Meanwhile, the NYT reported Thursday evening that the Obama administration is talking to the Egyptian government with a view toward pressuring Mubarak to step down immediately in favor of his vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman,...
When I saw this yesterday, it struck me as ominous. Will we Americans now be accused of having tried to make things work out the way our government prefers rather than the way Egyptian citizens have been hoping it will?
Given that this is about what Egyptian citizens want, what more can and should President Obama do beyond supporting their wishes by suggesting to Mubarak that he should quickly transition out of power?
The disappearance of the police from the streets had led to a threat of widespread looting is now being redressed by the regular military.
Last night a fellow being interviewed in an Al Jazeera studio opined that some of the looting was being done by the police in plain clothes. The implication was that they were being ordered to do this. A few minutes ago on Al Jazeera a fellow on the street claimed that some of the looters arrested were found to have police IDs. I can only wonder whether any of this will prove to be true.
(Obviously, it somewhat disadvantages non-believers, now 14% of the population, but most of those are not atheists but agnostics and so far have not mounted a concerted challenge to this tradition of discourse)
Whatever the percentage is, it is probably lower in Alabama than in most parts of the country. Moreover, Bentley knows they aren't weren't likely to have voted for him. so he feels no need for treating them with respect. John Shelby Spong has pointed out that religions are merely manifestations of tribalism and, hence, aspires to getting Christianity out of the religion business. I think this would require converting another species to Christianity.
I find it difficult to believe that the majority of women in this country don't favor a meaningful controls on sales of handguns, but if the senseless killing of Christina Taylor Green doesn't suffice to motivate them to campaign for such controls, I'm not sure we can hope for any improvement in the situation.
However, at least as far as the domestic scene is concerned, those inflammatory statements would not lead to the murder of politicians and innocent bystanders were it not for the ready availability of firearms.
This reality really struck home when I read this NYT article citing this Gabrielle Giffords quote: “I have a Glock 9 millimeter, and I’m a pretty good shot.” It made me wonder about the kind of subculture where even the more liberal are apt to be well aware of what is meant by the term "Glock 9 millimeter." Not being aware myself, I turned to the Glock Wikipedia, where I found the plastic (i.e. cheap) body to be the distinguishing feature explaining the popularity of the Glock. Further searching revealed that the ready availability of the Glock has lead to the creation of a blog called Glock Talk. Given all of this, I find unsurprising that that Loughner chose to purchase a Glock. Perhaps we'll never know whether his mental state was impacted by the rantings of Beck and Limbaugh, but it surely couldn't have helped.
As part of the National Geographic's yearlong series of presentations on the population issue, PBS will be featuring the issue throughout the year on the News Hour. The first of these features was shown last night and concerned the water crisis in Delhi. The video is here.
Among the several articles discussing the issue, there is one titled The Radicalization of Peter King. That sounds more like what needs to be investigated.
What Julian Assange did in putting the information on Wikileaks is irrelevant. If the Pentagon wanted the information to be kept secret, then they should have secured it. They didn't, so they only have themselves to blame for what has happened. If this is such a huge problem for our government, then Robert Gates should be fired. Obama's first big mistake as President was retaining Gates as Secretary of Defense.
Paul asked how it was that a Private was able to access so much secret information. Indeed, it seems to me that Robert Gates' eagerness to go after Assange is intended to take the heat off of himself and the Pentagon brass responsible for information system security. I see Obama's decision to keep Gates on as Secretary of defense as a big mistake.
I can't help thinking the apathy relates to the fact that the average American prefers to believe what Petraeus and Gates say about the progress being made against the Taliban rather than to face the reality that it is futile to try to bring modernity to Afghanistan by bombing parts of the country back to the stone age.
I say to climate skeptics, “If you don’t believe in climate change, why not?” And as near as I can tell, disbelievers are mostly people who grew up in wide-open spaces. People who grew up when there were a lot fewer people in the world. I remember back in 1965 my family went to the World’s Fair in New York City. Now, my father was the guy who would pull the car over and drive real slowly to take pictures of the odometer as it turned over from 99,999 to 100,000. So when we got there I remember this very large board had just changed from 2,999,999,999 people in the world to 3 billion. That was in 1965. Now, we’re about 6.8 billion. By the end of next year, we’ll be at 6.9 billion. And that’s really the problem. Having that many people living on what’s proven to be a very small planet is really going to be troublesome...
For Capitalism as we currently know it, the population problem and the attendant climate change are very inconvenient truths whose acceptance is surely seen as a threat to those with the get rich quick mindset. Given that they believe growth to be the only means for maintaining a healthy and prosperous economy, it seems to me that their only defense is to deny the reality of the population and climate change problems.
This Cantor guy must be something, he has the supposedly most powerful politician in the USA, running scared without so much as a toothless yelp?
He's the only Republican member of the House who is Jewish. His district is in the Bible Belt, so includes a lot of fundamentalist Christians. Hence, I would presume that Cantor's positions with respect to Israel reflect the views of his constituents. The irony is that Cantor's district encompasses the domiciles of Jefferson and Madison, who would surely be appalled to find themselves amidst such backwardness.
There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.
Family planning, however, is taboo politically in the USA. Evidently, this results from a combination of Christian fundamentalism and the continued belief that growth is the only means for maintaining a "healthy" economy. In a book titled More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want Robert Engelman argues that if women are given the choice, they will opt for having fewer children in order to provide them a better quality of life. Per the quote cited in this blog posting Tunisia is trying this approach:
There is now substantial evidence that the health and schooling of children can be raised by empowering women, and this is precisely what Tunisia did when it raised the minimum age for marriage, revoked the colonial ban on imports of contraceptives, instituted the first family planning programme in Africa, legalized abortion, made polygamy illegal, and gave women the right to divorce as well as the right to stand and vote for election.
Hopefully, the USA will wake up sooner rather than later.
As alarming as it may seem to have a long-serving congressional representative quoting the infallibility of the Bible as evidence against climate change, I believe that Biblical delusion is a far less serious long-run threat than the addiction to economic growth as a cause of serious the myriad sorts environmental degradation that threaten the future of civilization. Whether climate change is really the most serious of those problems or not is unimportant if they are all being caused by the same problem--too many people consuming resources and generating waste faster than the environment tolerates. Just yesterday I saw the headline US help needed to sustain India's nine to ten percent growth rate for next 30 years: PM. When will we face up to the reality that the resources of this world are finite and that incessant growth of the economy and the population are unsustainable?
But with virtually every American politician chanting the "grow the economy" mantra and with economists believing growth to be a requirement for a "healthy economy," I can't see how ideas like those of Suzuki will get serious consideration any time soon. There are those like the Aussie Ted Trainer that propose alternatives, but persuading large numbers of people of the need for a radical change in our economic philosophy will surely be next to impossible.
Pakistan has a high birth rate, so it needs to grow eight percent a year for people to get ahead on a per capita basis. At this rate this year Pakistanis will at most stand still economically, and every lost year is a threat to the country’s long-term prospects for stability.
Seeing growth as the solution to an overpopulation issue seems akin to seeing an increase in rash as a sign that a case of poison ivy is abating.
The end would be an embarrassing retreat by the US, and the definitive establishment of Iran as the dominant power of the Gulf region.
That was the outcome of every war-game the Pentagon played, and Mike Mullen knows it. So there is a plan for an attack on Iran, but he would probably rather resign than put it into action. It is all bluff. It always was.
Talk of global warming is cheap if we don't identify the root cause: the fact that the Earth has more people than can be supported at current levels of consumption. Dennis Miller's climate change denialism is surely is an insignificant part of the problem. The real danger, consumerism, is illustrated by the recent wedding of the daughter of America's Secretary of State. As is amply illustrated by this wedding, Americans are consumers par excellence and cause more environmental degradation than any other society on Earth. The solution does not lie in howling at the moon about climate change or screaming that the sky is falling as a result. We need to do something about our seemingly insatiable desire for stuff.
Do you regard questioning the rationality of core beliefs the same as attacking them? In a 2008 book titled The Secular Conscience, Austin Dacey argues for the public discussion of all points of view on issues of conscience, religious and secular. Do you agree that the core beliefs of any religion or world view should be open to rational analysis? It certainly doesn't appear that that is what the cartoons are about, but, even if it is, I suppose it can't be the most effective way to go about it.
Thanks for the clarification. Am I correct in understanding that the taboo concerning images representing Muhammad is conceptually like the Judeo-Christian commandment forbidding gods other than the God of the Bible? Would Muslims be less offended by images representing Allah than by those representing Muhammad? Would an image mocking Allah/Yahweh/God be expected to be equally offensive or inoffensive to Muslims, Jews, and Christians?
Nobody contests your right to call the participants in the today's "draw Muhammad" contests juvenile. I have never seen an episode of South Park, but if it was juvenile of the writers to come up with the idea of representing Muhammad in a bear suit, was it prudent or cowardly for them to back down in the face of death threats from persons representing themselves as offended Muslims? A similar thing happened in Australia in 1997; there was a cancellation of an art show including a controversial piece of 1987 pop art in which a small statuette of Christ on the cross was photographed in a container of the artist's urine. In this case, the show was canceled out of concern for the safety of Rembrant works being shown in another portion of the National Gallery of Victoria. Given that you don't see drawings of Muhammad as a proper way to stand in opposition to this kind of sensorship, what would be the proper way to take a stand?
When I saw this yesterday, it struck me as ominous. Will we Americans now be accused of having tried to make things work out the way our government prefers rather than the way Egyptian citizens have been hoping it will?
Given that this is about what Egyptian citizens want, what more can and should President Obama do beyond supporting their wishes by suggesting to Mubarak that he should quickly transition out of power?
Last night a fellow being interviewed in an Al Jazeera studio opined that some of the looting was being done by the police in plain clothes. The implication was that they were being ordered to do this. A few minutes ago on Al Jazeera a fellow on the street claimed that some of the looters arrested were found to have police IDs. I can only wonder whether any of this will prove to be true.
Whatever the percentage is, it is probably lower in Alabama than in most parts of the country. Moreover, Bentley knows they aren't weren't likely to have voted for him. so he feels no need for treating them with respect. John Shelby Spong has pointed out that religions are merely manifestations of tribalism and, hence, aspires to getting Christianity out of the religion business. I think this would require converting another species to Christianity.
I find it difficult to believe that the majority of women in this country don't favor a meaningful controls on sales of handguns, but if the senseless killing of Christina Taylor Green doesn't suffice to motivate them to campaign for such controls, I'm not sure we can hope for any improvement in the situation.
This reality really struck home when I read this NYT article citing this Gabrielle Giffords quote: “I have a Glock 9 millimeter, and I’m a pretty good shot.” It made me wonder about the kind of subculture where even the more liberal are apt to be well aware of what is meant by the term "Glock 9 millimeter." Not being aware myself, I turned to the Glock Wikipedia, where I found the plastic (i.e. cheap) body to be the distinguishing feature explaining the popularity of the Glock. Further searching revealed that the ready availability of the Glock has lead to the creation of a blog called Glock Talk. Given all of this, I find unsurprising that that Loughner chose to purchase a Glock. Perhaps we'll never know whether his mental state was impacted by the rantings of Beck and Limbaugh, but it surely couldn't have helped.
As part of the National Geographic's yearlong series of presentations on the population issue, PBS will be featuring the issue throughout the year on the News Hour. The first of these features was shown last night and concerned the water crisis in Delhi. The video is here.
Among the several articles discussing the issue, there is one titled The Radicalization of Peter King. That sounds more like what needs to be investigated.
What Julian Assange did in putting the information on Wikileaks is irrelevant. If the Pentagon wanted the information to be kept secret, then they should have secured it. They didn't, so they only have themselves to blame for what has happened. If this is such a huge problem for our government, then Robert Gates should be fired. Obama's first big mistake as President was retaining Gates as Secretary of Defense.
Paul asked how it was that a Private was able to access so much secret information. Indeed, it seems to me that Robert Gates' eagerness to go after Assange is intended to take the heat off of himself and the Pentagon brass responsible for information system security. I see Obama's decision to keep Gates on as Secretary of defense as a big mistake.
I can't help thinking the apathy relates to the fact that the average American prefers to believe what Petraeus and Gates say about the progress being made against the Taliban rather than to face the reality that it is futile to try to bring modernity to Afghanistan by bombing parts of the country back to the stone age.
In the latest issue of the The Humanist, Bill Nye touches on the problem of climate change denial. He said:
For Capitalism as we currently know it, the population problem and the attendant climate change are very inconvenient truths whose acceptance is surely seen as a threat to those with the get rich quick mindset. Given that they believe growth to be the only means for maintaining a healthy and prosperous economy, it seems to me that their only defense is to deny the reality of the population and climate change problems.
He's the only Republican member of the House who is Jewish. His district is in the Bible Belt, so includes a lot of fundamentalist Christians. Hence, I would presume that Cantor's positions with respect to Israel reflect the views of his constituents. The irony is that Cantor's district encompasses the domiciles of Jefferson and Madison, who would surely be appalled to find themselves amidst such backwardness.
Oops, I see that I neglected to insert the URL for my final blockquote. Its from a post titledThe unsung development miracles of our time.
In May of 1966, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said:
Family planning, however, is taboo politically in the USA. Evidently, this results from a combination of Christian fundamentalism and the continued belief that growth is the only means for maintaining a "healthy" economy. In a book titled More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want Robert Engelman argues that if women are given the choice, they will opt for having fewer children in order to provide them a better quality of life. Per the quote cited in this blog posting Tunisia is trying this approach:
Hopefully, the USA will wake up sooner rather than later.
As alarming as it may seem to have a long-serving congressional representative quoting the infallibility of the Bible as evidence against climate change, I believe that Biblical delusion is a far less serious long-run threat than the addiction to economic growth as a cause of serious the myriad sorts environmental degradation that threaten the future of civilization. Whether climate change is really the most serious of those problems or not is unimportant if they are all being caused by the same problem--too many people consuming resources and generating waste faster than the environment tolerates. Just yesterday I saw the headline US help needed to sustain India's nine to ten percent growth rate for next 30 years: PM. When will we face up to the reality that the resources of this world are finite and that incessant growth of the economy and the population are unsustainable?
But with virtually every American politician chanting the "grow the economy" mantra and with economists believing growth to be a requirement for a "healthy economy," I can't see how ideas like those of Suzuki will get serious consideration any time soon. There are those like the Aussie Ted Trainer that propose alternatives, but persuading large numbers of people of the need for a radical change in our economic philosophy will surely be next to impossible.
Seeing growth as the solution to an overpopulation issue seems akin to seeing an increase in rash as a sign that a case of poison ivy is abating.
But Gwynne Dyer concludes:
Talk of global warming is cheap if we don't identify the root cause: the fact that the Earth has more people than can be supported at current levels of consumption. Dennis Miller's climate change denialism is surely is an insignificant part of the problem. The real danger, consumerism, is illustrated by the recent wedding of the daughter of America's Secretary of State. As is amply illustrated by this wedding, Americans are consumers par excellence and cause more environmental degradation than any other society on Earth. The solution does not lie in howling at the moon about climate change or screaming that the sky is falling as a result. We need to do something about our seemingly insatiable desire for stuff.
Rachel Maddow says it isn't so based on info from NOAA.
Do you regard questioning the rationality of core beliefs the same as attacking them? In a 2008 book titled The Secular Conscience, Austin Dacey argues for the public discussion of all points of view on issues of conscience, religious and secular. Do you agree that the core beliefs of any religion or world view should be open to rational analysis? It certainly doesn't appear that that is what the cartoons are about, but, even if it is, I suppose it can't be the most effective way to go about it.
Thanks for the clarification. Am I correct in understanding that the taboo concerning images representing Muhammad is conceptually like the Judeo-Christian commandment forbidding gods other than the God of the Bible? Would Muslims be less offended by images representing Allah than by those representing Muhammad? Would an image mocking Allah/Yahweh/God be expected to be equally offensive or inoffensive to Muslims, Jews, and Christians?
Nobody contests your right to call the participants in the today's "draw Muhammad" contests juvenile. I have never seen an episode of South Park, but if it was juvenile of the writers to come up with the idea of representing Muhammad in a bear suit, was it prudent or cowardly for them to back down in the face of death threats from persons representing themselves as offended Muslims? A similar thing happened in Australia in 1997; there was a cancellation of an art show including a controversial piece of 1987 pop art in which a small statuette of Christ on the cross was photographed in a container of the artist's urine. In this case, the show was canceled out of concern for the safety of Rembrant works being shown in another portion of the National Gallery of Victoria. Given that you don't see drawings of Muhammad as a proper way to stand in opposition to this kind of sensorship, what would be the proper way to take a stand?