World News Korner

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This is from an op-ed over at Truthout by William Rivers Pitt, that I thought was very spot on and worth sharing:

Over the weekend, hundreds of gun-rights activists descended on the Alamo in Texas to lament how hard it is these days for gun-owners in America. The crowd was regaled by luminaries like Alex Jones, who dispensed his gibberish with the proud fervor of someone who has taken to heart the old adage, "There's a sucker born every minute," because he knows he's getting paid no matter what he says. "If it's a war they want," he roared again and again as the day wore on, "it's a war they'll get."

Maybe I am desensitized at this point, but after another week of stories about dead children, I find myself most bothered by this thing at the Alamo, for it represents the distilled essence of the ongoing, blood-sodden catastrophe that is this nation's terminal fetish for guns in all forms. They really do think they are under siege, and see themselves standing post on the walls of their own fictional Alamo, facing down hordes of Obama-programmed FEMA soldiers who carry the banner of the UN and seek to take their guns before instituting Sharia Law across the land.

Under siege? It would be funny if it wasn't so completely lethal. It is almost like a magic trick: a pack of dangerous, dim-witted blivets who drape themselves in camouflage and masturbate relentlessly to "Red Dawn" on a nightly basis sprawled on a pile of NRA leaflets while clutching an AR-15 in their other hand have figured out a way to become an untouchable class in American politics, even as the blood and brain matter of children swells past their ankles and up over their fatted calves.

It is, perhaps, the most remarkable trick ever turned in modern American politics. A few bottles of Tylenol are poisoned in 1982 and kill seven people, and the country erupts, and Tylenol is scourged from every shelf in the land, and new safety measures are swiftly enacted. More than three hundred million guns kill tens of thousands of people on a yearly basis, however, with gun and ammunition sales going through the roof every time a mass slaughter happens, and the nation barely twitches.

Somehow, these sad, sorry, pathetic, weak, soulless, gutless sacks of shame have not only insulated themselves and their deadly little hobby from the normal procedures of civilized society that take place when a mortal threat is exposed, but have giddily convinced themselves that they are, in fact, the real victims in all this. They can, and do, sell guns on Instagram and evade any and all background checks or other firearm laws, yet somehow they are being crushed under the bootheel of tyrannical governmental overreach.

There is more, and if you are interested I suggest that you click the link at the top to read it, however this part really spoke to me in that it lays out just how perverse this obsession with owning guns has become.

Now I personally don't really have an issue with a person owning one gun for protection and keeping it locked away in a safe location, or owning a rifle for hunting, and also keeping that safely locked away when not in use.

No my problem is with these assholes that own an arsenal of weapons, many of them designed for combat, who spend their days fantasizing about repelling an attack by the Iranians, North Koreans, or Obama led liberals, who they believe are about to tread on their sacred freedoms, seemingly unaware that most of those freedoms were taken from them by the previous administration right before their very eyes.

These people have traded away their actual manhood for a symbol of manliness, leaving them largely impotent in regards to dealing with aggression or personal safety unless they have a gun in their hand.

How else to explain the outpouring of support for George Zimmerman, who gunned down an unarmed teenager who was doing nothing wrong other than trying to get home in the rain?

I truly believe that if Zimmerman had beaten Trayvon Martin with a baseball bat, or a crowbar, and left him alive, that he would have been convicted. However the gun, an instrument solely designed to kill, has become such a symbol for freedom in this country, that it seems to defy justice. (Well unless you are a woman of course, then you get a twenty year sentence for firing a warning shot.)

Our entire perception of an appropriate response to potential violence has been skewed to the point that it almost seems that murder with a gun is more accepted these days rather than to injure to our attacker, or to fire a shot to dissuade them from continuing.

As I have shared before, I was trained in the martial arts by a very strict traditionalist.

And the guidelines that he taught me forty years ago, still resonate with me today.

It is better to walk away than to argue.
Better to argue than to injure.
Better to injure than to maim.
Better to maim than to kill.
And better to kill, than to allow innocents to suffer harm.

A simple lesson, but one that has never seemed more timely.

I just wish that these gun nuts had been exposed to similar instruction when they were young.




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Courtesy of Mother Jones:

"For the first time in our history," says Haidt, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, "the parties are not agglomerations of financial or material interest groups, they're agglomerations of personality styles and lifestyles. And this is really dangerous. Because if it's just that you have different interests, that doesn't mean I'm going to hate you. It just means that we've got to negotiate, I want to win, but we can negotiate. If it's now that 'You people on the other side, you're really different from me, you live in a different way, you pray in a different way, you eat different foods than I do,' it's much easier to hate those people. And that's where we are."

Haidt is best known for his "moral foundations" theory, an evolutionary account of the deep-seated emotions that that guide how we feel (not think) about what is right and wrong, in life and also in politics. Haidt likens these moral foundations to "taste buds," and that's where the problem begins: While we all have the same foundations, they are experienced to different degrees on the left and the right. And because the foundations refer to visceral feelings that precede and guide our subsequent thoughts, this has a huge consequence for polarization and political dysfunction. "It's just hard for you to understand the moral motives of your enemy," Haidt says. "And it's so much easier to listen to your favorite talk radio station, which gives you all the moral ammunition you need to damn them to hell."

Here's an illustration of the seven moral foundations identified by Haidt, and how they differ among liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, from a recent paper by Haidt and his colleagues.

To unpack a bit more what this means, consider "harm." This moral foundation, which involves having compassion and feeling empathy for the suffering of others, is measured by asking people how much considerations of "whether someone cared for someone weak and vulnerable" and "whether or not someone suffered emotionally" factor into their decisions about what is right and wrong. As you can see, liberals score considerably higher on such questions. But now consider another foundation, "purity," which is measured by asking people how much their moral judgments involve "whether or not someone did something disgusting" and "whether or not someone violated standards of purity or decency." Conservatives score dramatically higher on this foundation.

How does this play into politics? Very directly: Research by one of Haidt's colleagues has shown, for instance, that Republicans whose districts were "particularly low on the Care/Harm foundation" were most likely to support shutting down the government over Obamacare. Why?

Simply put, if you feel a great deal of compassion for those who lack health care, passing and enacting a law that provides it to them will be an overriding moral concern to you. But if you don't feel this so strongly, different moral concerns can easily become paramount. "On the right, it's not that they don't have compassion," says Haidt, "but their morality is not based on compassion. Their morality is based much more on a sense of who's cheating, who's slacking.”

"My analysis is that the Tea Party really wants [the] Indian law of Karma, which says that if you do something bad, something bad will happen to you, if you do something good, something good will happen to you," says Haidt. "And if the government interferes and breaks that link, it is evil. That I think is much of the passion of the Tea Party.”

In other words, while you may think your political opponents are immoral—and while they probably think the same of you—Haidt's analysis shows that the problem instead is that they are too moral, albeit in a visceral rather than an intellectual sense.

This may be one of the most stunning, and unsettling arguments that I have ever read. made more so by the fact that what Professor Haidt says feel very true.

I have often found myself wondering just HOW some of these people can fight so hard against something that I personally consider the morally correct way of treating my fellow man.

I think that as a society we are all connected, and that what is good for one segment of our population is ultimately good for all of us.

Sure I want to find and punish those who take advantage of social programs, but I also believe they are a small segment of our communities and that punishing everybody for the sins of the few is morally abhorrent.

And the funny thing, the thing that always bewilders me, is that I'M the Atheist. And yet it seems that my views on caring for others, and putting their needs before my own, seems much more in line with the teachings of Jesus Christ than those embraced by the groups who claim ownership of Christianity and use it to belittle and oppress the rest of us.

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Israel will switch to standard time at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, after daylight savings time was extended by 3 weeks. Clocks go back an hour at 2 a.m. to 1 a.m.

Instead of moving clocks back on October 6, Israel waited until the end of the month to do so after Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar agreed to extend daylight savings time by three weeks.


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Author: BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF

(CNN) -- Marcia Wallace, whose four-decade television career included playing the receptionist on "The Bob Newhart Show" and Bart's fourth-grade teacher on "The Simpsons," has died, her agent said Saturday.

Wallace was 70, according to imdb.com. Her cause of death was not immediately confirmed.

Wallace starred for six seasons as Carol Kester on "The Bob Newhart Show" in the 1970s and reprised the role in the 1990s on "Murphy Brown."

But it was her Emmy-winning role as Edna Krabappel, Bart Simpson's teacher with the snarky laugh, that may have earned her the most fame in recent years. It was a part she held since the show's premiere in 1990.

"I was tremendously saddened to learn this morning of the passing of the brilliant and gracious Marcia Wallace," executive producer Al Jean of "The Simpsons" said in a statement. "She was beloved by all at 'The Simpsons' and we intend to retire her irreplaceable character."

Jean said rumors that the show had already planned to retire Wallace's character are not true, he added.

"Marcia's passing is unrelated and again, a terrible loss for all who had the pleasure of knowing her," Jean said.

Wallace was a regular guest star on a host of popular TV shows in the 1970s and 1980s, from "The Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" to "Gimme a Break!", "ALF," "Night Court," "Charles in Charge" and "Magnum, P.I."

Courtesy of ABC News 15:

Air Force Academy cadets are no longer required to say "so help me God" at the end of the Honor Oath, school officials said Friday.

The words were made optional after a complaint from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group, that they violated the constitutional concept of religious freedom.

Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson said the change was made to respect cadets' freedom of religion.

The oath states, "We will not lie, steal or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does. Furthermore, I resolve to do my duty and to live honorably, so help me God."


Cadets are required to take the oath once a year, academy spokesman Maj. Brus Vidal said.

It is not taken out completely, it is still there for those who want it. And as Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundations, points out in the article there still might be times when it may be included even if the cadet does not want it.

However this is yet another positive step forward in respecting the belief systems, or lack of belief systems, of individuals in these academies and that is a good thing for everybody.

Unless of course your religion relies on indoctrination, or bullying people into giving thanks to your God whether they believe in him or not that is. But seriously, whose religion would be THAT insidious?

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You know it's actually a pretty good song. Too bad it will always be associated with this rather controversial Miley Cyrus video.

Oh, and by the way, this little girl is freaking AMAZING!

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While most people who purchase a gun believe that it is to keep them safe, statistics prove that they have just made their family less safe. And if, for some reason, they believed they are less safe, their solution would simply be to add more guns, kind of like discovering that your house is on fire and trying to make it less flammable by throwing gasoline on it.

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