Running and thinking in Colorado
posted by Steve Bremner @ 12:49 PM
0 comments
Slate: The Bauer of Suggestion: Our torture policy has deeper roots in Fox television than the Constitution.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:03 PM
0 comments
Today we drove down to Westcliffe for the Solar Homes Tour. At left is Dave Tonsing (with dog), owner of the earthship behind him and Tyler Stein of Sustainable Ways. We joined the tour along with about 40 others at the courthouse in Westcliffe at 8:30 this morning. Dan Miller and Jennifer Younger made our aquaintance and joined us to car pool to the three featured homes. Later we had lunch with this delightful couple in Westcliffe and drove down to see their magnificent home in the Cuerno Verde development 10 miles south of Westcliffe where I also own 20 acres.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:40 PM
0 comments
ACLU Obtains Key Memos Authorizing CIA Torture Methods
"These documents supply further evidence, if any were needed, that the Justice Department authorized the CIA to torture prisoners in its custody," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. "The Justice Department twisted the law, and in some cases ignored it altogether, in order to permit interrogators to use barbaric methods that the U.S. once prosecuted as war crimes."
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:26 PM
0 comments
Juan Cole set the record straight weighing in with "A Social History of the Surge"
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:52 PM
0 comments
HuffPo: Congressional Interest in Bugliosi book on Prosecuting Bush for Murder
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:06 PM
2 comments
Harper's: Six Questions for Jane Mayar, author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of how the War on Terror turned into a War on American Ideals
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:24 PM
0 comments
The Last Psychiatrist: The Wrong Lessons from Iraq
posted by Steve Bremner @ 6:43 PM
1 comments
John Lennon: We're all Hitler inside, we're all Christ Inside: I Met the Walrus
posted by Steve Bremner @ 10:37 PM
0 comments
The Washington Note: Mr Obama goes to Berlin
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:36 PM
0 comments
posted by Steve Bremner @ 10:21 PM
0 comments
Derrick Jensen: Endgame
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:03 PM
0 comments
HuffPo on the Barack Obama as Muslim New Yorker Cover
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:42 PM
0 comments
Manitou Springs (my town) Mayor, Eric Drummond leads by example, bringing environmentalism home
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:56 PM
0 comments
VanityFair.com: The Green Light on Torture: Philippe Sands follows the torture trail, and holds out the possibility of war crimes charges. See his new book: Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values
posted by Steve Bremner @ 6:01 PM
0 comments
The OilDrum: Asking one of the less comfortable questions about our energy future...
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:27 PM
0 comments
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:20 PM
0 comments
Guernica Mag: Darfur Crisis, A conversation with Mia Farrow and Bernard-Henri Lévy
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:07 PM
0 comments
The New Yorker: Elizabeth Kolbert: The Island in the Wind A Danish Community's Victory over Carbon Emmissions
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:28 PM
0 comments
Tonight's Democracy Now! program was highly entertaining! Amy Goodman interviewed the author of "The Fruit Hunters": Adam Leith Gollner. He talks about some of the thousands of exotic fruits he has sought out all over the world in this video. The miracle fruit changes your taste buds from sour to sweet.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 6:42 PM
0 comments
HuffPO: Naomi Wolf calls out Condi Rice on Sex Crimes in the White House and Torture
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:37 PM
0 comments
HuffPo: Joe Lauria talks about his and Senator Mike Gravel's new book: "A Political Odyssey: The Rise of American Militarism and One Man's Fight to stop it" Why Bush has won in Iraq and the rest of us have lost
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:17 PM
0 comments
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:30 PM
0 comments
Orangutans on fast track to extinction
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:57 PM
0 comments
The Oil Drum: Why are we Addicted to Oil? (Hint: it has to do with evolution)
posted by Steve Bremner @ 6:33 PM
0 comments
I'm just about finished reading a free version on my Kindle of Cory Doctorow's harrowing account of a near future of our impending total surveillance society: Little Brother. Here he is on Boing Boing TV with a reading.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 10:46 PM
0 comments
HuffPo: Lloyd Alter: A Field Guide to the New Environmentalists
posted by Steve Bremner @ 10:30 PM
0 comments
I run a lot. I get outdoors as much as I can. I read and I think. I love intellectual confrontation. I'm a liberal secular humanist atheist who speaks French (and German). I am the opposite of the "Christian Right".
“There is no question about it. In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.”
Robert F. Kennedy (stated in 1968, when Robert was Attorney General, and his brother John had been the President)
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” - Philip K. Dick
“The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.” Bertrand Russell
"Just as nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight... and it is in such a twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air--however slight--lest we become unwilling victims of the darkness."
-- William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1939 to 1975
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
-- James Madison
"You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody's crazy."
-- Charles Manson, serial killer and one-time cult leader
"A very popular error-having the courage of one's convictions: Rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one's convictions."
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900
"I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"There are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a Euclidean, an Archimedean. When the truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and factions to arise.... Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? To the worship of a God, and to honesty. All the philosophers of the world who have had a religion have said in all ages: "There is a God, and one must be just." There, then, is the universal religion established in all ages and throughout mankind. The point in which they all agree is therefore true, and the systems through which they differ are therefore false."
-- Voltaire
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
-- Albert Einstein
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
-- Bob Dylan, 'Masters of War'
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war . . . and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
James Madison, April 20, 1795
"In the end the party would announce that 2 plus 2 made 5, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim, sooner or later, the logic of their position demanded it."
-- George Orwell, in 1984
"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out. " --€”Richard Feynman
"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.
"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
"I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise. They have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving: it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."
--Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
--John Kenneth Galbraith
"We're all in this alone."
--Lily Tomlin
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
-Joe Hill, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 1911
“The more compelling our journalism, the angrier became the radical right of the Republican Party. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.�
--Bill Moyers
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
--Hermann Goering
"Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasure, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing." --Jerome K. Jerome
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." -Benjamin Franklin
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." --Aldo Leopold
"Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do." --Jose Ortega y Gasset
"The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected [Washington; Adams; Jefferson; Madison; Monroe; Adams; Jackson] not a one had professed a belief in Christianity...."
"Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism."
-- The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson, an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, in a sermon preached in October, 1831
"Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level." --Henry David Thoreau
"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. It's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly." --Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Mother Night
"I am Diogenes the Dog. I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy and bite scoundrels."
--Diogenes of Sinope (c. 408-323 B.C.)
"Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow;
They toil not, neither do they spin;
And yet I say unto you,
that even Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these."
Jesus
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
