The issue of slavery in the United States was ultimately decided by
the Civil War (1861-1865). It was
a showdown between the free North and
the slave South, amongst other things. It was also one of the first
“total wars” seen by the West in a very long time.
As Warfare in the Western World: Military Operations from 1600 to 1871, describes it:
“The final year of the Civil War witnessed the
full bloom of total war. No western state in centuries had waged a
military contest more comprehensively than did the Union and
Confederacy. Determined national efforts the world had seen: during the
Napoleonic Wars the Spanish and Russian people had fought relentlessly
against the French invaders; and in 1813 the Russians had pursued the
retreating French for nearly a thousand miles. Yet neither the Spanish
nor the Russians had mobilized their populations and economies as
systematically as did the North and South.”
If we are to judge who or what “built” America, we must honestly look
at the legacy and the strength of each. The reality is that the
slave-holding South lost the Civil War. Why? Why, if slavery built
America, was it not able to provide the strength needed to the South to
be able to crush the North? And what did the North have that made it so
great without the aid of slavery?
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville is universally
regarded as one of the most influential Democracy as a rich
source about the age of Andrew Jackson, Tocqueville was more of a
political thinker than a historian. In the introduction to Democracy,
he states: “In America, I saw more than America… I sought the image of
democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices,
and its passions.” His subject is nothing less than what is to be hoped
for, and what to be feared from, the democratic revolution sweeping the
Western world in his time.
books ever written about
America. While historians have viewed
The greatest danger Tocqueville saw
was that public opinion would become an all-powerful force, and that the
majority could tyrannize unpopular minorities and marginal individuals.
In Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 7, “Of the Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects,” he lays out his argument with a variety of well-chosen constitutional, historical, and sociological examples.
Following
such an author and his argument can be a challenge to beginning
students, yet the book is so important and illuminating that its
exemplary status has been recognized by the Common Core State Standards.
With that challenge in mind, this unit of three lessons has been
developed to encourage both teachers and students to work through
Tocqueville’s argument by breaking it down into its component parts.
If you want to see how inflated our portion sizes have become, don’t go
to the supermarket – head to
an antique shop. You spot a tiny goblet
clearly designed for a doll, only to be told it is a “wine glass”. What
look like side plates turn out to be dinner plates. The real side plates
resemble saucers.
Back in a modern kitchen, you suddenly notice how vast everything is –
28cm has become a normal diameter for a dinner plate, which in the
1950s would have been 25cm. Just because we are eating off these great
expanses of china does not of course mean that we have to serve
ourselves bigger portions. But as it happens, we usually do. Brian Wansink
is a psychologist (author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We
Think) who has done numerous experiments to prove what you would hope
common sense might already tell us: that oversized tableware makes us
consume bigger portions. A large ice-cream scoop makes you take more ice-cream; a short, squat glass makes you pour more juice.
Because it doesn’t look like much, we still feel we are consuming
roughly the same amount. Wansink calls this the size-contrast illusion.
The “real danger of these kitchen traps”, writes Wansink, is that
“almost every single person in the world believes they’re immune to
them”.
In fact, it seems that the only people who are immune to big portions
are tiny children. Up until the age of three or four, children have an
enviable ability to stop eating when they are full. After that age, this
self-regulation of hunger is lost, and sometimes never relearned. This
is a cross-cultural phenomenon, from London to Beijing. One study from
the US found that when three-year olds were served small, medium and
larger portions of macaroni cheese, they always ate roughly the same amount. By contrast, five-year-olds ate a lot more when the portion of macaroni cheese was oversized.
In a world where food is ever-present, many of us have become like Alice
in Wonderland, controlled by cakes that say Eat Me and bottles that say
Drink Me. As the nutritionist Marion Nestle remarked 10 years ago in
her book, What to Eat:
“It is human nature to eat when presented with food, and to eat more
when presented with more food.” The trouble is that we are pushed more
food, more often, every day. In 2013, the British Heart Foundation
published a report called Portion Distortion on how portion sizes in Britain have changed since 1993.
Back then, the average American-style muffin weighed 85g, whereas 20
years later it was not uncommon to find muffins weighing 130g. Ready
meals have also ballooned in size, with chicken pies expanding by 49%
and the average shepherd’s pie nearly doubling in size since 1993 (from
210g to 400g). To overeat in such an environment may be less about
lacking willpower than being set in your ways. Food psychologists talk
about “unit bias” meaning that we are inclined to think that a portion
equals one of something, no matter what the size. Even when it’s the
2,000-calorie single slice of pizza that nutritionists managed to buy in New York City: a whole day’s worth of calories in a single snack.
1. "Science can't explain the complexity and order of life; God must have designed it to be this way."
First, when considering this position, it's important to recognize
the difference between complexity and design. Complexity itself does not
require an intelligent creator. It's easy to impose a design upon
things that exist by chance or developed through a natural process like
evolution.
To an extent, this argument gains traction because of wide
misunderstanding of science and especially evolution. Everything in the
universe conforms to certain simple scientific rules that have been
repeated over billions of years. While this can be awe-inspiring, it by
no means suggests a creator.
2. "God's existence is proven by scripture."
This argument presupposes its premise. People believe in scripture
and place value in the words because they already believe in the
religious principles the text describes. There is no inherent value to
the Bible, Quran or any other religious text; these documents are not
self-authenticating in any way.
In fact, many factual inaccuracies and inconsistencies can be found
within religious texts themselves. For example, the Bible contains two
separate creation stories, each of which provides a very different
explanation. Similarly, there is no historical, archaeological or
scientific evidence to support many of the stories in the Bible and the
Quran.
Ultimately, religious texts are infinitely fallible because they are
man-made products of whimsy, poetry, mythology and some history woven
together into a new whole. The texts in the Bible have been gathered
from many oral sources over thousands of years and compiled arbitrarily
into a single document; it's hardly surprising that the narrative would
be so inconsistent. Other religious texts have similarly convoluted
histories.
Aside from the problems with individual texts, there's also the
obvious issue that the very presence of multiple scriptures negates the
authenticity of any single religious document. It's impossible for every
religious book to be true; it's highly presumptuous to assume that
one's own preferred scripture is the single "true" scripture while all
the others are false accounts. It's far more likely that every religious
book is equally fictitious and unreliable.
3. "Some unexplained events are miraculous, and these miracles prove the existence of God."
A miracle is typically understood as an extraordinary event or
happening that is explained as being the work of a divine agency and
having a supernatural origin. However, before miracles can be used as
irrefutable proof of God's existence, the cause or origin of so-called
miracles must be proven.
There is currently no evidence to suggest that
miracles truly exist. In reality, there are several underlying
explanations behind most miracles, for example:
-- The event is statistically unlikely, and its
unlikeliness has caused some people to attribute significance to it. For
example, some cultures believe that all-white animals are miraculous or
somehow magical. However, science has proven that albinism is a
perfectly normal genetic condition that happens to be rarer than other
forms of pigmentation. Similarly, a single person surviving a natural
disaster is no more miraculous than a single person winning the lottery;
it's simply an unlikely random occurrence.
-- The event has a scientific cause that is not immediately apparent
or understood but is later identified. Many natural phenomena were once
viewed as miraculous. After science demonstrated the reason behind
previously incomprehensible things, like aurora borealis, earthquakes
and hot springs, they stopped seeming like the actions of a mysterious
deity.
-- The event was inherently meaningless, but meaning and significance
was attributed after the fact. In science, hearsay and anecdotal
evidence are not sufficient to prove something. Each time a "miracle"
occurs, it's easy to see magical thinking, misattribution and other
human errors at work. For example, if a child is ill in the hospital, a
family member might pray for his recovery. If that child does recover,
the praying relative will attribute this to the power of prayer, not to
any medical innovations, immunological responses or sheer power of
chance.
It's curious to note that the miracles performed by an "all-loving"
and benevolent God so often involve sparing a handful of people from a
tragic accident, devastating disaster or deadly disease. God is rarely
held accountable by believers for all of the deaths that occur when
people are not saved by a "miracle." On the whole, the tiny percentage
of "miraculous" recoveries would be greater evidence of a deity's
arbitrary cruelty than his benevolence, but this is never something
believers seem comfortable discussing.
AP has already looked
at some of the ins and outs of Trump’s comments on North Carolina’s
bathroom law, but the fact is Donald Trump is right. This doesn’t mean I
plan on replacing my #NeverTrump magnet with a “Make America Great
Again” one or start delighting in the idea of a Trump presidency. But
I’m okay with agreeing with him on this even if it may be a case of
Trump the blind squirrel finding the nut.
The thing which does bother me is why is this even an issue? I know
North Carolina passed the bill in response to Charlotte’s bathroom
ordinance, but it seems like an odd hill for the GOP to die on. Ted
Cruz, Curt Schilling, and a host of other conservative commentators are
making this about creepy men sharing bathrooms with 12-year-old girls. I
can see their reasoning, and completely understand their concern, but
here’s the thing…I’m not sure the few criminals that are out there
really care about what laws they break. If they really want something,
they’re gonna try to get it however they want. Yes, there are stories about guys hiding cameras in women’s bathrooms (including the 2013 one of a dude in California disguised as a woman) but these seem to be outliers.
Miserable rain. Temp around 68 or so. Unpleasant to be outside. So
. . . since I can’t exercise my arms and legs, I’ll put my fingers to
work:
Climate change! Big deal these days. Greatest threat to national
security according to BHObeyme and JFQuerrie and Pope Algore. BUT . . .
I’m actually all in favor of it, just so long as the change is in
Murkan politics.
The moral climate of our political landscape has created a toxic fog
which repels men of honor and integrity but dangles mountains of cash in
front of wastrels and hypocrites. My guess is it’s a persistent
low-hanging cloud of gaseous residue from decades of party members
eating revenue, belching corruption, and farting deceit.
What we’ve managed to set up in the US is an entrenched two-party
system which offers politicians for sale to the highest bidder. And
naturally somebody will buy them . . . the problem is that it’s never
the people, but the special interests who can afford it.
Our two-party system isn’t a democracy – it’s a plutocracy. All it
offers voters is a myth, a coin flip between unpalatable puppet leeches
contaminated with the morals of Capone, the scruples of Quaddafi, and
the credibility of Baghdad Bob.
Trump is complaining about the corrupt party bosses cheating him out
of delegates and ignoring citizens’ votes. He willingly accepted
delegates from winner-take-all states, though, ignoring the vast numbers
who did NOT vote for him in primaries. Hey, entrenched party bosses
depriving a deluded egotist of a perceived campaign victory is a
victimless crime.
A bunch of career parasites deciding to scuttle a candidate because
he won’t play by their rules is like an NFL team refusing to draft a
quarterback because he’s a Druid. Politics never bind communities
together or solve social problems; all politics can do is keep
entrenched, power-hungry, double-dealing sponges in power.
Hell, Trump is as qualified as anybody who’s run for PotUS in the
past quarter-century: he’s rich, he’s flamboyant, he’s controversial, he
thinks he knows everything, and he knows nothing about the job. Sounds
exactly like the guy we got in there now, right?
I don’t know if Trump can be bought or not. If elected, he’ll take
office without obligation to any PACs or other special interest groups,
and that’s good. He’ll also be faced immediately with accusations of
conflict of interest, and the opportunity for sweet deals to multiply
his fortune will always be there, and that ain’t good.
The question would be, of course, whether he considers himself rich
enough already. He’ll take a pay cut and a housing downgrade, and all
he’ll get for it in the long run will be criticism, wrinkles, threats,
and very possibly ulcers. So . . . what’s in it for him?
Sometimes when I’m not quick enough with the remote and hear parts of
a Trump speech, I wonder if he’s autistic or something. Many times he
sounds like somebody coming down off a cocktail of LSD and speed.
I mean, he uses words of course, but he repeats himself like the old
guys who hang around on the benches in front of the court house in
little Midwestern towns. Often he’ll begin a sentence and never finish
it, breaking off in the middle and shifting topics as if his horse threw
him off into the thought stream and he had to remount on another one,
talking for several minutes without saying anything meaningful.
And he thinks they’re terrific sentences. That I can tell you.
Believe me, they’re great, at least in his opinion. They’re great.
Full of words. Good words. Not big words that regular people would
have to go look up. That I can tell you. But every Trump sentence uses
words. Sometimes over and over again. And that’s great. Believe me.
They’re great. Winners. All of them. Not stupid, like our
politicians. That I can tell you. Believe me.
And I gotta say, I’m absolutely astonished that nobody has so far put
a 7.62 ventilation port in the supraorbital foramen of the alleged
person who has been squatting in The People’s House for the past 7
years.
Which brings up the issue of why it’s hard for people to understand
why someone would vote for Trump . . . I mean, that’s PRE-goddam-cisely
how millions of us felt when people voted for Soetoro out of a sense of
white guilt or ethnic loyalty.
All I know is that you mix one part hype with equal parts of greed,
deceit, and lust for power and you get a PoliCockl, or a Political
Cocktail. ‘Tis the season for sound bytes, buzzwords, catch phrases,
bombast, sales pitches, spin, backtracking, denying, and hypocrisy,
which eventually all boils down to common everyday propaganda.
It is the art of promising paradise and taking things to hell, then
claiming to be a savior for rescuing the country from purgatory.
People might like to have friends who are in politics, but any parent
who loves his child wants him to be a true professional anything BUT
politician.
We climb 26 steps to the first floor of the ark. Our tour will be quick, we’re told,
because this is an
active construction site, and workers are on a strict
deadline. The Ark Encounter, the world’s first theme park to boast a
life-sized replica of Noah’s Ark, would open no matter what on July 7,
2016, a date chosen because 7/7 corresponds to a biblical verse from
Genesis: “Then Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with
him entered the ark because of the water of the flood.”
I’m one of a handful of journalists being led through the empty
structure by Ken Ham, president and founder of Answers in Genesis, or
AiG, a Christian organization committed to “upholding the authority of
the Bible from the first verse.” Ham is probably most well-known beyond
Christian circles for his 2014 debate with Bill Nye “The Science Guy”
over evolution. A former science teacher himself, in Australia’s public
school system, Ham believes passionately that the world was created
exactly how the opening verses of the Bible explain: in six 24-hour
periods of time, about 6,000 years ago, by God.
Throughout the tour, an armed guard sticks close to Ham, which, we’re
told, is standard for media visits. Ham shows us where Noah’s bedroom
will be as well as photos on his phone of what some of the other
exhibits are expected to look like. AiG boasts that the ark is the
world’s largest timber-frame building. Based on the dimensions given in
the Bible, the structure is 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet
high. If you laid all this timber end to end, it would stretch from its
home in Williamstown to Philadelphia. After the ark opens its doors in
July, AiG plans to eventually work on a replica of the Tower of Babel,
described in Genesis 11. The entire project will cost more than $150
million, with the first phase costing $91 million. According to
estimates from America’s Research Group, the Ark Encounter will host
between 1.4 million and 2.2 million visitors in its first year.
One
important note is that most of the animals that will eventually fill
the ark will be animatronic — presumably because it would be difficult
to fill the boat with temperamental animals, like lions and tigers and
dinosaurs.
1. The Punishment for a simple disobedience is grossly unjustified
It is justifiable to inflict such punishments as described in the
Bible for a simple disobedience – violating an instruction not to eat a
fruit – that too under the temptation of a wily serpent? God threw them
out of the Paradise and opened the gates of everlasting hell and started
roasting souls in there. He brought in, thereafter, all sorts of
suffering and pain to man.
2. The concept of the original sin is simply incomprehensible
How come a simple disobedience of the first parents gets passed on to
their offspring? What did the coming generation do to inherit the
original sin, eternal hell and the wrath of God? Once the original sin
is done away with, there is no need for god’s own son to take birth,
suffer, die to redeem mankind.
3. Eternal fire for a temporary sin is grossly unjust
A sin committed in this temporal life does not deserve eternal
roasting in the inner chambers of a burning hell. A transient offense
merits a temporary punishment. This is monstrous and the god who insists
on it must be monstrous.
4. Why has God killed more than half of all children born before the age of 14?
The purpose of creation is attain eternal bliss with God as a fruit
of one’s merit accumulated in this life by obeying god’s commandments
using one’s free will. But those who die as kids cannot use their
freewill and what is then the purpose of creating them? Their death
simply causes a lot of pain to their dear ones and no good whatsoever.
5. What is the purpose in creating the feeble minded, psychotic, and the brain deficient?
It is amply clear many of them cannot even take care of themselves,
leave alone the use of freewill and merit eternal bliss. Life is simply a
pain to themselves and for all their relatives and friends.
6. His choice of a small tribe as His own
He chose a semi stupefied peasant tribe as his own to the exclusion
of all others. He murdered and destroyed millions of people and all
nations of Canaan to settle the group. He revealed himself to this
minuscule tribe and left the whole of humanity in utter darkness.
7. Why did God love to kill and insisted on animal and human sacrifices?
He sent a deluge to drown every living thing on earth! He destroyed
Sodom and Gomorrah. Can all the living people be sinful at the same
time? Why did He behead the firstborn of Egyptians to intimidate
Pharaoh? Are children and animals not God’s own creation? Why did God
love so much the taste of blood and fat of the young sturdy animals?
8. How could God turn against His own people?
With the coming of Christianity, Yahweh turns against the Jews and he
prods the Church to persecute, banish or gas them. The same god had
madly protected them and traveled with them in an arc for centuries and
murdered entire nations for settling them.
9. Christianity has fragmented into warring sects
From almost the beginning, the Church got disintegrated into hostile
denominations. The patriarch of Antioch ceded from Rome, each head
excommunicating the other. Protestants and Anglicans turned against
Catholics and many bloody wars ensued. Today there are many diverse
denominations with contradictory doctrines each claiming to be the true
Church. Some of them are incidentally atheistic.
10. The Church has always stood against mankind and perpetuated suffering
The higher clergy have been living luxuriously and licentiously until
the recent times. One of the major reasons for the French Revolution
has been their sins and utter negligence of the poor. It has killed
billions in crusades, in its sectarian wars and by its inquisition
courts. Great scientists like Bruno was burnt for not accepting Church’s
foolishness and even Galileo was interned for years. Innocent women
were haunted down and burnt at stake as witches including Joan of Arc.
11. There is only pain and suffering in this world
Each year there are a number of earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic
eruptions, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural calamities.
Each one kills many instantly and buries them with all their dreams.
Plagues and epidemics have decimated human societies. Horrendous viruses
have worked havoc with humans too. Science and advancement in medicine
have lessened child mortality rates and controlled deaths due to
epidemics. But God has no part in this latter development. There are
millions who die of hunger, malnutrition and diseases. The Church being
against birth control measures is adding empty stomachs into the world!
Pain has been the only reality in the world and we don’t find any
supernatural power coming to alleviate the same.
This week has seen much ado regarding the supposed rights of
transgendered people. North Carolina and Mississippi have each passed recent laws that will,
among other things, provide that people use restrooms designated for
their biological gender. Response from across the culture has been
mind-numbing. PayPal announced that it will pull a major development from North Carolina
on account of the new law. The company claimed to protest
discrimination, despite doing business in Saudi Arabia, where
homosexuals are executed for their orientation. Other entities have
taken similar action. Whatever their expressed intent, their true gripe
is with free association and the facts of reality.
The religious
freedom debate has revealed widespread cultural psychosis, defined as "a
serious mental disorder characterized by thinking and emotions that are
so impaired, that they indicate that the person experiencing them has lost contact with reality." Here are but three expressions:
1) Denial of Biological Reality
Transgenderism
was once widely regarded as a mental disorder, and properly so. We
know, scientifically and objectively, what distinguishes a male from a
female. The terms are not subjective, arbitrary, or debatable. Excepting
for rare defects, human beings are born male or female. They stay that
way. Surgical mutilation does not change a man into a woman, or vice
versa. A man does not become a woman because he feels like one, or vice
versa. We are each whichever gender our chromosomes determined at
conception. This is not an opinion. It is as objective a fact as any
fact can be. Yet we now live in a culture intent upon denying this
reality and enabling transgendered fantasy.
2) The Contradictory LGBT Narrative
Politically,
it makes sense that homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered
constituencies would unite in common cause. Coalitions prove important
to political endeavors. However, the narratives of these three
communities completely contradict one another. Homosexuality, we are
told, is an inherent and inescapable orientation. Efforts at conversion
therapy are inappropriate and offensive, we are told, because a gay
individual cannot naturally be attracted to the opposite sex. Except
when they are. Then it's called bisexual. Similarly, no one chooses
their orientation. Except when they do. Then it's called bi-curious.
Apparently, orientation is an ironclad biological determination, or a
trendy social experiment, whichever proves most convenient in a given
context.
The
Democratic Party leaders talk about two Americas. They are talking
about the rich and the poor which they sometimes call the haves and the
have-nots. They put the connotation on the haves that they achieved
their positions by taking advantage of the have-nots. They demand
equality and quote the President with his slogan about share the
wealth. There are wealthy people who have inherited their wealth
because of the efforts of their parents and ancestors. At the same time
there are children that are born to poor uneducated parents that teach
their children that the way to live is to take money from the government
and charitable organizations. They are taught that they are entitled
to these things because they were unfortunate to be born poor. The
Democratic Party tells them that they are poor because of the rich
Republicans and the greedy corporations that take advantage of them and
makes them work for less money than they are worth.
When
I graduated from high school in the 1950s there was not a paved road
across the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The major mode of transportation
was walking or riding camels. Oil was discovered and American companies
went in and set up wells and pipelines to get the oil to the coast
where it could be shipped to refineries in America. The King of Saudi
Arabia took ownership of most of the wells and began to give money to
all of the citizens of the country. They now have three or four
generations of people who have never worked in their lives. When I
arrived in the country forty years later, there were large industrial
complexes producing products sold in the Middle East. There were no
Saudi citizens working in these factories. The labor force was all
hired and imported from other countries. The Saudi population is now
getting so large it is getting harder to pay all of the citizens and
they are wanting them to go to work in the industries. They have not
been successful. The Saudis are accustomed to getting up for the day
when they wake up after the sun rises without looking at a clock. They
decide what they are going to do for the day after they wake up. This
is the ultimate in the welfare state. This is what America would become
if the policies of the Democrat Party were followed. In Egypt there
are no foreign workers. To live in Egypt you must work and provide for
yourself and your family. Even a marriage is not supposed to take place
until the man has a home for his wife. Egyptian workers work hard and
they are regular and on time.
There
are two Americas but it is not the haves and the have-nots. It is the
doers and the don’t doers. It is about those that want to work and
support themselves and those that want things given to them. It is
about those that give to others and those that want to take from
others. Mitt Romney took a lot of flak during his campaign for the
presidency when he said that 47% of the voters were taking from the
government and would vote for the Democrats because the Democrats were
telling them that the greedy Republicans would take away the benefits
that they were entitled to receive. Our Declaration of Independence
stated that we believe that all men are created equal. It does not say
that all adults should be equal. We achieve what we achieve because of
our own efforts. The harder you work the more successful you become.
It is not up to the government to take from the successful people and
give to the unsuccessful people in order to create equality. This is a
principle of the Democratic Party.
Our
country was founded on principles that allow all of us to make our own
decisions. We become the product of these decisions. The Republican
Party encourages cooperation and working with others to bring success to
all of us. The Democratic Party uses the philosophy that has destroyed
the city of Detroit. That philosophy encourages each individual to
look out for himself and if you achieve power through politics then use
that vehicle to profit yourself.
An
individual who drops out of high school without completing the grades
will generally not do as well in life and those who finish. I attended
Georgia Tech and graduated. This has improved my success in life. My
doctor is more successful than me but my doctor spent about three more
years in school than I did. Doctors are paid a lot more money than I
ever made. I am not in favor of taking anything from doctors and having
it given to me. It was my choice to take the path that I took. I
never considered being a doctor but it was available to me. We are
rewarded based on the decisions that we made. It is not up to the
president to try to make us all equal. The law of the harvest is, “As
you sow, so shall you reap.”
Equality
of income is not a right. We are the product of our decisions. The
efforts to equalize income is intended to make us dependent on the
federal government. We lose our freedom when we are dependent on the
government.
The issue of slavery in the United States was ultimately decided by
the Civil War (1861-1865). It was 
