simply be accelerated: More laws restricting "offensive" speech will be enacted; litigation will increase and trial lawyers will gain more power; the American military will be less valued; trees will gradually replace the flag as our most venerated symbol; schools will teach even less as they concentrate even more on diversity, sexuality and the environment; teenage sex will be increasingly accepted; American identity will continue to be replaced by ethnic, racial, gender or "world citizen" identity; and the power of the state will expand further as the power of the individual inevitably contracts. It's hard to believe most Americans really want that.
By Dennis Prager
The day the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced, I said to my then-teenage son, "David, please forgive me. I am handing over to you a worse America than my father handed over to me."
Unfortunately, I still feel this way.
With the important exception of racial discrimination -- which was already dying a natural death when I was young -- it is difficult to come up with an important area in which America is significantly better than when I was a boy. But I can think of many in which its quality of life has deteriorated.
When I was a boy, America was a freer society than it is today. If Americans had been told the extent and number of laws that would govern their speech and behavior within one generation, they would have been certain that they were being told about some dictatorship, not the Land of the Free. Today, people at work, to cite but one example, are far less free to speak naturally. Every word, gesture and look, even one's illustrated calendar, is now monitored lest a fellow employee feel offended and bring charges of sexual harassment or creating a "hostile work environment" or being racially, religiously or ethnically insensitive, or insensitive to another's sexual orientation.
Meanwhile, all employers in California are now prohibited by law from firing a man who has decided to cross-dress at work. And needless to say, no fellow worker can say to that man, "Hey, Jack, why not wear the dress at home and men's clothes to work?" An employer interviewing a prospective employee is not free to ask the most natural human questions: Are you married? Do you have a child? How old are you? Soon "How are you?" will be banned lest one discriminate on the basis of health.
When I was boy, what people did at home was not their employer's business. Today, companies and city governments refuse to hire, and may fire, workers no matter how competent or healthy, who smoke in their homes. Sarasota, Fla., the latest city to invade people's private lives, would not hire Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy if they applied for a job.
When I was a 7-year-old boy, I flew alone from New York to my aunt and uncle in Miami and did the same thing coming back to New York. I boarded the plane on my own and got off the plane on my own. No papers for my parents to fill out. No extra fee to pay the airline. I was responsible for myself. Had I run away or been kidnapped, no one would have sued the airline. Today, fear of lawsuits is a dominant fact of American life.
When I was a boy, I ran after girls during recess, played dodgeball, climbed monkey bars and sat on seesaws. Today, more and more schools have no recess; have canceled dodgeball lest someone feel bad about being removed from the game; and call the police in to interrogate, even sometimes arrest, elementary school boys who playfully touch a girl. And monkey bars and seesaws are largely gone, for fear of lawsuits should a child be injured.
When I was boy, I was surrounded by adult men. Today, most American boys (and girls, of course) come into contact with no adult man all day every school day. Their teachers and school principals are all likely to be women. And if, as is often the case, there is no father at home (not solely because of divorce but because "family" courts have allowed many divorced mothers to remove fathers from their children's lives), boys almost never come into contact with the most important group of people in a boy's life -- adult men. The contemporary absence of men in boys' lives is not only unprecedented in American history; it is probably unprecedented in recorded history.
When I was a boy, we had in our lives adults who took pride in being adults. To distinguish them from our peers, we called these adults "Mr.," "Mrs." and "Miss," or by their titles, "Doctor," "Pastor," "Rabbi," "Father." It was good for us, and we liked it. Having adults proud of their adulthood, and not acting like they were still kids, gave us security (as well as something to look forward to in growing up). Today, kids are surrounded by peers twice, three, four times their age.
When I was a boy, the purpose of American history textbooks was to teach American history. Today, the purpose of most American history texts is to make minorities and females feel good about themselves. As a result, American kids today are deprived of the opportunity to feel good about being American (not to mention deprived of historical truth). They are encouraged to feel pride about all identities -- African-American, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay -- other than American.
When I was a teenage boy, getting to kiss a girl, let alone to touch her thigh or her breast (even over her clothes) was the thrill of a lifetime. Most of us could only dream of a day later on in life when oral sex would take place (a term most of us had never heard of). But of course, we were not raised by educators or parents who believed that "teenagers will have sex no matter what." Most of us rarely if ever saw a naked female in photos (the "dirty pictures" we got a chance to look at never showed "everything"), let alone in movies or in real life. We were, in short, allowed to be relatively innocent. And even without sex education and condom placement classes, few of us ever got a girl pregnant.
When I was a boy, "I Love Lucy" showed two separate beds in Lucy and Ricky's bedroom -- and they were a married couple. Today, MTV and most TV saturate viewers' lives with sexual imagery and sexual talk, virtually all of which is loveless and, of course, non-marital.
When I was boy, people dressed up to go to baseball games, visit the doctor and travel on airplanes. Today, people don't dress up even for church.
When I was a boy, Time and Newsweek were well written and relied little on pictures and illustrations. Today, those magazines often look like adult comic books by comparison. They are filled with large illustrations and photos, and they dumb down the news with features like "Winners and Losers" and "Who's Up and Who's Down." And when I was a boy, it would have been inconceivable for Time to substitute anything, let alone a tree, for the flag planted by the marines on Iwo Jima.
One might argue that these are the same laments that every previous older generation has expressed -- "Ah, when I was young" But in America, that has not been the case. In America, the older generations tended to say the opposite -- "When I was a kid, things were worse."
Can we return to the America of my youth? No. Can we return to the best values of that time? Yes. But not if both houses of Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court move the country even further leftward. If that happens, many of the above noted changes will simply be accelerated: More laws restricting "offensive" speech will be enacted; litigation will increase and trial lawyers will gain more power; the American military will be less valued; trees will gradually replace the flag as our most venerated symbol; schools will teach even less as they concentrate even more on diversity, sexuality and the environment; teenage sex will be increasingly accepted; American identity will continue to be replaced by ethnic, racial, gender or "world citizen" identity; and the power of the state will expand further as the power of the individual inevitably contracts. It's hard to believe most Americans really want that.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Problem 7 with America - Appitite
We eat pure shit!
People, you're fueling your body with manufactured chemical crap!
An Exerpt from The North American Diet
The food industry aims at making products look and taste appealing without thought to the products' nutritional value. Loaded with chemical additives and designed to be addictive, processed food is manufactured first for profit.
All great chefs will tell you that the tangy flavor of lemon juice is a must in enhancing and lifting the taste of fish. In fact, lemon juice is widely used to compliment a variety of popular dishes. But to cut cost and for the sake of convenience, manufacturers have replaced lemon juice with 2-methyl-3-(pisopropylphenyl)-propionaldehyde. An unpronounceable name to add to the estimated three thousand chemical additives which we consume.
Your body has become a chemical depository. Sulfur is used to keep dried fruit fresh. Formaldehyde which is used to retard corpse decomposition is added to disinfect frozen vegetables. The blue shimmer on the surface of luncheon meat is the result of sodium nitrate. Sodium nitrate is commonly used in the preservation of ham, bacon, sausage and bologna to keep meat looking red, when normally, it would have decomposed into an unappealing gray. In the stomach, sodium nitrate is converted into nitrous acid which is suspected of inciting stomach cancer. Germany and Norway have banned the use of this powerful toxin.
Feed for raising chickens contains arsenic to stimulate growth, increase egg-production and give the chicken a yellowed skin. Aluminum compounds are added to baking powder, aspirin, antacids, beer, table salt and antiperspirants. It also leaches into our food and water through cookware, soft drink cans and aluminum foil. It has been discovered in high concentrations in the brain of Alzheimer's patients and is suspected in contributing to this most hideous disease.
Potatoes may seem untouched by chemicals but because of their bad habit of sprouting, they are coated with the chemical inhibitor, maleic hydrazide, which has resulted in cancer in laboratory animals.
Ice cream producers use propylene glycol, the same substance in antifreeze and paint remover. Carboxymethylcellulose is a stabilizer, used in ice cream, salad dressing, cheese spreads and chocolate milk. It has produced tumors in 80% of rats injected. Yet, the FDA flatly denies it as a carcinogen, for the reason that when it was given to the rats orally, it didn't cause cancer.
For 50 years, producers have added brominated oils to bottled fruit juice to maintain a look of freshness—even after 6 months of storage. Unfortunately, brominated oils have side effects. They produce changes in heart tissue, enlargement of the thyroid, kidney damage, decrease in liver metabolism and cause withered testicles. Canada, Holland, and Germany have banned brominated oils in the production of bottled drinks, yet they can still be imported from other countries.
And this sums it up best.
The life of most cells is short; new cells are constantly being made to replace dead ones. The raw materials for this rebuilding come from the blood stream. When it contains toxins, the process of rebuilding cells is disrupted. Resistance to disease diminishes. If you have a genetic weakness and continue to eat processed foods, the cumulative effect of toxins will increase the risk of becoming a host to disease or premature death.
You're free to go back to your instant gratification lives...
People, you're fueling your body with manufactured chemical crap!
An Exerpt from The North American Diet
The food industry aims at making products look and taste appealing without thought to the products' nutritional value. Loaded with chemical additives and designed to be addictive, processed food is manufactured first for profit.
All great chefs will tell you that the tangy flavor of lemon juice is a must in enhancing and lifting the taste of fish. In fact, lemon juice is widely used to compliment a variety of popular dishes. But to cut cost and for the sake of convenience, manufacturers have replaced lemon juice with 2-methyl-3-(pisopropylphenyl)-propionaldehyde. An unpronounceable name to add to the estimated three thousand chemical additives which we consume.
Your body has become a chemical depository. Sulfur is used to keep dried fruit fresh. Formaldehyde which is used to retard corpse decomposition is added to disinfect frozen vegetables. The blue shimmer on the surface of luncheon meat is the result of sodium nitrate. Sodium nitrate is commonly used in the preservation of ham, bacon, sausage and bologna to keep meat looking red, when normally, it would have decomposed into an unappealing gray. In the stomach, sodium nitrate is converted into nitrous acid which is suspected of inciting stomach cancer. Germany and Norway have banned the use of this powerful toxin.
Feed for raising chickens contains arsenic to stimulate growth, increase egg-production and give the chicken a yellowed skin. Aluminum compounds are added to baking powder, aspirin, antacids, beer, table salt and antiperspirants. It also leaches into our food and water through cookware, soft drink cans and aluminum foil. It has been discovered in high concentrations in the brain of Alzheimer's patients and is suspected in contributing to this most hideous disease.
Potatoes may seem untouched by chemicals but because of their bad habit of sprouting, they are coated with the chemical inhibitor, maleic hydrazide, which has resulted in cancer in laboratory animals.
Ice cream producers use propylene glycol, the same substance in antifreeze and paint remover. Carboxymethylcellulose is a stabilizer, used in ice cream, salad dressing, cheese spreads and chocolate milk. It has produced tumors in 80% of rats injected. Yet, the FDA flatly denies it as a carcinogen, for the reason that when it was given to the rats orally, it didn't cause cancer.
For 50 years, producers have added brominated oils to bottled fruit juice to maintain a look of freshness—even after 6 months of storage. Unfortunately, brominated oils have side effects. They produce changes in heart tissue, enlargement of the thyroid, kidney damage, decrease in liver metabolism and cause withered testicles. Canada, Holland, and Germany have banned brominated oils in the production of bottled drinks, yet they can still be imported from other countries.
And this sums it up best.
The life of most cells is short; new cells are constantly being made to replace dead ones. The raw materials for this rebuilding come from the blood stream. When it contains toxins, the process of rebuilding cells is disrupted. Resistance to disease diminishes. If you have a genetic weakness and continue to eat processed foods, the cumulative effect of toxins will increase the risk of becoming a host to disease or premature death.
You're free to go back to your instant gratification lives...
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Problem 3 with America - The Pompus
There's always some f'ckin' moron who thinks he knows best when it comes to people's lives.
This quote comes to mind, "If the slave is HAPPY being the slave, what makes you so sure he'd be happier being the master?"
Be free all you want, but keep your religious bigotry to yourself.
This quote comes to mind, "If the slave is HAPPY being the slave, what makes you so sure he'd be happier being the master?"
Be free all you want, but keep your religious bigotry to yourself.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
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