"The Electoral College has Spoken." Senator Mitch McConnell

Elizabeth Warren tells the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Nancy Pelosi gives shout out to Thomas Paine!

Why Impeachment is a Good Idea. From Yoni Appelbaum

I first got saw this a few months ago via the Atlantic Magazine's Facebook Watch Channel. I thought it worth sharing now in light of recent developments

Celebrate Groundhog Day - Support Kishi Bashi

Omoiyari - A Songfilm by Kishi Bashi - OFFICIAL TEASER from Rubble Films on Vimeo.

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...

"What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for."

                            ~Robert M. Pirsig
                                  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Edward Snowman

The NYPD arrested a statue. Will the Capitol Police arrest a snow man? Story at 11. https://t.co/vRtB2DJBwz pic.twitter.com/HCgsUpRx59

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) January 24, 2016

Bo Bergdahl explained by Rachel Maddow while remembering Michael Hastings

Not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be.

An Open Letter from Tomas Young.

Tomas Young enlisted to fight against those behind the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. A few years after enlisting he found himself in Baghdad's Sadr City shot by an AK47. His spinal cord severed his life would never be the same. He came home and began to speak out against the Iraq war. Why were we fighting a war with a country who had not attacked us? Almost all the terrorists who took control of the planes on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia. Why, WHY did we invade Iraq?

These questions have not stopped burning in my mind since George W. Bush started the "Shock and Awe" campaign 10 years ago.

Tomas Young is now on his deathbed and wants to say something to the people who decided to put US forces in Iraq.

A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney

From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives.

I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care. I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries.

I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done.

You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes.

The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Today's CNN story about Tomas prompted me to repost his letter. The video below by CNN I think is not fair. It minimizes his message and focuses on his medical problems. Young's message is above I hope you read it.

Congressman - evolution and bing bang "lies from the pit of Hell!"

Rep. Paul Broun (R-Georgia) is seen in the video below saying that evolution, embryology, and the big bang are “lies straight from the pit of Hell”. The scariest part of this is that he is a current member of the Science Committee of the House of Representatives! No wonder we are lagging international in science education. We have young earth creationists operating at the upper echelons of our federal government!

The New Colossus

The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus. As inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty was written in 1883 and read here by Kristopher Hite along the south bank of the Cache de Poudre River in Fort Collins, CO.

Facebook, Family, Politics, and Prejudice

David Barton slanders Thomas Paine

It pains me to see David Barton, an evangelical christian, slander the founding fathers so terribly. Barton is not a historian. He has a bachelor's degree in Christian Education from Oral Roberts University. Though his writing is predicatably popular among conservative Christian Americans his transgressions as a researcher recently led his publisher - Thomas Nelson -  to yank his controversial book Thomas Jefferson Lies off the shelves.

I was personally pushed over the edge by Barton's cavaleir reference to of one of the most progressive freethinkers in American history - Thomas Paine. Watch the following clip in which Barton asserts that the founding fathers had decided creationism should be taught in public schools in the late 1700's and that Thomas Paine spearheaded the campaign. Nevermind how wildly out-of-context this attribution is considering the theory of evolution was not fully formed until nearly a century later.

If only Barton ever actually read Thomas Paine he would have come accross some of these gems...

"The chrstian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun."

or...

"It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."

Or any single page of Thomas Paine's lengthy diatribe on the man-made myths rampant throughout the bible entitled the Age or Reason.



Listen to the episode of all things considered below. Numerous errors in David Barton's scholarship are pointed out. Barbara Bradley Hagerty makes clear Barton is flat out lying in his pro-christian propaganda.

Tom Paine and the Ironies of Social Democracy

The 2011-12 Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy, recorded on February 29, 2012, was presented by Elizabeth Anderson, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, University of Michigan.

To skip the introductions start the video to 6:55.

Professor Anderson begins speaking of Thomas Paine in detail around 16:30.
 

What is a Sweat Lodge? Rick Two Dogs explains

The August 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine is dedicated to telling the story of the Oglala Lakota who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

The reports from the reservation are both tragic and uplifting.

It is of special significance to me as my father tells me I am 1/16th Oglala Lakota myself. My great-great grandmother lived near Fort Wayne Indiana in the late 1800s. She was named Pamela Caldwell and was full-blooded Oglala Lakota. I have confirmed this through the census records.  As a severely diluted mixed-blood mostly European-American I feel a strange mix of guilt and pride as I observe the living conditions of distant relatives.

Find many more contemporary Lakota stories here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson - Where are the tomorrow articles?

Hypatia - Carl Sagan and Stephen Greenblatt

I am currently reading The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt and it is fantastic in my humble opinion. Many thanks to Jack for the high recommendation. 

I have just finished the section of the book where Greenblatt tells the story of the great library at Alexandria and the demise of its last librarian, Hypatia in 415 C.E. I was reminded of the above video from Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. There are a few differing details in the two accounts; Sagan says the mob used abalone shells, Greenblatt says they used broken pottery. Either way the scene painted marks a terrible inflection point in history. 

A woman of legendary beauty and intellect, Hypatia's death epitomized the decay of natural philosophy in the wake of spreading Christian fundamentalism. In the moment of her death as a mob of zealous Christians carved her flesh the pendulum of history began a millennium of descent into fear and superstition. 

I can not help but think of the current state of natural philosophy here in the United States. It scares me that people I run into on a daily basis probably are not aware that the inclusion of "under God" in our national pledge of allegiance, the inscription "In God we Trust" on our currency, and the adoption of the same phrase as our national motto all happened in the year 1952! 

These tacitly Christian phrases were injected into our national identity as a result of McCarthy era fear-mongering. A perceived spread of communism pushed the US government to pass reactionary legislation echoed by the Patriot Act.

The founding fathers were more like thinkers in the great library of Alexandria when they adopted the inclusive motto "E Pluribus Unim." 

My question is, when did our Hypatia die? 

Today, it is the height of irony to pull out a nickel and see this!

Ed Brayton, fellow freethinker and blogger posted this on Facebook a few days ago and it has been resonating in my head ever since. Ed writes the blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Center for Inquiry - VIDEO

The use of video in the free-thought community is growing rapidly and I love it. Seeing video of bloggers I regularly read makes them more real. In the following video Chris Mooney hosts the Center for Inquiry's radio show Point of Inquiry. The video was recorded in Amherst, New York and focuses on maintaining a separation of church and state.

Ken Burns on Telling Stories