Will 2012 Be 1984: DRM and SOPA are Breaking The Internet! via www.singularityweblog.com

Imagine a world where someone has a monopoly over the media, backed by the power to ban personal privacy and political dissent and capable of preventing people from public gathering and collective discussion without due process, judicial review or any evidence! Sound familiar?! Some of you might venture a guess that the above text reads like a passage from George Orwell’s 1984. Others might say that it sounds like the situation under the totalitarian regimes of the former Eastern Block or any other contemporary authoritarian. It is vital to realize, however, that this is not only fiction. This is not just the situation in some geographically obscure country stuck in the last 6 seconds of the evening newscast. This is in fact the future reality that we might be facing today, here, in the “free world.” This is Canada, the United States and the E.U.

we are all connected

To say my fate is not tied to your fate is like saying, "Your end of the boat is sinking." ~Hugh Downs

Quotes from our Founding Fathers on Christianity

God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there will never be any liberal science in the world. - John Adams, Founding Father and 2nd President of the United States We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication . - Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father and 3rd President of the United States Lighthouses are more helpful than churches. In the affairs of the world, men are saved not by faith, but by the lack of it. I looked around for God’s judgments, but saw no signs of them. The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. - Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father, scientist, inventor, educator Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies. Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all. The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. - Thomas Paine, leader of the American Revolution Via @princedarwin

New Republican Budget

Influence without indoctrination (Parenting Beyond Belief #4)