SIMON --
When are you going to add polling ability to this web site?
i thought it might be a good idea to find out at what age or after how long we descided to leave the watchtower.. prehaps we my find a patern in it which we could use .. i think what we need to know are ,.
1.age you left the watchtower.
(or age you found out it was wrong).
SIMON --
When are you going to add polling ability to this web site?
from the inimitable salon.com:.
collateral damage.
by robert scheer.
freeman,
Care to substantiate your characterization of Scheer's article? Maybe pick a specific point and comment intelligently on it?
It's easy to characterize a piece as biased. Harder to say why...
from the inimitable salon.com:.
collateral damage.
by robert scheer.
It's called political involvement, Badwillie. I will definitely be registering and voting this year.
Keep yourself educated with sites like Salon.com that have opinions from many sides of the argument, always well stated.
The Enron scandal nicely typifies the corrupting influence of business on politics. The more the people stand up and insist on being counted, the better off we are. In that respect, at least, we have a good Constitution, with the ability to heal our nation built into its framework.
Intelligent, educated voters can, and do, make a difference.
from the inimitable salon.com:.
collateral damage.
by robert scheer.
This guy is the first columnist to ever grab my attention repeatedly.
More at http://www.robertscheer.com/
Mike
from the inimitable salon.com:.
collateral damage.
by robert scheer.
From the inimitable Salon.com:
Collateral damage
By Robert Scheer
Now we get to see just how cowardly the Democrats in Congress can be. President Bush has proposed the most preposterous military buildup in human history .. annual spending of $451 billion by 2007 .. and nary
a word of criticism has been heard from the other side of the aisle. The president is drunk with the popularity that his war on terrorism has brought, and those sober Democrats and Republicans, who know better, are afraid to wrestle him for the keys to the budget before he drives off a cliff.
The red ink that Bush wants us to bleed to line the pockets of the defense industry, along with the tax cuts for the rich, will do more damage to our country than any terrorist. The result will be an economically hobbled United States, unable to solve its major domestic problems or support meaningful foreign aid, its enormous
wealth sacrificed at the altar of military hardware that is largely without purpose.
Why the panic to throw billions more at the military when even the Pentagon brass have told us it is not needed? Our military forces, much maligned by Bush as inadequate during the election campaign, proved to be lacking in nothing once the administration decided to stop playing footsie with the Taliban and eliminate those monsters of our own creation. It was obviously not a lack of hardware that made us vulnerable to the cruelty of Sept. 11 but rather a failure of will by President Clinton, and then Bush, to brand the Taliban as
terrorists and then to take out the well.marked camps of al.Qaida with the counterinsurgency machine we have been perfecting since the Kennedy administration.
Clinton authorized the elimination of Osama bin Laden in 1998, but the spy agencies simply failed to execute the order. Neither, apparently, were they competent enough to track Al Qaeda agents from training camps in Afghanistan to flight schools in Florida. All this even though these agencies possess secret budgets of at least $70 billion a year, combined.
Despite the ability to read license plates from outer space and scan the world's e.mail, our intelligence The bottom line is that we need sharper agents, not more expensive equipment. There is not an item in the Bush budget that will make us more secure from the next terrorist attack.
That being obvious, Bush is now resorting to the tried and true "evil empire" rhetorical strategy, grouping the disparate regimes of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil."
This alleged axis then becomes the rationale for a grossly expanded military budget, the idea being that the United States must be prepared to fight a conventional war on three fronts.
However, no such axis exists. North Korea is a tottering relic of a state whose nuclear operation was about to be bought off under the skilled leadership of the South Korean government when Bush jettisoned the deal.
Iraq and Iran have been implacable foes for 25 years, and both were despised by the Taliban and al.Qaida. Meanwhile, a key Muslim ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia, produced 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers ..and bin Laden. Saudi Arabia is also where al.Qaida does its biggest fundraising and yet, inexplicably, it is excluded from the new enemies list.
Even if the accepted goal were the overthrow of the three brutal regimes targeted by President Bush, that would hardly require an expansion of a war machine built to humble the Soviet Union in its prime.
Is Bush the younger now telling us that his father failed to topple Saddam Hussein because he lacked sufficient firepower? The road to Baghdad was wide open after we obliterated the vaunted Iraqi tank army in a matter of weeks. Or does Bush the younger have even more grandiose plans in mind?
His astonishing budget makes sense only if we are planning to use our mighty military in a pseudo.religious quest to create a superdominant Pax Americana.
Bizarre as that sounds, it may be the real framework for Bush's proposed spending orgy. In any case, almost every non.American speaker at the World Economic Forum in New York expressed fear at this specter.
Even our own Bill Gates was alarmed at the United States' apparent hubris: "People who feel the world is tilted against them will spawn the kind of hatred that is very dangerous for all of us."
Is it too much to ask that these billions, our billions, be spent to enhance our security rather than further erode it?
in other posts about silentlambs where i defended bill bowen's efforts to expose child molestation, proplog2 raised a lot of ire by challenging bill bowen's integrity amongst other things.. however, in proplog2's posts he mentioned concern for the possibility of an innocent adult being falsely accused of child molestation.
naturally because his overall views were objectionable to many, the proverbial baby got thrown out with the bathwater.. in other words, many (but not all) seemed to dismiss the possibility that an adult accused of child molestation is automatically guilty as charged!.
proplog2 pointed out that further complicating matters is that anyone who does not automatically conclude the accused is guilty by virtue of the accusation by a child, is considered a closet child molester themselves.
Sexual abuse is a horrible thing. We should not forget, though, those who were repeatedly beaten by their own parents, and who were told to be quiet about it by the congregation.
There should be a class action lawsuit for them also.
the nbc news just showed the latest update on enron.
ken lay will show up...yada yada yada.
the next clip dealt with a man and wife...he worked at enron.
Enron allegedly deliberately mislead their employees and investors, while paying off politicians, including our moron-n-chief.
Go read Salon.com for a while before you go projecting your stupidity on these poor Enron folks.
We all project our own faults onto others...I am doing it now. :-)
Mike
sometimes, i try to be sad.. as the sun sets low, turning the rugged hills of arizona into soft, purple, fuzzy-looking rumpled cones, dappled in the red-orange reflections of failing sunlight, i stand upon a hill.
i try to reflect on what could have been.. i could have been part of a family that was close -- a family that hugged, laughed and cried together, always.
a family that strove not to take everything personally, but to see that even our attacks, especially our attacks, are projections of our own insecurities.
Sometimes, I try to be sad.
As the sun sets low, turning the rugged hills of Arizona into soft, purple, fuzzy-looking rumpled cones, dappled in the red-orange reflections of failing sunlight, I stand upon a hill. I try to reflect on What Could Have Been.
I could have been part of a family that was close -- a family that hugged, laughed and cried together, always. A family that strove not to take everything personally, but to see that even our attacks, especially our attacks, are projections of our own insecurities. I could have been part of a family that was so strong that even momentous change, like changing your religion, would have been no threat to the unity of the family, the love of the family. I could have been part of a family that understood that we are not our actions, that we are all lovable, that we are all innocent children who need love, especially when we act in ways that are unloving toward each other.
I could have been part of a family where everyone strove to trust, all the time, that they are loved.
But, What Could Have Been, never was. My parents sit in their Florida home, no doubt considering my disassociation some kind of personal attack, or betrayal -- if they think of me, their grandchildren, their daughter-in-law, at all. No, they are not even able to get beyond their own ailments and disallusionment long enough to trust that it had nothing to do with them. That they are loved.
I turn from the sun, from the majesty of the hills, the sparse beauty of the desert, and I look down upon our home, my wife and children.
Then I realize, that there, What Could Have Been...is.
Peace and love to you all,
Mike Pence
i keep seeing his name around.... mike pence.
reading: susan sontag's "in amercia".
listening: puddle of mudd
Anyone know anything about him? I keep seeing his name around...
Mike Pence
Reading: Susan Sontag's "In Amercia"
Listening: Puddle of Mudd
the wts has misrepresented einstein's beliefs.
here is what the man himself had to say:.
"i cannot imagine a god who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a god, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.
The WTS has misrepresented Einstein's beliefs. Here is what the man himself had to say:
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in Nature."
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."
Albert Einstein.