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If you don’t like how things are, change it! You’re not a tree.

It's how our country was born.

American fascists are most easily recognized by their
deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and
propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in
the common front against fascism….
Henry A. Wallace

Hitler would have loved FOX News.

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.
Buddha

An author of ‘50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology’ discusses some of his favorite misconceptions.

Opposites attract….We use very little of our brainpower….the full moon makes you do crazy things….American culture teems with commonly accepted pop-psych beliefs. Read this article from U.S.News & World Report that discusses 5 of those myths. (READ IT HERE)

Does the full moon make you crazy?

HAMMOND, La. (Oct. 15) – A white Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

(Read the full article from the Associated Press here then return to this page to comment – FULL ARTICLE)

By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer
Sun Oct 11, 3:58 am ET

MEXICO CITY – Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly “running out” on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it’s not the end of the world.

Or is it?

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. “I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff.”

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood’s “2012” opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the “Curious? Ask an Astronomer” Web site, says people are scared.

“It’s too bad that we’re getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they’re too young to die,” Martin said. “We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn’t live to see them grow up.” (more…)

This famous photo of illegal Jewish settler children kicking and pulling the scarf of a Palestinian woman while Israeli police turn their backs on the harrassment, was taken in Hebron. The writer of this article predicts illegal settler violence against Palestinians will be even worse in the village of Silwan.

By Meron Rapoport, 24th August 2009

When I was still a very little boy, I went to an event at a local park with my much older sister and her boyfriend. My sister and her boyfriend, young, in love, and completely caught up in each other, left me pretty much on my own. I was drawn to a huge collapsible table set up near a wooded area. Beside the table was a shiny red bike with a tag on the handle bars. On the table was an assortment of toys and games, all brand new, still in the packages. My eyes rolled over them to the end of the table; to the electric train set. It was beautiful, exactly what I’d always wanted. In awe, I reached toward it.

“Don’t touch the prizes.” someone shouted at me.

“Prizes?” I thought to myself hopefully, wondering just how I might get a shot at that train set.

Someone blew a whistle and more kids than I’d ever seen at one time began lining up, side by side, behind a white chalk line on the grass in front of the picnic tables. I ran for it, and squeezed into the line just as a man, standing off to one side, raised a pistol in the air. The starting shot rang out and I was off with the bang.

(more…)

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.

I can’t recall who wrote it.

1. “The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates (470-399 BCE)

Socrates’ [wiki] belief that we must reflect upon the life we live was partly inspired by the famous phrase inscribed at the shrine of the oracle at Delphi, “Know thyself.” The key to finding value in the prophecies of the oracle was self-knowledge, not a decoder ring.

Socrates felt so passionately about the value of self-examination that he closely examined not only his own beliefs and values but those of others as well. More precisely, through his relentless questioning, he forced people to examine their own beliefs. He saw the citizens of his beloved Athens sleepwalking through life, living only for money, power, and fame, so he became famous trying to help them.

2. “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily” – William of Ockham (1285 – 1349?)

Commonly known as Ockham’s razor, the idea here is that in judging among competing philosophical or scientific theories, all other things being equal, we should prefer the simplest theory. Scientists currently speak of four forces in the universe: gravity, the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Ockham [wiki] would certainly nod approvingly at the ongoing attempt to formulate a grand unified theory, a single force that encompasses all four.

The ultimate irony of Ockham’s razor may be that some have used it to prove God is unnecessary to the explanation of the universe, an idea Ockham the Franciscan priest would reject. (more…)