©2008-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind ProductsBehold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
~ Ezekiel 16:49To me, that describes the USA to a tee. It is insanely conceited. It consumes the lion’s share of the earth’s resources and invades other countries to steal even more. It has exported its jobs so it no longer produces anything. It is the stingiest developed country on the planet in terms of per capita foreign aid, and treats its own poor with utter contempt.
Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.
And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.
They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them:
But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.
While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.
And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.
Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.
And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out.
But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.
And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.
Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.
But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not.
~ Matthew 25:1-12This could be taken an a parable for modern times on the necessity of energy conservation.
Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory… and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.
~ Alfred Adler (born: 1870-02-07 died: 1937-05-28 at age: 67)
It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
~ Alfred Adler (born: 1870-02-07 died: 1937-05-28 at age: 67)
Violence as a way of gaining power… is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security…
~ Alfred Adler (born: 1870-02-07 died: 1937-05-28 at age: 67)
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
~ Aesop (born: 620 BC died: 564 BC at age: 56)
What America has essentially done is transform Iraq from a very brutal, but highly functioning secular state into a very brutal, totally dysfunctional theocracy.
~ Jenan al-Ubaedy Full Cover Girl
Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.
~ Edward Albee (born: 1928-03-12 age: 83)
I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong.
~ Muhammad Ali (born: 1942-01-17 age: 70)Unlike most young men in 1966, Ali was brave enough to resist the draft into the Vietnam war.
History is replete with examples of empires mounting impressive military campaigns on the cusp of their impending economic collapse.
~ Eric Alterman (born: 1960-01-14 age: 52)
Mistakes have been made.
This is the closest Americans will come to admitting that they behaved as badly as Nazis in Afghanistan and Iraq.
~ An Average American
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
~ Maya Angelou (born: 1928-04-04 age: 83)
It’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going. But, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.
~ Sharron Angle (born: 1949-07-26 age: 62) Republican candidate for Senate in NevadaWhat she is effectively saying is, if the democratic majority rejects your views, intimidate and assassinate with firearms and if that does not work, overthrow the government. My jaw drops that Americans don’t commit her to an institution for the criminally insane.
I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.
~ Sharron Angle (born: 1949-07-26 age: 62), unsuccessful Tea Party candidate of Senator in Nevada.In so many words, she threatened to have her supporters assassinate Harry Reid if she lost the election. This lunatic was not charged or committed to a mental institution for the criminally insane.
One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create.
~ Michael Anissimov (born: 1995 age: 16) 1995
The invasion and occupation of Iraq is illegal.
~ Kofi Annan (born: 1938-04-08 age: 73) Secretary General and Boutros Boutros-Ghali (born: 1922-11-14 age: 89) former Secretary General of the U.N.
If Americans and Jews are God’s chosen people, why did He hide all their oil under Muslim soil?
~ Anonymous
It is cruelty to the innocent not to punish the guilty.
~ Anonymous
What’s the difference between an American soldier and a sow? A sow kills and devours her neighbour’s young; an American soldier kills but doesn’t eat them.
~ Anonymous
A existence deprived of freedom is a kind of death.
~ General Michel Aoun (born: 1933-09-30 age: 78)Americans revere there own freedom but seem completely blind to the need for freedom in the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. Like meddling mother-in-laws they imagine their occupations, unlike all other occupations, are appreciated, necessary and helpful.
Evil brings men together.
~ Aristotle (born: 384 BC died: 322 BC at age: 62)Aristotle on the Republican party of his day.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say nigger — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
~ Lee Atwater (born: 1951-02-27 died: 1991-03-29 at age: 40) father of dirty election tricks.
Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.
~ Margaret Atwood (born: 1939-11-18 age: 72) Oryx and Crake in a 2004 Massey Lecture
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
~ Wystan Hugh Auden (born: 1907-02-21 died: 1973-09-29 at age: 66)The Germans could not see Hitler as evil. He was too familiar. Similarly, Americans could not see Bush-43 or Cheney for the mass-murdering psychopathic torturers they were. People invite soldiers to Thanksgiving dinner, and mentally block out the unspeakable crimes they know perfectly well they have committed.
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
~ Wystan Hugh Auden (born: 1907-02-21 died: 1973-09-29 at age: 66) September 1, 1939
Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.
~ St. Augustine, Augustine of Hippo (born: 354-11-13 AD died: 430-08-28 AD at age: 75) , a pirate in City of God
Poverty is the mother of crime.
~ Marcus Aurelius (born: 121-04-26 AD died: 180-03-17 AD at age: 58)
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
~ James Baldwin (born: 1924-08-02 died: 1987-11-30 at age: 63)
No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies.
~ Daisy Bates (born: 1914-11-11 died: 1999-11-04 at age: 84)
The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.
~ Brendan Behan (born: 1923-02-19 died: 1964-03-20 at age: 41)
The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes.
~ Harry Belafonte (born: 1927-03-01 age: 84)
When I was born, I was colored. I soon became a Negro. Not long after that I was black. Most recently I was African-American. It seems we’re on a roll here. But I am still first and foremost in search of freedom.
~ Harry Belafonte (born: 1927-03-01 age: 84)
If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.
~ Tony Benn (born: 1925-04-03 age: 86) Labour British Member of Parliament
We need a new law that owners of SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle)s are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil.
~ Jello Biafra (born: 1958-06-17 age: 53) 2007-11-03
Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
~ Otto von Bismarck (born: 1815-04-01 died: 1898-07-30 at age: 83)
If you build it, they will come
~ Conrad Black (born: 1944-08-25 age: 67) criticising Prime Minister Harper’s plane to build more prisons.
Glenn Beck has Nazi Tourettes’.
~ Lewis Black (born: 1948-08-30 age: 63)
I did not think so at first. But the US is so incredibly dependent on oil, that they wanted to secure oil in case competition on the world market becomes too hard.
~ Dr. Hans Blix (born: 1928-06-28 age: 83), head UN Weapons Inspector 2005-04-07
Muslims don’t hate our freedoms, but rather they hate our policies.
~ US Defense Science Board 2004-12
How many things apparently impossible have nevertheless been performed by resolute men who had no alternative but death.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte (born: 1769-08-15 died: 1821-05-05 at age: 51)
Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte (born: 1769-08-15 died: 1821-05-05 at age: 51)
One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte (born: 1769-08-15 died: 1821-05-05 at age: 51)
We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
~ Louis Brandeis (born: 1856-11-13 died: 1941-10-05 at age: 84)
[Insurgents] pose no strategic threat to the United States or to the Coalition Forces.
~ L. Paul Bremer III (born: 1941-09-30 age: 70) Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, 2003-11-17
If people become accustomed to lying, they will unconsciously commit every possible wrong deed. Before they can act wickedly, they must lie, and once they begin to lie they will act wickedly without concern.
~ Gautama Buddha (born: 563 BC died: 483 BC at age: 80)Politicians start by lying, and graduate to other forms of corruption. You might say that lying in the “entry drug” to political corruption.
It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.
~ Gautama Buddha (born: 563 BC died: 483 BC at age: 80)
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
~ Edmund Burke (born: 1729-01-12 died: 1797-07-09 at age: 68)
The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and good will would wish, five or ten years hence, had been done.
~ Edmund Burke (born: 1729-01-12 died: 1797-07-09 at age: 68)
Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths… mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?
~ Barbara Bush (born: 1925-06-08 age: 86) George W. Bush’s mother. on Good Morning America 2003-03-18.
I will never apologise for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are.
~ George Herbert Walker Bush (born: 1924-06-12 age: 87) aka Bush-41, Bush Sr. after the US shot down a civilian airliner over Iran killing all 290 innocent passengers. The apple does not fall far from the tree.
I wouldn’t join the International Criminal Court. This is a body based in The Hague where unaccountable judges, prosecutors, could pull our troops, our diplomats up for trial. And I wouldn’t join. And I understand that in certain capitals of, around the world that that wasn’t a popular move. But it’s the right move not to join a foreign court that could, where our people could be prosecuted.
~ George W. Bush (born: 1946-07-06 age: 65), 2004-10-01 confessing he is an international scofflaw during the first presidential debate with Kerry.
To bring about a genuine political realignment, Republicans must kill the Government Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs — the very Goose they have fought so hard and long to possess.
~ Jeb Bush (born: 1953-02-11 age: 59) Imprimis Magazine 1995In other words, Jeb wants to stop the functions of government that create prosperity. The man is either nuts, or has the same problems with English as his brother.
We must create a [economic] crisis in order to ensure that there is no alternative to a smaller government.
~ Jeb Bush (born: 1953-02-11 age: 59) Imprimis Magazine 1995This may explain why brother George seemed to be intentionally attempting to tank the economy.
We mustn’t assume that we are going to deinvent government solely from inside the Beltway or within one or two sessions of Congress. We will do it one step at a time, in one community at a time – at the local level and through local institutions like churches, nonprofit and volunteer organizations, and families.
~ Jeb Bush (born: 1953-02-11 age: 59) Imprimis Magazine 1995Jeb wants to destroy democratic government and hand the reigns to private corporations, much the way society was organised in the 1800s, without any regulation on the robber barons. He must have been impressed by the 1975 sci if movie, Rollerball, starring James Caan.
Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people — and kill them.
~ 1978 Protest Button
If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases, observe it.
~ Julius Gaius Caesar (born: 100-07-13 BC died: 44-03-15 BC at age: 55)
You are evil. You enjoy death. I hope you enjoy your own.
~ Horatio Caine played by on CSI (Crime Scene Investigator) : Miami by David Caruso (born: 1956-01-07 age: 56) to a military sniper who killed civilians.
An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.
~ Simon Cameron (born: 1799-03-08 died: 1889-06-29 at age: 90) US financier and politician
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
~ Albert Camus (born: 1913-11-07 died: 1960-01-04 at age: 46)
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
~ Albert Camus (born: 1913-11-07 died: 1960-01-04 at age: 46)
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
~ Albert Camus (born: 1913-11-07 died: 1960-01-04 at age: 46)
I remember feeling ridiculous and thinking the only real difference between me and them was they had every right in the world to be fighting against me where as I had no right to be fighting against them.
~ Ross CaputiTalking about being an American attacking Fallujah in Iraq.
Good people can’t out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can’t think of.
~ Orson Scott Card (born: 1951-08-24 age: 60), Homebody
Once you duct-tape a Ziploc bag to a man’s chest, there’s no going back.
~ Orson Scott Card (born: 1951-08-24 age: 60), Treasure Box
The Department of Education using SpongeBob SquarePants now to teach kids about global warming. The government agency showed kids this cartoon and handed out books that blamed man for global warming, but they did not tell kids that that is actually a disputed fact.
~ Gretchen Carlson (born: 1966-06-21 age: 45) SourceThat is a bald faced-lie, one promoted by Rupert Murdoch through his faux-news network FOX. There is no controversy at all. Svante Arrhenius, the great Swedish chemist who also discovered ions, discovered global warming and the mathematical relationship betweenCO₂ and global temperature, way back in the 1800s. This has been accepted science for over a century. Spreading FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) like Gretchen did makes her one of the most evil women in the world. She and her cohorts are successfully delaying action on global warming. This procrastination will cause billions of people to die. Not even Hitler was that evil. Global warming sounds benign, but, according to Environment Canada, it is second only to global nuclear war in destructiveness.
At first I had her pegged as a bimbo. She looks like a bimbo. She moves and talks like a bimbo. She is obsessed with beauty contests. She works for FOX news, but I discovered she graduated magna cum laude in sociology from Standford, one of the best universities in America. So I can’t excuse her on the grounds she is too stupid to know what she is doing. Posterity will curse her name and wish she had never been born.
The definition of terrorism is killing civilians with the intent of changing their political affiliation.
~ Caleb Carr (born: 1955-08-02 age: 56), military historianSo, strange as it sounds to American ears, the American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are just as much terrorists as bin Laden.
What is the definition of terrorism? killing civilians with the intent of changing their political affiliation.
~ Caleb Carr (born: 1955-08-02 age: 56), military historianThe Tea Party are a tiny minority who do not believe in majority rule. They are holding the USA hostage to force its senate and house to change the constitution, something that requires a 2/3 majority. They are clearly trying to force their political views on all the house members. They are threatening financial collapse of the USA to do it. They are not directly killing people, but there is no doubt many people would die as a result of the financial chaos from lack of food, housing and medical care. It is politically infeasible to prosecute the Tea Party members of the House of Representatives as terrorists and traitors, but it is possible to treat them with appropriate contempt.
In the hostage negotiations, Obama’s non-negotiable demand was that the Tea Party not pull this same stunt again for at least two more years, and the Tea Party’s demand was that no tax loopholes be closed to make the rich start paying taxes like everyone else. They further insisted the most profitable companies in the history of man continue to receive government subsidies. The Tea Party are a front for those that have far more than enough who want to take from those who have far less than enough. The Tea Party has been clear. They want policies that will make the recession drag on. They want jobs to flee the country. They believe the worse they can make the economy, the more Obama will be blamed.
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre.
~ John le Carré (born: 1931-10-19 age: 80)
Unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent.
~ President Jimmy Carter (born: 1924-10-01 age: 87) 39th president of the USA
We must make it clear that a platform of “I hate gay men and women” is not a way to become president of the United States.
~ President Jimmy Carter (born: 1924-10-01 age: 87) 39th president of the USA.
What has happened at Guantánamo Bay… does not represent the will of the American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people.
~ President Jimmy Carter (born: 1924-10-01 age: 87) 39th president of the USA.
The privation of water is justly ranked among the most dreadful of the miseries of our life… The violence of raving thirst has no parallel in the catalogue of human calamities… Our thirst had become now incessantly more intolerable than our hunger, and the quantity then allowed [236.59 mls (8 fl oz) ] was barely sufficient to keep the mouth in a state of moisture, for about one third of the time… In vain was every expedient tried to relieve the raging fever of the throat… Our suffering during these… days almost exceeded human belief.
~ Owen Chase (born: 1798 died: 1869-03-08 at age: 70) In the Heart of the Sea Owen Chase was a whaling captain. A huge whale rammed and sank his ship, inspiring the novel Moby Dick.Having been tortured by water deprivation myself, I concur it is a misery thousands of times worse than you might imagine. I would sooner be eaten alive by tigers than repeat the experience. The Americans in Iraq routinely torture all POW (Prisoner Of War)s with water deprivation. They have utterly no idea what cruelty they are imposing. The victim just sits there quietly with no energy to protest.
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)
Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)
I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)
If we move toward the weaponisation of space, we can bid farewell to the planet. The chances of survival are very slight.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83) Pax Americana and the weaponisation of Space
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)
The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)
To some degree it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)
If U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned.
~ Ward Churchill (born: 1947-10-02 age: 64)
When you kill 500,000 children in order to impose your will on other countries, then you shouldn’t be surprised when somebody responds in kind.
~ Ward Churchill (born: 1947-10-02 age: 64)
Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
~ Winston Churchill (born: 1874-11-30 died: 1965-01-24 at age: 90)
Some people’s idea of [free speech] is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.
~ Winston Churchill (born: 1874-11-30 died: 1965-01-24 at age: 90)
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
~ Winston Churchill (born: 1874-11-30 died: 1965-01-24 at age: 90)Democracy works because consensus is wiser than the average individual.
The longer you can look back, the further you can look forward.
~ Winston Churchill (born: 1874-11-30 died: 1965-01-24 at age: 90) Churchill by Himself
We can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.
~ Winston Churchill (born: 1874-11-30 died: 1965-01-24 at age: 90)Every other nation has discovered that single payer health care is by far the best solution to delivery the highest quality care for the lowest cost. Americans want to try a some other ineffective schemes to appease the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies a little longer.
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero (born: 106-01-03 BC died: 43-12-07 BC at age: 63)
All nations that have nuclear weapons think that they are responsible and it is the other guys who are irresponsible.
~ Joseph Cirincione (born: 1949-11-13 age: 62) president of President of the Ploughshares Fund
A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible — indeed, inevitable — the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90) First on the Moon 1970
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90)
What we’re saying today is that you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.
~ Eldridge Cleaver (born: 1935-08-31 died: 1998-05-01 at age: 62) U.S. African-American leader
Ode to Sean Hannity
Aping urbanity,
Oozing with vanity,
Plump as a manatee,
Faking humanity,
Intellectual inanity,
Journalistic calamity,
Fox Noise insanity,
You’re a profanity,
Hannity
~ John Cleese (born: 1939-10-27 age: 72)
Our mission is to go after Al Qaeda, not the Taliban. Right now, they are in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. We should go after them wherever they are.
~ Max Cleland (born: 1942-08-24 age: 69) Vietnam Vet, and former US Senator, 2009-19-07
The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.
~ William Colby (born: 1920-01-04 died: 1996-04-27 at age: 76), former CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) director
Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
~ Confucius (born: 551-09-28 BC died: 479-02-04 BC at age: 71)
I’ve always wanted to go to Switzerland to see what the army does with those wee red knives.
~ Billy Connolly (born: 1942-11-24 age: 69)
A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
~ Joseph Conrad (born: 1857-12-03 died: 1924-08-03 at age: 66) Under Western Eyes 1911
I perform for soldiers because they are important.
~ Coolio (born: 1963-08-01 age: 48)Saddam Hussein was important too. But was that any excuse to give him a command performance?
Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?
~ Norman Cousins (born: 1915-06-24 died: 1990-11-30 at age: 75)If your next door neighbour had thirty thousand pounds of explosives accumulated to kill you, you probably would insist he be either arrested or committed. Why they do you put up with this behaviour from governments?
Bombing another country. What could be more American than that?
~ Denny Crane Republican played by Bill Shatner (born: 1931-03-27 age: 80) on Boston Legal
America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
~ Walter Cronkite (born: 1916-11-04 died: 2009-07-17 at age: 92)
The invasion of Iraq was illegal from the start.
~ Walter Cronkite (born: 1916-11-04 died: 2009-07-17 at age: 92) 2007-12-04, Common Dreams
The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.
~ US Agency for International Development
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky (born: 1821-02-11 died: 1881-02-09 at age: 59)
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
~ William O. Douglas (born: 1898-10-16 died: 1980-01-19 at age: 81)
There are those that crave war. They need it.
~ Gul Dukat a Cardassian character on Star Trek played by Marc Alaimo (born: 1942-05-05 age: 69) .
As a lifelong student of the world’s wisdom literature, it is my duty to inform students that “ridding the world of evil” is a goal very different from any recommended by Jesus, Buddha or Muhammad, though not so different from some recommended by Joseph Stalin, Joseph McCarthy and Mao Tse Tung.
~ David James Duncan (born: 1952-02-03 age: 60) When Compassion Becomes Dissent, Orion Magazine, 2003-01
We find that when conquerors come, their first words are often “We are your friends”.
~ Chancellor Avel Durken , a character in Star Trek Next Generation, First Contact.
It doesn’ matter what we think we are there [in Afghanistan] for; it matters what they think. They think we are invaders.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68)
Never did anyone ever stay longer than ten years because the resistance grows fiercer as your presence grows longer [in Afghanistan]. I don’t think we are going to be any exception. What made us exempt from history?
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68)
Take the year a country first reaches 50% literacy, and add one or two generations to allow the idea to sink in, and, democracy, more or less automatically, appears.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68)
The first and most important impact of climate change on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply. Eating regularly is a non-negotiable activity, and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be reasonable about it.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68) Climate Wars
But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side
~ Bob Dylan (born: 1941-05-24 age: 70) With God On Our Side
I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.
~ Freeman Dyson (born: 1923-12-15 age: 88) The Day After Trinity
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
~ Barbara Ehrenreich (born: 1941-08-26 age: 70)
Force always attracts men of low morality.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)
If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76) Telegram, 1946-04-25
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)
The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76) Telegram, 1946-04-25
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)
Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower (born: 1890-10-14 died: 1969-03-28 at age: 78)
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower (born: 1890-10-14 died: 1969-03-28 at age: 78)
There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower (born: 1890-10-14 died: 1969-03-28 at age: 78)How dare we impose this ultimate penalty on the mothers and fathers of Afghanistan and Iraq when they have done absolutely nothing to harm us or even threaten us.
The best defense is no offense.
~ Dr. Ivan Eland (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
~ George Eliot (born: 1819-11-22 died: 1880-12-22 at age: 61) (Mary Ann Evans)
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
~ Thomas Stearns Eliot (born: 1888-09-26 died: 1965-01-04 at age: 76)
Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.
~ Havelock Ellis (born: 1859-02-02 died: 1939-07-08 at age: 80)
What we call morals is simply blind obedience to words of command.
~ Havelock Ellis (born: 1859-02-02 died: 1939-07-08 at age: 80)
Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.
~ Bergen Evans (born: 1904-09-19 died: 1978-02-04 at age: 73)
You have to be willing to sacrifice as much to prevent war, as soldiers are willing to sacrifice to wage war.
~ Jodie Evans (born: 1954-09-22 age: 57) co-founder of Code Pink
What has happened here is not war in its traditional sense. This is clearly a crime against humanity. War crimes are crimes which happen in war time. There is a confusion there. This is a crime against humanity because it is deliberate and intentional killing of large numbers of civilians for political or other purposes. That is not tolerable under the international systems. And it should be prosecuted pursuant to the existing laws.
~ Benjamin Ferencz (born: 1920-03-01 age: 91) Chief Prosecutor for the United States in The Einsatzgruppen Case at the Nazi Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.
Bush is not Hitler. Hitler’s father wasn’t an arms dealer.
~ Winnipeg Comedy Festival 2008
We are gonna to have to choose as a nation between the homosexual agenda and freedom because the two cannot coexist. Every advance of the homosexual agenda, comes at the expense of liberty, particularly religious liberty.
~ Bryan Fischer head of The American Family AssociationThis is Orwellian language. He is claiming that gays having the right to marry or serve in the military somehow impairs his freedom. How pray tell? He avoids even being in the same room with gays so he unlikely to be invited to same-sex wedding. He is far too old for military service, so he won’t run into any gays in that context. Perhaps his freedom to force his fundamentalist religious beliefs on others. Perhaps he is thinking of more fundamental freedoms, to go gay bashing, or in other ways persecute gays for amusement.
How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, slowly changing the world.
~ Ann Frank (born: 1929-06-12 died: 1945 at age: 16)
They that give up liberty for safety deserve neither.
~ Benjamin Franklin (born: 1706-01-17 died: 1790-04-17 at age: 84)
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
~ Sigmund Freud (born: 1856-05-06 died: 1939-09-23 at age: 83) 1905
The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
~ Sigmund Freud (born: 1856-05-06 died: 1939-09-23 at age: 83)
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
~ David Friedman (born: 1945-02-12 age: 67)
The price of empire is America’s soul, and that price is too high.
~ J. William Fulbright (born: 1905-04-09 died: 1995-02-09 at age: 89)
Whenever we “defend democracy” we find oil.
~ Peter Gabriel (born: 1950-02-13 age: 62)
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
Be the change that you want to see in the world.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
Before you do anything, stop and recall the face of the poorest most helpless destitute person you have seen and ask yourself, “Is what I am about to do going to help him?”
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
I care so deeply about this matter that I’m willing to take on the legal penalties, to sit in this prison cell, to sacrifice my freedom, in order to show you how deeply I care. Because when you see the depth of my concern, and how civil I am in going about this, you’re bound to change your mind about me, to abandon your rigid, unjust position, and to let me help you see the truth of my cause.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest… No country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak… Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism… True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.
~ Jerry Garcia (born: 1942-08-01 died: 1995-08-09 at age: 53), The Grateful Dead
I want to make sure every House Republican is protected from some kind of dishonest Democratic ad. So let me say on the record, any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood.
~ Newt Gingrich (born: 1943-06-17 age: 68) in interview with FOX’s Greta Van SusterenNewt is such a brazen flip flopper he thinks he has libel-law protection from anyone pointing it out.
The folks who want to build this mosque, who are really radical Islamists, who want to triumphfully prove they can build a mosque next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists. Those folks don’t have any interest in reaching out to the community. They’re trying to make a case about supremacy… This happens all the time in America. Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.
~ Newt Gingrich (born: 1943-06-17 age: 68)This is how Gingrich defends interfering with the constitutional right of Muslims from building a mosque two blocks from ground zero. His logic is flawed. The Muslims building the mosque had absolutely nothing to with 9/11. Gingrich is dishonestly trying to pretend they did. He a demagogue rallying hatred for his political gain.
Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of people, tempered by fear.
~ William Gladstone (born: 1809-12-29 died: 1898-05-19 at age: 88)
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
~ Joseph Goebbels (born: 1897-10-29 died: 1945-05-01 at age: 47), Nazi propaganda minister
It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.
~ Joseph Goebbels (born: 1897-10-29 died: 1945-05-01 at age: 47), Nazi propaganda minister
In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.
~ Alberto Gonzales (born: 1955-08-04 age: 56) Attorney General Of the USA in the Bush administration
Each of the great social achievements of recent decades has come about not because of government proclamations, but because people organised, made demands and made it good politics to respond. It is the political will of the people that makes and sustains the political will of governments.
~ James Grant (born: 1922-05-12 died: 1995-01-28 at age: 72), former executive director of UNICEF.
G.O.P (Greed Over Principal)
~ Alan Grayson (born: 1958-03-13 age: 53) Democratic Representative from Florida
If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks.
~ Frederick The Great (born: 1712-01-24 died: 1786-08-17 at age: 74)
It makes no sense to spend $6 billion a month to go after 100 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
~ Robert Greenwald (born: 1945-08-28 age: 66) director of Rethinking Afghanistan
The worst thing that happened to the gay community was the fall of communism… As long as the conservative movement had communism to fight, they could organize and raise their money over that issue. The minute they lost communism, they had to find a new enemy, and that enemy became homosexuality.
~ Steve Gunderson (born: 1951-05-10 age: 60), first openly gay Republican congressman.
The moment you think only of yourself, the focus of your whole mind narrows, and because of this narrow focus uncomfortable things can appear huge and bring you fear and discomfort and a sense of feeling overwhelmed by misery. The moment you think of others with a sense of caring, however, your mind widens. Within that wider angle, your own problems appear to be of no significance, and this makes a big difference. If you have a sense of caring for others, you will manifest a kind of inner strength in spite of your own difficult situations and problems. With this strength, your problems will seem less significant and bothersome. By going beyond your own problems and taking care of others, you gain inner strength, self-confidence, courage, and a greater sense of calm.
~ Tenzin Gyatso (born: 1935-07-06 age: 76) the fourteenth Dalai Lama
When you hate someone intensely, 80% of what you think is delusion.
~ Tenzin Gyatso (born: 1935-07-06 age: 76) the fourteenth Dalai Lama
The recipe to get your letter to the editor published is:
~ Geneva Hagen (born: 1948-05-09 age: 63)
- one part pandering.
- one part crank.
- one part facts.
- one part telling what you want.
Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.
~ Alexander Hamilton (born: 1755-01-11 died: 1804-07-12 at age: 49)
It doesn’t say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state.
~ Sean Hannity (born: 1961-12-30 age: 50)He overlooked the first amendment “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.
Interestingly, while English was spoken by about 10% of the world’s population in 1900, and by about 11% in 1950, it is today spoken by about 8.5-9%. The corollary is that, for better than 90% of the world’s population, it is not the de facto means of international communication.
~ Don Harlow (born: 1942-07-08 died: 2008-01-27 at age: 65), former president of Esperanto-USA.
Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason? Why, when it prospers, none dare call it treason.
~ Sir John Harrington (born: 1561 died: 1612 at age: 51)
If you factor in the cost of the military to protect our petroleum assets in the middle east, gasoline costs us $7 a gallon. We have to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
~ Gary Hart (born: 1936-11-28 age: 75) of The Last Word TV show on MSNBC 2010-11-21What an arrogant imperialistic American! He refers to the oil in the middle east as belonging to the USA. I suppose it does now in a sense, stolen, now that Obama had the big auction to sell off all of Iraq’s oil reserves to American and European oil companies on the very day he announced the pullout.
We are witnesses to the decline of the largest empire since Rome [the American empire], perhaps the largest empire in the history of the world. If you are not taking notes, you should be. You have a ringside seat.
~ Len Hart echoing the sentiments of Gore Vidal.
The place where you got to get revenues has to come from the middle class. That’s where the huge number of people that are there. So the system does need to be revamped [to tax the rich less and the middle class more.]
~ Orrin Hatch (born: 1934-03-22 age: 77) Republican senator from Utah.
That may have been true in 1955, but since then the wealth gap has grown to a chasm. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The population may be in the middle class, but the money is now in the upper class. Even if it were true you could not extract substantial amounts of revenue from the wealthy, that is still no excuse for them to pay a lower effective tax rate that everyone else.
Why is Orrin Hatch’s top priority coddling the rich and winning special privileges and tax breaks for elites that nobody else gets? Hatch is a millionaire four times over. (Similarly, over half of congressmen are millionaires, not even counting their homes and property.) Hatch, and friends, are thus fighting for their own personal gain at the expense of the country they swore to serve. Further, winning a senate seat costs about $10,000,000. Most of this money comes from a handful of billionaires for whom this is pocket change. So both senators and congressmen are complete toadies when it comes to satisfying the whims of their rich angels.
Although September 11 was horrible, it didn’t threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do.
~ Stephen Hawking (born: 1942-01-08 age: 70)
Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of this magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaeda as if it were Nazi Germany or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and al-Qaeda has been penetrated by US intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organisation and sophistication.
~ Mohamed Hassanein Heikal (born: 1923-09-03 age: 88), editor-in-chief of the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram.
We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we at last come to look upon them as virtues.
~ Heinrich Heine (born: 1797-12-13 died: 1856-02-17 at age: 58)
You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.
~ Heinrich Heine (born: 1797-12-13 died: 1856-02-17 at age: 58)
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
~ Ernest Hemingway (born: 1899-07-21 died: 1961-07-02 at age: 61)
If we treat people like animals, how can we expect them not to behave like animals.
~ Dr. Jack Henson played by David Hyde Pierce (born: 1959-04-03 age: 52) in the Outer Limits The Sentence episode.
The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear.
~ Heinrich Himmler (born: 1900-10-07 died: 1945-05-23 at age: 44) Chief of the German Police including the Gestapo.
The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
~ Adolf Hitler (born: 1889-04-20 died: 1945-04-30 at age: 56)This is what Bush was counting on in Iraq. His tactics would make even Hitler blush, with banned weapons (napalm, white phosphorous, land minds and cluster bombs), torture and complete disregard for the Geneva conventions.
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (born: 1841-03-08 died: 1935-03-06 at age: 93)
The fact that Tasers are being used in situations that border on debt collection by the government is outrageous. The public has every right to be concerned that there is a lack of proper control over the use and application of these devices. A full investigation is required.
~ Rob Holmes , President BCCLA (British Columbia Civil Liberties Association), on the use of Tasers on people with expired bus transfers.
Impersonal killers are like drug addicts.
The first time gives them the ultimate high, and after that, no high is as good.
Unfortunately, the addict doesn’t know that.
He will chase that high to the gates of insanity and death.
By now, killing is all our UNSUB (Unknown Subject) thinks about.
He’s set up the exact same situation again and again, hoping to get the same result.
He begins to think he’s doing it wrong.
He becomes obsessed with improving his skills, honing his m.o.
And tailoring his weapon to his deadly purpose.
He figures if he gets them all just right, if he can get his technique and his tools perfected, he’ll feel that first high again.
He’s becoming a more lethal addict.
and he’ll never accept that the high is gone and it won’t come back.
He’ll never stop.
Never.
~ Aaron Hotch Hotchner Criminal Minds played by Thomas Gibson (born: 1962-07-03 age: 49)This addiction to killing is what really draws soldiers to enlist for pitiful pay, long hours and disgusting, dangerous working conditions.
We need a more prosperous environment.
~ Patrick Hunt (born: 1949 age: 62) Conservative Party candidate for Victoria, on 2011-04-26, vainly attempting to sound pro-environment.
Wherever you are, we will come and get you.
~ Nazi HuntersSoldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are committing the exact same capital crime that hanged all the Nazis at the end of WW II. I think it rather cavalier to commit a capital crime and trust all future governments to protect you or even to want to protect you from prosecution.
Just because it’s in print doesn’t mean it’s the gospel.
~ Michael Jackson (born: 1958-08-29 died: 2009-06-25 at age: 50)
Iraq has lost 5 percent of its population, a number that in the U.S. would equal 14 million people.
~ Mick Jagger (born: 1943-07-26 age: 68)
I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83) American Founding Father and U.S. president, in a letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802. The term separation of church and state became shorthand for the wording in the first amendment Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof and the subsequent supreme court rulings interpreting its meaning.
Such is the moral construction of the world that no national crime passes unpunished in the long run… Were present oppressors to reflect on the same truth, they would spare to their own countries the penalties on their present wrongs which will be inflicted on them in future times. The seeds of hatred and revenge which they [sow] with a large hand will not fail to produce their fruits in time. Like their brother robbers on the highway, they suppose the escape of the moment a final escape and deem infamy and future risk countervailed by present gain.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83) American Founding Father and U.S. president (1743— 1826), letter to Francois de Marbois, 1817
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)
We’re fucked, so fucked, not in the good sense of the word.
~ Derrick Jensen (born: 1960-12-19 age: 51) Endgame
The US is a selfish, individualistic society devoted to commerce, and the despoliation of the planet. It is uncaring of the poor and sick and it is indifferent to the rest of humankind. The U.S. rides roughshod over international laws and treaties and threatens the moral, environmental, and physical future of humanity. It is inconsistent and hypocritical in its foreign dealings, and it wields unparalleled military clout. It is, in short, a bull in the global china shop.
~ Anthony Judt (born: 1948 age: 63)
The healthy man does not torture others — generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
~ Carl Jung (born: 1875-07-26 died: 1961-06-06 at age: 85)
Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
~ Immanuel Kant (born: 1724-04-22 died: 1804-02-12 at age: 79)
If ballots won’t work, bullets will.
~ Joyce Kaufman chief of staff for Representative-elect Allen West (R-Florida)This is was a threat to assassinate the opposition if West had lost the election. This lunatic was not charged or committed to a mental institution for the criminally insane.
We thank you [the soldiers recently returned from the middle east] for your service. ~ Garrison Keillor (born: 1942-08-07 age: 69)If even a gentle soul like Garrison Keillor think bombing, burning alive, raping and torturing men, women and children who were zero threat to the USA is service that’s proof that Americans have drunk the same Kool-Aid as the Germans under Hitler.
Health care is a right, not a privilege.
~ Edward (Ted) Kennedy (born: 1932-02-22 died: 2009-08-25 at age: 77)
I won’t yield to anyone about guns in our society. I know enough about it.
~ Edward (Ted) Kennedy (born: 1932-02-22 died: 2009-08-25 at age: 77) senate debate with Mitt Romney, 1994.
What we have in the United States is not so much a health-care system as a disease-care system.
~ Edward (Ted) Kennedy (born: 1932-02-22 died: 2009-08-25 at age: 77) 1994
The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.
~ John F. Kennedy (born: 1917-05-29 died: 1963-11-22 at age: 46)
Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.
~ Robert F. Kennedy (born: 1925-11-20 died: 1968-06-06 at age: 42)
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
~ Robert F. Kennedy (born: 1925-11-20 died: 1968-06-06 at age: 42)
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
~ Robert F. Kennedy (born: 1925-11-20 died: 1968-06-06 at age: 42)
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
~ Robert F. Kennedy (born: 1925-11-20 died: 1968-06-06 at age: 42)
There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
~ Robert F. Kennedy (born: 1925-11-20 died: 1968-06-06 at age: 42)
Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.
~ Robert F. Kennedy (born: 1925-11-20 died: 1968-06-06 at age: 42)
Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.
~ Coretta Scott King (born: 1927-04-27 died: 2006-01-30 at age: 78)
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (born: 1929-01-15 died: 1968-04-04 at age: 39) I Have A Dream, 1963-08-23
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (born: 1929-01-15 died: 1968-04-04 at age: 39)
A gaffe in Washington is when politician tells the truth.
~ Michael Kinsley (born: 1951-03-09 age: 60)
Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.
~ Henry Kissinger (born: 1923-05-27 age: 88)
I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy.
~ Henry Kissinger (born: 1923-05-27 age: 88)
I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
~ Henry Kissinger (born: 1923-05-27 age: 88)
Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.
~ Henry Kissinger (born: 1923-05-27 age: 88)
Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.
~ Henry Kissinger (born: 1923-05-27 age: 88)
It costs us $1 million for every troop[soldier] in Afghanistan.
~ Lawrence Korb (born: 1939-07-09 age: 72) assistant Secretary of Defence under Reagan.
There are ten times as many sex slaves transported around the globe today as agrarian slaves were transported in the 1790s.
~ Nicholas Donabet Kristof (born: 1959-04-27 age: 52), double Pulitzer Prize winner
Humans feel deeply the suffering of their friends and allies, and easily discount/dismiss the comparable experience of their enemies.
~ Ray Kurzweil (born: 1948-02-12 age: 64)
That claim was not intended to be a factual statement.
~ Jon Kyl (born: 1942-04-25 age: 69)When Republican Senator Kyl was caught lying that Planned Parenthood spends 90% of its budget on abortion when it is actually 3%.
If Satan exists, and if he is clever at promoting Evil, then would he not agitate one section of mankind to go to war with an another — both believing God was on their side?
~ Stephen Paul Lather
You can wait forever for perfect conditions or you can make do with what you have.
~ Jack Layton (born: 1950-07-18 died: 2011-08-22 at age: 61)
I’m a Marine; I like Killing Kids
that way u get what every iraq taliban piece of shit deserves not matter what their age is if we don’t kill the little ones first all they are gunna do is grow up and wanna kill americans well FUCK that and FUCK you…
~ Derick Lewis inin email
When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross.
~ Sinclair Lewis (born: 1885-02-07 died: 1951-01-10 at age: 65)
“Is he a terrorist?”
“Ya, even more so now we murdered his wife and family”
~ Cal Lightman a fictitious character on Lie to Me played by Tim Roth (born: 1961-05-14 age: 50) . We try to stomp out terrorism by killing and raping innocent children and women and by torturing teenagers. We know perfectly well that it has the exact opposite effect, but like brats having a tantrum we persist in the folly. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
before: Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs… And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.
after being caught with dealer sized quantities of oxycontin: I need to tell you today that part of what you have heard and read is correct. I am addicted to prescription pain medication.
~ Rush Limbaugh (born: 1951-01-12 age: 61)
I was not wrong. I was just misinformed.
~ Rush Limbaugh (born: 1951-01-12 age: 61)
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
~ Abraham Lincoln (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1865-04-15 at age: 56)After all that talk about give me liberty or give me death, Americans surrendered nearly all their freedoms with the Patriot Act, quaking in cowardly fear after terrorists demolished a mere two buildings.
establish whether the particular spot of soil which the blood of our citizens was so shed was, or was not, our own soil.
~ Abraham Lincoln (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1865-04-15 at age: 56), Lincoln’s Spot Resolution, 1847-12-22.Few people know that Congressman, later President, Abraham Lincoln was an anti-war activist. He introduced the Spot Resolution in congress to challenge President Polk’s lies that Mexico had attacked America, rather than the reverse. His opposition to the Mexican-American war made him very unpopular, and he lost his seat. Plus ça change…
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
~ Abraham Lincoln (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1865-04-15 at age: 56)
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
~ Abraham Lincoln (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1865-04-15 at age: 56)
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
~ Abraham Lincoln (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1865-04-15 at age: 56)
The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
~ Walter Lippmann (born: 1889-09-23 died: 1974-12-14 at age: 85)
It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit… No one likes to think of him or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase what we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier.
~ James W. Loewen (born: 1942-02-06 age: 70)
We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war.
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (born: 1903-11-07 died: 1989-02-27 at age: 85)
A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.
~ George MacDonald (born: 1824-12-10 died: 1905-09-18 at age: 80)
Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.
~ Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (born: 1469-05-03 died: 1527-06-21 at age: 58)
Never was anything great achieved without danger.
~ Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (born: 1469-05-03 died: 1527-06-21 at age: 58)
The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.
~ Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (born: 1469-05-03 died: 1527-06-21 at age: 58)
The great majority of mankind is satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities.
~ Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (born: 1469-05-03 died: 1527-06-21 at age: 58)
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
~ Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (born: 1469-05-03 died: 1527-06-21 at age: 58)
Whoever conquers a free town and does not demolish it commits a great error and may expect to be ruined himself.
~ Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (born: 1469-05-03 died: 1527-06-21 at age: 58)This is the Hitler/Bush view. The Romans made the conquered people citizens of Rome.
Whenever the people are for gay marriage or medical marijuana or assisted suicide, suddenly the “will of the people” goes out the window.
~ Bill Maher (born: 1956-01-20 age: 56)
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
~ Nelson Mandela (born: 1918-07-18 age: 93)
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
~ Nelson Mandela (born: 1918-07-18 age: 93)
It always seems impossible until its done.
~ Nelson Mandela (born: 1918-07-18 age: 93)
Only free men can negotiate; prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.
~ Nelson Mandela (born: 1918-07-18 age: 93)
Why is the United States behaving so arrogantly? All that (Mr. Bush) wants is Iraqi oil.
~ Nelson Mandela (born: 1918-07-18 age: 93), 2003-01-30
Anguish of suspense made men even desire the arrival of enemies.
~ Guy de Maupassant (born: 1850-08-05 died: 1893-07-06 at age: 42) , Boule de Suif
Military men are the scourges of the world.
~ Guy de Maupassant (born: 1850-08-05 died: 1893-07-06 at age: 42)
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.
~ Guy de Maupassant (born: 1850-08-05 died: 1893-07-06 at age: 42) , Sur l’eau 1888.
We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs… of our barbarous ancestors.
~ Guy de Maupassant (born: 1850-08-05 died: 1893-07-06 at age: 42) , Sur l’eau 1888.
Since 1947, American has been the chief perpetrator of preemptive state terror… These rogue actions worsened local political and economic conditions and were of a piece with equally unscrupulous blockades, embargoes, military interventions, punitive air (missile) strikes and kidnappings, always in the name of democracy, liberty and justice.
~ Arno Mayer (born: 1926-06-19 age: 85), historian
After living on the edge, the adrenalin, some people in the military get addicted. Anything else seem boring. They have to have the excitement.
~ Timothy McVeigh (born: 1968-04-23 died: 2001-06-11 at age: 33) approximate words from the Rachel Maddow documentary.
Kids are fair game; women are fair game.
~ Timothy McVeigh (born: 1968-04-23 died: 2001-06-11 at age: 33) convicted for the Oklahoma City bombing.Where would he get that idea? Hint, he was a United States Army veteran.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
~ Margaret Mead (born: 1901-12-16 died: 1978-11-15 at age: 76)
The advent of the Keyhole satellite program nearly 30 years ago provided the United States with the capability to digitally observe events on Earth in near “real time”. Exponential advances in computer processing power have subsequently provided refinements that allow these “spies in the sky” to observe the Earth regardless of cloud cover, inclement weather and darkness. Using infrared cameras, radar and advanced sensing lenses, they can resolve images approaching a single inch in diameter.
~ Keith Melton Spies in the Digital Age CNNYet despite this astounding technology, Bush claimed he had no idea where Osama bin Laden was, and Americans believe it is impossible to intercept illegal immigrants or to track the perpetrators of drive by shootings, or hunt down kidnappers.
We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibres, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.
~ Herman Melville (born: 1819-08-01 died: 1891-09-28 at age: 72)
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or to forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because in the opinions of others to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else.
~ John Stuart Mill (born: 1806-05-20 died: 1873-05-08 at age: 66)
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
~ Arthur Miller (born: 1915-10-17 died: 2005-02-10 at age: 89)
Ignore their heathen prayers and help us blow those little bastards [the Viet Cong] straight to Hell. Amen.
~ Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore played by Mel Gibson (born: 1956-01-03 age: 56) in We Were SoldiersThe self-glorifying book was written by Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore. You’d think by now that anyone who went to Vietnam to kill orphans and others who had never done anything to the USA would be considered a vicious psychopath. Oddly, even now, most American consider their actions heroic. Americans even gave this filthy old buzzard Moore a veteran of the year award.
The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not insurgents or terrorists or “The Enemy”. They are the revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.
~ Michael Moore (born: 1954-04-23 age: 57)
We are the richest country in the world. We spend more on health care than any other country. Yet we have the worst health care in the Western world. Come on. We can do better than this.
~ Michael Moore (born: 1954-04-23 age: 57)
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan (born: 1927-03-16 died: 2003-03-26 at age: 76) New York Senator
You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts.
~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan (born: 1927-03-16 died: 2003-03-26 at age: 76)
So, I’m not impressed by BP’s promises and I’m not ready to take the word of a company with a track record of pursuing profit over safety.
~ Patty Murray (born: 1950-10-11 age: 61) Democratic senator from WashingtonPoliticians know perfectly well that corporations are required by law to do whatever it takes to maximise profit. So it is no surprise that, for BP, profit trumps safety. Maximising profit usually requires minimal compliance with the law. If the law is weak, that is the fault of the lawmakers, not the corporations. Dr. Frankenstein (congress) is responsible for the behaviour of his creations — the conscience-free monsters (the corporations).
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
~ Edward R. Murrow (born: 1908-04-25 died: 1965-04-27 at age: 57)
Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is a merger of State and Corporate power.
~ Benito Mussolini (born: 1883-07-29 died: 1945-04-28 at age: 61) , the father of modern fascism.
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.
~ Huey P. Newton (born: 1942-02-17 died: 1989-09-22 at age: 47)
Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.
~ Reinhold Niebuhr (born: 1892-06-21 died: 1971-06-01 at age: 78)
Rationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naïve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.
~ Reinhold Niebuhr (born: 1892-06-21 died: 1971-06-01 at age: 78)
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
~ Pastor Martin Niemöller (born: 1892-01-14 died: 1984-03-06 at age: 92)
When the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal.
~ Richard Milhous Nixon (born: 1913-01-09 died: 1994-04-22 at age: 81) denying the rule of law in the USA.
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50)
I have no patience with people who go around blowing up innocent people.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50) 2009-04-07St. Obama is apparently unaware the biggest killer of innocent civilians is the US military, which he commands. This is a necessary side effect of the way the USA fights wars with high technology from a safe distance.
I opposed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. It should be repealed and I will vote for its repeal on the Senate floor. I will also oppose any proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gays and lesbians from marrying.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50)
Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50)I guess I am one of those who need my head examined. I have seen no evidence that bin Laden had anything to do with 9/11 other than the tape taking responsibility, along with others from dozens of other crackpots. All I have is Bush-43’s assurance. Bush lied about almost everything he said. His word is worthless. I have seen hundreds of pieces of evidence why bin Laden could not have done it without help from people outside Al Qaeda. Everyone deserves a trial. Trials are both for the accused and for the public to learn about the crimes. I would really like to hear if bin Laden managed the threaten or bribe any Americans into betraying their country. Bin Laden’s execution is akin to the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald before he could spill what he knew. The chief witness to these crimes has been silenced. Further, Obama risked nuclear war by violating Pakistani sovereignty. There is nothing crazy about demanding conformance with law.
On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50) speech in Egypt, 2009-06-04Get serious! The Palestinians have had a homeland for centuries before the USA was founded. The problem is Zionists invaded, occupied and subjected them to apartheid.
Our destiny is not written for us, but by us.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50)
Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50)
The fact that my 15 minutes of fame has extended a little longer than 15 minutes is somewhat surprising to me and completely baffling to my wife.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50)
The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as — it is as if he has killed all mankind.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50) speech in Egypt, 2009-06-04How odd! The USA has killed more innocent civilians than any other country in the last decade.
We do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We see no military — we seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50) speech in Egypt, 2009-06-04This is nonsense. According to both the US military and the Afghan puppet dictator Hamid Karzai, bin Laden is not in Afghanistan and neither are Al Qaeda. American soldiers are putting themselves in harm’s way by occupying Afghanistan. The Afghans fight the occupation with primitive home made bombs. They have no means to kill Americans once they go home, and the Taliban would be insane to attempt to resume the fight. The situation is similar to Vietnam. Obama fails to acknowledge the original motivation for the invasion was the Taliban refused to give Unocal a free right of way for their oil pipeline. He is becoming more like Bush every day in his denials.
We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50) speech in Egypt, 2009-06-04Obama’s paranoid attitude will get the USA in deep trouble. Attempting to kill all the people who hate you will just create ten times as many new enemies. America made most of its enemies as a direct result of its illegal aggression and egregious behaviour such as torture, banned weapons and butchering civilians. If Obama cleaned up America’s act, most of its enemies would evaporate.
We will not apologise for our way of life.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50)defending America’s conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste. That man is 80% Republican.
Every Thanksgiving, Barack sits down to call some of our troops and thank them for their service. When he tells me about these conversations, it always reminds me of how blessed we are to live in a country where men and women will stand up to protect our freedoms and preserve our way of life. And whenever I ’ve had the chance to meet with these heroes and their families, I’ve always walked away inspired by their courage and in awe of their strength.
~ Michelle Obama (born: 1964-01-17 age: 48)Michelle knows perfectly well this is a monstrous lie. She knows the soldiers who went to Afghanistan and Iraq were sent to plunder their oil and minerals, not to protect American freedoms. On the day he announced the troop drawdown in Iraq there Obama auctioned off all of Iraq’s oil reserves to American and European oil companies. True mission accomplished! Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq threatens American freedom in any way. Neither has the means to even if it wanted to. Neither had anything to do with 9/11. In contrast, the USA illegally invaded both countries, unprovoked and then enforced martial law and the imposed almost a decade of military occupation on them. Not only does America threaten other people’s freedom, it stomps all over it.
Is there anybody here who thinks that following the orders takes away the blame
Is there anybody here who wouldn’t mind a murder by another name
~ Phil Ochs (born: 1940-12-19 died: 1976-04-09 at age: 35) Is there Anybody Here?
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46) 1984
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
It was with the last revolution and the coming of INGSOC (English Socialism) that the latest High learnt how to keep their position permanently — by cultivating ignorance among the other classes and by constantly surveying them through the Thought Police. Part of this strategy included the maintenance of a state of continual warfare, which Goldstein discussed in the third chapter. The three major powers were not fighting this perpetual war for victory; they were fighting to keep a state of emergency always present as the surest guarantee of authoritarianism.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46) 1984 chapter 9.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
Defend our freedoms
~ Sarah Palin (born: 1964-02-11 age: 48)Sarah Palin is an American celebro-politician with a voice like a squeaky fuel pump. She uses the phrase “defend our freedoms” the way most people use um. What she means by it is the freedom to drive Hummers as far as you want with dirt cheap gas, the freedom to dine outside in cold weather under heat lamps, the freedom to not insulate your home but mostly the freedom to kill people who don’t subscribe to your religion and steal their oil.
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
~ C. Northcote Parkinson (born: 1909-07-30 died: 1993-03-09 at age: 83)
Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man has a right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has quarrel with mine, although I have none with him?
~ Blaise Pascal (born: 1623-06-19 died: 1662-08-19 at age: 39)
Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience’s sake.
~ Blaise Pascal (born: 1623-06-19 died: 1662-08-19 at age: 39)
I’d rather have a German division in front of me, than a French one behind.
~ George S. Patton (born: 1885-11-11 died: 1945-12-21 at age: 60) , GeneralThis shows the anti-French bigotry goes back even before freedom fries. The Americans forget they would be a part of Canada were not for the French helping defeat the British in their battle for independence. They conveniently forget the British had 66 ships, the French had 52 and the Americans 0. France endured a billion livre deficit to help the Americans, which badly hurt their economy. Today’s Americans are embarrassingly rude and ungrateful.
What you are inferring is, “If we were to legalise heroin tomorrow everybody would use heroin.” How many people here would start using heroin? I bet nobody would. Oh yeah, I need the government to take care of me. I don’t want to use heroin, so I need these laws.
~ Ron Paul (born: 1935-08-20 age: 76)It is not quite that simple. If heroin were legalised, Altria (née Philip Morris tobacco) would flood the airwaves with ads designed to convince people that their brand of menthol heroin-lite made from genetically enhanced poppies, wink wink, was harmless, and made you irresistible to the opposite sex. Just as with tobacco, horny teenagers would fall for it.
Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.
~ William Penn (born: 1644-10-14 died: 1718-07-30 at age: 73)
Either faith in Christ can cleanse all people of their sin, or none, but not some… The truth of Christ’s death, resurrection, and power over sin is absolute.
~ Rick Perry (born: 1950-03-04 age: 61) On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting for page 180Perry is a throwback to the 1600s when Catholics and Protestants tried to force each other to accept their dogma. The founding fathers learned the lesson from the endless religious wars in Europe and sought to avoid strife in America using the constitutional separation of church and state. Perry is so sure he is right he wants to toss that wisdom out, and impose his own primitive form of Christianity on the whole country using force of law.
How does the richest country in the history of the world fail to pay its bills?
~ Rick Perry (born: 1950-03-04 age: 61) governor of Texas, presidential hopeful, ex-Democrat.If Perry is truly interested in the answer to that question, he should have a look at the differences between the USA and other major nations:
- The USA is the only country to offer loopholes to let rich people and corporations pay no taxes.
- The USA is the only country to support a military bigger than every other military on earth combined.
- The USA is the only country to fight large optional wars that drag on for over a decade.
- The USA has the lowest taxes.
- The USA spends twice as much for its private medical system than other countries do for their public systems and gets the worst outcomes.
- Other countries limit how much money individuals, corporations and foreign nations may to contribute to legally buy politicians.
- The USA is a relatively new country with relatively little history. They tend to focus on the immediate future. They don’t properly plan for generations to come.
I think there are a substantial number of [climate change] scientists who have manipulated data, so that they will have dollars rolling into their, to their projects.
~ Rick Perry (born: 1950-03-04 age: 61) source, ex-Democrat.Perry later admitted he had so evidence to support this claim. Can you trust someone who makes such serious accusations based on a hunch as a president?
The Defense Department claims 12 nations with nuclear weapons programs, 13 with biological weapons, 16 with chemical weapons, and 28 with ballistic missiles as existing and emerging threats to the United States. But only one of those countries sits atop the second largest oil reserves in the world. [Iraq]
~ Charles Peña , Senior Defense Policy Fellow of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, for The Chicago Tribune
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. Since he said that estimates now put Iraq at #1.
~ Steven Pinker (born: 1954-09-18 age: 57)
The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
~ Plato (born: 428 BC died: 348 BC at age: 80)
He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.
~ General Colin Powell (born: 1937-04-05 age: 74) 2001-02-02
We here, we’re unclear, get used to it!
~ Occupy Protestor
The problem with allowing abrogation of legal procedure for terrorists, is that the government is free then to declare anyone it does not like a terrorist. Nobody is safe. Gordon Brown of Britain took this to ludicrous extremes by declaring the entire nation of Iceland as terrorists when the prime minister of Iceland did not handle a banking crisis to his liking.
~ Kikuyu Proverb
When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.
~ Kikuyu Proverb
If a man is slain unjustly, his heirs shall be entitled to satisfaction, but let him not carry his vengeance to excess, or his victim is sure to be assisted and avenged.
~ The Qur’an Al Isra 17:33
What does it say about our society and culture that since 1991, a “World-Trade-Center’s worth of Iraqi children continue to die every month” as a direct result of the crimes against humanity perpetrated under the direction of the last three Presidents of the United States? What does this fact mean to each and every person in this nation-state who pays annual taxes, the largest portion of which goes to the ongoing expansion of the United States military? As tax-paying members of the United States, can we reconcile our culpability for these Iraqi deaths with the deaths of people one year ago in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania?
~ David Ratcliffe
Fundamentalist groups like Christian Embassy have infiltrated the very top of the U.S. military and gained positions of influence in the Pentagon.
~ Darrel Ray in The God Virus.
Freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. We have to fight for it and protect it and then hand it to them, so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.
~ Ronald Reagan (born: 1911-02-06 died: 2004-06-05 at age: 93) Warning against the dangers of universal health care, no kidding.
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.
~ Ronald Reagan (born: 1911-02-06 died: 2004-06-05 at age: 93)That is perhaps true for the I.R.S. or the department of Homeland Security, but after a disaster I think you would be extremely happy to see someone from the government to help you put the fire out, dig out from an earthquake, get your water working again, get your electricity working again, stop the looters, clean up a toxic spill, help your finance repairs to your house.
The United States has no credible evidence that Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria early last year before the U.S.-led war that drove Saddam Hussein from power.
~ Condoleezza Rice (born: 1954-11-14 age: 57), National Security Adviser, 2004-09-04.
How awful for them [Hitler’s victims] to see those swastikas, the SS men and the SA — people we’d never thought of as criminals.
~ Leni Riefenstahl (born: 1902-08-22 died: 2003-09-08 at age: 101) The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni RiefenstahlI hope some day Americans similarly allow themselves to face the reality of what they did in Viet Nam, Afghanistan and Iraq. So far they have behaved like holocaust deniers, pretending nothing happened.
Iraq has not been disarmed 100 percent [but] in terms of what they [Iraqis] have accomplished there are no meaningful weapons or weapons production capability in Iraq today.
~ Scott Ritter (born: 1961-07-15 age: 50) Former U.N. weapons inspector, who was right.
It has been estimated that 80 percent of the oil illegally smuggled out of Iraq under “oil for food” ended up in the United States.
~ Scott Ritter (born: 1961-07-15 age: 50)
There has been no case made — based on anything other than speculation — that Iraq poses a threat.
~ Scott Ritter (born: 1961-07-15 age: 50)
If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that difference in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear.
~ Gene Roddenberry (born: 1921-08-19 died: 1991-10-24 at age: 70)
28% of American were able to pick the name of the leader of the Supreme court from a list of four famous people. If they just guessed randomly, they still could have managed 25% which suggest the number that actually knew is closer to 3%. Amazing how many extreme opinions Americans have about the supreme court without even knowing that basic information.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
60% of the world’s countries have banned cluster bombs. Holdouts include China, Russia, Israel and the USA.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
60-80% of fertilized eggs fail to implant and then another 15-20% of the fertilized eggs that do implant spontaneously abort. That gives us a 16-34% survival rate for fertilized eggs. A religiously minded person might say God condemns 66-84% of all babies to death in the time between conception and the start of pregnancy. Give his happens more often than not, calling for the public hanging of doctors who encourage this process, seems a bit overblown.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
9/11 shattered the confidence of the American people. If you believe George W. Bush, a handful of Muslims armed only with box cutters, was able to defeat the entire US Air Force and intelligence community. Americans naturally wanted revenge. Most of them see their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as revenge for 9/11. But this makes no sense. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. According to George W. Bush, the suicide attackers were Saudis, not Afghans or Iraqis. But even if Afghanistan and Iraq were guilty, 9/11 was a flea bite compared with the American levelling of Afghanistan and Iraq.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
9/11 was the most brilliant terrorist attack of all time. The story is a tiny band armed only with box cutters miraculously defeated the entire US military without any inside help. How is it then that Al Qaeda, the supposed architects of 9/11, have not managed an even more spectacular repeat performance? They have only pulled of the most embarrassingly inept attacks ever since. German intelligence said that Al Qaeda were far too inept to pull off 9/11. History seems to be proving them right.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A big disadvantage of owing a gun is if anyone ever uses that gun in a crime, you will be the presumed culprit. You will need a lawyer and a good explanation of why you could not have done it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A child born to a mother addicted to heroin, cocaine, alcohol or methamphetamines is condemned to a hellish existence. Prenatal exposure to drugs, and postnatal neglect cause brain damage. I think we should consider implanting a contraceptive in women drug addicts. It would be removed only after a year of clean living.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A commentator on the second Republican debate announced that Mitt Romney “looked presidential”. He intended this as high praise. To me, he is complimenting Romney’s tailor, not Romney. How he was dressed is just about the least important feature of his performance. That could easily be fixed if it were deficient.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A conspiracy is simply a crime committed by more than one person. Most important crimes are conspiracies. A conspiracy theory is a hypothesis about how and why an important crime was committed. To help cover their crimes, criminals usually successfully dismiss anyone who suggests a conspiracy theory as a crackpot. Famous sleuths Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Tom Barnaby are all professional conspiracy theorists. There is no paranoia necessarily involved.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A country that refuses to protest the illegal and unjust Afghanistan and Iraq wars deserves to ruled by corrupt Republican politicians usurping power with every dirty trick in the book and then some. The American people looked the other way by thinking about all the sweet Iraqi oil that would flow to their gas pumps, and all the precious Afghan lithium that would power their laptops and new cars. It is poetic justice. The greed of the American people is rewarded with victimhood at the hands of the Masters of Greed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A couple of hundred years ago, people did not linger. If they became sickly, an infection would kill them in a few days. Today, we use expensive technology to keep people barely alive for years, often against their will. It is a macabre thing to do to the elderly. It is most certainly not for their benefit, but for their children who can’t let go of their parents and for elderly silly Christians who have been traumatised with hellfire and are afraid to die.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A fine of $500 could represent a month’s income or a few minutes income. Using fines to enforce law severely punishes the poor and gives the rich a get out of jail free card.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A greedy scoundrel like Bernie Madoff can financially ruin thousands of people, but it takes someone unusually vain who loves power purely for the sake of power like George F. Will, Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh to take down an entire planet by spreading crank theories about the planet’s life support systems.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A group a Canadians is trying to bring back flogging because it is “beneficial for the prisoners” We know perfectly well flogging did not deter crime when it was standard. These advocates are dishonest. They want flogging because thinking about flogging gives them stiffies. They don’t give a hoot about the prisoners or deterring crime.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A historian can be thrown in jail for challenging the orthodox estimate of casualties for but one event in human history — the holocaust.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A natural side effect of capitalism is massive wealth redistribution. Money flows from the poor and middle class to the rich. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. When Republicans rail against wealth redistribution, they exclude this flavour of it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A new buzzword, authentic, has captured the minds of the media. When they say a candidate is inauthentic they mean he contradicts himself daily and he lies through his teeth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A one-party democracy is similar to a partyless democracy. Politicians in both compete primarily as individuals, rather than as parties.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A panel charged with finding the cause of homelessness discovered that the rise of homelessness exactly mirrored the decline in public housing. In other words, the problem is prime minister Harper’s fault. Why they are we punishing the homeless who had nothing to do with creating the situation? Harper is the only one with the power to fix the problem.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A party is responsible for the promises and platforms espoused by all its candidates. It must either:
- formally repudiate comments the party does not support.
- control the candidates to stick to the party platform.
The Republicans refuse to do this, so that nobody knows where they stand. They want to appear as Tea Party extreme right wing to some, and centrist to others. It is just one more way they are dishonest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A police lineup is a dishonest tool for identifying culprits. All it indicates is the perpetrator looks more like the selected candidate than the other four unselected ones. To be fair, all five candidates should look as similar as possible. In a mockery of the lineup, you could have four Asians and one white guy where the perpetrator was known to be white. Picking the white guy proves absolutely nothing. The idea needs to be brought up to date with computer technology, effectively creating a giant pool of lineup candidates. You could then do a traditional lineup with just the most likely candidates.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A rep from the Sally Jesse Raphael (a talk show host) once phoned me up and asked me to come on her show to talk about euthanasia. They asked if I could guarantee I would cry. I said no. They then decided I was not a suitable guest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A Republican believes the unborn have a right to life that trumps the mother’s. However, they believe that right evaporates at birth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A sadistic pedophile has four basic options:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- White knuckle his urges. Content himself with pornography.
- Attack children in his home town and have a police team track him down and jail him where he will be tortured and killed.
- Join the priesthood and trust the hierarchy to cover for him.
- Join the army and head off to combat where he becomes a god with power of life and death over his victims and their families. He can rape, torture and murder to his heart’s content. If he is lucky, the president will give him a distinguished service medal. There is almost no chance he will face consequences for his crimes.
A scientist would never dream of announcing the consequences of some course of action without researching and/or experimenting first. In contrast, a politician would never dream of doing any research. He always shoots from the hip announcing his intuition as gospel truth (and truth no more reliable than the science in the bible). We tolerate deliberate gross incompetence in our politicians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A social safety net is not a luxury. It is an absolute necessity for survival of our civilisation. Without it, you create fatal pressure for apopulation explosion . People plan for their old age by having at least half a dozen offspring to support them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A treatment for infertility involves creating a dozen embryos, implanting the healthiest-looking one and discarding the rest. Fundamentalist Christians do not object. What happened to “Every embryo and stem cell is sacred. Discarding one is morally equivalent to murdering an adult human being”? Because the net result of the process is increasing the number of Christians in the world, they consider the murder of the eleven other embryos perfectly acceptable. So sounds what these loons really mean is overpopulating and destroying the environment is a virtue, where controlling population is an evil equivalent to murder. They are stark raving bonkers, and hypocritical liars to boot.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Abraham Lincoln claimed that all men were created equal. Modern Americans no longer believe him. To them, non-Americans don’t count. When reporting the casualties of American-caused wars, American media report only American casualties. Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani children, women, grandparents, teens do not count for anything. This is yet another example of the extreme conceit of Americans. They even have a word for it exceptionalism. It is the American version of the Nazi master race.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to Bill Moyers, if you keep a gun in your home or office, it is 22 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder. How then can you possibly justify owning a gun to protect your family. It sounds more like an unconscious intent to bump them off.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to historians, terrorists are people who use violence to try to change the political opinion of civilians. Americans ignore that definition because it categorises them as the world’s biggest terrorists. Instead they use a different definition. If you lose a fight (even one not involving civilians) you are a terrorist. If you win, you are a heroic defender of democracy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to NOVA, the NSA (National Security Agency), by tapping all phone calls and all emails, collect the equivalent of 12 filing cabinets of information on every American citizen every year.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to the National Geographic channel, all those who work on megaprojects are mythic heroes; the Christian God is actively involved in human affairs; God gave the Jews a divine eviction notice to serve on the Palestinians and any Palestinians who refused to leave quietly are terrorists; Bush did a bang up job managing Katrina; American soldiers fight for holy purpose; the ideal dog lies quietly without moving or expressing its opinions… I think it should be renamed the RF (Republican Fantasy) channel.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to the Nova documentary The Spy Factory the 20,000 people working at the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland were asked to stay home on 9/11 to avoid a possible attack. However the NSA did not pass this warning on to anyone else, including the CIA and FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). I speculate leaks from this group would explain why so many people avoided the Pentagon and the World Trade centre on 9/11. It seems incredible that the NSA would take a threat so seriously that it sent its people home, where it simultaneously took it so lightly it did not pass the warning on to anyone else. It is as though the NSA did not want to interfere with the attack or frighten it off with too much publicity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to the Ralph Benmergui miniseries, God Bless America, the USA, in its wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, use logos involving the crucifix and heraldry from the Christian crusaders who invaded the middle east in the 1100s and killed everyone who had even known to be a Muslim. So much for separation of church and state.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Addicts are moral degenerates who will steal and sometimes kill to satisfy their habit. Americans make up 5% of the world’s population but use 25% of the world’s oil supply. Americans are addicted to oil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Adults have to make decisions around such things as marijuana use, sex, gay sex, abortion, pornography, diet, gun ownership, military service, church attendance… A Republican is someone who imagines he knows best how to make these decisions for others, even for people twice his age. He think he should have the right to punish people who do things differently than he thinks best. What is most disgraceful about Republicans is they have done no thinking at all on these matters. They just want to impose their religious dogmas on others. These beliefs are arbitrary with no evidence whatsoever to back them up, just a gut feeling based on childhood indoctrination. It amounts to a refusal to acknowledge the constitutional right of others to freedom of religion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Advertisers, such as Amex pound gibberish into the heads of the people, e.g. that they should use an Amex credit card because it gives them “social currency”. It gives access to currency, and you exchange it with other people, so that is social, but any credit card does that! Endless pounding with this sort of nonsense turns people’s brains to mush. It then leaves them even more vulnerable to nonsense thrown at them by politicians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
After a certain point, it works to your advantage if your political opponents are crazy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
After the way Christians have treated gays, it is wonder that gangs of gays don’t go beating up priests and nuns and torching churches with the congregations still inside. It is clear who actually stands on the moral high ground.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
After the way Christians have treated people who believe in freedom of choice in reproduction, it is a wonder than women don’t drag Christians from their homes and burn them alive, especially those who fund and promote the assassination of doctors. It is clear who actually stands on the moral high ground.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
All crimes should have a statute of limitations of under 75 years, otherwise you will have both the defendant and the witnesses suffering from Alzheimers. Further, science is showing human memory, even over short terms, is much less trustworthy than we imagine. Even if trials can’t be timely, perhaps collecting testimony can be.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
All the great people were first and foremost salesmen. Without extraordinary ability to persuade others adopt their ideas, they would have accomplished little.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
All the Republican shills keep telling me that Obama has absolutely no chance of re-election. There is plenty of time for the situation to change. Look at the history of previous elections. All that has to happen is for a tiny fraction of the Republican overreaching and wickedness to come to light, or the recession to run its natural course.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Almost every American is a bald faced liar. Like Nazis excusing themselves for invading Poland, they pretend their illegal, unprovoked attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were done in self defence.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
America behaves as if it owned the entire world, and believes the purpose of all non-Americans is to serve Rome, er, America. Another way of looking at it is America behaves much the way you would have expected Nazi Germany to mellow had they won WWII (World War II).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
America has terrible trouble with gun violence. They imagine the way to correct it is to increase the number of guns and to reduce the regulation on them. It never occurs to Americans to look at what other countries have done to discover what works and what does not.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
America is all about sacrifice. Those who have almost nothing sacrifice so that others may have too much.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
America is almost as decadent as ancient Rome:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Watch reality TV. You will see the average American is about 31¾ kg (70 lbs) overweight.
- Americans have eating contests where they throw up.
- Even with all they have, Americans still use their military to plunder other countries for natural resources.
- America creates the crassest TV shows like Kenny vs Spenny, Pure Pwnage, Downfall, Billy the Exterminator, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Trailer Park Boys, Jerry Springer, Ernest Angely, Californication, Andrew Zimmer stuffs his face on Bizarre Foods…
- America is the least generous developed country on a per capita basis, even though it is the richest.
- Americans boast in a most unseemly way that they are the #1 country on earth, #1 only in pollution, militarism, nuclear weapons, obesity, stinginess and greed.
America is plagued with bedbugs. Americans refuse to ask themselves why. The obvious reason is the callous way the Americans cast a sizeable proportion of their population out onto the streets without a clean place to sleep.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
America used torture, rape, illegal weapons and just about every imaginable outrageous act to suppress the “terrorists” who controlled the world’s oil. In the process America so outraged its victims that Americans will have to deal with the revenge for centuries to come. This is obvious. Think how strongly we resisted the Nazis. The worse they behaved, the more strongly we resisted. America”s behaviour is so stupid it has to be a deliberate way to foment perpetual war and hence perpetual war profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American are so conceited they believe they should be paid 1000 times more than others, and that others should be grateful for the pittance they get for working 16 hour days to produce goods for America. Americans produce nothing yet imagine they should be privileged to eat so much of the world’s food that they make themselves sick and become grossly obese. They imagine this position of privilege is something inherent in the structure of the universe and the inherent superiority of Americans. That is nonsense. The reason they get away with such idle luxury is they spend more on the military than all other countries combined and they use it to extract whatever they want from others. They are global parasites.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American children learn in school that President Lincoln wanted to free the slaves in the south. The south did not want to let their slaves go, so they seceded. Then the North and South had a war to decide if slaves should be free. The truth is more puzzling. Lincoln was in favour of slavery in the South. However, he opposed it in the North and West. When Lincoln was elected, the southern states seceded, angry that slavery was being blocked from expanding into the west. It was an emotional reaction, indignant at being told what to do by Yankees rather than a decision motivated by economics. In modern times, if a group want to leave a union, we let them. Back then, Lincoln felt obligated to wage war to preserve the union.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American exceptionalism used to be called jingoism. It is a monstrous conceit that America is superior to everyone else and hence need not comply with international law and has a right to take whatever it pleases from other countries. It is just an excuse for bad behaviour. It is Nazi master-race-light. It the neo-white man’s burden attitude that allows American to invade other countries and wonder why they are not grateful.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American governors have the power to legally Gerrymander electoral boundaries. This is so effective, that the next election is nearly always won by the party of the governor. This is corrupt. What is needed is a computer program to draw the boundaries that uses party-neutral rules.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American Muslims are the #11 terrorism threat to the USA. But bigotry makes Americans focus all their attention on them, ignoring the ten more dangerous groups.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American politicians freely admit to deciding their votes based on personal religious dogma. In other words they have no shame about imposing their personal religious beliefs on all their constituents, even when they acknowledge that choice is not in the best interest of the public. They even excuse themselves of racism and bigotry on religious grounds. They get away with this evil because Americans think of religion, any religion, no matter how irrationals or cruel, as a virtue.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American politics are deeply corrupt. I don’t just mean that all politicians have their fingers in the till, but that the laws themselves are unfair. Consider:
- It is possible for candidate A with more popular votes than candidate B to lose to B in a presidential election.
- Electoral boundaries are routinely Gerrymandered to favour one party.
- It is legal for corporations to buy politicians with unlimited amounts of money.
- It is legal for hostile foreign powers to anonymously influence US elections with campaign contributions.
- First past the post voting schemes exclude third parties from getting even a small foothold.
- The presence of third parties can cause a more unpopular candidate to win.
How could this be? A Republican strategist speaking on NPR (National Public Radio) was candid. He explained that when fairness favoured the Democrats, they fought fairness. The corrupt rules usually favour the party in power. The party in power thus works hard to maintain the corrupt rules or extend them. About the only way the rules are ever cleaned up is when the opposition party finally gets in, and sets about removing crooked rules the former ruling party installed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American politics are simple. Corporations and rich individuals give money to politicians to pass laws that help them become still richer at the expense of the middle class. Politicians need the money to pay for ads to trick the middle class into voting for them, despite their anti-middle class policies. The way out is for middle class people to explain to the politicians, that no matter how many ads they see, they will no longer vote for politicians with anti-middle class policies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American politics is so crooked it permits Republicans to place TV ads during Democratic primaries, while posing as Democrats, to attempt to get a weak candidate nominated. It is not just theoretical. Republicans did just that in the Arkansas 2010 senate primaries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American politics is so dishonest that Democratic presidential candidate Dukakis was kicked out of the running when Republicans blamed Dukakis for letting rapist Willy Horton out on parole as required by a law enacted by the previous Republican governor and repealed by Dukakis.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American rednecks object to mosques on the grounds they don’t like Sharia law. Sharia is just as irrelevant as Christian canonical law that burns witches and tortures people. The Muslims are just building a mosque not setting up a theocracy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American right wingers write, jeering “Nothing you do is going to slow down the US military doing whatever it damn well pleases. Similarly, nothing you do will have any effect on global warming. Give up you pompous idiot!” I have six responses:~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- You for one must think I have some power in the world, or you would not have taken the effort to write me to discourage me from taking action.
- What I do might not have significant effect, but what you want me to do will most certainly have zero effect (or even negative effect by discouraging others).
- Humans are herd animals. They tend to do whatever their peers are doing. If I take action, it encourages others to do so as well in a chain reaction. If I do nothing, it encourages others to similarly despair.
- It simply feels better to take what action I can.
- Back in 1969 I started a gay lib project that I figured had a 1 in a billion chance of accomplishing anything. Within four years we had the first gay rights legislation. Nobody was more surprised than me.
- Gandhi, the world’s foremost expert on social change, said “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
American school children turned on an 8-year old Muslim girl, tormenting her, pretending to pee on her, calling her all manner of cruel and inaccurate names, while the teachers looked on approvingly. The little girl’s hair turned partly grey and she hid under the covers of her bed for days at a time afraid to come out. This sort of thing reminds me of the behaviour of Nazis toward Jews prior to WW II. How does anyone admit to being American these days without profound apology?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans and their guns are like hicks who think you can put out a fire with gasoline.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are becoming disillusioned with both the Democrats and Republicans. They are beginning to notice both parties get most of their bribes (aka campaign contributions) from corporations, and hence pass peculiar laws to favour corporations, such as giving banks a massive bailout that they passed on as multi-million dollar bonuses or limiting the liability of oil companies to $75 million when they spill oil, sticking billions of the tab to the taxpayers, or loopholes that allow the rich to avoid taxes altogether.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are big on euphemisms. Social conservative actually means, anti-gay bigot, racial bigot and Christian triumphalist (The government should help shove Christianity down the throats of non-Christians.)
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are big on euphemisms. survivalist actually means people who accumulate arms caches and plot to kill their neighbours and government workers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are big on group punishment. If a black man kills a policeman, they want a black man executed. It is largely irrelevant if the black man chosen for the execution actually did the deed. If someone protests the execution, Americans go on an on about how terrible it is to kill a policeman. They never argue for why that particular black man must have done it. This question is, should someone pay with their life, not who. Similarly Americans want to kill about 3000 Muslims for every 9/11 victim. It does not matter if the scapegoats chosen for evisceration had anything to do with 9/11.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are crazy. The Tea Party and the Republicans use all manner of filthy tricks to bring down the US economy, and block everything Obama tries to fix the economy, and yet they hold Obama almost equally responsible for it failing to recover. That is like holding the firemen equally responsible to the arsonist for fire damage.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are extremely proud of their family values:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- They never attack anyone unprovoked, unless they have oil and a nasty dictator.
- They never torture or used banned weapons except in an emergency such as the enemy might not like us for attacking them and stealing their oil and might fight back effectively some day.
- They endorse harassing and persecuting gays as the national sport because bull baiting is cruel.
- They encourage the spread of Christianity, (whose primary values are child molesting and gay persecution) by making listening to its promotional material mandatory and by suppressing any science which contradicts it.
- They celebrate overconsumption of goods, services and food to punish the lazy poor of the world further with deprivation.
- Oil is the root of all evil, so they work feverishly to convert the remaining supplies into CO₂ greenhouse gas.
- Americans consider posterity a pack of deadbeats wanting a handout from the current generation who own everything. So they punish them with massive public debt and leave them with a hopelessly polluted world with no easy energy sources left.
Americans are fond of Orwellian language, for example:~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Orwellian Language Examples Example Meaning Defence of Marriage Act Prevents people from getting married. Clear Skies Initiative allows greater air pollution. Homeland Security Aggressive foreign wars to control oil supplies. Healthy Forests Initiative hands stewardship of the forests over to the logging industry and allows renewed cutting of old growth forests. Beyond Petroleum Off shore oil and natural gas drilling and drilling in the national parks. New Freedom Initiative mass forced drugging of school children. Patriot Act Abrogating all the freedoms in the constitution.
Americans are having a terrible time with their economy. The problem is, oddly, Christianity. Christians are hopelessly optimistic, gullible people who will believe what any charlatan tells them so long as it sounds pleasant. They have almost no interest in whether it is actually true. They have been trained in this sheep-like submission to crooks since birth. So they are vulnerable to politicians who lie to them that they can have their cake and eat it too — massive tax cuts, especially to the billionaires, no cuts in spending and pay down the debt. Honest politicians tell them they must pay higher taxes and accept across the board spending cuts to avoid the public debt dragging the whole country into bankruptcy. Christians turf these depressing but honest politicians out office. They prefer fairy tales.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are having a terrible time with unemployment. Part of the problem is crooked financial corporations permitted to screw the people while the Republicans block any attempts to reign them in. Part of the problem is the Republican party blocking every effort to create jobs in a bid to make Obama look bad.
Republicans claim the key problem is taxes are too high on the rich. This can’t be true. Taxes have not been this low since the 1950s. Big business and the rich have pots of money, more income, more wealth and a bigger share of the pie than ever before. But they are not creating jobs. Obviously, merely giving them more money through bigger tax breaks, loopholes and subsidies will not help. They will just sit on that money too or spend it is ways that don’t create jobs in America. I can see two ways to break the logjam:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Tax the heck out of the rich and use the money to create jobs by spending on infrastructure, teachers, research, alternative energy, electrified transportation etc.
- Tax the heck out of the rich and use the money to give the rich incentives to create jobs. No jobs, no money. Smart rich people will end up with even more money than they have now. It is their choice. It will be a wealth transfer from the lazy rich to the industrious rich, with the side effect of a landslide of jobs.
Americans are in extreme denial about their two wars. If you post anything on an American blog pointing out any of the following facts, it will be pulled:
- America attacked Afghanistan and Iraq unprovoked.
- The two aggressive (first strike) wars are illegal both by the Nuremberg Principles and by UN treaty. Aiding and abetting such a war is a capital war crime. Two secretaries general of the UN and a Nuremberg chief prosecutor have said this.
- American soldiers are not defending the USA or their freedoms. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq has any means to attack. America attacked them, not the reverse.
- The motive for both wars is control of resources, lithium (used in high performance batteries) in Afghanistan and oil in Iraq.
- Since soldiers are not fighting to defend the USA, they must be fighting because they enjoy fighting, killing bullying or torture. This is not a motive worthy of respect.
- Americans cheat in war, even against a relatively unarmed foe, ignoring the Geneva Conventions and employing routine torture and banned weapons including DU (Depleted Uranium), cluster bombs, white phosphorus, napalm and land mines.
- America’s military technology makes it easy to wage war from a safe distance. The side effect is roughly half the victims are children.
The irony is Americans love to pretend their occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are to protect traditional American freedoms, such as freedom of speech, which they themselves trample.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are like dieters who continue to gorge on giant sundaes, but abstain from the cherry. The Afghan and Iraq wars are both optional. Neither country attacked the USA or present any security threat. Thus the expenditures of the wars are also optional. Giving up the massive war expenditures would hurt no one but Cheney and his ilk selling war materials and mercenaries at inflated prices.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are much like Romans. They don’t need a reason to start a war to continue one. War is the normal state of affairs. They require reasons to stop wars. Economic and moral arguments do not count. Only arguments based on self-interest are considered relevant.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are only 4% of the world’s population, but they believe they have the right to unilaterally make all the major decisions for the planet.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are only 4% of the world’s population, but their chauvinism convinces them they are the planetary ruling class, much as Nazis believed Germans were the master race, deserving of special privilege solely by right of birth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are plumb crazy. They are panic stricken by flu shots and affordable health care, but have no concern at all about environmental collapse, global warming or nuclear war.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are prefer vigilante justice. They like the speed and deeply satisfying revenge of a lynching. This is a legacy of their romanticised wild west. They despise and fear the United Nations. But the USA cannot and should not take on the job of enforcing international law for the entire planet all on its own. For law to work, enforcement has to be a group effort. Otherwise, you have what amounts to a self-serving war lord.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are so dedicated to vigilante justice, they even teach children how to use lethal firearms.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are so enamoured by guns because crime dramas have convinced them the odds are close to 100% that if they are ever home alone at night, a homicidal maniac will break in.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are so irritating the way they imagine they are #1 in everything. Granted they spend more than anyone else on medical care, but they are #42 in results. The USA is #23 in infrastructure. They #1 in stinginess in per capita foreign aid. They are #2 is greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. They are #8 per capita is greenhouse gas emissions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are so out of touch with reality, they passed a law in 2011 declaring pizza is a vegetable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are so revolting the way they commit suicide with gluttony, while stealing from third world nations where children starve to death.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are so weak minded they would volunteer their first born for ritual sacrifice if Karl Rove showed them enough commercials telling them it was the American thing to do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are terrified of terrorists, yet they insist terrorists (and everyone else) be permitted to buy any weapons they please, anywhere in the USA they please, no questions asked.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are willing to spend millions of dollars and decades of legal safeguards before giving a murderer a lethal injection. Oddly they are also willing to sentence an old women to death by hypothermia by cutting off her electricity without even a hearing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans believe that a politician lies whenever his lips move, however, for the politician of all politicians, the one who won the brass ring of the presidency, they hold a completely different belief. They believe his word should be taken on unquestioning faith, even on important matters like 9/11 and war, and even when he has a history of lying.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans claim they don’t like regulations on corporations. Why do they live in America? If they want fly-by-night airlines, uninspected meat, no pollution regulations, no regulations on the use of pesticides… they can have it all now — just move to any third world country. Why are they so intent on turning the USA into a third world country? They lobby for the right of banks and corporations to lie to them and rip them off. Are they masochists?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans claimed the experience of 30 countries before them who allowed gays to serve openly in the military had no bearing on the question of the repeal of DADT (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) in America. They also claimed the experience of Portugal and the Netherlands were irrelevant in dealing with cannabis. This is such irrational vanity. The USA is made up of immigrants from all over the world. There in nothing magically different about Americans, even though Americans imagine they are the superior god-chosen race.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans don’t understand single payer health care. It does not magically provide free health care, just quality health care that costs half as much. Even if it is paid for it via taxes, you are still way ahead.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans fall into two classes: the incredibly thick and incredible liars. America attacked two tiny nations unprovoked, tortured them, used banned weapons, targeted children …, then had the gall to whine “Why do they hate us?”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans have a choice. They can make the necessary sacrifices to save themselves from global warming or they can listen to the lies of the Republican oil company shills assuring them there is nothing to worry about and die. Republicans are as irresponsible as those claiming there is no fire in a crowded theatre that is indeed on fire. The oil companies are as short-sighted as pick pockets on the Titanic.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans have a naïive view of their president as a cross between an emperor, Superman and father figure. They imagine he alone can solve the country’s ills, and it is up to him to do the entire job single handedly. They give all the credit for anything good and all the blame for anything bad to the president, even for things he had nothing whatsoever to do with.
If citizens would read their constitution, they would discover the president is tied in knots with checks and balances designed to make to make sure he cannot accomplish anything, especially take the country to war, without first convincing the majority of the politicians to go along with him. No president can do anything on his own about the economy. He needs the co-operation of the Congress, Senate and Supreme Court.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans have a sense of entitlement that rivals the French aristocrats in the time of Louis XVI. They claim they are #1 — God’s most beloved country. They ridicule and belittle every other country as inferior, even France, a country to which the owe an eternal debt for its help in gaining their independence. They think it is ok to invade any country they please, unprovoked and occupy indefinitely, a sucking like a spider on that country’s natural resources. However, if any other country or group attacks the USA, they believe it grounds for massive reprisal including destroying the entire earth in a nuclear conflagration. Americans think it is ok to incarcerate any foreigners they please, even children, indefinitely, without trial and to torture them. However, it is completely unacceptable for anyone else to reciprocate. They see no problem with the USA, with a relatively small fraction of the earth’s population, consuming deliberately, conspicuously and wastefully the lion’s share of its resources. They tell us that when they massively release greenhouse gases, it is perfectly safe, yet when other countries follow suite, it is reprehensible. If I were an American, I would be ashamed to admit it, and would find some way to renounce my citizenship.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans have a strange habit of saying the opposite of what they mean. Bad and wicked are used to mean excellent. The clear skies initiative allows unfettered air pollution. Insurgents are the former legitimate popular government of Afghanistan who were ousted by an illegal invasion and replaced by a provisional dictatorship.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans have always had a distrust of intelligent people, fearing being swindled. For this reason, Sarah Palin has great appeal, since everyone figures they are more intelligent than she is. The problem with electing a mental defective to the presidency is other countries’ leaders can skin them alive, and they fall prey to advisors who are not under public scrutiny.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans have such an inflated opinion of themselves, that nothing can shake it. They imagine they have the best health care in the world, yet their outcomes are lower than any developed country, even worse than Cuba. They imagine they are at the forefront of energy technology research and development, yet China outspends them 14 to 1. The Europeans are far ahead in green energy and electric cars. Americans imagine they have an unstoppable juggernaut of a military, yet two tiny impoverished countries, Afghanistan and Iraq have fought them to a stalemate. They are racing toward bankruptcy yet imagine they are the greatest nation on earth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans knew that Russians failed to conquer Afghanistan after a decade of effort. They knew how brutal the Russians had been, rounding people up then squashing them with tanks, using tiny mines shaped like toys targeting children. The Americans believed if they were to succeed, they would have to be an order of magnitude more brutal with napalm, white phosphorus, DU and other banned weapons to kill people with the most pain possible. The decided to routinely torture off all detainees. They decided to kill mostly children. They underestimated the resolve of the Afghans to resist such brutality. It is only a matter of time until the Americans similarly give up trying to break the spirit of the Afghans.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans love public rituals to honour dead soldiers. They even have grief camps for the children of dead soldiers and support groups for the partners of dead soldiers. They don’t do this for the survivors of the civilian dead. These rituals go on and on, sometimes for centuries. Why? The military does it as part of its recruiting drive. Young impressionable people see these rituals, and say to themselves, “If I get killed in the military at least somebody will respect and miss me. They might even respect me before I am dead.” Soldiers, at heart, are bastards. They abandon their families and kill and/or torture innocent people who were no thread to their countries. All this pomp is to deny and cover up the truth that these soldiers were not really very nice people, and drown out anyone who would say otherwise. It is taking not-speaking-ill-of-the-dead to ludicrous extremes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans love to congratulate themselves that they are the most compassionate nation on earth. This simply is not so. They are the stingiest first world country in terms of foreign aid on a per capita/or per GNP (Gross National Product) basis. They deny millions of people health care. No other first world nation does this. Their streets are filled with the homeless, worse than a third world country.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans openly admit they feel justified in interfering in the internal affairs of other nations if it is in the best interest of America. The rest of the world consider Americans meddling busybodies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans oppose universal health care because they don’t want to spend even a penny to save the lives of the deadbeats who can’t afford health insurance or whom the insurance industry refuses to cover. What they refuse to understand is they don’t even have to spend a penny extra to cover everyone. The health care industry is so obscenely profitable, all you need to fund universal health care is a small slice of that fat, and savings from computerising and simplifying the paperwork, leaving the health care industry as merely incredibly profitable. Americans pay twice what any other developed nation does for health care, and in return get the worst outcomes — even worse than Cuba. If everyone else can do it, Americans too could cover everyone and still pay half what they are paying now, and start getting first class outcomes. The battered Americans have been ripped off so long, it sounds too good to be true.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans passionately believe in owning guns for protection even though they are fully aware those guns are more likely to kill a family member than an intruder. This creates an arms race where criminals pack ever more lethal weapons. In most other countries, burglars don’t need or use guns. In a standoff between a grandmother and a criminal, it is no contest. The criminal is trained, practiced, better armed, and primed for confrontation. Grandma is more likely to survive or avoid a confrontation if there are no guns involved.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans persist in voting for the self interest of those 1% of richest people who are utterly devoid of conscience or compassion instead of their own not-so-evil self interest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans prosecute parents who withhold medical treatment from their children for religious reasons. However, it is perfectly OK for them to withhold treatment from their children if they cannot afford it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans recoil in horror at anything that smacks of socialism, with one exception, publicly funded sports stadiums. Taxpayers with no interest in football get sucked into paying to build stadiums for the benefit of players paid $15 million a year.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans refuse to learn from the experience of other countries. They prefer to speculate based on ideology instead. Consider how they predicted all manner of nonsense about what would happen if DADT were repealed, or marijuana were legalised, or physician assisted suicide were enacted. They refused to look at what happened when other countries did these things.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans remind be of loyal, drunken hockey fans shouting “We’re number one” when they are actually the last team in the league. Americans pay more than twice as much for their medical care as anyone else. So I guess that makes them the world’s #1 patsies. They are #42, tied with Cuba, in medical care outcomes. They spend more on the military than all other countries combined, so I guess that makes them #1 in paranoia. They are #9 in per capita wealth. They are #13 in livability. In theory their constitution guarantees all sorts of freedoms, but Americans have frittered nearly all of them away out of an exaggerated fear of terrorists.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans should be ashamed of themselves. They abandoned Obama, leaving him single handedly to face a giant pack of wolves, the Republicans — people with no sense of decency or fair play. Americans take no responsibility for what those bastards have done to the country. Lazy Americans try to blame Obama, when he is the only one who did do his damnedest. The average American did bugger all to help put the crooked, thieving, lying Republicans in their place.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans sneer at my country Canada. They hate Mexicans. The still have not forgiven Japan and Germany for WW II. They are utterly contemptuous of France. They think speaking Spanish is treason. They obviously hate the Afghans and Iraqis since they have been butchering their children for a decade. They hate the Iranians and the Koreans. Russians and Chinese are sworn enemies. Swedes and Norwegians are effete socialists. They mock the British. They still have not forgiven the British for taxing tea. They hate the Palestinians, like Israel, but dislike Jews.
American love to say “We’re number one” and “USA, USA, USA” brazenly bragging they are superior to everyone else, like some mad white supremacists. Americans don’t even like themselves. They constantly argue for why the elderly, poor, disabled, homeless and unemployed should receive no help and be left to die. They argue for everyone including children packing guns, settling disputes in the vigilante manner of the old west. With an attitude like that, no wonder Americans have made so many enemies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans solved the problem of corporations bribing politicians by legalising it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans solved the problem of corporations and the wealthy bribing politicians by making it legal.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans spend $2 billion a week on the Afghan war. As of 2011-06-23 1600 of their soldiers have been killed. Americans accidentally killed well over a million of Afghan civilians. Yet nobody can give a coherent reason why all this bloodshed is worth the cost. The US military claims there are at most a couple of dozen Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Seals have already assassinated bin Laden in Pakistan. It is bizarre that Americans are closing schools, firehalls and police stations, tossing the unemployed onto the street, kicking ill people out of hospitals etc. to fund this firehose of money whose only beneficiaries are criminal corporations like Xe (Blackwater/Monsanto) and Halliburton.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans who favour the papers-please Arizona law, realise there is no way other than race to select people for harassment. What they really want is both the hated illegal aliens and also the local Hispanics, (especially those daring to speak Spanish in public) harassed out of their neighbourhoods. Before long they will demand that blacks be hassled too — anyone but whites.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans who go livid at the abortion of an 8-cell embryo would be a lot more convincing if they did not stand up and patriotically cheer the torture and murder of 10 year olds in Iraq.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans will defend to the death their constitutional right to own assault weapons, even though no such right is mentioned in the constitution. But they will let slide America’s treaty obligations, which trump the constitution, namely the software lumber agreement with Canada, the Geneva conventions (banning torture, cruel weapons and targeting civilians) the UN Charter which forbids aggressive war — precisely what the USA did in Afghanistan and Iraq, attack first unprovoked — the only war crime charge used to hang all the Nazis at the end of WW II.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
An American president has to measure his words carefully. The instant they leave his lips, the world’s wheels start to turn in reaction. He can’t take them back. That is why Americans wisely want nothing to do with candidates who shoot from the lip or who keep flip flopping on issues.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
An American senator won his seat with but a single massive donation from a single corporation. Not surprisingly he dedicated his term to the interests of that corporation. That used to be a serious crime — undermining democracy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
An argument appealing to your opponent’s values in more likely to succeed than one that appeals to your own.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
An ox wearing blinders is the image that comes to mind when I think of an American conservative. Because they are so stolid, they want to simply the world so that only one principle applies to any given situation. For example, they think that “Punish people who do things I don’t like” is all you need to know about drug addiction and law enforcement. To them, whether the addict recovers, whether the addicts commits more or fewer crimes to support his habit, what causes people to take drugs in the first place, whether you drive the addict to suicide or how many people fall into the addictive life style, is all completely immaterial. All that matters is making him suffer even more than he is now.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
An unscrupulous politician or Glenn Beck clone is deliberately vague. He wants you to rage, and to channel your rage to support him. If he is too clear just on what the problems are, who the villains are or precisely what they did, he will lose supporters who disagree. Similarly, he avoids presenting solutions, because too many supporters would disagree and desert him. The Tea Party could be renamed the Rage party since incoherent rage is the unifying force of the party.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Any time a person carries a gun in public, they are telling everyone, they are itching to threaten or kill, (a felony). Every time I have encountered such a person in the USA, they shot at me (five separate incidents). You should lock such people up for the same reason you lock people up in possession of a car bomb. If Americans actually read the constitution, they would see it in no way protects the right to carry guns much less the right to bully or terrorise with guns (drunk or sober).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Anyone who claims American private medicine is superior to Canadian universal healthcare clearly has not experienced both. I have, since I lived in the US and made many visits. My experiences with the US health care system were nightmarish. All they cared about was the paperwork for extracting as much money as possible. They did not give a hoot about the patients, even to the point of repeatedly giving drugs that were obviously causing severe allergic reactions. They treated them like cattle. I consider their behaviour criminal. On top of that, statistics show the average American spends $8000 a year on health care and the average Canadian $4000 (through taxes and Medical Service Plan insurance fees), The US care is substandard, #42, below all other developed countries in the world, on par with impoverished Cuba. Americas are so conceited they pretend theirs is #1 even though their own C.I.A. says otherwise.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Anyone who denies universal medical care is in favour of the death penalty for the crime of not having sufficient savings for critical medical care.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Anyone with a strong emotional attachment to a weapon should not be trusted with one.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Are you a democrat or a plutocrat? Do you believe that the view held by the greatest number should prevail, or the view supported by the wealthiest? Do you believe in democracies or autocracies? Corporations are autocratic run much like medieval monarchies. You have no say in how they behave; they exist for only one purpose, profit. Yet they have so enchanted Americans, that the majority of Americans trust corporations to look after their interests better than elected governments, even after corporations like Philip Morris/Altria/Kraft conspired to kill their customers in pursuit of profit. The way it works now, corporations run the government through their wealth for influencing, threatening and bribery. The resulting unresponsiveness of government to the public’s needs won’t be fixed by less government and more corporate power. That’s is the problem! The flow of corporate money to corrupt officials and representatives must be stopped if government is to serve the people instead of the corporations.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Arguing with someone who shares none of your values is a nauseating experience. You must think purely rationally to come up with arguments that might be persuasive, while every fibre of your being is screaming “Exterminate this monster before it multiplies!”.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Arizona’s attempt to usurp federal jurisdiction of immigration is preposterous. Should they be allowed to set up portals on the border to let in any white rich right-winger? If they thought Obama was not handling the economy well enough, should Arizona be allowed to print currency? If they thought Obama was too much of a wimp, should Arizona be allowed to mount an invasion of Pakistan?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
As a protest against American war crimes, I refuse to purchase American produce. This often means going without fresh fruits and vegetables.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
As an adult, a saw two Clayton Moore Lone Ranger episodes I had seen as a child. In both, racist cowboys hassled Tonto then later received their just deserts. I wonder if my own strong anti-racist attitudes were instilled by this simple melodrama.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
As documents are declassified it turns out the government has always lied to people in the past. It seem then naîve to trust them without evidence on today’s issues such as 9/11, the Afghan war, the Iraq war and torture.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
As you get older, the increasing evil of the planet vis a vis warfare and environmental destruction becomes ever more unbearable. It is a good thing we grow old and die,and are replaced by new people who are born into the mess, seeing it not as intolerable, but as the norm to be improved.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
At this point American democracy is doomed, unless by some extreme fluke, the crooked supreme court justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas working to dismantle it and replace it with a corporatocracy, were to die simultaneously in a plane crash, fire or gas explosion. Even less likely they would be removed by impeachment.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Attempting to combat violent crime with prisons is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. Why? Prisons teach non-violent criminals to become violent since violence is the only way to survive in a prison. In prison, there are plenty of hardened criminals to teach violence to the younger generation. For a start, we should segregate violent and non-violent prisoners.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Automation and computers increase productivity. You’d think that would mean everyone could work fewer hours a week, and everyone would be more prosperous. What has happened instead is the elite have garnered all the benefits, and fired people no longer needed. This creates massive unemployment and depressed wages. Ironically, some people have to work three times as many hours as before just to provide the necessities. This causes even more wealth to flow from the former middle class to the elites. To add insult to injury, the elites have bribed politicians to give them massive tax breaks, tax loopholes, and even tax subsidies. The politicians then started withdrawing services from the middle class to further make the rich richer and the poor poorer. People fail to see the unemployment problem as a wealth inequality problem.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Back in the 1950s, the majority of Americans voted against equal rights for blacks. They voted for segregation. They smugly discriminated against blacks quoting the bible for justification. Today, most of those people are embarrassed about what they did. In this decade, the majority of Americans are doing the exact same thing, equally smugly, to gays.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Back in the 1980s, Republicans cheered when impoverished East Germans risked their lives and broke through the Berlin Wall to economic opportunity. Today, they patrol the border and shoot at Mexican families doing the same thing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Bakers make bread for a living. Butchers cut up animals for meat for a living. Soldiers kill people for a living. But that last fact is never mentioned in the media, even left-of-centre media like NPR .
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Banks are like hallucinogenic plants that exude chemicals to defend themselves. Banks exude money which pacifies and befuddles those who would attack them for illegal activity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Barack Obama got in trouble by promising sweeping changes that would shift the balance of power from the corporations to individual. Perhaps because he was inexperienced, he vastly overestimated his ability to do this, and vastly underestimated the corruption of the Republican and Democratic parties gorging at the corporate trough. Now he has everyone mad at him, his supporters for promising so much and accomplishing so little, and his detractors for even attempting token swipes at corporate power. But if you look back, he has been on the Wall Street gravy train since day 1. Those insanely expensive wall street bailouts with multi-million dollar bonuses were payback for campaign contributions. He is just better at faking sincerity than the average politician.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because drunk driving is such a common crime, it is treated much less seriously than it really is. At the least, the vehicle should be confiscated, and the person prohibited from driving for 5 years. Those that drive while under suspension, drunk or sober, get a 5-year sentence. Those under suspension are not even permitted to own a car. Again a 5-year sentence. It could be known as the 555 crackdown.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because of Christian religious superstitions, American citizens are far more distressed about their soldiers cutting off souvenir body parts from corpses of their victims than they are about those same soldiers torturing, raping, killing and dousing in white phosphorous and napalm.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because of our Christian heritage, our taboos about sex and talking about sex are overly strong, particularly about variations that are unpopular, dangerous or illegal. The net result is, for example, a young sadist enters puberty, but fears telling anyone. He fans his fantasies with violent video games. He secretly tortures and kills animals. Then he joins the military, is shipped to some foreign land where he can butcher and torture innocent people to his heart’s content, is given a medal for it, comes home and becomes a mental basket case. It would have been better if he felt free to get help containing and redirecting his desires.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because of the Christian influence, most Americans would far sooner punish secular pedophiles who had never actually touched a child than protect children from being raped by priests.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because of the Citizen’s United, John Roberts, supreme court decisions, foreign countries can now buy Republican politicians by stealthily and legally donating unlimited amounts of money to them. Ditto foreign corporations. This is not just a theoretical concern. The Republicans are awash in cash from hidden sources.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because the irresistible appeal of gossip, political campaigns so easily get side-tracked into discussion of who truly loves Jesus, whom the candidate has sex with and who smoked pot in college. This is all irrelevant. What counts is how he/she will vote.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because the USA has sunk so many dollars and so many lives into the Afghan and Iraq wars, they are having trouble ending the occupation. They feel an overwhelming need to save face. They keep throwing bodies on the fire simply to postpone the wound to the pride when they eventually withdraw. But consider the Afghans and Iraqi who have hundreds of times as many casualties, mostly children. Surrendering to the infidels who did this would be impossible.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)Americans are worse than bullies. Not only does pride drive them to defeat their victims (accomplished long ago in the first days of each war), they torture them and they demand abject surrender. They even drive them to abandon their religious beliefs.
Before Hitler rose to power, his party advocated intimidating candidates of other parties and using violence against them. Remind you of anyone?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Before the election parties,promise to do all manner of things the people want done. After the election, they burn that list and do the things the richest 1% of the people want done. Why? Because the rich people give them the most money in both legal and illegal contributions. There is no point in listening to the promises. Look for candidates the rich despise.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Being a Canadian is like living in Washington DC. The US federal government controls your destiny, but you don’t get to vote.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Blacks and Hispanics are arrested 9 to 1 over whites even though use in by whites is higher (they are more prosperous) and whites are more numerous. It is a Jim Crow law used to bully blacks and Hispanics for reasons completely unrelated to marijuana use.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Books you have probably never read: the Qur’an, the Bible (cover to cover), a description of what it is like to have your country invaded and nearly all your land confiscated, living under apartheid and being universally called a terrorist any time you object (e.g. the Palestinian view the creation of Israel), the settling of North American from the point of view of the people who were already there, what it is like to be homeless, what WW II was like from the point of view of an Italian, Japanese or German citizen.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Both Britain and America set out to create an empire, based not on military conquest and plunder, but on spreading freedom and enlightenment. Both failed for the same reason — when humans have absolute power over others, they always abuse that power.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Both the USA and Russia did exactly the same thing, namely illegally invaded Afghanistan, unprovoked. Most Americans and Canadians laud themselves for the highest virtue and condemn Russia. I presume Russians do the reverse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Bullies are cowards. They attack in gangs. They only attack those much weaker than they are. They steal from those they attack. They attack first and unprovoked and then make up excuses for it. They jeer mercilessly at those they harm. There is only one way to stop a bully. Hit back hard by surprise. Once they learn there are consequences, they back off. The USA is a bully for the way it attacked Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Britain and Canada are its henchmen. They are bullies too. Citizens of these countries refuse to acknowledge this as bad behaviour, just as the citizens of Nazi Germany refused to acknowledge their bad behaviour. Nevertheless, attacking other countries unprovoked is both illegal and immoral.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 scored record sales of $550-million in its first five days. It beats the $500-million record of Grand Theft Auto. What does this mean? We are successfully using theatre and video games to encourage young men to mindlessly kill and steal. No wonder the military helps fund these games. They shape values.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Caller after caller to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Remembrance Day radio show justified, nay glorified, Canada and the USA invading other countries, illegally and unprovoked, then stealing their oil. Each caller asserted that our noble motive for doing this was “protecting our freedoms”. Just what threatened freedoms are they talking about? Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq has ever attacked Canada or the USA in the entire history of the human race. Further, they do not have the means to do so. They don’t even have the means to get to Canada. So the callers can’t be worried about literal invasion in retaliation for invading and occupying them. Maybe they mean the freedom to bomb around aimlessly in an SUV powered by cheap gas? Maybe they are just as full of shit as Nazis with their crazy excuses for mayhem. What about the right of Afghans and Iraqis to have two legs, to be free from torture, to husband their own natural resources, to run their own countries without interference from an infinitely conceited, patronising occupying power?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Can you explain why in the civil rights struggle nearly always whites killed blacks and not the reverse? Similarly in the gay rights struggle, it was bigots killing gays, not the reverse. What suppressed acting out revenge?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Canada has the Charter of Rights and freedoms that spell out the rights of citizens, much like the US constitution. However, it has a fatal flaw. The federal or a provincial government may enact a law that violates the charter. All they need do is invoke the notwithstanding clause, and renew the law every five years. In theory, they could do any bigoted thing they pleased: put a tax the French language, ban Muslims from employment, put gays in concentration camps… To fight the bigots who devised this loophole, we should gradually phase it out by requiring a super majority of 60% then 80% then consensus then discarding it altogether. To violate the charter would require changing the charter.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Canada set up an apartheid system with reserves and residential schools for indigenous peoples. Indigenous people would then not be able to influence the beliefs, religion and language of their children. Racists from South Africa came to Canada and studied the system. They modeled it for use in South Africa’s apartheid. I suspect in turn the Israelis studied the South Africans, and possibly the East Germans, for ideas for their apartheid scheme to segregate the Palestinians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Canadians and Americans are alike in that they share a Christian superstition that makes them far more horrified when US Marines urinate on dead Afghans (allegedly Taliban) than it does when Marines kill civilians, use banned weapons, rape children or routinely torture POWs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Caral is the oldest city in Americas, built in 2627 BC. It enjoyed 1000 years of peace. If these early Peruvians could accomplish that, so can we. Warfare is not an inevitable part of the human experience.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Casinos give away basic alcoholic drinks, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but so the patrons will be addled and make more stupid gambling mistakes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Catching a murderer does the victim no good, and provides the family only a little satisfaction. Yet societies are willing to spend millions of dollars solving a murder but almost nothing to prevent one.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Censorship
In the 1600s, the church killed anyone who translated the bible so that the laity could have access to it. They burned people at the stake who had variant religious ideas, calling them heretics. Since religion is all made up anyway, there is not much to recommend one lie over another. Censorship is pretty much the only way to stop the spread of other people’s religious ideas.
Today censorship is more subtle. Most of the time you don’t even know it is there. For example, circa 1976s I tried to buy radio and TV time to promote the idea that reducing nuclear stockpiles would reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war. Every station refused stating that it would disturb their viewers.
They are many ideas that rarely appear on the mainstream blogs such as: the state of Israel has behaved badly, the US government has withheld information on 9/11, today’s soldiers are motivated by sadism, not patriotism, or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are illegal. If somebody posts them, they are just quietly removed. Unless you actually make such a post, you would never know such censorship was going on. It is hard to see what is not there. I wonder how aware the Chinese are of their government’s censorship.
Most websites have a moderator whose job it is to keep out the spam, irrelevancy, obscenity and outright crazies. But they can’t help also unconsciously censoring out ideas they don’t agree with. Again, unless you post something that crosses swords with the moderator, you would never notice the censorship. RichardDawkins.net is unusual in that it also pre-moderates even what thread topics are permitted. In these days, your best defence is to interact with multiple sources.
There is yet another form of censorship. Circa 1971 I lead a gay lib group. Two of the members were Trotskyites (a flavour of Communist). Our group was solely concerned with gay lib. It has no opinions on economics. Yet our radical ideas on gay equality were constantly discounted because some of them came from Trotskyite mouths. Americans often discount any idea that came from outside the USA. It is though Americans imagine European ideas have cooties. It is the ad hominem fallacy writ large.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, points out the cruelest thing you can do to an abused or crippled dog is to offer pity. The same is true of people. The holocaust is long over. It is time to move on. We should not encourage those indirectly harmed by it to wallow in self-pity, ditto 9/11.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Children sometimes drag around a filthy old security blanket. It makes them feel safe, even though it endangers their health. Similarly, adult Americans sometimes drag around a firearm, to make them feel safe, even tough it is 22 times more like kill a family member than an intruder. It is time they grew up and gave up this self-indulgence.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
China doubles its output of wind power every year. They surpassed the USA long ago. The USA’s democracy has been hijacked by the oil industry who have done all they could to block alternative energy. The key problem is the Citizens United Roberts supreme court decision to allow corporations to buy politicians with unlimited secret funds.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christian try to take away the civil rights of gays. Men suppress women. Republicans suppress unions. Christians kill off Muslims, whites torment blacks. What motivates this behaviour? People cling tenaciously to unearned privilege. If gays have equal rights, then Christians can no longer claim they are superior to everyone else, just for being Christian.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christians are a royal pain in the ass. They try to force their religious superstitions on everyone else, including end of life decisions, gay marriage, abortion, junk science… I hope some young lawyers try a new approach to fight back by criminally prosecuting or civilly suing Christians who pull these stunts. The constitution guarantees freedom of religion. Christians are interfering with this freedom by pushing the government to force the Christian religion, values and superstitions on everyone. That is similar to denying or interfering with other civil rights. Surely it is criminal. It is no different than Christians ganging up to pass a law forcing everyone drink sacramental Jesus blood and partake in the ritual cannibalism ritual of the wafer. It is simply wrong. We have let Christians get away with this so long because they have a majority and because historically we have let them bully the rest of us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christians believe that as God’s chosen people, they deserve special privileges that gays must not be granted, including marriage, security of person, housing and employment.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christians have been extremely successful in implementing their Puritanical agenda. They have ordinary people believing that men who so much as lust after 17-year olds (e.g. by looking at naked pictures of them on the Internet) deserve the death penalty. They have ordinary people equating succumbing to seduction by a 16-year old to raping an 8-year old. They have convinced ordinary people that accusation, even by rumour is equivalent to conviction. On the other hand, they have the public looking the other way any sex crime committed by clergy. There is no sense of proportion. This agenda has many of the characteristics of a witch hunt. Few people are willing to speak out about this muddle fearing being labeled a sexual predator.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Circa 1982 I was having dinner in an upscale part of Seattle. Out the window, I noticed a group of teens walking by snapping off the public sapling plantings. I roared out of the restaurant and loudly confronted the boys and chased them off. I was annoyed that nobody of the scores of people who had observed them had many any attempt to stop them. When I went back into the restaurant, several people told me I had done a very stupid thing. “They could have killed you!” I was furious with them for their cowardice. They massively outnumbered the teens. They did not even notify the authorities. They did not deserve their beautiful city, and now they have lost it. I doubt they would have so meekly submitted if the saplings were planted on their private property. The problem was they were devoid of any sense of public ownership of the saplings.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Citizens whine, “If I vote, campaign or take other political action it might not have any measurable effect”. Yes, and if you don’t do those things, guaranteed you won’t have any effect at all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
CNN (Cable News Network) ’s Dana Bash says there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to bring gas prices down. I am sure Exxon-Mobil wants you to think this and they paid Ms. Bash to expound this view. Here are some things that could be done:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- The oil companies are obscenely profitable because they eliminated competition through mergers and acquisitions. They need to be split up so there is true competition. A century ago Standard Oil was split up in an anti-trust measure. Now the oil companies have undone that work and then some.
- Canada successfully tackled the problem by creating a small oil company, Petrocan, whose sole job was to compete and keep the other companies honest. The oil lobby eventually bribed Brian Mulroney to kill it.
- Conservation will effectively expand the fuel supply. We need to get rid of gas guzzlers.
- Alternative fuels expand the fuel supply. Oil is getting rarer and rarer. In the long run we have to give it up altogether. Let’s get on with replacing it.
Code Pink is one of the ballsiest anti-war organisations around, run by women. Fearless. Willing to tell the truth no matter how different it is from what the average American believes. It reminds me of the gung ho spirit of the 70s protest organisations.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Cognitive therapists like to point out how a common error in thinking causes all manner of trouble in their patients’ lives. Dichotomous thinking is imagining there are only two possible options, two extreme possible solutions to a given problem. Such patients see the world in black and white. They ignore all shades of grey. So, for example, an American dichotomous thinker imagines the only alternative to more military spending is disbanding the military and allowing other countries to invade unopposed. A Republican dichotomous thinker imagines the only alternative to giving corporations completely free reign is to nationalise them all and set up a Communist dictatorship. They are willfully blind to the thousands of intermediate positions, e.g. for military spending, cancel obsolete weapons systems, avoid attacking other nations unprovoked, insist on bids for contracts, cut spending across the board by 10%… For the corporations, you could have truth in advertising laws, truth in labeling laws, make banks compute interest a standard way so consumers can compare deals, you could insist that corporation clean up their own environmental damage, you could give corporations tax incentives to create jobs and to avoid layoffs…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Compare Libya and Iraq:~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Libya Iraq Libya has oil. Iraq has more oil than anyone including, according to the latest estimates, Saudi Arabia. Gadafi threatened to accept gold and euros for oil not just US dollars. Saddam threatened to accept euros for oil not just US dollars. American primarily bombed Gadafi’s forces. American attacked the entire country. Even on the first day they bombed the residential neighbourhoods of Baghdad, live on CNN. Gadafi was killed without trial. Saddam was killed after a trial. Libya’s oil has not yet been sold off to European and American oil companies. Iraq’s oil has been sold off to European and American oil companies. American fought by air and drone without ground troops. Americans fought a ground war using torture and banned weapons. The war went on for 7 months and 25 days. The war has dragged on for 8 years, 10 months and 24 days.
Conservatives notice that punishment helps deter anti-social behaviour, so they reason harsh punishment should work even better. They know this in their guts. They ignore any scientific evidence to the contrary. They like punishing people on any pretence, especially blacks, gays and Hispanics. Why doesn’t it work? Consider the Afghan war. Americans and Canadians tortured, used banned horror weapons such as radioactivity, white phosphorus and napalm. They removed limbs, raped and killed the wives and children. Yet the Afghans fought back all the harder. Why? They perceive the Americans and Canadians as devils — minions of Satan. They feel morally obligated to oppose them. The same thing happens when the legal system is too heavy-handed and perceived as unfair. There are many more efficient ways to discourage anti-social behaviour than brutal incarceration. Conservatives are not interested. They like it when people behave in anti-social ways because it gives them an excuse to exercise their sadistic impulses.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Consider the overall state of the USA before and after George W. Bush. If Americans elect Rick Perry as president he will finish the job. It will be another expression of the American shame-motivated death wish.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Consolidating schools is a monumentally stupid idea. Why?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- It costs the parents far more to transport the kids than the school district saves.
- The long commute is tiring, boring and sometimes dangerous.
- It wastes parents’ time delivering and picking up kids.
- Kids prefer a smaller school where everyone knows everyone, rather than a giant impersonal school that feels like a prison.
- All that extra traffic creates needless greenhouse gases.
- As the oil runs out and energy prices rise, all the schools will have to be decentralised again to be within walking or cycling distance.
Control freaks imagine a new law will fix any problem. They forget that this means extra taxes for enforcement, and police and courts distracted from other work. The refuse to even acknowledge the costs of the new law. They want to stop people from doing things that they disapprove of for religious reasons that may have no effect on anyone but the perpetrator.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Corporations have found yet another way to abuse copyright law. When somebody criticises them, and in the process quotes corporate documents or manuals, even ones freely available, the corporation can censor the critic by charging him with copyright infringement.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Count how many times a politician speaks for “the American people” in a five-minute speech. The slimier the politician, the higher the count will be.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Creating new laws does not necessarily reduce crime.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Unless the budget for enforcement is increased, the new laws take away resources from enforcement of existing laws. If you raise the age of consent to 21, you take away resources from prosecuting cases where the child was 12, resulting in an increase in the more serious crime.
- Making marijuana illegal has the effect acclimatising smokers to transactions with drug dealers, who then attempt to sell them more dangerous drugs, ironically resulting in an increase in more serious crime.
Criminals subscribe to a primitive us vs them tribal notion of morality. So they naturally tend to agglutinate in gangs based on national origin. The bigot then uses this observation to prove to himself the problem lies with some particular country of origin, where in actuality that nationality is incidental to which gang predominates in any given region. Bigots are fools because they mistake the cause of their misery. Their problem is criminal gangs not people of some particular national origin.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Currently Europe gets 20% of its oil from Iran. The sanctions against Iran are a bit of a joke. Why? Iran will have no trouble selling its oil to Russia and China. This means Russia and China will buy less oil than they would normally on the world market. This will free up oil for Europe to buy. We are right back where we started, with the only people getting rich being the speculators and middlemen.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
David Bahati is a member of the Ugandan parliament. He collaborated with the American C-street conservative lobby to draft a bill for Uganda that calls for the execution of all gay people, along the lines of what Hitler attempted with Jews, gays and gypsies. Even knowing a gay person will be punishable with three years in prison. Bahati explains than his God’s law is that the wages of sin are death, and thus execution for sin is a beautiful and loving punishment. He claims he does not hate gays, he just wants to kill them to protect children. He believes all gays are child molesters. (The opposite is true. Homosexuals are less likely the heterosexuals to be child molesters.) He also believes that gays reproduce by corrupting children. If he could block them from doing that, there would be no more gay people. He is quite surprised that there are people who consider him crazy or cruel. He sees himself as God-fearing and highly virtuous. He explains that he had no thoughts about homosexuality until the C-street folk opened his eyes. He is the epitome of the nightmarish Christian idiot. The C-street people have committed a megacrime, mass attempted murder. They should all be executed themselves.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Democracy is fragile. It depends on the representatives accepting the rules of procedure. They must debate in an orderly way, then vote, and agree to go along with the will of the majority. A small disruptive group like the Tea Party can hold things up with a filibuster. It can refuse to pass absolutely necessary legislation, unless it gets its way. They act like a teenage boy who grabs the wheel of the family car and threatens to drive over a cliff unless father agrees to buy him drugs. The other fragility is the cost of running for office. It permits wealthy individuals and corporations to buy sufficient politicians to pass laws favouring their special interests against the public good. If you want the politicians to be responsible to the general public good, they must get their money from the general public, not special interests.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Democracy means letting a people choose their own leaders and form of government. You don’t interfere, even if you don’t like their choices. Americans use quite a different definition. Democracy means deposing a government not sufficiently friendly to American interests and replacing it with a puppet dictator who is. The dictator may even be the most corrupt politician on the planet, like Karzai. The appointed leaders normally hold American interests higher than their own country, like the leaders of Iraq.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Democracy means the people get to choose which government they want. It does not mean they necessarily like that government. It does not necessarily mean that Americans have to like that government. It does not mean that government has to be friendly to the USA making trade deals to hand over its resources on plate. It does not mean a government selected by the government of the USA such as the provisional governments in Afghanistan and Iraq.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Democratic vs Republican tax cut pie slice size Republicans want massive tax cuts for the rich, even though it will increase the deficit by $700 billion every year into the future and speed the day when America goes bankrupt, which some might argue is a Good Thing™.
Tax cuts are like borrowing money to buy a big pie for a picnic. Then you cut it up in varying size pieces and hand them out to the guests. Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the richer/fatter you are, the bigger slice of pie you need/deserve. The difference is the Republicans think the super rich need really big pieces, where the Democrat think they deserve only really big pieces. It may not be immediately obvious, but this is a wealth transfer scheme from the poor to the rich, supposedly an anathema to Republicans. However, Republicans only oppose government-aided wealth transfer from rich to poor, not the reverse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Democrats are like football players who blame the quarterback for losing the game when they put in only a pathetic effort themselves.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Democrats trash their Tea Party opponents by running film clips of the Tea Party candidates saying silly, outrageous or insane things. Tea Party candidates trash their Democratic opponents by making up outrageous lies and repeating them ad nauseam, never bothering even to fabricate evidence to support them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Denying gay people the right to marry follows in the same vein as assigning subjugate status to Chinese immigrants, blacks and women. It is motivated by a desire to feel superior without effort.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Despite draconian efforts, drug addiction is on the rise, except for tobacco. Perhaps we should try our successful approach for reducing tobacco use to other addictive drugs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Dick Durbin, Democratic Senate Majority Whip, made one of the silliest statements I have ever heard a politician utter. He claimed that cutting funding to Medicare would strengthen it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Did you ever notice that in TV crime dramas, anyone who asserts their constitutional rights is always a mob boss or terrorist. Did you ever notice how the heroes of these dramas so frequently break the law to chase criminals? Hollywood is conspiring to create fascist contempt for the constitution and the rule of law.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Did you ever notice that the media portray anti-government demonstrators as heroic, but when the demonstrations are here in North American, they become hooligans.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Do you find the mass panic over the Christmas bomber somewhat disingenuous? It was clearly not a serious attempt to take down a plane. It could, however, have been a bit of theatre to justify invading Yemen. Scott Creighton of the Pacific Free Press irreverently explores this possibility. Oddly, most news reports fail to mention that the boy’s father who warned the Americans, was head of Nigeria’s biggest bank. You’d think the American Homeland Security people would heed a warning from so highly placed a man.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Do you have a responsibility to look after people who fall on hard times? If you present this question to Americans in the context of socialism, they will say no. If you ask in the context of Christianity, they will say yes. But in either case they won’t actually do anything.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Do you want a Mormon in the White House? I would say definitively not. I don’t want someone who harbours and nurses delusions. For the same reason I don’t want a Jew or a Christian either. It is too important a position to entrust to anyone who indulges in wishful thinking.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Does increased spending on nuclear weapons make you safer or put you more at risk? The question has an objective answer, but you will never discover it just by polling people for their ideology-based opinions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Does it seem odd to you that democracy is as sacred as Mom and apple pie, yet important institutions such as the military, corporations, schools and the church are still run as dictatorships? Pretty much only governments, unions and clubs have switched to democracy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Does the death penalty decrease or increase violent crime? The question has an objective answer, but you will never discover it just by polling people for their ideology-based opinions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Donald Trump claims it is suspicious that Obama does not know the name of the doctor that delivered him, and that no doctor has come forth to say he delivered Obama. I have no idea who delivered me, and there is no reason he would remember me. Other than weighing 4.54 kg (10 lbs) there was nothing unusual about the delivery. There was nothing about me to indicate why I might become memorable as an adult. The same is true of Trump and Obama.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Donald Trump pretends to be suspicious that no nurse remembers president Obama being born in Hawaii. He wasn’t the president back then. He did not require any special medical attention. He was just one of hundreds of babies born that month. There was nothing to make him memorable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Donald Trump says the Obamas or the grandparents were too poor to have placed birth announcements in two newspapers. That is irrelevant. The State of Hawaii at the time placed announcements for all births.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Don’t ask, don’t tell is unique among laws. It requires people who have no classified information to lie.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Drug addicts will kill a stranger for $350. Some people will kill a relative for a $10,000 inheritance. Imagine what a military officer would do for share of the unaudited $1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) military budget or a cut of the $1 trillion a year heroin trade under his control. This is a temptation so huge most of us can’t even begin to imagine it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
During mating season, sea elephants fight causing collateral damage of the females and pups. Ancient humans had a similar problem, and devised various games, such as lacrosse, jousting and war to avoid the side carnage. The young men would go out to a field to fight. Young ladies, if they wanted, could watch from a safe distance to see which males were most fit and brave. However, males gradually lost sight of the point of the games and escalated the lethality with ever more advanced and horrible weapons. The aim became to exterminate the opposition without incurring any personal danger. War became increasingly fought by remote control primarily against weak unarmed opponents including their women and children. War became a game for the sadistic and cowardly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
During prohibition, bootleggers contaminated their brews with toxic substances in an attempt to make cheaper booze. We have the same problem today with street drugs such as ecstasy. The result is the same, teens die. The solution is the same, regulated, legal, production with standard purity and dosage, and public education on the dangers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
During the dark ages, people felt under the sway of all manner of bizarre myths. The modern day creationists and tea partiers want to take us back to those days. If they would only but study how miserable life was back then, they might have second thoughts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
During the debt ceiling crisis, the Republican party proved itself willing to throw the USA into economic collapse in order to protect the special privilege of the super wealthy. After that, it baffles me if any Republican is ever elected again.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
During the debt ceiling crisis, the Tea party made clear its goal was to collapse the US economy in order to destroy the federal government and hand control to the corporations. After that, it baffles me if any Tea Party candidate is ever elected again. I would expect people to demand they be arrested for treason.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
During the Manson murders, one ordered another to kill. She did. There was no mercy, and no remorse. When I heard this I thought, “That pretty much describes a garden variety kill by NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) forces in Afghanistan”.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
During the SOPA (Stop On-line Piracy Act) general Internet strike protest yesterday NPR , that supposed hotbed of liberalism, now controlled by a Republican, did something I consider inexcusable. All day long they broadcast hints on how to break the strike by stealing content from striking websites. Further they posted even more techniques on their website. Stealing, according to the Buddha is taking that which is not given. Taking content during the strike is stealing in the same sense breaking in to a closed museum is stealing. What NPR did is improper on two grounds.
- They encouraged the public to steal and taught them how.
- As a quasi-governmental body, they improperly interfered in a perfectly legal strike, giving out biased and incomplete straw men pro-SOPA arguments throughout the strike.
Some of the techniques they taught were designed to break the strike on my website mindprod.com, not just Wikipedia. It is ironic an organisation promoting a silly law to fight pirates would themselves teach piracy on the air.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Earthquakes have killed 75 million people. 9/11 killed 3500 people. The caldera supervolcano at Yellowstone, when it blows will wipe out the USA. Guess which threat get orders of magnitude more funding.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Economists have an odd view of what is desirable. To them, the purpose of life is to increase economic activity, any activity, even including things like more vandalism repairs, more funerals, more pollution, more soil erosion, more deforestation, conspicuous consumption, more hospital care, inefficiency, waste… I call this locust mentality. Economists refuse to notice how their frantic efforts to stimulate short-term economic activity destroy the very substrate the enables sustained economic activity. They refuse to look even a decade into the future about how their actions harm economic activity, much less the environment or human welfare.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Economists have hundreds of years of data on which economic policies produce which results. They know that austerity is a good way to extend a recession and increase unemployment. Its benefits can only be born in times of prosperity. So why are the Republicans pushing austerity at state and federal level now, in the middle of a recession? Apparently the want to extend the recession and increase unemployment. They believe Obama will blamed for the results of their policy, and they can take the White House, allow the recession to end, and take the credit, thus allowing them to control the White House for a generation. They are willing to sacrifice the country for over a year for their selfish reasons. Surely that willingness to sacrifice the country should disqualify them from leadership.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even in America, gun owners are a minority, only 1 in 4 own a gun, and they own an average of 3.6 guns each. A gun on the premises is more dangerous than a pet lion, yet the neighbours tolerate gun owners.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even people as left wing as Jon Stewart buy some of Bush’ nuttier ideas that he proposed to defend his illegal invasion of Iraq, such as:
- It is self defence to kill someone you think they might own a weapon, even if they don’t use it against you or point it at you and you have never seen it.
- It is self defence to kill someone if you think they might be considering buying a weapon.
What could persuade a normally sane person like Jon Stewart to fall for such crazy talk? Patriotism! Jon Stewart, like most other Americans, can’t stand the idea of his country behaving badly, so he joins in Bush’s delusions that allow him to deny the evil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even though bearing bad news is the hardest time to tell the truth, when you tell someone something they don’t want to hear, that’s when they are most apt to accuse you of lying.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even though I have no children of my own, one of my recurring nightmares is what it would be like to put so much effort into raising your kids then have them destroyed by drugs. The very curiosity that made them such promising kids would be the thing that did them in.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even though the US constitution prohibits any sort of religious test for holding office, six southern state constitutions bar atheists from holding public office (Arkansas, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas). Even though the federal constitution trumps state constitutions, state constitutions still stubbornly maintain conflicting provisions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even though the USA is still formally bound by treaty to honour the Geneva conventions, it no longer recognises them, and boycotts the meetings in Switzerland. Why? Almost everything the USA and Israel do in the middle east flagrantly violates them. Bush’s chief legal aid, Alberto Gonzales, described the Geneva Conventions as quaint and obsolete.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even though the USA officially ended segregation back in the 1960s, segregation lives on because whites don’t like living near blacks. This dislike forms white and black neighourhoods. They are not held in place by law, but by mutual repulsion. This leads to de facto segregated schools. Further, some high schools in Mississippi still have separate proms for white and black students. The most backward of all are the churches, still 93% segregated.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even though there is theoretically separation of church and state in the USA, Christians are treated specially:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- They are allowed to do political campaigning from the pulpit. Other churches are not.
- They are allowed to call for murder and persecution of homosexuals. Formerly, they were allowed to call for the murder and persecution of blacks.
- They are increasingly permitted to force Christian teaching on abortion on the general population.
- They are permitted to force Christian beliefs about sex education on not only American children, but children all over the world, even though doing that results in increased illegitimate pregnancy and STDs.
Even with the recent temporary drop, Americans are up in arms at high oil prices and the way America is hostage to foreign oil. The biggest single buyer of oil on the planet is the US military. They have bid the prices up with their wasteful consumption of oil. An aircraft carrier gets about 58,804 l/100km (0.004 mpg). Using fuel efficiently and protecting the environment are simply not on the military’s radar.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Eventually even the Temperance Union folk came to the conclusion that prohibition was not working. It created more problems than it solved. The exact same argument apply to marijuana. The difference is Mexican criminal gangs can now legally bribe American politicians as can the prison-building industry.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Ever since Reagan, Republicans have been extravagant spendthrifts, ignoring the economists by foolishly spending even when times were flush. Oddly, now a recession has America in its grip, Republicans suddenly became interested in reducing the debt, even though economists say belt-tightening in a recession just makes the recession worse. Republicans claim they want to create jobs, but clearly that is nonsense, because if the government pulls in its horns, fires people and cancels contracts, there will obviously be fewer jobs. So what really motivates Republicans is a desire to prolong the recession until 2012, then blame Obama for it, and take power.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every American DVD (Digital Video Disk) starts by threatening to put you in jail for up to 5 years if you make a copy, even a backup in case the first is damage. The average times served for rape is 5.4 years.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every American mother wants her son to grow up to become president, yet no one in the country is more reviled.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every day the weapons nations use against each other become more lethal and more cruel. There is no process limiting or reversing this evolution. In other words, the horror grows without bounds, and will necessarily eventually eliminate us all. Everyone knows this, but nobody has the balls to do anything about it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every day, mankind further perfects its weapons of war, making them ever more lethal and ever more capable of launching hair-trigger attack on their own. The human species has unconsciously decided to go extinct, certainly within a century.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every November 11 in Canada, we have a national holiday to celebrate our triumph over Germany in WWII. It is used to glorify war in general, including illegal wars such as the invasion of Afghanistan. Military geezers are dragged out and asked to tell stories of their ancient atrocities. The holiday is ostensibly to honour the sacrifices of those who fought to defend Canada. Everyone, especially media people, are pressured to wear a red poppy to signify assent to honouring war. Ever since WWI (World War I), there has been a way to dissent — wear a white poppy. It means you believe war is obsolete and it is time to stop glorifying it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every other industrialised country but the USA has a universal health care system. You would think having to pay for health care out of pocket would encourage Americans to take better care of their bodies, yet they do very badly. They have far more trouble with life-style induced diseases such as obesity, diabetes and clogged arteries than people in other countries. Perhaps the problem is the out-of-pocket cost discourages Americans from regular visits where physicians can implement preventive measures and harangue them on life-style choices.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every year, the Economist, a right wing, pro-business British magazine ranks the countries of the world for how democratic they are. Last year, they ranked the USA #17. The top four were Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden. What do those countries do right? Like the USA in former times, they subsidise the press. In the United States, newspapers and news media are folding, leaving the stage to a handful for rather corrupt, dishonest players like FOX who treat the news as entertainment and right wing fantasy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Everybody knows that old people vote and young people don’t. What this means is everybody eventually comes to the conclusion that voting really does matter. That is quite a cheering thing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Everyone knows that a major earthquake on the west coast would do thousands of times more damage than 9/11, but politicians give it no funding. It is so much more exciting to fight a human foe that a mindless force of nature. Besides the contractors who would do the upgrading are not a powerful arms lobby like Halliburton, Xe(Blackwater) and GE.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Everything the Republicans do is dishonest. Consider the prescription drug plan. It should have saved the people money by doing contract bid bulk buys of prescriptions. But it does the exact opposite. It is a way of ripping the people off and giving the extra money to the drug companies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Ex-Democrat, Rick Perry, compared himself to Galileo, challenging the church orthodoxy. But Perry is not a scientist. He has less understanding of science that a second grader. He admits he has no evidence at all for his claims that global warming is a hoax, just a gut feeling. If you don’t have evidence, it is not science; it is bullshit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64) source
Ex-Democrat, Rick Perry, compared himself to the great scientist Galileo, challenging the church orthodoxy with experimental science. But Perry is not a scientist though he claims he knows more than the combined climate scientists on the planet. Granted he may have taken science in the second grade, but that was long ago and its all quite foggy now. He has delusions of grandeur.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64) source
Ex-Democrat, Rick Perry, in posturing further and further to right could try this — calling for less namby-pamby means of executing criminals. Dammit, being executed should hurt. How about using mustard gas, napalm, DU, white phosphorus, land mines, cluster bombs? If they are good enough to use for exterminating Eye-raq varmint children, they should be good enough for gittin’ rid of riff raff folk who don’t have the decency to keep they’s skin pearly white.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Ex-Democrat, Rick Perry’s, #1 political asset is his hair, but we don’t even know if it is his or Hair Club for Men’s. Almost no male 61 years old naturally has hair that thick. We need to see what he looks like really.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Ex-Democrat, Rick Perry’s, big advantage over his rivals, is that he looks sane. His problem is, as soon as he opens his mouth, it becomes clear he is as delusional as Michele Bachmann.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Extreme enforcement of anti-marijuana laws has two undesirable effects:
- It increases the price of pot, which attracts more criminals into the business.
- It eliminates the amateur growers and leaves the field to hardened, remorseless, criminal gangs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
F.B. Eye is a charming little American political propaganda drama on TV. I had to laugh when in one episode the North Koreans were attempting to buy fissionable materials. One F.B.I. agent speculated they needed it to build a bomb for a first strike on the USA. Huh? If they did that, the USA would retaliate leaving North Korea a sea of glass. The agent conveniently forgot Bush’s promise to annihilate North Korea in his axis of evil speech. They need a nuke or two to deter the USA. It is working. The USA conquered and plundered Iraq. It had no nukes. North Korea has fended off invasion, with only the feeblest nuclear deterrent.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Fairness does not require you to pretend that both sides in a dispute have behaved equally badly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Family values folk love to talk about how firmly they stand behind the law. Yet oddly they tell us that corporations should have unrestricted power to run our lives, instead of the government. There is a contradiction here. An extremely common way to begin a criminal career is to sign on with a corporation. They grind down the consciences of their employment so that they will break the law and do other immoral things to profit the company. Companies get people to lie, steal, defeat competition, cook the books, create shoddy products that kill some of the customers… The corporation threatens a bad job reference or dismissal to attain compliance. Once the employee has committed sufficient crimes, the corporation can use that knowledge to push them into committing even more serious crimes. Corporations are the antithesis of family values.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Fining a corporation is pointless. It can’t feel pain. It just passes the cost onto the customers. Instead, you must freeze executive salaries and fine the executives directly or put them in jail. They are the criminals.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For a new theory to replace an existing one, it must explain the facts better than the existing one. Those who deny the holocaust have the embarrassing problem of having no explanation for what happened to millions of missing people. The mainstream historians who accept the holocaust do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For most of humanity’s time on earth, they had almost no effect on the environment. They could not even store food for winter. Short term thinking, the type required to get out the way of a sabre tooth tiger, was more than adequate. Then we mastered fire and how to level forests, dam streams, pollute the air, factor farm etc. Before we knew it, we had instituted a new geological age where human activity moved more earth than moved by natural processes. Our activities drastically changed the composition of the atmosphere. Short term thinking no longer sufficed. Unfortunately, humans have not yet evolved the ability to do long term thinking. Either we, or our machines, do, or we perish from too much power to destroy our planet. Humanity is Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For Republicans, the right to life ends at birth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For the last 500 years or so, leaders have refrained from assassinating each other. However, recently, the USA has taken to assassinating leaders, at quite a clip, using remote-control Predator drones. It is only a matter of time until American leaders are assassinated at the same rate in reprisal.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Fort Hood Shootings
The media have ignored the most obvious explanation for the Fort Hood shootings. As a psychiatrist, Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan would have heard horrific confessions of brutality, sexual violence, and torture. Day after day of this, having to pretend to like these men, and keep their secrets might convince him that his psychotic patients should be exterminated. Few psychiatrists have serial killers exclusively as patients.In one news report, Hasan said he believed that killing these soldiers would save the lives of many children. No matter how strenuously you deplore his murders, you can’t deny his logic. Motivated by racism, patriotism and religious bigotry, most Americans put no value of the lives of Afghan and Iraqi children, but some people, including Dr. Hasan do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
FOX fought and won in the supreme court of Florida for the right to treat the news as fictitious entertainment. They used this power to destroy the Acorn organisation (an advocacy for the poor group) with a fake video that made it look as if Acorn employees helped pimps rip off the government. The attorney general of California exposed the fakery, but not until Acorn has collapsed because of the scandal. The people still have not caught on that FOX is wish-fulfilling fiction for rightards because they carefully dress up their lies as if they were ordinary news. I too was fooled.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
FOX is effectively a PAC (Pre-Authorised Chequing) to raise money for the far right (biggest corporate donor). It produces infomercials for them disguised as news programs. It throws in some pure entertainment to pull in viewers. It an utter joke when they claim to be a “fair and balanced” news organisation. The sued in the supreme court for the right to make up the news, and that is exactly what they do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
FOX News won in the supreme court the right to completely fabricate the news. Think how many times you have caught advertisers dissembling or outright lying. Thus you can’t trust anything you hear in an advertisement, especially a political advertisement.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
FOX’s idea of fair and balanced is to give equal time to some loon who asserts the moon is made of green cheese to make sure the astrophysicist guest is put in his place.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Fred Phelps is a weird old coot who calls for murdering all homosexuals. He also likes to crash funerals, even those of straight people, to protest the USA tolerating gays. Most people treat what he is doing as eccentric and harmless, even amusing. Other religious bigots beat and kill homosexuals daily. What is odd, is if Fred were calling for the murder of all Jews, or even denying that Hitler killed 6 million Jews, he would find himself in hot water. For some reason it is still much more acceptable to persecute gays that Jews.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Free speech includes the freedom not to listen. Free speech does not guarantee a spot on the Tonight Show. Christians imagine they are entitled to a seat at the table any time homosexuality, abortion or euthanasia is discussed even though they never contribute any useful information, just their faith-based beliefs for which they can offer no rational justification.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
From ages 6 to 14 the #1 political issue for me was bullying. I was beat up by gangs of bullies every school day during that period, but of course I had no vote. I was called names, beaten, had my clothes torn, set on fire, had my school books destroyed, spat on, money stolen… The attack that angered me most was on a pet turtle I was carrying home from a pet store. When I complained to the school, I was told the bullies came from homes where the parents had divorced. I should be patient with them. In one case a teacher, Mr. Armour, was one of the bullies. He lifted me by my necktie into the air. Adults would never put up with this sort of abuse. Why do we expect children to?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Fundamentalist Christians claim to believe in talking snakes. I guess that is good practice for pretending to believe ex-Democrat, Rick Perry’s, tall tales.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
General Custer was a genocidal killer. He attacked the Sioux and got exactly what he deserved. Yet Americans to this day treat Sitting Bull, his victim, as the monster.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Generals refer to the locale of war as a theatre. This betrays the fact the treat war as an enjoyable game.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
George W. Bush appointed Chief Justice John Roberts to head the Supreme Court. Roberts (not to be confused with John Roberts the newscaster) is responsible for the crookedest decision the court has ever made. It has effectively turned the USA from a democracy into a plutocracy. In the Citizens United case, he ruled that corporations may now anonymously contribute as much money as they please to buy off elections. They may advertise and slander candidates anonymously as much as they please. In practice this also allows hostile foreign nations to buy elections as well. In the 2010 midterm elections, such anonymous campaigning now swamps the traditional tracked donations to the political parties.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
George W. Bush tells us that Osama bin Laden masterminded 9/11. bin Laden confessed that the reasons he did so are:
- The USA aided Israel in invading Lebanon in 1982.
- The USA aids Israel to oppress the Palestinians.
- There are US troops in Saudi Arabia, soil holy to Islam.
How many American do you think know that?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)9/11 aside, I think the USA acted unwisely on all three counts. Dramatic and horrible as 9/11 was, it killed far fewer people than the deaths bin Laden was protesting. Primarily pride will stop the USA from backing down and playing the role of an effective, neutral peace broker in the middle east. The USA persists in seeing itself as a 100% innocent victim on 9/11, and claiming the attack had no rational motivation. This deliberate blindness leaves the USA helpless to fully defend itself.
Germans in the 1930s looked upon Hitler as a clown. They could not believe someone so nutty could last in power long, and dismissed him as a crank. Americans today are watching a similar mass insanity — the rise of the Tea Party.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given how many introductions are made on the Internet, especially where the two parties live in different states or even countries, you need a uniform country-wide set of laws to cover age of consent and related issues such as apparent age, age on offered ID, puberty reached, age difference, involvement of drugs or payment and just how close to the legal-illegal boundary an incident occurred. The constitution might block the federal government from introducing a uniform legal code, but that would not stop states from gradually harmonising their age of consent laws (much as Canadian provinces are harmonising their sales tax law.) The current laws are simplistic. They harshly punish the relatively innocent and slap the wrists of the fiendish. The advantage to prudes of harmonisation, is that a uniform code will have more authority. As it is, the inconsistency with the laws of nearby states shout “Your laws are wrong. Ignore them. They are not ‘real’ laws.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given than about 50% of fetuses abort naturally, usually with the woman never even noticing she was pregnant, the fanaticism of the anti-abortionists seems excessive.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given that addicts take drugs to self-medicate extreme psychological pain, such as the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, to me, it seems counter productive to increase the load of psychological pain with deprivation, punishment and incarceration.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given that corporations own the politicians, would it not make more sense to pressure the corporations than lobby the politicians?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given that mere ownership of a gun used in a homicide is routinely used as evidence of guilt, I am surprised anyone would take the risk.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given that pharmaceutical companies routinely attempt to release ineffective or harmful drugs then face the lawsuits because this is the more profitable tactic, it is naîve to expect these companies to behave themselves with even less regulation than they have now.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given that the evangelical churches are the engine of pro-war and anti-Muslim sentiments in the USA, I would think the evangelical megachurches would be prime terrorist targets. They have relatively flimsy construction, easy access, low security and guaranteed massive casualties. From a psychological point of view, the church itself might broadcast the attack live to an even bigger audience, magnifying the terror.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given that you will have some serious and expensive legal explaining to do if anyone is harmed by a gun you own, I find it odd that Americans are so eager to own one.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given the prevalence of adultery, it is hypocrisy for the media to pounce on a straying political candidate with the vengeance as if he had been convicted of cannibalism.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Government borrowing to pay current expenses and fobbing the debt off on future generations is not that different from selling off your children as sex slaves so that you can afford opium.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Governor Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii attests that he knew Barack Obama’s parents when the future president was born there in 1961. Donald Trump claims it is impossible than Abercrombie could recall an event that happened 50 years ago. This is nonsense. I recall the births of my friends’ children. Surely some friends of Mr. Trump’s parents recall his birth. It is quite possible Mr. Trump cannot remember such events, but that is because his brain is overcrammed with thoughts of adulation for Mr. Trump.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Granted, Castro is a dictator, but as dictators go, he is reasonably benign and popular with his people. Yet Americans have focused almost all their assassination efforts to kill him. Further they have, for decades, been doing all they could to make the Cuban people miserable, too. How come must nastier dictators such as Robert Mugabe and the Sudanese generals don’t rate this treatment? Similarly, Americans oddly hate and fear Hugo Chavez, who enjoys higher popularity ratings than Obama in his own country. He sold cheap heating oil to freezing New Yorkers. What a monster!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Grover Norquist fancies himself as the conscience of the Republican party, but he is actually a shill for the super rich. He has a grudge against the universe based on the trauma caused when his mother named him Grover. He sells the idea that it is right and proper that the tax system should favour the rich, and the rich should have to pay no more tax than they feel like. As it is, the official federal income tax rate in the USA is 35% for people who earn more than $374,000. Because of all the loopholes, with a good accountant, the rich need pay no tax at all. Nobody pays the full 35%. With an especially good accountant the rich can get money back, a sort of negative income tax or a subsidy to reward them for existing. Corporations have similar loopholes. Fabulously profitable oil companies all get billions from the government every tax time. The rich and the corporations bribed/contributed to the right people to insert the necessary loopholes into law. The bottom line is the rich don’t pay their fair share of the tax pie. They are sponges — parasites. What really burns me up is when these deadbeats look down on working people. They are the leeches. And they use Grover Norquist to sell the idea that these loopholes should never be closed. Only the way Grover puts it is “no new taxes”. Since the deadbeat rich pay more tax when loopholes are closed, Grover figures he can pass that off as a “new tax” which nobody likes. He wants to fool the people into thinking he is trying to protect them from new taxes, yet he works to effectively raise them by advocating reducing benefits to the middle class. His prime directive is to ensure the rich can continue to sponge off everyone else. This is the same goal that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner exhibited in the debt ceiling extortion. Norquist is a professional liar. He deserves none of the respect he is given.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Have you ever noticed that American presidents have no compassion at all for people living under dictatorships, except for dictatorships with oil?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Have you ever noticed that if you watch a documentary on science, if there is doubt, the documentary always makes a polite reference to the opposing point of view, but for the most part, there is agreement on the facts. Why is this so different from political discourse, where there is no agreement on even the most basic facts? In science, there is great humiliation in being caught wrong, and a career end if caught fudging the numbers a little, let alone out and out lying. In politics, spinning the facts to mislead and brazen lying is the norm, with no shame or penalty in getting caught.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Have you noticed that nearly all TV dramas are about grisly murders usually with a side of torture? How Roman!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Have you noticed the odd coincidence that the leaders of Canada and the USA are only interested in the civil rights of citizens who live in countries that have abundant oil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta, Canada bears witness to a custom practiced by native people of the North American plains for nearly 6000 years.Native Americans would panic buffalo herds into throwing themselves off a cliff. The hunters would then gorge themselves sick.
Modern Americans are just as naïve as buffalo, allowing the insurance companies to panic them into paying twice what people in any other developed country does for the worst care in the developed world — on par with Cuba in outcomes. Check the IMR (Infant Mortality Rate) stats on the CIA website for yourself.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Health care costs in the USA are going through the roof. The Ryan plan that just changes the scheme by which the bills are paid merely rearranges the deck chairs. It does not do anything to bring the total expenditures under control. It actually makes them worse by making the entire population a captive customer for the insurance industry to easily exploit. The problem is:
- The Health care industry is obscenely profitable. They are permitted to keep jacking up prices even when costs have not risen. They are permitted to dump non-profitable patients. There are all manner of laws to favour monopolies include patent law and laws preventing the government from doing bulk bids on drugs and supplies.
- You spend most of your lifetime healthcare budget in your last year of life, most of that is the last months, weeks and days. There is no point is painful heroic measures that can give only a few extra weeks of misery. What’s worse, his treatment is forced on those who don’t even want to live any longer. Let people die with help and dignity, if they want to. Let us encourage people who will die soon to accept palliative care to make their final days as comfortable as possible, rather than radical surgery with almost no chance of significant benefit.
Every developed country has for all practical purposes solved the health care problem. They spend half or less of what the US does. They get much better outcomes. They have their problems, e.g. long waiting lists for hip surgery in Canada, but they are popcorn to what Americans face. All the US need do is copy any of the other developed countries (even Cuba does better on a minute fraction of the budget.) The main roadblocks are:
- The health care industry that has a vested interest in raising their billings ever higher. The Republicans act as their agents since the health care industry spends so much in campaign donations and under the table perks to Republicans.
- The Republican ideology that government involvement in health care is inherently wicked. They never explain why. It is matter of religious faith. Most American swallow this without thinking. They think there is something honorable about going without health care. When I lived in San Francisco in 1985, almost none of my friends had health care, even though they were employed. They all had untreated health problems. This is irresponsible. Your bad health hurts the health of others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Heaven for Republicans would be a country with no regulation of corporations, cheap labour, suppressed unions, a wide wealth gap, low taxes. Can you think of a closer match than Columbia? Perhaps Republicans should be required to live there for a few months before they convert the USA to emulate Columbia.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Here are some of the ways I have discovered you can attract death threats:
- State that gay people should have identical civil rights to straight people, including marriage.
- Condemn soldiers who break international law by engaging in first strike wars and point out they have committedcapital war crimes .
- Point out that the remote-warfare techniques used by US soldiers inevitably leads to them killing large numbers of civilians, including women and children.
- Suggest to young women that soldiers make poor husbands.
- Suggest that the USA’s own bad behaviour the root cause of terrorist attacks and that stopping such bullying would be the most effective way to deter attacks against the USA.
- Point out that by the CIA ’s own definition of terrorism, the USA is the perpetrator the most state sponsored terrorism than any other nation.
- Investigate suspicious deaths at the hands of American health care providers.
- State thatabortion laws as they stand are a reasonable compromise.
- State that you believe whales deserve the same protection from being killed that humans enjoy.
The people who make these threats either have no reasons to support their view, or they are ashamed of their reasons, so they resort to intimidation instead of argument. They are unprincipled people whom I enjoy irritating.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Here is my current list of the 10 most evil Americans:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Dick Cheney
- Hugh Grant, CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Monsanto
- John Roberts, Supreme Court Justice
- David Leskar, CEO Halliburton
- Erik Prince of Xe (née Blackwater) (Blackwater is the technical term for sewage.)
- Michael E. Szymanczyk, CEO Altria/Kraft
- Rush Limbaugh
- Pat Robertson
- George W. Bush
- Glenn Beck
Historians call great those leaders who conquered the most territory and built most massively. They were egotistical pigs who dragged their people through misery for their glory.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
History tells us there is a pattern. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The rich then use that edge to really rub it in. Eventually, the exploitation becomes unbearable and the people rebel against the rich. In France in 2008, the people kidnapped their bosses and pelted them with vegetables. The violent rebellion comes as a sudden snap (familiar to catastrophe theory mathematicians). America is closer to its 1789 Bastille Day revolution than it imagines.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Hitler spent $270 billion attempting to conquer the world. The USA spend $741 billion trying to subdue Iraq. Yet Americans persist in claiming they harmed no civilians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Holocaust deniers are odd ducks. They are terribly pleased the holocaust happened, but pretend it didn’t.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Homophobia and racism run so deep in some people that they enjoy the suffering of children who have lost their parents to AIDS (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
How did it happen that the Republican party of Lincoln that freed the slaves became the party of bigotry and segregation hated by blacks? It was Richard Nixon’s doing. He formed an alliance with segregationists such as Strom Thurmond. Democrats like Kennedy and Johnson were so solidly pro-civil rights, that Nixon felt his only chance was to champion the opposition.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
How easily the occupy movement was distracted from demanding economic inequality to the right to camp out.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
How is it possible environmental cretins like Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens could have grown up in Alaska?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
How many failing states do you need before global civilisation as a whole collapses? Global warming and dwindling oil resources have reduced food supplies and more than tripled food prices in much of the world. This has lead to riots and political unrest. The anger is not so much about freedom as bread.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
How often can we expect a major oil spill like Exxon Valdiz or Deepwater Horizon? The question has an objective answer, but you will never discover it just by polling people for their ideology-based opinions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
How often on the news is a story where a criminal or insane person killed one or more people? How often is there a news story about someone shooting and killing a family member by mistake? How often is there a story of a homeowner successfully defending themselves with a gun against a criminal intending to kill them? You’d think the first two were rare and the last by far the most common given the American love affair with guns and horror of gun control.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans and chimpanzees are genetically similar. The main reason humans dominate earth is because we learned to co-operate with and care for each other where chimps did not. Scientists speculate this occurred over the millennia as humans shared a fire, waiting for food to cook. Modern day Republicans would have us abandon that core of what makes us human and return to the raw selfishness and competitiveness of the other hominids.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans are never more inventive that when coming up with rationalisations why they should receive special privilege.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans go to absurd lengths of self-deception to see themselves as virtuous. When criminals intimidate the population into non-co-operation with the police, their victims convince themselves this is a virtue — a code of silence. When American soldiers illegally attack other countries unprovoked and torture their inhabitants in a multitude of fiendish ways, they convince themselves they are “defending freedom”.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans were once prey animals. Our sense of morality is based on that. Before we humans commit any atrocity, we ritually claim we are a victim. It takes on ridiculous proportions e.g in Iraq where the USA claims it is defending itself from invasion. Sometimes a nation will even put on the charade of a false flag attack on itself to claim the virtue of victimhood.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans will soon go extinct because they have a fatal flaw. Even when a scientist knows full well the hazards of what he is about to invent, he goes ahead anyway so that he can be recognised as the first to do it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Hunting Children
There are two kinds of safari camps you can go on in the third world to hunt children (or adults if that is your pleasure). You can bag your prey completely unarmed. You can shoot from a distance or bound and gagged. You can use a variety of other weapons including a wide selection of banned ones. You can even rape and torture or other amusements requiring non-consenting prey. The food and lodgings are slightly better than you would expect in the third world. There are two basic types of plan: self-directed and those with assistance for the squeamish or those with vestigial scruples. Dominatrixes and large male authority figures bully, abuse and order and force the clients to commit the atrocities, thus symbolically taking on the guilt. You would think you could not possibly afford such luxury safari camps, but these camps are not expensive. Self-directed camps pay you obscene amounts of money and assisted camps pay you a nominal fee, enough to cover travel and living expenses. If this sounds like you, apply at Xe Services (née Blackwater) for self-directed camps or your nearest US military recruiter for assisted ones.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Hypnotists, advertisers, politicians and clergy use a strange technique. They spout gibberish at their audiences. This has the effect of putting the audience into a light trance where they are suggestible. Read Milton Erickson for details. I have pondered why this works. I have seen a herd of moose defer to the matriarch. She decides where the herd will go and what they will do. Humans are partly herd animals too. They defer to strong personalities. Ideally, the strong personalities are the most intelligent individuals. I think what happens with humans is when someone hears something they don’t understand, they presume the speaker must be more intelligent than they are, and they tend to acquiesce to them. Hypnotists, advertisers, politicians and clergy have hijacked this technique. The use gibberish instead of wisdom to make themselves sound intelligent, and hence trigger submission. The Republican platform has no rational appeal to anyone but a billionaire. The only way to sell it is with hypnotic techniques like this that bypass the rational mind.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am a citizen of planet Earth first, Canada second.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am astounded that people in the middle and lower class sometimes vote Republican. The Republicans have made no bones about their agenda:
- More and longer wars.
- The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
- Continued tax loopholes, subsidies and tax cuts for the rich only.
- Persecution of homosexuals.
- Forcing evangelical Christianity on everyone.
- Globalisation and outsourcing jobs overseas.
- No action on global warming.
- No action on protecting the environment.
- Dismantling the social safety net.
- Dismantling the public school system.
- Crushing the unions.
- Inefficient light bulbs.
- No consumer protection. Corporations can do to their customers whatever they please.
- Supporting apartheid in Israel.
The only way someone would vote Republican is if they did not understand what they were voting for.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am astounded that so many Americans are so stupid that they believe they have the best health care on the planet when 36% of claims are denied, seriously sick people find their policies canceled, premiums are twice what they are anywhere else in the world, 46 million people can’t afford any insurance at all, and outcomes are on par with Cuba. This callous neglect the ill simply does not happen in other countries, but crooked Republicans have suckered American fools into thinking the status quo where insurance companies behave like Bernie Madoff is the best of all possible worlds. Far more people die from this insanity than will ever die from Al Qaeda attacks.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am endlessly amazed at the stupidity of Americans. They disingenuously ask “why the do the Muslims hate us?” Don’t be daft! The reasons are obvious: The Americans have butchered millions of Muslim civilians mostly children (starting long before 9/11 with the sanction bombings), routinely tortured young Muslim men, stolen their oil and land, supported apartheid in Israel, broken every Geneva convention in the book with dirty tricks warfare, not to mention invaded their countries unprovoked and occupying them for 10 years.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am enjoying the cosmic justice of the Republican-packed Supreme Court making legal all manner of crooked campaign financing. Republicans presidential candidates are using the new freedom to destroy each other. Whoever survives this will be so battered that Obama will be able to push him over with a feather.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am surprised that Republicans think they can sell as their major plank that health care should only be for the rich.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I can easily understand someone opposing abortion, but when they want to make medical abortion impossible, even for rape and incest, I wonder if they have spent any time at all thinking about the issue from the women’s point of view and the child’s point of view. They have no compassion and no common sense. Their goal is mean-spirited, to punish the women by forcing them to use septic back room abortions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I can think of no greater shame than knowing a truth, but being too cowardly to say it aloud because no one else had already done so, or was too afraid to, or that louts would jeer at me for saying it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I can understand an old, wizened, unloved, fart with only short while to live, who cares about no one but himself and his amassed fortune joining the Republicans in the USA or the Conservatives in Canada, but it is horrifying to see a young handsome guy with his life before him succumbing to the dark side.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I cannot believe that so many Americans are stupid enough to be taken in by Tea Party slogans, bigotry and craziness. I take comfort that those same Americans will be punished most severely by those very Tea Party candidates they elect. Remember where the Tea Party got nearly all its money — from anonymous large corporations and anonymous hostile foreign countries. Those are the interests they will serve, not the interests of those who voted for them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I can’t believe how stupid Americans are. The Republicans blocked Obama at every turn from getting the economy going, then the voters blamed Obama and imagined the Republicans could save the day with policies well-proven not to work.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I can’t believe the gall of Republican billionaires who claim the top priority should be dismantling the social safety net for the benefit of those disenfranchised, namely those who will die without medical coverage, those with disabilities that mean they cannot survive without care those who will wander the snowy streets without shelter. The uberrich already have 90% of the wealth, far more than they could ever spend, yet they cannot rest until they have ever last penny of the planet’s wealth, and everyone else are beggars. It is an insane game with real victims. My contempt for these loons is unbounded.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I can’t think of anyone who ever ran for office more aggressively ignorant than Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party Candidate for senate in Delaware.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I could imagine a gangster hiring armed guards and security technology and spending more than everyone else put together in the town. This suggests either paranoia or the gangster has made many enemies through his own criminal actions. A normal person does not need too spend that much on security. Just why then does the USA think it needs to spend more on the military than the rest of the world put together? I suggest it has nothing whatsoever to do with defence but with corruption of the military and the associated politicians shovelling out money in no-bid contracts to kick-back contractors.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I don’t enjoy movie fiction about the military. The plots are mindlessly simplistic. The characters all despicable. There is no suspense since I do not care if the protagonists gets their heads blown off or not.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I don’t like the idea that the wealthy can have many appeals of their convictions. They are like a do-over for a failed defence. At each higher level, the defendant faces a more sympathetic judge, because the higher level judges are richer, more politically connected and privileged. The net result is wealthy people just pay a fine — the cost of appealing sufficiently high. Appeals should be permitted only where there was some serious flaw in the original trial or some ambiguous point of law that needs to be hammered out. In contrast, the poor don’t even get one trial. They are brow-beaten into pleading guilty with plea-bargain threats.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I don’t see much difference between the state offering immunity in return for testimony it wants and a criminal offering money in return for testimony he wants. He who pays the piper calls the tune. At the very least, the jury should be fully aware of what incentives were given for any testimony and the witness’s past history of accepting such incentives.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I don’t think Americans yet understand that if their neighbour’s house is on fire, it is to their advantage to see it is put out quickly, lest it spread to their home, and that if a neighbour is being robbed, that it to their advantage that the robber is quickly apprehended, and that if their neighbour has tuberculosis, it is to their advantage that he gets immediate treatment, even if he is an illegal immigrant.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I don’t think there should be such a big difference in the penalty for murder and attempted murder. Whether the victim survives depends mostly on factors that have nothing to do with the assailant, e.g. time to get medical attention, general health of the victim and skill of the surgeon.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find Arizona’s attitude toward illegal immigration appalling for several reasons:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- They show contempt for the constitution by flagrantly overstepping their constitutional authority. Immigration is a federal matter.
- They are happy to exploit illegal immigrants for cheap labour or sex slave prostitutes. They have no compassion for the immigrants.
- They are dishonest about their racism with their “show ze papers” legislation. They are almost as interested in hassling legitimate Hispanic citizens as illegal immigrants.
- Instead of going after crime, they are only interested in going after Hispanic crime. They refuse to acknowledge their racism.
I find it a bit thick when a someone chastises me for being rude to a politician who I have criticised when that politician has openly committed capital crimes. Surely these critics would not require me to be deferential to someone on death row or to a foreign leader who has committed similar crimes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find it deeply satisfying that advances in forensic DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) have allowed law enforcement to revisit cold cases and nail smug criminals who figured they had committed the perfect crime. I hope future advances in forensic science will put even master criminals like Bush and Cheney behind bars.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find it disturbing that American Christians find equally abhorrent a man who likes to watch women slather themselves in guacamole and one who forces women to do it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find it frustrating politicians almost never do what I ask them to, but then when I read the exhortations of history’s greats, I discover politicians paid no attention to them either.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find it massively hypocritical that Americans refuse to forgive a young Leni Riefenstahl for making a propaganda movie at Hitler’s command, but forgive themselves for volunteering to torture, mutilate and murder Iraqi children with every illegal weapon known to man for no plausible excuse other than stealing oil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find it odd that Americans are happy to spend millions of dollars investigating the homicide of anyone, no matter how low their status, but they are unwilling to spend even a dime to prevent that person’s death by disease, starvation, exposure or drug addiction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find it odd that Americans so strenuously vilify people like Castro, Chavez and Ahmadinejad. Americans have done infinitely more to harm Cuba, Venezuela and Iran than they have ever done to Americans in retaliation. Americans are behaving like the Nazis when they vilified the Jews to justify persecuting them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find it odd that anti-abortionists who consider In a capital crime to kill even a single cell zygote, are so keen on soldiers killing adults and children. It is also irrational that they consider it mandatory to kill the trillions of cells that make up a doctor to save the life of a single cell fertilised egg.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find it odd that non-disclosure contracts have been found constitutional. You are not permitted to sell yourself into slavery. Why should you be permitted to give up other constitutional freedoms in return for money?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find Republicans appalling, not because they hold odious beliefs, but because they defend them only with lies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have always been somewhat on the fence of the abortion issue. I can appreciate both point of view, but I have just realised that one side is being deceptive. The anti-abortion people have not been honest about the motive for their opposition. It is not a moral question as they pretend. It is a question of religious dogma. Christians believe in souls and that souls inhabit fertilised eggs or fetuses. Given there is no way to detect a soul, and given souls are almost certainly fictitious, there is no way to determine how soon after conception souls seize possession of a human body. So what this abortion debate is really about is forcing non-Christians to accept this loony tunes soul theory complete with possession timetable. Souls are why Christians give blastulas exalted status, not because they are potential humans, not because life is sacred. Anti-abortion fervor is really about Christians imposing their idiotic religious dogma on others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have never understood the way Americans are so contemptuous of the French. They are the new blacks. Americans would not have stood a chance rebelling from Britain had the French not helped.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have no problem with people who study the facts and come to a different conclusion from me, but I have infinite contempt for people who refuse to even look at the facts, then angrily tell me that I am utterly wrong, based on nothing more than what they feel in their guts, namely what they wish were true.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have noticed that Americans have an absolute lack of curiosity about what motivates a terrorist to a mindless suicide attack to kill Americans, any Americans, even children (not just any of the planet’s 5.9 billion infidels). If they did, they would have to confront the murderous and treacherous behaviour of the USA all over the planet over the last century.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have often puzzled that humans feel most self-righteous when regulating the behaviour of others that has zero effect on them, e.g. sex, gay marriage, marijuana use, oral sex, contraception, pornography, the adultery of strangers, religious ceremonies…This is so weird, when you consider people do so many things that do adversely affect each other.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have seen movies going back thousands of years of most parts of the world except where I live, Victoria, BC Canada. For some reason people who make movies think nothing of interest could ever have happened here in BC before the coming of the white man.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have seen various Republican pundits villainising the poor and demanding they pay a greater share of the tax burden. These pampered fat cats don’t seem to understand the poor work longer hours and work far harder than they do. The difference is they are paid a lot less. That is not something they chose and not something need to be further penalised for.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have to admire the Afghans and Iraqis. They have hung on for 10 years and 4 months against a gang of bully countries (including the USA, Canada and Britain) more than 13 times larger, forcing a stalemate. They did it with almost no budget when the invaders spent trillions. They did it with only the most primitive weapons — kitchen made IED (Improvised Explosive Device) s; and rifles. Unlike us, they did not target women and children. Unlike us, they did not use banned weapons such as cluster bombs, DU, napalm and white phosphorus. They did not invade anyone else’s country unprovoked, like we did. The very fact we are withdrawing is proof we were never in any danger at all from Afghanistan or Iraq. We could never have walked away from fighting true threats like Germany or Japan. It is distressing rooting against the home team, but I have to because we are behaving like European colonial powers and often worse than Nazis and certainly much worse than our alleged enemies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have two complaints with the NRA (National Rifle Association), the first lying about the effect of gun control in Canada. Contrary to NRA propaganda, in Canada you are seven times less likely be killed by a gun, and gun violence has dropped every year since the stricter laws were enacted. Secondly they claim the NRA wants to give the right to a New Yorker to own a gun to protect himself. No matter what one’s intent for a gun are, the facts are guns are far more likely to kill a family member than a criminal, so if you keep one, your implicit intent is to bump off your family, hardly what the founding fathers would condone. It was a lot harder to fire a muzzle-loaded musket by accident or in a sudden fit of anger than a modern hair-trigger Firestar.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have watched the Republicans in the USA do all they could to block economic recovery. I thought this a bizarre thing to do. Surely their constituency of billionaires and businesses also want recovery. Then it dawned on me, if the recovery can be postponed until after the November elections, the Democrats can be defeated, and by taking over the senate, the Republicans can then hamstring Obama and defeat him in 2012.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I heard a politician stumping for a proposition ostensibly to more strictly control sale of liquor to minors, but what he was actually stumping for was closing government liquor stores and having liquor sold in gas stations and corner grocery stores. One study discovered minors could successfully buy liquor from gas stations four out of five times. Some people have no shame. There is no mechanism for the public to stop this deception.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I heard one Tea Party candidate advocating making gun toting mandatory. Just how far do NRA members want to take this?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Guns in cars to make drive by shootings and road rage shootings more convenient.
- Guns in airplanes and airports to make it easier for Americans to shoot illegal immigrants.
- Guns in bars. You need a little liquor to loosen up the trigger finger to kill some coloured folk or fags.
- Kids should take guns to school so they can deal with bullies.
- Guns in the house and senate chamber so Tea Partiers can invoke second amendment right solutions when politicians don’t do as they ask.
- Guns for felons. They need them for protection even more than ordinary folk.
- Guns in prisons for inmates. Think of the money you would save housing them if they killed themselves off. The constitution makes no exception for prisoners.
- Guns for deer. To make hunting fun, deer are rigged up with guns they can shoot back just by raising their tails three times in rapid succession.
I hung out primarily with 20 something black employed people when I lived in San Francisco in 1985. To my surprise none of them had health insurance. They could not afford it. It drove me nuts. They always had some problem you would get fixed immediately if you lived in Canada. They would let it get worse and worse, trying to ignore the problem.
I don’t think Americans have any idea how terrible their health care system is and what a rip-off it is. It has outcomes on par with Cuba, below every other developed country. Americans are not aware of this because few people travel outside the USA to see what other countries are doing.
When you total up the bill for taxes, fees, hospital care, copayments, pills… in the USA you will spend twice what you do in Canada. The US system is designed to make extremely large amounts money by extracting as much as possible from patients. In contrast the purpose of a universal health care system is to keep people healthy.
The big advantage of universal health care is there is no excuse for sick people wandering around infecting others and getting worse. You just go into the nearest clinic and get in fixed. No extra bill. No paperwork. Riding a bus in the USA scares the heck out of me. It looks like half the passengers have some reportable disease.
In Canada, even the druggies and alcoholics get treated. The big benefit of that to everyone is this policy helps prevent the spread of infections.
I am absolutely baffled by the Tea Party desire to die for the right to pay twice as much as necessary for their health care so that billionaires can profit. They have a knee-jerk phobia over the word "socialism" but they have not the first clue what it actually means. They react as if it meant being put in a cage and tortured. It is just you set up a super insurance scheme to cover everyone. Because it is universal and gets economies of scale, it can afford to cover everyone, and offer very low rates, can be collected many ways, including taxes.
Dentistry has problems too. It is like putting yourself in the hands of the Mafia when you walk into a US dentist office.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I know of three ways do deal with the extreme pain of the last weeks of life:
- Grit your teeth.
- Become an opiate addict and die babbling.
- Use physician assisted suicide for a planned and coherent farewell.
I find Christians highly peculiar for restricting themselves to only methods (1) and (2), however, when they try to impose that choice on me, it makes me want to wring their bloody necks.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I laugh at people who want to ban the hijab. What’s next? banning wearing white after labour day? The law has no business dictating fashion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I learned at an anthropology lecture that in the 1860s here in BC Canada, the British distributed blankets infected with slabs of skin stripped from natives who had just recently died of small pox to every native in the province. Men were assigned to make sure every single native touched what looked like a snakeskin. Within 10 days, 98% of the population were dead. The British who had used these primitive but effective biological weapons went to claim the lands of the people they had killed even before they were dead.
Many people dismiss as totally out of hand that anyone would deliberately spread HIV (Human Imumuno-deficiency Virus) in Africa, as I accuse Ronald Reagan. They forget there is plenty of precedent.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I live in Victoria, BC, Canada. It has a reputation for being unusually liberal. However, city council has a vendetta against the homeless, after promising to house the homeless in the last civic election. If you are homeless:
- It is illegal to own a cart, tent, back pack or sleeping bag. The councilors insist the homeless stay wet, dirty and cold. If the police catch the homeless with such contraband, they confiscate and burn it. This is odd. If the intent is to make the homeless more prosperous, why destroy their meager property?
- It is illegal to defecate or urinate. There are no facilities for them and businesses chase them out. Just what do the councilors expect them to do?
- It is illegal to congregate. If they do, the police come and hit them.
The councilors berate them and say are lazy and should get a job. Just how are the homeless supposed to clean up for a job interview, or even to make an appointment for one? Since they don’t have a home, they don’t get a welfare allowance for rent. How are they supposed to ever scrape the money to together for even the cheapest accommodation? After promising more shelter beds for the homeless, instead they have closed them. If it is that bad in Victoria, I wonder what is like in conservative cities.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I oppose the death penalty for the following reasons:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- The death penalty is a deterrent, but not a punishment. One tiny pin prick and its over.
- If new technology exonerates, there is no way to apologise if you have already killed him.
- The legal costs to kill someone are exorbitant. Serial murders don’t deserve than sort of expense.
I puzzle why anyone would pay any attention to air heads like Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean. My best guess is they appeal to bimbos who idolise them because they are fellow bimbos who are taken seriously. A strange bit of circular reasoning.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I remember back in 1975 my lover dumped me suddenly. I had never felt such intense pain. I could not believe what I was experiencing was real. Imagine instead, that he had been killed. Imagine how I would have felt then. It would be even worse for your child being killed. We have absolutely no right to go killing people’s loved ones. There needs some sort of virtual reality to make these bastard soldiers and generals experience personally what they are imposing on others for the most trivial of reasons, for most soldiers, just to break the boredom.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I see the USA the way the ancient citizens of Gaul might have looked on Rome.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I speak as someone who has received over 3000 death threats. Why would someone who actually intended to kill you register their phone number to be investigated as a potential culprit? Why would they warn you they were coming? More worrisome are anti-abortionist style terrorists who broadcast your address and schedule and encourage other whackos to bump you off, like Lowell Green.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I suppose, technically, it is legal for politicians vote to do nothing about global warming and greenhouse gas emissions. After all, suicide is legal. But this is tantamount to premeditated genocide.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I suspect that bigots in the USA have been so keen on keeping a black man out of the White House, and on keeping their sons and daughters from having sex with black people, because they fear once they’ve tried black, they will never go back.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I suspect the art of public persuasion is the art of concocting metaphors that suggest your views are not controversial.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I take a dim view of the Tea Party, or any anti-democratic party that shouts down its opposition, uses threats of violence, lies in torrents about its opponents or purges members insufficiently pure because I have read about the history of the Nazi party and where those tactics lead.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I think all Obama has to do to defeat any Republican rival is to keep pointing out he/she belongs to the same Republican party that abused congress to block recovery.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I think Americans suffering from deficiency in reading comprehension. I see nowhere in the constitution where it guarantees lunatic psychos the right to stockpile arms of every description then go postal. Just how far does the NRA want to take this? guns in airports, in airplanes, in congress, in bars, at football games, in stores, in banks, in restaurants, in prisons? Just what weapons should be permitted? machine guns, nukes, poison gas, anthrax, surface to air missiles? Should toddlers have them too? I think you Americans are stark raving bonkers. You are afraid to go out of your houses. That is because of the second amendment arming all those whackos to the teeth. Other countries don’t have your problems. I was shot at three times in one evening by drunk NRA conventioneers bombing around in cars in Portland. These people are certifiably nuts. Don’t listen to them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I think it is time to end the British monarchy for many reasons including:
- It is anti-democratic. It is based on bloodlines, wealth and privilege.
- It in unfair to those born into to the job. They are condemned to a life in the fish bowl whether they want it or not.
- It is unfair to demand that royals avoid expressing political opinions.
- You can get people in the job (as part of the extended royal family, not just the monarch) totally unsuited to it with no way to replace them.
- A rogue member of the royal family can bring dishonour to the whole country.
Selecting a head of state should be handled as in Canada. It is a temporary job. The person selected has already proven himself/herself suitable. The person selected has agreed to take on the job. The president of the country should not be burdened with the dual ceremonial job of head of state. He/she is way too busy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I think it should always be legal to request that the laws be changed. People have their exceptions, e.g. pedophiles, pot smokers, protestors at a G8 summit…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I think it would be a Good Thing™ had Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann… had never been born. All of them, even if they don’t realise it, are dedicated to the destruction of earth through global warming, pollution, refusal to prepare for the end of oil and creating international hatred for the USA through bullying other nations. At first look, it would seem necessary to assassinate these people to save the planet. But that would not work. What happens when someone is assassinated? They become a saint, and everything they ever said becomes unquestioned holy writ. Instead these villains need to be exposed, shamed and discredited, not killed. If all goes well their lesser crimes can be exposed, prosecuted and punished so they can no longer create global mischief.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I think most people would agree in principle that nations who threatened others with nuclear weapons or attacked other nations with nuclear weapons or that made a habit of invading other nations should not be entrusted with nuclear weapons. Primarily this would include the USA, Britain and Israel. Secondarily, it would include North Korea and Iran.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I think the top priority of any government housing policy should be see that everyone has some place to live. Conservatives look at it differently. Their goal is to enhance the grandeur of the mansions and expropriate the lands of the other people, for ever grander mansions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I was surprised at my horror at the Americans allowing the body of Gadafi to decompose. Logically it was just a piece of meat. Yet I know how superstitious Americans are about corpses and how they normally treat them with exaggerated respect. By letting Gadafi’s corpse rot, they were signalling their willingness to violate their own strongest taboos to express their contempt. They were also willing to spit on Muslim taboos as well which require burial within one day of death. It was as if they had broken the taboo against cannibalism. It is a sign of moral breakdown. ~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I watch the Viennese put on an elegant concert. It is hard to believe just generation ago these people welcomed Hitler. It is not that the Viennese are particularly susceptible to fascism, all of humanity is. That is why we must never imagine it can’t happen here. Just as we wish someone has stomped out Hitler’s movement before it gained power we should stop out the Tea Party and other bigoted political movements before they wreck havoc he way Hitler did.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I watched an NFB (National Film Board of Canada) documentary called Dancing Around the Table about negotiations between the government and the indigenous peoples on land claims and self government. I watched the indigenous people sabotage themselves with unskillful negotiation:
- The aboriginal negotiators kept accusing the non-aboriginals present of stealing their land. None of those present had anything to do with it. It happened back in the 1800s. The culprits are long ago dead. Those present are trying to redress this crime. Lumping all white people together and accusing all whites for the crimes of some subset of whites is racism too.
- Most of the speeches were of the form. “You white bastards stole our land and refuse to give us what we want.“ Only they each took about 15 minutes to say the same thing. (They were never any more specific about what land they wanted back or what else they wanted.) Falsely accusing your opponents does nothing but get everyone’s backs up, on both sides. The essential argument seemed to be, “you guys are such sick fucks, to atone, you should give us a blank cheque for anything we want”. This is approach is hardly going to appeal to someone in government who believes they are trying to do the right thing, and is looking for a token first step. He has to sell his fellow whites on whatever he does too.
- They demanded all the land in North and South America back. They demanded absolute self government, what sounded like the status of autonomous nation states. Obviously it is impossible to comply with that since the government of Canada does not even own all that land. Since the indigenous people made no more specific smaller demands, there was nothing the government could agree to.
By adamantly demanding nothing less than 100% restitution, the indigenous people ended up with the status quo, which was considerably less than the government was willing to give them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I would have expected more politicians to have started out as psychics where they would have perfected the art of sounding profound while committing to nothing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I would have thought that by now Americans would have caught on, that if you want freedom of religion, you have to give others freedom of religion. If you don’t want others imposing their religion on you, you can’t forcefully impose your religion on them. Mitt Romney is thoroughly confused on this point. He claims Obama is interfering with his religious freedom by offering contraception and abortion services to the public, even though he and his spouse are free to do whatever they want. It is not as though Obama is making contraception or abortion mandatory. What Romney means is Obama is interfering with his attempts to impose his Mormon religion on others. If Mitt gets his way, and makes contraception and abortion illegal, he will be imposing his whacko Mormon beliefs about soul-spirit possession of blastulas and their sacredness on rational people, who reject it as utter nonsense with not a shred of evidence to support it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I would like it if there were a cyclical 30-year ongoing review of the entire base of law. Laws that were obsolete, illogical, inconsistent, religious taboos, unconstitutional… would be pruned and simplified.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I would like to see a debate on reclassifying types of murder and their penalties. It seems to me a drive by shooting, killing a husband for the insurance, killing a con man who embezzled your life savings, shooting an intruder, killing a blackmailer, killing someone who molested your 6 year old, killing someone who threatened to kill your family are not the same order of crime. The killer is not the same order of danger to the public in future.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I would think most seniors look at the cost of medical care this way. How much do I spend each month? If I get really sick, will I have to suddenly pay a lot more, or will my costs stay the same? You want monthly payments as low as possible with so surprises. It does not really matter who you write the check to: the government, your doctor, an insurance company. What counts is the total amount. The Republicans claim they are going to make things better for seniors by slightly lowering taxes and greatly increasing the amounts seniors pay to insurance companies. Further Republicans are greatly increasing the uncertainty since insurance companies routinely drop coverage for people with serious illnesses. The Ryan plan does not save seniors any money, it just redirects it to the Republican sponsors and to the super wealthy who are the beneficiaries of the tax cuts this plan funds. Canadians and every other developed country pay less than half what Americans do and get much better care! If you really want to save money and help seniors, adopt the Canadian, British, French, German etc. plan that has been proven both to provide superior medical care and to cost much less.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Identifying as a Republican is a bit like dressing up a civil war general and riding about on horseback waving a sword, feeling terribly heroic.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
IDs made of paper and plastic are becoming easier and easier to counterfeit. A proper ID needs the following features:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Adigital signatures to ensure the claimed issuing agency actually did issue this card.
- A private digital key that is not recorded anywhere outside the card. The card is designed never to reveal the key. This ensures you cannot clone/duplicate the card.
- The card needs to be tied to a particular person. Perhaps a DNA screen might eventually be practical. For now, a photo, height, iris scan, finger prints digitally embedded. The card itself would just have name and photo.
- It should be backed by online databases, so that IDs can be revoked, or police can be notified if a suspect uses the card.
- A single card should handle multiple ID functions, e.g. drivers licence, voting card, passport, Social Security, unemployment insurance, banking, credit cards so you don’t need a wallet full of cards.
- Most of the data would be stored in databases, not in the card itself, e.g. emergency medical data, your address, phone. That way you can update it without needing to issue a new card, or even re-write the card.
- If criminals put false card readers in retail outlets, I would hope the card would have same way of detecting them, perhaps by keeping track of past institutions it has dealt with, and warning on encountering a new one.
If 26% of Americans are unaware that the USA won independence from Britain, perhaps it is expecting a bit much of them to remember that the USA attacked both Afghanistan and Iraq unprovoked, especially when politicians of every stripe intone that every dead soldier gave his life to protect American freedoms.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If a friend or family member commits a crime it is much more sickening than if a stranger does it. In like manner, I feel so ashamed and distressed at the American war crimes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If a godfather hires a hitman to commit a murder, we still charge the godfather with murder. If you an American, through paying your taxes, you have effectively hired soldiers to torture and kill children in Afghanistan and Iraq. By that same godfather reasoning, you too are a serial murderer. On judgement day, you might argue that you did everything you could to stop the slaughter of innocents, but you didn’t do even that, did you?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If a group resort to intimidation or violence when they fail (perhaps only temporarily) at the ballot box, they are at heart Nazis. They don’t believe in majority rule. They do believe in might makes right. We should either incarcerate these people or ask them to leave the country. The worst offenders are those who claim to have an exclusive handle on the deity’s wishes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If a man carries a gun, either he plans to kill someone or threaten to kill someone. I don’t want to be anywhere near such a nut case. That is a job for the police. We don’t need amateur police any more than we need amateur high voltage linemen or amateur skunk control officers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If a man kills animals for pleasure, he is a sadist. He gets his pleasure from the pain of others. I can’t understand why any woman would leave her kids alone with such a man, even if he were the father.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If a presidential candidate has delusional beliefs, they need to be exposed, whether they be sourced in religious dogma, propaganda from big oil, a lack of education, willful ignorance or lying.
It does not matter why a presidential candidate believes nutty things. Blind trust in allegedly infallible disembodied voices is just as dangerous if they come from schizophrenia or evangelical euphoria.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If a reporter permits a lie to pass without so much as an eyebrow twitch, he is complicit in that lie and should be held responsible for lying too.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If a sadistic pedophilic priest came to you and whined, “Everyone is so unreasonable. Everyone hates me. They are trying to kill me and even my acquaintances. What can I do?” You might answer “For a start, you are going to have to stop raping, torturing and killing kids. People won’t immediately forgive you, but at least the fury won’t escalate even further. You must make amends and go through a process similar to the 12 step process alcoholics do to cease destructive behaviours.” I give the same advice to America.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If alcohol or tobacco were invented today, they would stand no chance of legalisation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If Alexander the Great were alive today, we would lump him with other murderous lunatics like Stalin, Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe. Just because he committed his crimes so long ago, he is venerated for them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If Americans elect Republicans to fix the economy for them, it would like hiring the woman who deliberately poisoned you as your doctor.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If Americans want to vote on whether they can deny gays people equal rights such as marriage, then legally they should first amend the constitution to repeal equal protection provisions of the fourteenth amendment.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If by some magic every lie told during the 2010 midterm campaign had been silenced, the public would have come to realise the president is far better than they deserved. As it is, history will excoriate the voters for being so stupid and so gullible as to swallow so many Tea Party whoppers such as:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Giving tax breaks to the rich will reduce the deficit. Obviously if you reduce government revenue, the government has less money and has to borrow more.
- America is #1 in health care and needs no improvement. Actually, it is #40, on par with Cuba. Further insurance companies soak Americans double any other country.
- The many lies about Obama personally e.g. that he was not born in Hawaii, he is a Muslim and he consorts with Muslim terrorists. That is all just made up. There is evidence at all to support it and plenty to deny it. Yet many Americans refused to look at the facts, and just repeated rumours.
- Global warming is a hoax perpetrated by all the world’s scientists. This assertion is so ridiculous when people can watch the glaciers disappearing in their own national parks.
If daredevils such as skydivers, race car drivers, skiers, boxers etc. expect the public to pick up the tab for their hospital bills via socialised medicine, then the public has the right to force them to take precautions against serious injury.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If George Soros would send all of America’s Republicans on a short all-expense paid vacation to a third world country they would come face to face with the no-government dream they have for America — uninspected meat, uninspected restaurants, uninspected aircraft, overloaded ferries, water you have to boil, open sewers, toxic waste, 7 cent an hour wages… How about Somalia? They don’t have any government at all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If George Washington had failed in his rebellion, today, he would be lumped with other terrorists and traitors like bin Laden and Louis Riel in the history books.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If God wanted to punish Americans, in his harsh style, for what they did to the children of Afghanistan and Iraq, all he need do is rig the voting machines in favour of, ex-Democrat, Rick Perry.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If Hitler had prevailed, I doubt his regime could have done a better job than FOX at convincing the populace the wars of empire are purely self defence, even when the enemy is 1/10 the size and the USA attacked first, unprovoked.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If I were born in Texas, I would be so ashamed to come from a war-cheerleading, anti-environment state whose main export is bigotry against Hispanics, gays, Muslims… that I would take speech therapy to drop my Texas accent. Happily, my only connection is some ancestors who died there.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If Mr. A lied that Mr. B had just raped and murdered your child, and you in a rage beheaded Mr. B, who is at fault? You, Mr. A or Mr. B? Similarly when FOX news tells lies about various politicians that so enrage the voters that some of them threaten to kill or attempt to assassinate those politicians, who is at fault, FOX news or the enraged voters?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If politicians blindly did what the majority asked them to, even monumentally stupid things, it should not take all that long for the majority to start demanding sensible policies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If Republicans ever become interested in animal rights, their “family values”concerning abortion and the age of consent could morph into a zealous campaign to ban egg-eating and consuming poultry that did not die of old age.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If somebody buys a gun, that means they are planning to kill someone, for who knows what offense, perhaps playing music too loudly. They know perfectly well that statistically any weapon they buy will more likely will end up killing a family member rather than someone threatening their family. That in itself is strong evidence they should be institutionalised. In any case, I think everyone should at the least shun any known gun owner to avoid confrontational situations with such a mentally unbalanced person and to put gentle pressure on them to get rid of the gun and use non-lethal techniques of coercing others. People who buy hunting rifles are planning to kill wild animals. Children who enjoy killing animals often graduate to killing people. These are not the sort of people you want to invite into your home, to socialise with, or to let anywhere near your children. They should be shunned too.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If someone calls for a bi-partisan approach, ask them just what Republican values do they want contributing to the solution:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Trashing the environment for short term corporate profit?
- Transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich?
- Protecting the right of corporations to buy politicians?
- Endless wars?
- Imposition of Christianity on the general populace?
- Harassing gays, Hispanics and immigrants as the national pastime?
If someone has a serious genetic defect, and we as a society rescue them with extreme costly medical procedures, that person owes it to society not to pass the gene on. The condition of being treated should be sterilisation, ideally with a method that could be reversed if ever there is discovered a way to avoid passing on the defective gene. It is morally wrong to knowingly saddle a child with a such a handicap. It is morally wrong to saddle society with a huge bill to rescue that child. It is tantamount to deliberately burning the child over most of his or her body or deliberately infecting him or her with AIDS.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If someone invites health problems with poor diet, lifestyle, alcohol/drug use, or dangerous sporting activities, or dangerous profession such as mercenary, should they have equal access to universal health care without paying a premium?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If someone refuses military service, all they need is the excuse It’s against my religion. What they mean is That’s the tradition in my religious club. There is no need to justify the stance. In contrast, someone who has thought this through and can give ten good reasons for refusing service is sent off anyway. In the USA, an irrational excuse is thus strongly preferred to a rational one.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If the events of 9/11 had been presented as a whodunnit in 2000, viewers would have complained. There was 100 times too much evidence to know the president was complicit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)People who believe Bush’s version of 9/11 did not reach that conclusion by studying the evidence. They simply refuse to believe any president could commit such a dastardly crime.
If the Muslim world wanted to destroy the USA, the easiest way would be to use the Citizens United supreme court decision to buy the congressional, senate and presidential elections and install mentally defective and crackpot leaders who would bring the government to a standstill with in-fighting.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If the negative consequences of using a weapon are greater than any conceivable benefit of using the weapon, then you should not develop the weapon because, sooner or later, somebody will use it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If the Republican party ran your household budget:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- They would tell your kids to drop out of school to save money.
- They would procrastinate fixing the leak in the roof to save money.
- They would tithe 25% of your income to the Koch brothers and the Walton (Walmart) family.
- They would rip out your solar panels and install an oil furnace.
- They would save money by leaving the old batteries in the smoke alarms.
- They would sell your hybrid and buy a Hummer.
- They would put your groceries on your MasterCard and pay only the minimum amount each month.
- They would stock your root cellar with automatic weapons for use in killing gays, immigrants, blacks, Koreans and other undesirables as soon as it becomes legal.
- They would put your life savings in McDonnell Douglas stock.
If the skeleton of a homeless man is found, the government will spent tens of thousands of dollars determining the precise cause of death. However, while he was alive, they would not spend a dime on him.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If the Tea Party attempt to force fundamentalist Christianity (including 4000 year old creationist science) on the USA succeeds it will be as black a day for civilisation as Julius Caesar burning down the library at Alexandria.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If there are five drag racers and one kills a pedestrian, only that one is charged with homicide. Yet all did the same thing. What are you trying to punish? slow reflexes, or taking reckless risks with other people’s lives?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If there are two suspects (A) and (B) for a serious crime, and the prosecutors don’t know which one is the culprit, they will offer a deal to (A), freedom from prosecution, so long as (A) agrees to testify against (B). If (A) is the actual culprit, this testimony is worthless. (A) has pressing motive to lie.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If tourists knew how out-of-control gun violence is in the USA and Mexico, they would never dream of visiting. What is even crazier is most Americans are working hard to increase the number of concealed weapons.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If TV station announced that a black politicians should be lynched, or that a mob should burn down the house of a Jewish one they would probably find themselves in deep hot water, but is perfectly OK for a preacher to preach that a gay person deserves violence, murder and general persecution just for being gay. The USA has yet to grow out of this childish homophobic phase.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If we are still here a century from now, I think we will look back with horror on how we treated criminals. When we come to understand why criminals do what they do, our treatments will seem as primitive as witch burning.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If we can demand that churches stop the persecution of Jews, surely we can ask them to stop persecuting gay people. It is already illegal. All we have to do is enforce the laws on professional Christians too.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If we Canadians and Americans don’t stop spewing greenhouse gases very soon, the Europeans, Chinese and Japanese will be forced to destroy us financially or militarily to stop us from destroying civilisation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you are a witness in a court trial, you have to swear to tell the whole truth, yet judges constantly badger witnesses when they give qualifying information. Judges command witnesses just to answer the question without elaboration. Just what would you do if you were a witness?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you are debating someone and they dismiss all your evidence by calling you insane and laughing at you, but offer no counter evidence or counter reasoning, you get suspicious that they have no evidence to support their position. That is what is what defenders of the Bush version of what happened on 9/11 do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you are debating someone and they repeatedly misrepresent your arguments, and create straw men to demolish, you get suspicious that even they don’t believe in their position. That is what is what defenders of the Bush version of what happened on 9/11 do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
