Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Monday, June 16, 2014
Done with This
I am so sick of this new forced attachment to Google Plus and the fact that my comments disappeared and I can't change the settings that I am going to import what I have to a new place, probably Weebly or something. I give up.
Saturday, June 14, 2014
Where are all the Comments?
Hi, does anyone with a blog on here happen to know what happened to all my old comments from before Google Plus reared its ugly head, and why I cannot find any current comments anywhere on this blog or in Google Plus even though it says there ARE comments? The help pages are no help to me. I am wanting to go back to Wordpress or some other blogsite but am afraid I will lose everything in the process. Thanks...
Posted via Blogaway
Friday, June 13, 2014
Free Will?
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This is being proved more and more with cognitive neuroscience that eventually philosophy will have no valid argument for free will.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Surviving the Devil-An Account of Adoption And Abuse
I don't normally promote things but this is something very special that I wanted to get the word out about. My really good friend, Angie Cox, wrote the book described here: a very disturbing detail of her childhood abuse and overcoming it. It is an issue important to her and myself and many people, but still many refuse to acknowledge that it happens or that it's a big deal. Her book can be purchased at Barnes and Noble.com or Amazon.com with a percentage of the profits going to several children's child abuse charities. I also will be posting the book's Facebook Page link.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Kafka Quote
"He feels imprisoned on this earth, he feels constricted: the melancholy, the impotence, the sickness, the feverish fancies of the captive afflict him; no comfort can comfort him, since it is merely comfort, gentle head-splitting comfort glozing the brutal fact of imprisonment. But if he is asked what he actually wants he cannot reply, for--that is one of his strongest proofs--he has no conception of freedom." - Franz Kafka, in "He"
New Yorker Article -
I can think of a few reasons...maybe people just want to hold onto their belief, even if proven wrong, just to be stubborn and not admit they are wrong. Or it's a comforting belief, and who cares if it flies in the face of the truth? Another reason is plain old stupidity- like the people who would believe anything Jenny McCarthy has to say about ANYTHING over established medical scientists and doctors who have been proving the same thing for years. It's like if Justin Bieber said the sun revolves around the moon, there'd soon be a huge group of "activists" espousing that fallacy...And another is that science is not infallible, "facts" change as more information becomes available- like, for example, theoretical physics is a huge area that changes what is "true" about activity at the subatomic level. Things that people believed to be impossible, then get proved true in an experiment, then later, it is revealed the experiment was faulty, etc etc.
Friday, April 18, 2014
Quote For Easter
 |
| English: Dwight Lyman Moody, founder of the Northfield Seminary, Mount Hermon School, and the Moody Bible Institute, circa 1900. Edited image from the Library of Congress (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Dwight L. Moody
Depression
Science is proving more and more that depression and other mental illnesses are real, not merely hypochondria or laziness, and that is a very good thing...
LIFE MENTAL HEALTHResearchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York have reversed depression-like behaviors in mice in an unexpected way. Rather than silencing the hyperactive neurons that triggered the rodents’ symptoms, the team boosted their activity even further. This triggered a compensatory, self-tuning response that brought the neurons’ firing—and the rodents’ behaviors—back to normal.
Triggering Resilience to Depression
In mice, boosting depression-causing activity in neurons can actually reverse depressive symptoms.
| April 17, 2014
LIFE MENTAL HEALTHResearchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York have reversed depression-like behaviors in mice in an unexpected way. Rather than silencing the hyperactive neurons that triggered the rodents’ symptoms, the team boosted their activity even further. This triggered a compensatory, self-tuning response that brought the neurons’ firing—and the rodents’ behaviors—back to normal.
“There’s a saying in Chinese: If you push something to an extreme, the only way it can go is in the opposite direction,” said Ming-Hu Han, who led the study, published today (April 17) in Science. Although his team needs to confirm their results in humans, Han added, “it could give us new avenues for treating depression that are conceptually very different to the classical therapeutic strategy.” Rather than identifying the cause of an illness and reversing it, it may be possible to push those causes even harder and get the body to right itself.
The team subjected mice to 10 days of constant stress by housing them in cages with a dominant-aggressive rival. Under these circumstances, some susceptible mice developed symptoms similar to depression—avoiding social contact, losing motivation, and gaining less pleasure from rewarding activities like tasting a sugary drink. Other, more resilient, mice showed no such symptoms.
In earlier studies, the team showed that these differences depend on a brain region called the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which is a hub for dopamine-producing neurons. If these neurons are too active, the mice are more likely to show signs of depression. And the team managed to convert resilient rodents into susceptible ones by stimulating the VTA’s dopamine neurons, and vice versa, by silencing them.
They also found that the VTA dopamine neurons in susceptible mice have an unusually strong Ih current—a stream of positively charged ions that flows into them after they fire and restores them to a resting state. These cells reset more quickly, and fire more frequently.
But when postdoc Allyson Friedman measured the Ih currents in resilient mice, she found a surprise: they were even larger than those in susceptible rodents. This should have driven the rodents’ VTA neurons into fits of runaway activity but, in fact, those neurons were firing normally. As Friedman discovered, they also had a stronger inhibitory current, which cancels out the excitatory Ih one. These currents balance each other out to make the dopamine neurons resistant to perturbations, and the mice resilient to stress.
The team wondered whether they could duplicate the same balance in susceptible mice by exaggerating their Ih currents rather than dampening them. “The idea looks crazy, right?” said Han. “We hesitated to go down that direction. What if we made things even worse?”
They team made the VTA neurons more active in three ways: they boosted their Ih currents with a drug called lamotrigine; they added extra copies of the HCN2 proteins that drive the Ihcurrents; and they stimulated the dopamine neurons directly by loading them with light-sensitive proteins and flashing them via optic fibers.
In all three cases, the treatments reversed the depressive symptoms of the susceptible mice after five days. The animals became more sociable and regained their sweet tooth. Their once-hyperactive VTA neurons became less excitable thanks to stronger inhibitory and excitatory currents, and started firing normally.
Han’s team has effectively discovered the neurological version of a psychological phenomenon—resilience. “It makes us re-evaluate what it means to be resilient,” said Michelle Mazei-Robisonfrom Michigan State University, who was not involved in the work. “We didn’t think of it as a continuum, where you almost have to push through the pathological response to bring things back into balance, rather than just having some sort of compensation. It’s a new twist, and very novel.”
The mechanism is conceptually similar to exposure therapies in which people with anxiety are deliberately and safely exposed to the objects or situations that worry them. However, Han cautioned that it would be foolhardy to try a similar strategy for people with depression. “They have a higher risk of suicide,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to make them even more depressed to try and get a treatment effect.”
Instead, he hopes that by studying the resilience effect more carefully, he can find safer and more efficient ways of triggering it in people. “Perhaps for people with depression, we can tap into their own homeostatic ability that’s hopefully there but that they aren’t reaching for whatever reason,” Mazei-Robinson added.
“It’s an exciting breakthrough with vast translational potential,” said Kay Tye from MIT in an e-mail. “Pushing the system one way could actually trigger the brain’s own homeostatic plasticity to push back. This could be a critical factor in the functionality of existing therapies, as well.” For example, lamotrigine is sometimes used to treat people with bipolar disorder who go through bouts of depression. “We never knew how it worked, but our study gives us an idea,” said Han.
The team still must address several issues. For example, not all of the VTA’s dopamine neurons are the same. The team found that they could only induce resilience by overstimulating the neurons that connect the VTA with the nucleus accumbens (NAc), rather than those that link to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).
The VTA also responds differently to different types of stress. In 2012, Han’s team managed to reverse depressive symptoms in socially-stressed mice by silencing their VTA neurons. But Tye’s group at MIT found that the same technique had the opposite effect in mice that experienced chronic, long-term stress. In these rodents, silencing the VTA induced depressive symptoms in normal mice.
“The VTA dopamine neurons have clear contextual dependence, and we don’t understand that,” said Han. “That’s a big issue in the field now.”
A.K. Friedman et al., “Enhancing depression mechanisms in midbrain dopamine neurons achieves homeostatic sesilience,” Science, 344: 313-9, 2014.
Tags
Friday, April 4, 2014
Twilight Zone Guy Quote
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| 1959 Series Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
― Rod Serling
Yeah, guess he was right...
Monday, March 31, 2014
From Markadelphia Blog
Food Stamp Myths
There are a lot of myths about food stamps and this site is an excellent source for correcting the misinformation. Here are a few basic facts.
76% of SNAP households included a child, an elderly person, or a disabled person. These vulnerable households receive 83% of all SNAP benefits.
These are real people, folks, with real problems. Lumping them all into one category as lazy, good for nothings is ridiculous.
Two-thirds of all SNAP payment errors are a result of caseworker error. Nearly one-fifth are underpayments, which occur when eligible participants receive less in benefits than they are eligible to receive.
The idea that there is something special about the "fraud" that goes on with SNAP is completely ridiculous. The errors aren't overpayments but underpayments.
Here is one of my favorite myths followed by reality.
Work Requirements
Myth: SNAP doesn’t do enough to encourage participants to get a job, and the program needs stronger work requirements.
Reality: SNAP already has strict time-limits for unemployed workers. Able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs) may only receive 3 months of SNAP benefits during any 3 year period, unless they are working in a qualifying job training program. The SNAP benefit formula is structured to provide a strong work incentive – for every additional dollar a SNAP participant earns, their benefits decline by about 24 to 36 cents, not a full dollar, so participants have a strong incentive to find work, work longer hours, or seek better-paying employment.
We have enough problems with helping out those in need. Adding fake problems makes it worse. The next time you here some mouth foaming about food stamps, check out this site for reality.
76% of SNAP households included a child, an elderly person, or a disabled person. These vulnerable households receive 83% of all SNAP benefits.
These are real people, folks, with real problems. Lumping them all into one category as lazy, good for nothings is ridiculous.
Two-thirds of all SNAP payment errors are a result of caseworker error. Nearly one-fifth are underpayments, which occur when eligible participants receive less in benefits than they are eligible to receive.
The idea that there is something special about the "fraud" that goes on with SNAP is completely ridiculous. The errors aren't overpayments but underpayments.
Here is one of my favorite myths followed by reality.
Work Requirements
Myth: SNAP doesn’t do enough to encourage participants to get a job, and the program needs stronger work requirements.
Reality: SNAP already has strict time-limits for unemployed workers. Able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs) may only receive 3 months of SNAP benefits during any 3 year period, unless they are working in a qualifying job training program. The SNAP benefit formula is structured to provide a strong work incentive – for every additional dollar a SNAP participant earns, their benefits decline by about 24 to 36 cents, not a full dollar, so participants have a strong incentive to find work, work longer hours, or seek better-paying employment.
We have enough problems with helping out those in need. Adding fake problems makes it worse. The next time you here some mouth foaming about food stamps, check out this site for reality.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Venting...
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| English: Portrait by Benjamin D. Maxham (daguerreotype), black and white of Henry David Thoreau in June 1856. The writer-collar post a beard and is dressed in a black frock coat, a white shirt and a black bow tie. Français : Portrait par Benjamin D. Maxham (daguerréotype), en noir et blanc de Henry David Thoreau, en juin 1856. L'écrivain poste une barbe-collier et est habillé d'une redingote noire, d'une chemise blanche et d'un noeud papillon noir. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I also did not intend this blog for me to be writing personal "diary" type stuff, but I just have to say it. Call me what you want, it's my truth. And yes, after this I will go back (hopefully) to writing about things that really matter, not my own personal opinion. :)
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
I think, therefore I am
I think, therefore I am | New Philosopher:
Posted via Blogaway
Quotes I am Reposting
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| Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and from 1951 to 1955. Deutsch: Winston Churchill, 1940 bis 1945 sowie 1951 bis 1955 Premier des Vereinigten Königreichs und Literaturnobelpreisträger des Jahres 1953. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
SOME GOOD QUOTES that I like!!
"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it." - Henry Ford
"Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give some people." - Anon.
"It is a greater compliment to be trusted than to be loved." -George MacDonald
"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information." - Winston Churchill
"The power to stand alone is worth acquiring at the expense of much sorrowful solitude." - George Bernard Shaw
"Don't talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave." - Wilson Mizner
"Men will wrangle for religion; unite for it; fight for it; anything but live for it." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known." - Michel deMontaigne
"He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals." - Ben Franklin
"Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give some people." - Anon.
"It is a greater compliment to be trusted than to be loved." -George MacDonald
"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information." - Winston Churchill
"The power to stand alone is worth acquiring at the expense of much sorrowful solitude." - George Bernard Shaw
"Don't talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave." - Wilson Mizner
"Men will wrangle for religion; unite for it; fight for it; anything but live for it." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known." - Michel deMontaigne
"He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals." - Ben Franklin
Hope
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| Friedrich Nietzsche portrait (Photo credit: Wyoming_Jackrabbit) |
Friedrich Nietzsche
Obama to Call for End to N.S.A.’s Bulk Data Collection - NYTimes.com
Does anyone really think this is going to happen?
Obama to Call for End to N.S.A.’s Bulk Data Collection - NYTimes.com:
'via Blog this'
Obama to Call for End to N.S.A.’s Bulk Data Collection - NYTimes.com:
'via Blog this'
Monday, March 24, 2014
Are You Smarter Than An Atheist?
Are You Smarter Than An Atheist?
Take the quiz and find out!
Not too hard if I got only one wrong and I am not an atheist...:)
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Books I've Read
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| Bookshelf with books and mangas (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Goodreads | Gina Lombardo's bookshelf: read (showing 1-20 of 152) (sorted by: rating):
'via Blog this'
Monday, March 10, 2014
 |
| English: Hemingway posing for a dust jacket photo by Lloyd Arnold for the first edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", at the Sun Valley Lodge, Idaho, late 1939. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
"[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Giving Up
I am almost ready to give up on this formatting thing, at least I will for tonite. I'd rather write some ideas, someday :). But I will say goodnight with this profound quote of Woody Allen's:
“Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end.”
“Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end.”
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Cliff's Notes for Dummies!
Let's face it - no one reads anymore. In fact, if you do you hide it. It's embarrassing to admit you still do it - kind of like admitting you still use MySpace, for example.
In fact, even knowing how to read marks you as perhaps one of the dreaded out of touch "elites."
Aside from the social stigma of being a literate reader, there's just the fact that when you're part of "Real America," the part that's not out of touch, you sure don't have time to read, or to learn to read.
Sure, in school they still attempt to teach it, but like algebra, when are you ever going to use it in practically in real life? And, heaven knows, if it can't be used practically, then what good is it?
Unfortunately, there are still some schools and universities and even a few employers who are still elitist enough to expect you to know how to read, and to know a few things about books. Fortunately, this won't last much longer, but for now, some classes, teachers, etc. want you to know about some books written a zillion years ago by weirdo dorks who thought they were better than us just because they could do this thing called "critical thinking" or had "creative literary skill," or could invent some silly thing called the "theory of relativity," - like who did they think they were anyway, Einstein? Regardless, for now, at least, while people like Obama (elitist professor) are still in charge, it could be to your advantage to play along. Of course, no one expects you to really do it, but just fake it.
That's where we come in- we provide a product called "Cliff's Notes for Dummies". (Note we have already resolved the intellectual property lawsuit regarding this since Cliff's Notes are much different than our product - they are just as much of a waste of time and hard to read as the book itself anyway).
We can give you a short synapsis of a book, or a biography of a writer or thinker, etc. - enough for you to fake knowing not only how to read and write a sentence but actually what the thing means.
The good thing is, standards in college are so low now that just by reading these you will impress your professor so much that you'll ace the class and probably be known as the smartest in the class. Of course, that could be a liability (and will be soon) but not yet. But at the very least, you could win trivia games.
Of course, it's embarrassing to admit, or let others think, that you're actually READING. So this is strictly confidential. The only ones who will know you can read (or think you can) will be profs, elitists, etc., that you have to play the game for....the best thing is, these Notes will NOT clutter your mind with knowledge or take up valuable space your brain should be using spending it on video games and "social" interaction in front of a computer in your dark basement with strangers in Thailand.
They are written for "dummies," but even dummies don't need to understand them. You just need to be able to transfer, or, like, copy, the notes- no understanding or memorizing necessary, and they will do the trick.
For example, you may be asked, "Who was Karl Marx?" To gain bonus points, the Notes teach you to say, "the 4th Marx brother" - if your prof is REALLY old- but then, to seriously say, "The guy we want to take our country back from - see "Barack Obama."
We realize that you have to be able to read somewhat since you're reading this, but we've got this whole thing on audio. So actually you can listen to our sales pitch and our Notes without having to read a thing. Not only that but in our next version we will have microchips that can be directly installed into your brain so that you don't even have to listen to the audio. (This version will be much more expensive, obviously.)
The Notes even teach you how to write out answers in English to written exams, etc., through a crude shorthand that does not even require you to know the alphabet. How's that?
Thankfully society is progressing fast enough that probably within a decade, all books will have been burned (because they will all have been transferred to Google), and then Google will crash and lose all those darn books. Then problem solved. Then there won't be no book learning going on anymore by them elitist smarty-pantses out there.
So this is just a stop-gap measure to help you get along until that age arrives. Further on down the road, once there are no books and thus no reading, quite possibly language will go the way of the horse and buggy too, thus reducing us to the level of chimpanzees, the way nature intended. (There is a Note explaining "horse and buggy.")
Then without words, without language, here will be no more miscommunication, and therefore peace and utopia will reign.
Until then use "Cliff's Notes for Dummies."
In fact, even knowing how to read marks you as perhaps one of the dreaded out of touch "elites."
Aside from the social stigma of being a literate reader, there's just the fact that when you're part of "Real America," the part that's not out of touch, you sure don't have time to read, or to learn to read.
Sure, in school they still attempt to teach it, but like algebra, when are you ever going to use it in practically in real life? And, heaven knows, if it can't be used practically, then what good is it?
Unfortunately, there are still some schools and universities and even a few employers who are still elitist enough to expect you to know how to read, and to know a few things about books. Fortunately, this won't last much longer, but for now, some classes, teachers, etc. want you to know about some books written a zillion years ago by weirdo dorks who thought they were better than us just because they could do this thing called "critical thinking" or had "creative literary skill," or could invent some silly thing called the "theory of relativity," - like who did they think they were anyway, Einstein? Regardless, for now, at least, while people like Obama (elitist professor) are still in charge, it could be to your advantage to play along. Of course, no one expects you to really do it, but just fake it.
That's where we come in- we provide a product called "Cliff's Notes for Dummies". (Note we have already resolved the intellectual property lawsuit regarding this since Cliff's Notes are much different than our product - they are just as much of a waste of time and hard to read as the book itself anyway).
We can give you a short synapsis of a book, or a biography of a writer or thinker, etc. - enough for you to fake knowing not only how to read and write a sentence but actually what the thing means.
The good thing is, standards in college are so low now that just by reading these you will impress your professor so much that you'll ace the class and probably be known as the smartest in the class. Of course, that could be a liability (and will be soon) but not yet. But at the very least, you could win trivia games.
Of course, it's embarrassing to admit, or let others think, that you're actually READING. So this is strictly confidential. The only ones who will know you can read (or think you can) will be profs, elitists, etc., that you have to play the game for....the best thing is, these Notes will NOT clutter your mind with knowledge or take up valuable space your brain should be using spending it on video games and "social" interaction in front of a computer in your dark basement with strangers in Thailand.
They are written for "dummies," but even dummies don't need to understand them. You just need to be able to transfer, or, like, copy, the notes- no understanding or memorizing necessary, and they will do the trick.
For example, you may be asked, "Who was Karl Marx?" To gain bonus points, the Notes teach you to say, "the 4th Marx brother" - if your prof is REALLY old- but then, to seriously say, "The guy we want to take our country back from - see "Barack Obama."
We realize that you have to be able to read somewhat since you're reading this, but we've got this whole thing on audio. So actually you can listen to our sales pitch and our Notes without having to read a thing. Not only that but in our next version we will have microchips that can be directly installed into your brain so that you don't even have to listen to the audio. (This version will be much more expensive, obviously.)
The Notes even teach you how to write out answers in English to written exams, etc., through a crude shorthand that does not even require you to know the alphabet. How's that?
Thankfully society is progressing fast enough that probably within a decade, all books will have been burned (because they will all have been transferred to Google), and then Google will crash and lose all those darn books. Then problem solved. Then there won't be no book learning going on anymore by them elitist smarty-pantses out there.
So this is just a stop-gap measure to help you get along until that age arrives. Further on down the road, once there are no books and thus no reading, quite possibly language will go the way of the horse and buggy too, thus reducing us to the level of chimpanzees, the way nature intended. (There is a Note explaining "horse and buggy.")
Then without words, without language, here will be no more miscommunication, and therefore peace and utopia will reign.
Until then use "Cliff's Notes for Dummies."
Monday, June 11, 2012
Someone apparently hijacked this blog to post things about how they got a new job or won the lottery or a new apartment, I don't have any clue why they would want to choose this obscure place to advertise! But I removed what I think is all there is, and hope to revive this blog with real material ASAP.
Obama's Secret Law in the Patriot Act | Nat Hentoff | Cato Institute: Commentary
Obama's Secret Law in the Patriot Act | Nat Hentoff | Cato Institute: Commentary
I'm posting this because I absolutely love Nat Henthoff! He is right on about almost everything in my mind. (at least, for the most part!) I think he's in his 80s now- he co-founded the Village Voice and has always been concerned about our civil rights. But I think that he's like the voice crying in the wilderness. Or rather, the boy crying wolf- because nobody is listening to him!!
Honestly, he is a consistent critic of any and all who mess with the Constitution! He protested about Bush, and now he's on Obama! And the thing is, it appears that Obama's administration is even more clandestine and cavalier with our rights than the Bush one was, if that's possible.
Like in the paper today, Obama's administration being sued for refusing to follow the War Powers Act regarding our involvement with NATO in Libya. Granted, many presidents have disregarded this law - but weren't we supposed to expect more from Obama? I mean, he seemed like the "anti-war" candidate, and he was a Harvard constitutional law professor previously. But as if still being in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't enough, he wants to spend millions on Libya, which certainly is not a threat to us? What's next, the rest of the Middle East?
Anyway, I digress about Obama and his blatant disregard for the Constitution....more on that another time.
What I wanted to write today relates to Nat Hentoff's column- about the importance of education regarding the constitution.
Democracy (or a representative democracy, a Republic, which is what the US has), is one of those things, like communism, that in theory seems great. But it, like communism, holds an optimistic view of humanity that is not warranted by factual reality and history.
Instead, as the founding fathers called it, it is an experiment. And experiment that fails if the presumption is incorrect- namelt, that the average person (American) is capable of engaging in, and being knowledgeable about, holding up their end of the social contract. THis presumes a basic level of intelligence, education, critical thinking, reasoning, intellectual curiosity, knowledge of not only history and civics but also of current events.
A basic level that is truly no longer basic. It is now almost astonising if a person has those abilities, or admits to them.
The rules of the "game" of this experiment require peope to be able to (literally) read them and get them. Otherwise it's like a toddler trying to play monopoly.
Both assume the "proletariat" is apable of rule -or even of meaningful participation. Both assume the soile reason for their position in loife is factors such as oppression, or the "cultural elite" --That Joe 6-Pack, as well as a peasant worker, are no different in leadership, etc. ability than the
I'm posting this because I absolutely love Nat Henthoff! He is right on about almost everything in my mind. (at least, for the most part!) I think he's in his 80s now- he co-founded the Village Voice and has always been concerned about our civil rights. But I think that he's like the voice crying in the wilderness. Or rather, the boy crying wolf- because nobody is listening to him!!
Honestly, he is a consistent critic of any and all who mess with the Constitution! He protested about Bush, and now he's on Obama! And the thing is, it appears that Obama's administration is even more clandestine and cavalier with our rights than the Bush one was, if that's possible.
Like in the paper today, Obama's administration being sued for refusing to follow the War Powers Act regarding our involvement with NATO in Libya. Granted, many presidents have disregarded this law - but weren't we supposed to expect more from Obama? I mean, he seemed like the "anti-war" candidate, and he was a Harvard constitutional law professor previously. But as if still being in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't enough, he wants to spend millions on Libya, which certainly is not a threat to us? What's next, the rest of the Middle East?
Anyway, I digress about Obama and his blatant disregard for the Constitution....more on that another time.
What I wanted to write today relates to Nat Hentoff's column- about the importance of education regarding the constitution.
Democracy (or a representative democracy, a Republic, which is what the US has), is one of those things, like communism, that in theory seems great. But it, like communism, holds an optimistic view of humanity that is not warranted by factual reality and history.
Instead, as the founding fathers called it, it is an experiment. And experiment that fails if the presumption is incorrect- namelt, that the average person (American) is capable of engaging in, and being knowledgeable about, holding up their end of the social contract. THis presumes a basic level of intelligence, education, critical thinking, reasoning, intellectual curiosity, knowledge of not only history and civics but also of current events.
A basic level that is truly no longer basic. It is now almost astonising if a person has those abilities, or admits to them.
The rules of the "game" of this experiment require peope to be able to (literally) read them and get them. Otherwise it's like a toddler trying to play monopoly.
Both assume the "proletariat" is apable of rule -or even of meaningful participation. Both assume the soile reason for their position in loife is factors such as oppression, or the "cultural elite" --That Joe 6-Pack, as well as a peasant worker, are no different in leadership, etc. ability than the
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