For what is it to die

“For what is it to die, But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind? And when the Earth has claimed our limbs, Then we shall truly dance.”

— Kahlil Gibran

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Every gun that is made...

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

President Dwight Eisenhower

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Thomas Paine quote

"The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum." -

Thomas Paine

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

ROBERT CREAMER: During the Holidays We Celebrate Progressive Values

When you think of the heroes and heroines of American -- and world -- history you think of the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Cesar Chavez, Robert Kennedy, Mohandas Gandhi and Franklin Roosevelt...

...Let's be clear: "Greed is good" is not being celebrated at Christmas. The values of Ebenezer Scrooge do not define the Christmas spirit -- past, present or future. More tax breaks for the top one percent is not the moral of A Christmas Carol.


Read article here

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Foxhole Atheist Gets ‘A’ Tattoo for Christmas

Foxhole Atheist Gets ‘A’ Tattoo for Christmas

love is...

Love is my religion - I could die for it.

John Keats

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Anti-intellectualism in the US

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.”

— Isaac Asimov, US biochemist and science fiction author (1920-1992)

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

why hell was invented

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. ~ Bertrand Russell -

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

No defense of superstition and pseudoscience

It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people… If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with. ~ Isaac Asimov

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

The Hidden Motivation of Regret

The Hidden Motivationi of Regret

It's What You Don't Do That Haunts You

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

If something is really, honestly indefensible, it can be defeated.

"If something is really, honestly indefensible, it can be defeated. The people perpetrating that indefensible thing will want you to think that what they are doing is inevitable. They will want you to think that it cannot possibly be changed or fixed. That it is the way it has to be, that that is the way it's gonna be, they will want you to think those things. And it's not true. An indefensible practice or policy is, in America, vulnerable."

- Rachel Maddow

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Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean”

Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean”

It’s Official: More Private Sector Jobs Created In 2010 Than During Entire Bush Years

It’s Official: More Private Sector Jobs Created In 2010 Than During Entire Bush Years

Religious States the Fattest

Religious States the Fattest

Tea Party candidate’s company seeks bankruptcy protection

Tea Party candidate’s company seeks bankruptcy protection

Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit

Martin Luther King "I have a dream"

RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment

“I didn’t get my inspiration from Karl Marx

“I didn’t get my inspiration from Karl Marx; I got it from a man named Jesus, a Galilean saint who said he was anointed to heal the broken-hearted. He was anointed to deal with the problems of the poor. And that is where we get our inspiration. And we go out in a day when we have a message for the world, and we can change this world and we can change this nation.”

-- MLK, Jr. quoted in "The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.," Clayborne Carson, Ed., p. 351.

Divide & Conquer (Don't Be A Sucker)

Spandau Ballet - True

This is my favorite song!

Cecilia and Juliana

WAR

Dir: Tomek Baginski / Poland / 2005

In an old forgotten military base far from civilization, a group of deranged military officers nurture their insanity.

For more info: http://www.fallen-art.com/

For Latinas, A Fine Line Between Reproductive Justice and Eugenics : Ms Magazine Blog

For Latinas, A Fine Line Between Reproductive Justice and Eugenics : Ms Magazine Blog

I've seen EARTHLINGS

I've seen EARTHLINGS


Please watch this movie

Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Another Brick In The Wall (Hey Ayatollah, Leave Those Kids Alone!)

Bertrand Russell on God (1959)

The Tide Is Turning

Welcome To This World

What if the Tea Party was Black?

Star Wars Subway Car

Take Action: Stop BP's Disaster on Ice

Take Action: Stop BP's Disaster on Ice

The Gift of Forgiveness

Eyes of a Blue Dog by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Then she looked at me. I thought that she was looking at me for the first time. But then, when she turned around behind the lamp and I kept feeling her slippery and oily look in back of me, over my shoulder, I understood that it was I who was looking at her for the first time. I lit a cigarette. I took a drag on the harsh, strong smoke, before spinning in the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. After that I saw her there, as if she'd been standing beside the lamp looking at me every night. For a few brief minutes that's all we did: look at each other. I looked from the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. She stood, with a long and quiet hand on the lamp, looking at me. I saw her eyelids lighted up as on every night. It was then that I remembered the usual thing, when I said to her: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' Without taking her hand off the lamp she said to me: 'That. We'll never forget that.' She left the orbit, sighing: 'Eyes of a blue dog. I've written it everywhere.'

I saw her walk over to the dressing table. I watched her appear in the circular glass of the mirror looking at me now at the end of a back and forth of mathematical light. I watched her keep on looking at me with her great hot-coal eyes: looking at me while she opened the little box covered with pink mother of pearl. I saw her powder her nose. When she finished, she closed the box, stood up again, and walked over to the lamp once more, saying: 'I'm afraid that someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets.' And over the flame she held the same long and tremulous hand that she had been warming before sitting down at the mirror. And she said: 'You don't feel the cold.' And I said to her: 'Sometimes.' And she said to me: 'You must feel it now.' And then I understood why I couldn't have been alone in the seat. It was the cold that had been giving me the certainty of my solitude. 'Now I feel it,' I said. 'And it's strange because the night is quiet. Maybe the sheet fell off.' She didn't answer. Again she began to move toward the mirror and I turned again in the chair, keeping my back to her. Without seeing her, I knew what she was doing. I knew that she was sitting in front of the mirror again, seeing my back, which had had time to reach the depths of the mirror and be caught by her look, which had also had just enough time to reach the depths and return--before the hand had time to start the second turn--until her lips were anointed now with crimson, from the first turn of her hand in front of the mirror. I saw, opposite me, the smooth wall, which was like another blind mirror in which I couldn't see her-- sitting behind me--but could imagine her where she probably was as if a mirror had been hung in place of the wall. 'I see you,' I told her. And on the wall I saw what was as if she had raised her eyes and had seen me with my back turned toward her from the chair, in the depths of the mirror, my face turned toward the wall. Then I saw her lower he eyes again and remain with her eyes always on her brassiere, not talking. And I said to her again: 'I see you.' And she raised her eyes from her brassiere again. 'That's impossible,' she said. I asked her why. And she, with her eyes quiet and on her brassiere again: 'Because your face is turned toward the wall.' Then I spun the chair around. I had the cigarette clenched in my mouth. When I stayed facing the mirror she was back by the lamp. Now she had her hands open over the flame, like the two wings of a hen, toasting herself, and with her face shaded by her own fingers. 'I think I'm going to catch cold,' she said. 'This must be a city of ice.' She turned her face to profile and her skin, from copper to red, suddenly became sad. 'Do something about it,' she said. And she began to get undressed, item by item, starting at the top with the brassiere. I told her: 'I'm going to turn back to the wall.' She said: 'No. In any case, you'll see me the way you did when your back was turned.' And no sooner had she said it than she was almost completely undressed, with the flame licking her long copper skin. 'I've always wanted to see you like that, with the skin of your belly full of deep pits, as if you'd been beaten.' And before I realized that my words had become clumsy at the sight of her nakedness she became motionless, warming herself on the globe of the lamp, and she said: 'Sometimes I think I'm made of metal.' She was silent for an instant. The position of her hands over the flame varied slightly. I said: 'Sometimes in other dreams, I've thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that's why you're cold.' And she said: 'Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then, when the blood beats inside me, it's as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It's like- -what do you call it--laminated metal.' She drew closer to the lamp. 'I would have liked to hear you,' I said. And she said: 'If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you'll hear me echoing. I've always wanted you to do it sometime.' I heard her breathe heavily as she talked. And she said that for years she'd done nothing different. Her life had been dedicated to finding me in reality, through that identifying phrase: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' And she went along the street saying it aloud, as a way of telling the only person who could have understood her:

'I'm the one who comes into your dreams every night and tells you: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'' And she said that she went into restaurants and before ordering said to the waiters: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' But the waiters bowed reverently, without remembering ever having said that in their dreams. Then she would write on the napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables with a knife: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' And on the steamed-up windows of hotels, stations, all public buildings, she would write with her forefinger: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' She said that once she went into a drugstore and noticed the same smell that she had smelled in her room one night after having dreamed about me. 'He must be near,' she thought, seeing the clean, new tiles of the drugstore. Then she went over to the clerk and said to him: 'I always dream about a man who says to me: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'' And she said the clerk had looked at her eyes and told her: 'As a matter of fact, miss, you do have eyes like that.' And she said to him: 'I have to find the man who told me those very words in my dreams.' And the clerk started to laugh and moved to the other end of the counter. She kept on seeing the clean tile and smelling the odor. And she opened her purse and on the tiles with her crimson lipstick, she wrote in red letters: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' The clerk came back from where he had been. He told her: Madam, you have dirtied the tiles.' He gave her a damp cloth, saying: 'Clean it up.' And she said, still by the lamp, that she had spent the whole afternoon on all fours, washing the tiles and saying: 'Eyes of a blue dog,' until people gathered at the door and said she was crazy.

Now, when she finished speaking, I remained in the corner, sitting, rocking in the chair. 'Every day I try to remember the phrase with which I am to find you,' I said. 'Now I don't think I'll forget it tomorrow. Still, I've always said the same thing and when I wake up I've always forgotten what the words I can find you with are.' And she said: 'You invented them yourself on the first day.' And I said to her: 'I invented them because I saw your eyes of ash. But I never remember the next morning.' And she, with clenched fists, beside the lamp, breathed deeply: 'If you could at least remember now what city I've been writing it in.'

Her tightened teeth gleamed over the flame. 'I'd like to touch you now,' I said. She raised the face that had been looking at the light; she raised her look, burning, roasting, too, just like her, like her hands, and I felt that she saw me, in the corner where I was sitting, rocking in the chair. 'You'd never told me that,' she said. 'I tell you now and it's the truth,' I said. >From the other side of the lamp she asked for a cigarette. The butt had disappeared between my fingers. I'd forgotten I was smoking. She said: 'I don't know why I can't remember where I wrote it.' And I said to her: 'For the same reason that tomorrow I won't be able to remember the words.' And she said sadly: 'No. It's just that sometimes I think that I've dreamed that too.' I stood up and walked toward the lamp. She was a little beyond, and I kept on walking with the cigarettes and matches in my hand, which would not go beyond the lamp. I held the cigarette out to her. She squeezed it between her lips and leaned over to reach the flame before I had time to light the match. 'In some city in the world, on all the walls, those words have to appear in writing: 'Eyes of a blue dog,' I said. 'If I remembered them tomorrow I could find you.' She raised her head again and now the lighted coal was between her lips. 'Eyes of a blue dog,' she sighed, remembered, with the cigarette drooping over her chin and one eye half closed. The she sucked in the smoke with the cigarette between her fingers and exclaimed: 'This is something else now. I'm warming up.' And she said it with her voice a little lukewarm and fleeting, as if she hadn't really said it, but as if she had written it on a piece of paper and had brought the paper close to the flame while I read: 'I'm warming,' and she had continued with the paper between her thumb and forefinger, turning it around as it was being consumed and I had just read '. . . up,' before the paper was completely consumed and dropped all wrinkled to the floor, diminished, converted into light ash dust. 'That's better,' I said. 'Sometimes it frightens me to see you that way. Trembling beside a lamp.'

We had been seeing each other for several years. Sometimes, when we were already together, somebody would drop a spoon outside and we would wake up. Little by little we'd been coming to understand that our friendship was subordinated to things, to the simplest of happenings. Our meetings always ended that way, with the fall of a spoon early in the morning.

Now, next to the lamp, she was looking at me. I remembered that she had also looked at me in that way in the past, from that remote dream where I made the chair spin on its back legs and remained facing a strange woman with ashen eyes. It was in that dream that I asked her for the first time: 'Who are you?' And she said to me: 'I don't remember.' I said to her: 'But I think we've seen each other before.' And she said, indifferently: 'I think I dreamed about you once, about this same room.' And I told her: 'That's it. I'm beginning to remember now.' And she said: 'How strange. It's certain that we've met in other dreams.'

She took two drags on the cigarette. I was still standing, facing the lamp, when suddenly I kept looking at her. I looked her up and down and she was still copper; no longer hard and cold metal, but yellow, soft, malleable copper. 'I'd like to touch you,' I said again. And she said: 'You'll ruin everything.' I said: 'It doesn't matter now. All we have to do is turn the pillow in order to meet again.' And I held my hand out over the lamp. She didn't move. 'You'll ruin everything,' she said again before I could touch her. 'Maybe, if you come around behind the lamp, we'd wake up frightened in who knows what part of the world.' But I insisted: 'It doesn't matter.' And she said: 'If we turned over the pillow, we'd meet again. But when you wake up you'll have forgotten.' I began to move toward the corner. She stayed behind, warming her hands over the flame. And I still wasn't beside the chair when I heard her say behind me: 'When I wake up at midnight, I keep turning in bed, with the fringe of the pillow burning my knee, and repeating until dawn: 'Eyes of a blue dog.''

Then I remained with my face toward the wall. 'It's already dawning,' I said without looking at her. 'When it struck two I was awake and that was a long time back.' I went to the door. When I had the knob in my hand, I heard her voice again, the same, invariable. 'Don't open that door,' she said. 'The hallway is full of difficult dreams.' And I asked her: 'How do you know?' And she told me: 'Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart.' I had the door half opened. I moved it a little and a cold, thin breeze brought me the fresh smell of vegetable earth, damp fields. She spoke again. I gave the turn, still moving the door, mounted on silent hinges, and I told her: 'I don't think there's any hallway outside here. I'm getting the smell of country.' And she, a little distant, told me: 'I know that better than you. What's happening is that there's a woman outside dreaming about the country.' She crossed her arms over the flame. She continued speaking: 'It's that woman who always wanted to have a house in the country and was never able to leave the city.' I remembered having seen the woman in some previous dream, but I knew, with the door ajar now, that within half an hour I would have to go down for breakfast. And I said: 'In any case, I have to leave here in order to wake up.'

Outside the wind fluttered for an instant, then remained quiet, and the breathing of someone sleeping who had just turned over in bed could be heard. The wind from the fields had ceased. There were no more smells. 'Tomorrow I'll recognize you from that,' I said. 'I'll recognize you when on the street I see a woman writing 'Eyes of a blue dog' on the walls.' And she, with a sad smile--which was already a smile of surrender to the impossible, the unreachable--said: 'Yet you won't remember anything during the day.' And she put her hands back over the lamp, her features darkened by a bitter cloud. 'You're the only man who doesn't remember anything of what he's dreamed after he wakes up.'

Marx by Quino

This reminds me of so many people in the US.

Isaac Asimov on Bill Moyers World of Ideas pt 3

I'm a Mac ... and I've Got a Dirty Secret

A message to BP from Doug Baron

Growing Activism: Undocumented Students/DREAM Act

VYGOTSKY'S DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY: AN INTRODUCTION

B.F. SKINNER: A FRESH APPRAISAL

Ghosts of Southern Neo-Slavery

The violation was known as "vagrancy." If you were a black man in the South following Reconstruction,
and you were unable to show proof of employment on-demand to the police, you could be arrested and
delivered into what Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name, calls "Neo-Slavery."

"Show me your papers" in the vernacular of the late 19th Century through World War II involved furnishing pay stubs or,
if you were lucky, the word of your employer -- some kind of evidence proving to a police officer that you were employed.

But what if you forgot to carry your employment records with you when you left the house that morning? What if you were
-- like so many regular citizens -- unaware of the anti-vagrancy law? Hell, what if you were simply unemployed?
It might be your last mistake as a free citizen of the United States.

Like so many other African American males of that era, you might be incarcerated, convicted and perhaps sold
to a farming, mining or lumber operation. Yes, sold. After the Civil War. After the abolition of slavery and the
ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Slavery, it turns out, survived.


BartCop's most recent rants - Political Humor and Commentary

Adam Savage's Acceptance Speech

Harvard Secular Society conferred lifetime achievement awards on MythBusters' Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman this weekend. Adam's acceptance speech follows.

Good evening.

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to read my speech from my new iPad.

Yep. I'm not only a humanist, I'm also an early adopter.

I want to start by saying that, to me, any discourse from me about how one can live a moral existence without religion or the church would sound improperly defensive. That there's an opposite to be defended is absurd and based on a provably false premise. So let's dispense with that.

(To be clear: I'm referring to the humanist axiom "Good without God," whereby "good" means morality. It's provably false that there exists no morality outside of religion, therefore the statement sounds defensive to me.)

By what route does anyone come to believe what they believe? We all like to imagine that it's based on a set of logical facts, but it's often a much more circuitous route.

For me it was pretty simple. I'm actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion. My children continue this trend.

Here are a few things I've learned.

Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I've paid attention. I've pictured what I want to happen in my life. I've meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn't work for me about them. I've looked hard at problems and thought hard about their solutions.

See, I order my life by the same mechanism that I use to build things. I cannot proceed to move tools around in the real world until my brain has a clear picture in it of what I'm building. The same goes for my life. I've tried to pay attention. I've tried to picture the way I want things to be, and I've noticed that when I had a clear picture, things often turned out the way I wanted them to.

I've concluded by this that someone is paying attention—I've concluded that it's me. I've noticed that if I'm paying attention to those around me, to myself, to my surroundings, then that is the very definition of empathy. I've noticed that when I pay attention, I'm less selfish, I'm happier—and that the inverse holds true as well.

I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here. And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences. At least I have. (And in the empirical study I'm performing about interacting with the universe, I am unfortunately the only test subject I have complete access to, so my data is, as they say, self-selected.) While nobody's going to take care of us, it's incumbent upon us to take care of those around us. That's community.

The fiction of continuity and stability that your parents have painted for you is totally necessary for a growing child. When you realize that it's not the way the world works, it's a chilling moment. It's supremely lonely.

So I understand the desire for someone to be in charge. (As a side note, I believe that the need for conspiracy theories is similar to the need for God.) We'd all like our good and evil to be like it is in the movies: specific and horrible, easy to defeat. But it's not. It's banal.

There's a quote I love: "Evil is a little man afraid for his job." I always thought some famous author said it, but I asked my 200,000 followers on Twitter today, and it turns out that Roy Scheider said it in Blue Thunder.

No one is in charge. And honestly, that's even cooler.

The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It's not just an idea, it's reality. We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day. The inverse square law of gravitation is amazing. Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.

The nearly infinite set of dominoes that have fallen into each other in order for us to be here tonight is unfathomable. Truly unfathomable. But it is logical. We don't know all the steps in that logic, but we're learning more about it every day. Learning, expanding our consciousness, singly and universally.

As far as I can see, the three main intolerant religions in the world aren't helping in that mission.

For all their talk of charity and knowledge, that they close their eyes to so much—to science, to birth control education, to abuses of power by some of their leaders, to evolution as provable and therefore factual (the list is staggering)—illustrates a wide scope of bigotry.

Now, just to be clear. If you want to believe, or find solace in believing, that someone or something set these particular dominoes in motion—a cosmic finger tipping the balance and then leaving everything else to chance—I can't say anything to that. I don't know.

Though a primary mover is the most complex and thus (given Occam's razor) the least likely of all possible solutions to the particular problem of how we got here, I can't prove it true or false, and there's nothing to really discuss about it.

If Daniel Dennett is right— that there's a human genetic need for religion— then I'd like to imagine that my atheism is proof of evolutionary biology in action.

There may be no purpose, but its always good to have a mission. And I know of one fine allegory for an excellent mission should you choose to charge yourself with one: Carlos Castaneda's series of books about his training with a Yaqui indian mystic named Don Juan. There's a lot of controversy about these books being represented as nonfiction. But if you dispense with that representation, and instead take their stories as allegories, they're quite lovely.

At the end of The Eagle's Gift, Don Juan reveals to his student that there's no point to existence. That we're given our brief 70-100 years of consciousness by something the mystics call "The Eagle," named for it's cold, killer demeanor. And when we die, the eagle gobbles our consciousness right back up again.

He explains that the mystics, to give thanks to the eagle for the brief bout of consciousness they're granted, attempt to widen their consciousness as much as possible. This provides a particularly delicious meal for the eagle when it gobbles one up at the end of one's life.

And that, to me, is a fine mission.

Thank you.

— Delivered to the Harvard Humanist Society, April 2010

On December 22, 2012...

Ever Wondered How Many People Are In Space Right Now?

Ever Wondered How Many People Are In Space Right Now?

Optus "Whale Song"

Do you realize...

Buddhist Chant - Heart Sutra (Mandarin) by Imee Ooi

I am not a Buddhist

But i still like this:

"This mind is the Buddha. I don't talk about precepts, devotions or ascetic practices such as immersing yourself in water and fire, treading a wheel of knives, eating one meal a day, or never lying down. These are fanatical, provisional teachings. Once you recognize your moving, miraculously aware nature, yours is the mind of all Buddhas."

Water Buddha - Zen Bamboo Flute (Shakuhachi)