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Sunday, May 26, 2013

Since Everything is Everything Else, Everything is a Mirror of Itself

There is more to this than it seems though, because you have to have my understanding of itself, itself stands for everything, because at the deepest metaphysical level, there is no difference between anything, there is only Being, Existence, maybe there is a super-existent that is somehow larger than the whole of being or existence, I'm just a Monist at heart I think, some kind of Parmenidean mystic astrologer, but at the same time everything is different, a Heraclitean scientific quark explore, but this really comes from Leibniz's complete world view of substance which I talked about before.  More on this stuff later

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Letter to Parents

So I wrote this when I was visiting my mom in florida one time, in March of 2009 I"m pretty sure it was, I also think I was talking to Lora over this time period as well, who ended up having my son tyler about 9 months later.  oh how this entire statement would be a precursor for things to come, I could I have known my son and my fiancee Juli would make some things worse, but other things better , make sure to put on your seatbelt, this is a very bumpy ride, but straight from the heart!

So I'm writing this email because I have come to a realization tonight that I would like to share with the both of you. That realization is that I really hate it, i despise it actually, when the two of you rip on each other and tell me the bad things about the other person. It hurts me deeply when i hear my dad say 'well your mom is like this' where the this is a negative personality trait or character flaw and vice versa when i hear my mom say similar things about my dad. I have been wondering for a while now what about the entire situation still bugs me even to this day so many years later and I really think that this is what it is. It seems that every time I talk with you guys about your ex-spouse, all you have to say is negative or condescending things about them. How do you think this makes me feel?

In case you don't know how this feels I'll give you both a little bit of an example. Ken, your mom Glory was a piece of shit that was a horrible mother and couldn't raise you any better because she was drunk most of the time. Judy, your dad Michael was a piece of shit that was a horrible dad and couldn't raise you any better because he cared more about your other sisters and his bakery shop than he ever cared about you. I hope that my words here have hurt both of you deeply, because that's the point of them.

So, now that you both are pissed off and not feeling good about what I just said, I want you to remember that feeling for the rest of your lives, because that's exactly how the both of you have been making your son feel for the past 15 years whenever you have negative things to say about your ex-spouse. It hurts me more than either of you will ever, can ever, know when you say negative things about either MY mom or MY dad. If you want to know why your kids are messed up and why some of them are still in therapy and have issues about all this stuff after all these years, maybe it's because after 15 years, neither of you have nice things to say about each other. It's all 'well your mom is like this' and 'your dad is like that' and 'your mom did this wrong while we were married' and 'your dad did this wrong while we were married.' well, i'm sick and tired of it and I never want to hear anything like that ever again from either one of you.

If I ever hear one more negative thing about either my mom or my dad come out of either one of your mouths ever again, you can consider our relationship terminated and it will be like you never ever had a son in the first place, because I would rather have both of you dead and not be in any sort of relationship with either one of you then continue to hear the negative things you always have to say about the other one. In fact, a part of me cannot wait till both of you are finally dead so I don't have to deal with this shit ever again because even after all this time, you both still haven't realized what your negative comments about each other does to your son. Maybe I should should just kill myself and make it easier on both of you, then at my funeral, you can both continue to bad mouth each other over my rotting corpse and blame each other for why I killed myself, because it seems like badmouthing and blaming each other is what you both do best, despite both of your assertions to the contrary.

it's been 15 years now and in all that time, I've never ever heard either one of you say one nice thing about the other person and mean it. I'm sure you both wish you could go back and time and not get married to each other so you would never have had me so you wouldn't have to be reading this right now. But i'm sorry, you can't go back in time to erase your 'mistaken marriage' and thus, your mistaken children, we still exist, so you both are going to have to deal with it until i don't exist anymore. I'm sure you probably both want that as soon as possible as well, considering you both want all remembrances of your mistaken relationship with each other wiped out so you never have to remember those horrible times in your life ever again. If that's the case, then I have no problem killing myself to relieve you both of a memory of a mistake that you made so long ago. Heck, if you both had it your way and could go back in time and not marry each other that would be great because I'm sure that's what you both want. Well i could just kill myself and at least it would erase that part of the mistake you made, right? Oh yeah, I'm dead serious about this as well. Just let me know and I'll take care of it. I'll even take out a college loan to help pay for my funeral, because I'm sure you don't want to have to spend more money and time on a mistake then you already have.

related to this, why do you think i always try to stay friends and stay in contact with all of my ex-girlfriends? the reason is because I NEVER want to be like either of you when it comes to how you view your past relationship with each other. I stay in touch and am on good terms with all of them because the way you both have handled your own breakup over these past few years makes me absolutely fucking sick. I don't want to be, and will never ever be, like either one of you when it comes to this, because you have both taught me exactly how not to be with your ex's. I keep in contact and am on good terms with all my ex's to spite you, as a protest against the both of you, in regards to how you both have handled a similar situation with yourselves. maybe my relationships and yours are disanalogous enough for this criticism not to apply. obviously, i have never been married for 20 years and you guys were, but if either of you ever wondered why I still talk to phyllis or why i still talk to marie, this is why. Because I never want to be like either of you when I break up with somebody., the way you both have handled this situation over the past 15 years makes me sick, but at least you taught me how not to be, i guess for that i should be thankful.

So if you both still want to have a son, you both need to invoke the thumper rule with regards to each other at all times. What is the thumper rule you say? Well, thumper told bambi some great advice in their movie together that he got from his mom. his mom told him that if you don't have anything nice to say about somebody, don't say anything at all. From this day forward, if either of you want to continue to have a relationship with your son, you will both invoke the thumper rule with regards to each other at all times. I will no longer sit idlely by while either of you tells me what's wrong with your mother or what's wrong with your dad or why I need to keep my mother at arms length or why my dad wasn't mature enough to be a good father. You can have these opinions, there's nothing wrong with that, but if you want to continue to have a relationship with your son, you will never again tell me about any of these things, you will keep them to yourselves until you are dead because if you don't, then I will be dead to you.

And no, I don't want to talk about any of this with either of you, I just want you to remember this and practice it until I am dead. In fact, I want you both to keep this email, either put it in an email folder or print it out and put it in your wallet. I also want you to read it before every single time you both see me for the rest of your lives. I'm not joking about this either. I'm sick and tired of dealing with this shit and if it means I have to shut either one of you out of my life forever in order to accomplish this, I will do it in a heartbeat. you are both on your last straw, I am done being angered by this and will never again deal with this issue ever again because if I do, then I will never again deal with you either.


So if either of you ever cared about your son or his feelings, you will both respect your son's wishes in regards to this, but even more, you will both respect your son's parents because they are your son's parents, regardless of what you may think of them personally. This is the last time I will ever speak on this subject. hopefully, you guys value your relationship with your son enough to heed his request, even though he was in reality a mistake to begin with. if you want to continue your relationship with your mistake, you will invoke the thumper rule at all times. have a nice day.

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This coulda been the last chapter of my first real college research paper!

So I did this paper when I was a freshman at Millikin University for my honors english and seminar course, it was one of the first real papers I ever wrote and was the first college paper that one of my college professors actually liked and said I did a good job on and I'm pretty sure she gave me an A for the class and that assignment because of it.  Anyways, the paper was called, well I don't remember exactly for sure what the paper was called, but it was something like 'The Origins of the Irish Republican Army' and pretty much I traced the origin of the IRA and the events of the Easter Rebellion in 1916 all the way back to the Irish Potato Famine in 1845-1852, claiming that this deep seated hatred for Britain had started back then when many Irish potato farmers blamed British landowners and their policies for, if not causing the famine, at least exacerbating it to large proportions.  Even wikipedia says this on their page on the famine when they write 'the impact and human cost in Ireland—where one-third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food—was exacerbated by a host of political, ethnic, religious, social and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate' and later on it says that the famine 'became a rallying cry for nationalist movements,' proving my thesis when I didn't know nothing and was a simple college freshmen getting help from Emily because I didn't know how to write college papers.  Anyways, I saw this the other day, and it brought back memories for me, check it out

Mystery of Irish Potato Famine Solved

The Irish potato famine that caused mass starvation and approximately 1 million deaths in the mid-19th century was triggered by a newly identified strain of potato blight that has been christened "HERB-1," according to a new study.
An international team of molecular biologists studied the historical spread of Phytophthora infestans, a funguslike organism that devastated potato crops and led to the famine in Ireland. The precise strain of the pathogen that caused the devastating outbreak, which lasted from 1845 to 1852, had been unknown.
"We have finally discovered the identity of the exact strain that caused all this havoc," study co-author Hernán Burbano, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany, said in a statement. [Microscopic Worlds Gallery: Fascinating Fungi]
Previously, a Phytophthora strain called US-1 was thought to have triggered the potato famine, but by sequencing the genomes of preserved samples of the plant pathogen, the researchers discovered that a different strain — one that is new to science — was the real culprit.
"Both strains seem to have separated from each other only years before the first major outbreak in Europe," Burbano said.
DNA detectives
The researchers studied 11 historic samples from potato leaves that were collected about 150 years ago in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Europe and North America.
The scientists found these ancient samples, which were preserved at the Botanical State Collection Munich and the Kew Gardens in London, still had many intact pieces of DNA. In fact, the DNA quality was so good the researchers were able to sequence the entire genome of Phytophthora infestans and its host, the potato, within just a few weeks.
"The degree of DNA preservation in the herbarium samples really surprised us," study co-author Johannes Krause, a professor of paleogenetics at the University of Tübingen in Germany, said in a statement.
The decoded genomes of these historical samples were then compared with modern Phytophthora strains from Europe, Africa and the Americas. The results enabled the researchers to trace the evolution of the pathogen, including where and when the HERB-1 and US-1 strains likely diverged.
According to the study, Phytophthora infestans originated in Mexico's Toluca Valley. When Europeans and Americans first came to Mexico in the 16th century, the pathogen experienced increased genetic diversity, and in the early 1800s, the HERB-1 Phytophthora strain emerged and was brought out of Mexico, the researchers said.
By the summer of 1845, the HERB-1 strain had arrived at European ports, and the potato disease spread throughout Ireland and the United Kingdom, causing the Irish potato famine. In the 20th century, as new varieties of potatoes were introduced, the HERB-1 strain was eventually replaced by the US-1 Phytophthora strain, the researchers said.
Evolving blight
This evolutionary change may have been spurred by the introduction of new crop breeding methods, which suggests that breeding techniques may affect the genetic makeup of plant pathogens.
"Perhaps this strain became extinct when the first resistant potato varieties were bred at the beginning of the 20th century," lead author Kentaro Yoshida, a researcher at The Sainsbury Laboratory in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. "What is for certain is that these findings will greatly help us to understand the dynamics of emerging pathogens."
The new study marks the first time scientists have decoded the genome of a plant pathogen and its host from dried herbarium samples.
"Herbaria represent a rich and untapped source from which we can learn a tremendous amount about the historical distribution of plants and their pests — and also about the history of the people who grew these plants," Yoshida said.
Yoshida and his colleagues report their findings in a paper that was submitted May 17 for publication in the journal eLife.
 

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Thursday, May 23, 2013

Habermas on Horkheimer on Schopenhauer's subjective objectivism

So I totally agree with these quotes that I"m putting below

'The individuated will is base only when it turns itself against others; it becomes good when, through compassion, it recognizes its true identity with all other beings.'

- Schopenhauer did get pretty cool like this later on in his will and representation

'On the Schopenhauerian interpretation...compassion cannot assume the role of dialectical mediation between individual and society, between equal respect for all and the solidarity of each with all.  Here is is solely a matter of the abstract self-overcoming of individuality, of the dissolution of the individual in an all-encompassing oneness' 

but Horkheimer disagrees with this, because

'Those who at the Last Judgement come, one after the other, before the eyes of God as unrepresentable individuals stripped of the mantle of worldly goods and honors - and hence as equals - in the expectation of receiving a fair judgment, experience themselves as fully individuated beings for their actions.'

later on, Habermas criticizes Horkheimer when he writes that

'this impulse confirms Horkheimer in the view that the reconciling potential of solidarity with those who suffer can be realized only if individuals renounce themselves as individuals.  He fails to see that the danger of a nationalistic distortion of the identificatory bond with the nation arises precisely at the moment when false solidarity permits individuals to be subsumed into the collectivity.'

Habermas talking about Horkheimer now and bashing the reductive tendencies of analytic philsophy

'He also recognizes that we have to take into account the pragmatic dimension of language use, for the context-transcending truth-claim of speech cannot be grasped from the blinkered perspective of a semantics that reduces utterances to propositions'


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Sunday, May 19, 2013

Heaven's All the Rage Today, Except in Church of course!

I knew everything in this article was true the night of the mystic-gnostic revelation night, but this just confirms it for me.  Especially those last three lines in the article, which are listed below, also with some of my other favorite quotes from the article.

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong." - Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil towards health and sickness-Zarathustra's morality of going over by going under

"many ordinary pastors avoid the topic altogether out of embarrassment, indifference or fear, scholars and pastors say." - how sad is this, when it should be the most talked about thing, instead, it's the the least! truly, the realm of God is all around you and within you, if you would only have eyes to see and ears to hear

"Bell ignited a firestorm two years ago when he challenged the teaching that only Christians go to heaven in “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”
The book angered many members of Bell’s church as well as many in the evangelical establishment. He subsequently resigned." - this however, is one of the saddest things of all and really chaps my hide and is really my entire motivation for leaving the catholic church and realizing from an early age that there was something seriously wrong here, and this goes along with this next quotation from the article

“Conservative Christians aren’t the only ones going to heaven," said Price, "and that makes them mad." - WHAT?!? Are you serious? Love your enemies, pray for those who treat you badly, wow, do these people even read or even know anything about the damn book they supposidley revere and is supposed to be inerrant and a piece of God Itself on Earth? This just says everything about conservative christianity doesn't it!







Proof of heaven popular, except with the church

By John Blake, CNN
“God, help me!”
Eben Alexander shouted and flailed as hospital orderlies tried to hold him in place. But no one could stop his violent seizures, and the 54-year-old neurosurgeon went limp as his horrified wife looked on.
That moment could have been the end. But Alexander says it was just the beginning. He found himself soaring toward a brilliant white light tinged with gold into “the strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen.”
Alexander calls that world heaven, and he describes his journey in “Proof of Heaven,” which has been on The New York Times bestseller list for 27 weeks. Alexander says he used to be an indifferent churchgoer who ignored stories about the afterlife. But now he knows there’s truth to those stories, and there’s no reason to fear death.
“Not one bit,” he said. “It’s a transition; it’s not the end of anything. We will be with our loved ones again.”
Heaven used to be a mystery, a place glimpsed only by mystics and prophets. But popular culture is filled with firsthand accounts from all sorts of people who claim that they, too, have proofs of heaven after undergoing near-death experiences.
Yet the popularity of these stories raises another question: Why doesn’t the church talk about heaven anymore?
Preachers used to rhapsodize about celestial streets of gold while congregations sang joyful hymns like “I’ll Fly Away” and “When the Roll is Called up Yonder.” But the most passionate accounts of heaven now come from people outside the church or on its margins.
Most seminaries don’t teach courses on heaven; few big-name pastors devote much energy to preaching or writing about the subject; many ordinary pastors avoid the topic altogether out of embarrassment, indifference or fear, scholars and pastors say.
“People say that the only time they hear about heaven is when they go to a funeral,” said Gary Scott Smith, author of “Heaven in the American Imagination” and a history professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
Talk of heaven shouldn’t wait, though, because it answers a universal question: what happens when we die, says the Rev. John Price, author of “Revealing Heaven,” which offers a Christian perspective of near-death experiences.
“Ever since people started dying, people have wondered, where did they go? Where are they now? Is this what happens to me?” said Price, a retired pastor and hospital chaplain.
A little girl’s revelation
Price didn’t always think heaven was so important. He scoffed at reports of near-death experiences because he thought they reduced religion to ghost stories. Besides, he was too busy helping grieving families to speculate about the afterlife.
His attitude changed, though, after a young woman visited his Episcopal church one Sunday with her 3-year-old daughter.
Price had last seen the mother three years earlier. She had brought her then-7-week-old daughter to the church for baptism. Price hadn't heard from her since. But when she reappeared, she told Price an amazing story.
She had been feeding her daughter a week after the baptism when milk dribbled out of the infant's mouth and her eyes rolled back into her head. The woman rushed her daughter to the emergency room, where she was resuscitated and treated for a severe upper respiratory infection.
Three years later, the mother was driving past the same hospital with her daughter when the girl said, “Look, Mom, that’s where Jesus brought me back to you.”
“The mother nearly wrecked her car,” Price said. “She never told her baby about God, Jesus, her near-death experience, nothing. All that happened when the girl was 8 weeks old. How could she remember that?”
When Price started hearing similar experiences from other parishioners, he felt like a fraud. He realized that he didn’t believe in heaven, even though it was part of traditional Christian doctrine.
He started sharing near-death stories he heard with grieving families and dejected hospital workers who had lost patients. He told them dying people had glimpsed a wonderful world beyond this life.
The stories helped people, Price said, and those who've had similar experiences of heaven should “shout them from the rooftops.”
“I’ve gone around to many churches to talk about this, and the venue they give me is just stuffed,” he said. “People are really hungry for it.”
Why pastors are afraid of heaven
Many pastors, though, don’t want to touch the subject because it’s too dangerous, says Lisa Miller, author of “Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife.”
Miller cites the experience of Rob Bell, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors.
John Price ignored heaven until he met a woman with an amazing story.
Bell ignited a firestorm two years ago when he challenged the teaching that only Christians go to heaven in “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”
The book angered many members of Bell’s church as well as many in the evangelical establishment. He subsequently resigned.
“Farewell, Rob Bell,” one prominent evangelical tweeted.
“It’s a tough topic for a pastor,” said Miller, a former religion columnist for the Washington Post. “If you get too literal, you can risk sounding too silly. If you don’t talk about it, you’re evading one of the most important questions about theology and why people come to church.”
If pastors do talk about stories of near-death experiences, they can also be seen as implying that conservative doctrine – only those who confess their faith in Jesus get to heaven, while others suffer eternal damnation – is wrong, scholars and pastors say.
Many of those who share near-death stories aren’t conservative Christians but claim that they, too, have been welcomed by God to heaven.
“Conservative Christians aren’t the only ones going to heaven," said Price, "and that makes them mad."
There was a time, though, when the church talked a lot more about the afterlife.
Puritan pastors in the 17th and 18th centuries often preached about heaven, depicting it as an austere, no fuss-place where people could commune with God.
African-American slaves sang spirituals about heaven like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” They often depicted it as a place of ultimate payback: Slaves would escape their humiliation and, in some cases, rule over their former masters.
America’s fixation with heaven may have peaked around the Civil War. The third most popular book in 18th century America – behind the Bible and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” – was "Gates Ajar," written in the wake of the war, Miller says.
The 1868 novel was “The Da Vinci Code” of its day, Miller says. It revolved around a grieving woman who lost her brother in the Civil War. A sympathetic aunt assures her that her brother is waiting in heaven, a bucolic paradise where people eat sumptuous meals, dogs sun themselves on porches and people laugh with their loved ones.
“This was a vision of heaven that was so appealing to hundreds of thousands of people who had lost people in the Civil War,” Miller said.
Americans needed heaven because life was so hard: People didn’t live long, infant mortality was high, and daily life was filled with hard labor.
“People were having 12 kids, and they would outlive 11 of them,” said Smith, author of "Heaven in the American Imagination." “Death was ever-present.”
The church eventually stopped talking about heaven, though, for a variety of reasons: the rise of science; the emergence of the Social Gospel, a theology that encouraged churches to create heaven on Earth by fighting for social justice; and the growing affluence of Americans. (After all, who needs heaven when you have a flat-screen TV, a smartphone and endless diversions?)
But then a voice outside the church rekindled Americans' interest in the afterlife. A curious 23-year-old medical student would help make heaven cool again.
The father of near-death experiences
Raymond Moody had been interested in the afterlife long before it was fashionable.
He was raised in a small Georgia town during World War II where death always seemed just around the corner. He constantly heard stories about soldiers who never returned from war. His father was a surgeon who told him stories of bringing back patients from the brink of death. In college, he was enthralled when he read one of the oldest accounts of a near-death experience, a soldier’s story told by Socrates in Plato’s “Republic.”
His fascination with the afterlife was sealed one day when he heard a speaker who would change his life.
The speaker was George Ritchie, a psychiatrist. Moody would say later of Ritchie, “He had that look of someone who had just finished a long session of meditation and didn’t have a care in the world.”
Moody sat in the back of a fraternity room as Ritchie told his story.
It was December 1943, and Ritchie was in basic training with the U.S. Army at Camp Barkeley, Texas. He contracted pneumonia and was placed in the hospital infirmary, where his temperature spiked to 107. The medical staff piled blankets on top of Ritchie’s shivering body, but he was eventually pronounced dead.
“I could hear the doctor give the order to prep me for the morgue, which was puzzling, because I had the sensation of still being alive,” Ritchie said.
He even remembers rising from a hospital gurney to talk to the hospital staff. But the doctors and nurses walked right through him when he approached them.
He then saw his lifeless body in a room and began weeping when he realized he was dead. Suddenly, the room brightened “until it seemed as though a million welding torches were going off around me.”
He says he was commanded to stand because he was being ushered into the presence of the Son of God. There, he saw every minute detail of his life flash by, including his C-section birth. He then heard a voice that asked, “What have you done with your life?"
After hearing Ritchie’s story, Moody decided what he was going to do with his life: investigate the afterlife.

Raymond Moody revived interest in heaven by studying near-death experiences.
He started collecting stories of people who had been pronounced clinically dead but were later revived. He noticed that the stories all shared certain details: traveling through a tunnel, greeting family and friends who had died, and meeting a luminous being that gave them a detailed review of their life and asked them whether they had spent their life loving others.
Moody called his stories “near-death experiences,” and in 1977 he published a study of them in a book, “Life after Life.” His book has sold an estimated 13 million copies.
Today, he is a psychiatrist who calls himself “an astronaut of inner space.” He is considered the father of the near-death-experience phenomenon.
He says science, not religion, resurrected the afterlife. Advances in cardiopulmonary resuscitation meant that patients who would have died were revived, and many had stories to share.
“Now that we have these means for snatching people back from the edge, these stories are becoming more amazing,” said Moody, who has written a new book, “Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife.”
“A lot of medical doctors know about this from their patients, but they’re just afraid to talk about it in public.”
Ritchie’s story was told through a Christian perspective. But Moody says stories about heaven transcend religion. He's collected them from Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and atheists.
“A lot of people talk about encountering a being of light,” he said. “Christians call it Christ. Jewish people say it’s an angel. I’ve gone to different continents, and you can hear the same thing in China, India and Japan about meeting a being of complete love and compassion.”
It’s not just what people see in the afterlife that makes these stories so powerful, he says. It’s how they live their lives once they survive a near-death experience.
Many people are never the same, Moody says. They abandon careers that were focused on money or power for more altruistic pursuits.
“Whatever they had been chasing, whether it's power, money or fame, their experience teaches them that what this (life) is all about is teaching us to love,” Moody said.
Under 'the gaze of a God'
Alexander, the author of “Proof of Heaven,” seems to fit Moody's description. He’s a neurosurgeon, but he spends much of time now speaking about his experience instead of practicing medicine.
He'd heard strange stories over the years of revived heart attack patients traveling to wonderful landscapes, talking to dead relatives and even meeting God. But he never believed those stories. He was a man of science, an Episcopalian who attended church only on Easter and Christmas.
That changed one November morning in 2008 when he was awakened in his Lynchburg, Virginia, home by a bolt of pain shooting down his spine. He was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, a disease so rare, he says, it afflicts only one in 10 million adults.
After his violent seizures, he lapsed into a coma — and there was little hope for his survival. But he awakened a week later with restored health and a story to tell.
He says what he experienced was “too beautiful for words.” The heaven he describes is not some disembodied hereafter. It’s a physical place filled with achingly beautiful music, waterfalls, lush fields, laughing children and running dogs.
In his book, he describes encountering a transcendent being he alternately calls “the Creator” or “Om.” He says he never saw the being's face or heard its voice; its thoughts were somehow spoken to him.
“It understood humans, and it possessed the qualities we possess, only in infinitely greater measure. It knew me deeply and overflowed with qualities that all my life I’ve always associated with human beings and human beings alone: warmth, compassion, pathos … even irony and humor.”
Holly Alexander says her husband couldn’t forget the experience.
“He was driven to write 12 hours a day for three years,” she said. “It began as a diary. Then he thought he would write a medical paper; then he realized that medical science could not explain it all.”
“Proof of Heaven” debuted at the top of The New York Times bestseller list and has sold 1.6 million copies, according to its publisher.
Alexander says he didn’t know how to deal with his otherworldly journey at first.
“I was my own worst skeptic,” he said. “I spent an immense amount of time trying to come up with ways my brain might have done this.”
Conventional medical science says consciousness is rooted in the brain, Alexander says. His medical records indicated that his neocortex — the part of the brain that controls thought, emotion and language — had ceased functioning while he was in a coma.
Alexander says his neocortex was “offline” and his brain “wasn’t working at all” during his coma. Yet he says he reasoned, experienced emotions, embarked on a journey — and saw heaven.
“Those implications are tremendous beyond description,” Alexander wrote. “My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness; that human experience continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us.”
Skeptics say Alexander’s experience can be explained by science, not the supernatural.
They cite experiments where neurologists in Switzerland induced out-of-body experiences in a woman suffering from epilepsy through electrical stimulation of the right side of her brain.
Michael Shermer, founder and publisher of Skeptic magazine, says the U.S. Navy also conducted studies with pilots that reproduced near-death experiences. Pilots would often black out temporarily when their brains were deprived of oxygen during training, he says.
These pilots didn’t go to heaven, but they often reported seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel, a floating sensation and euphoria when they returned to consciousness, Shermer says.
“Whatever experiences these people have is actually in their brain. It’s not out there in heaven,” Shermer said.
Some people who claim to see heaven after dying didn’t really die, says Shermer, author of “Why People Believe Weird Things.”
“They’re called near-death experiences for a reason: They’re near death but not dead,” Shermer said. “In that fuzzy state, it’s not dissimilar to being asleep and awakened where people have all sorts of transitory experiences that seem very real.”
The boy who saw Jesus
Skeptics may scoff at a story like Alexander’s, but their popularity has made a believer out of another group: the evangelical publishing industry.
While the church may be reluctant to talk about heaven, publishers have become true believers. The sales figures for books on heaven are divine: Don Piper’s “90 Minutes in Heaven” has sold 5 million copies. And “Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back” is the latest publishing juggernaut.

Colton Burpo says he saw heaven and describes the color of Jesus' eyes.
“Heaven is for Real” has been on The New York Times bestseller list for 126 consecutive weeks and sold 8 million copies, according to its publisher.
The story is told from the perspective of Colton Burpo, who was just 4 when he slipped into unconsciousness while undergoing emergency surgery for a burst appendix.
Colton says he floated above his body during the operation and soared to heaven, where he met Jesus. Todd Burpo, Colton’s father, says he was skeptical about his son’s story until his son described meeting a great-grandfather and a miscarried baby sister — something no one had ever told him about.
Todd Burpo is a pastor, but he says he avoided preaching about heaven because he didn’t know enough about the subject.
“It’s pretty awkward,” he said. “Here I am the pastor, but I’m not the teacher on the subject. My son is teaching me.”
Colton is now 13 and says he still remembers meeting Jesus in heaven.
“He had brown hair, a brown beard to match and a smile brighter than any smile I’ve ever seen,’’ he said. “His eyes were sea-blue, and they were just, wow.”
Colton says he’s surprised by the success of his book, which has been translated into 35 languages. There’s talk of a movie, too.
“It’s totally a God thing,” he said.
Alexander, author of “Proof of Heaven,” seems to have the same attitude: His new life is a gift. He’s already writing another book on his experience.
“Once I realized what my journey was telling me," he said, "I knew I had to tell the story.”
He now attends church but says his faith is not dogmatic.
“I realized very strongly that God loves all of God’s children,” he said. “Any religion that claims to be the true one and the rest of them are wrong is wrong.”
Central to his story is something he says he heard in heaven.
During his journey, he says he was accompanied by an angelic being who gave him a three-part message to share on his return.
When he heard the message, he says it went through him “like a wind” because he instantly knew it was true.
It’s the message he takes today to those who wonder who, or what, they will encounter after death.
The angel told him:
“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”
“You have nothing to fear.”
“There is nothing you can do wrong."

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Thursday, May 16, 2013

Derrida's Duality

SO i was reading habermas transcendence from within, transcendence in this world article, and I decided that I needed to start reading his stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry (plato.stanford.edu) and from that, I found out that he debated with Derrida and that they were friends up until the latter's death in 2004 from cancer.  since i've never studied Derrida and I've heard so much about him, I finally decided to plunge through his Stanford entry as well and I'm glad I did, especially the part I just read about the separation between the hearer and the speaker in a person's mind, maybe this is the beginning and the secret of duality that I've been searching and looking for for 15 years now, since first reading Kryon's book, it's definitely food for thought but I thought I would share with you all my crib notes on derrida that i'm making my timelines for my exams for, enjoy, i'll also include my habermas one's below, which I've created today and which I will add to over the next few days, eureka!


Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) French-Jewish – founder of deconstructionism, part of new philosophical movement ‘incorruptibles’ with Foucault and Deleuze that emphasize refinement paradox and aporia [which means criticism and skepticism], subject and machine are internal to one another yet remain distinct [thus, same and different at same time] because no one is able to separate irreplaceable singularity and machine-like repeatability (Derrida’s “iterability”) into two substances that stand outside of one another or reduce one to the other so that we would have one pure substance (with attributes or modifications) so it’s the limit between the subject and machine is both indeterminate and divisible, is this a kind of radical wholism?, all events are both unique and repeatable at the same time with present future and past, experience of the same (I am thinking about myself) is the experience of the other (insofar as I think about myself I am thinking of someone or something else at the same time), purity is illusion because everything infects and contaminates everything else, ‘Babelization’ or internal translation of idioms [general shorthand labels for associated and similar groups ex: Washington meaning whole USA government or Hollywood meaning whole USA film industry] within specific language prove that pure objective prescriptivist language theory is false and should be criticized,  responsible guardians of heritage of Kantian transcendental idealism so Neo-Kantian concern with necessary and foundational conditions of experience, Derrida’s psychological duality is that at the very moment when I silently speak to myself in my mind, it must be the case that there is a miniscule temporal gap that differentiates me into both the speaker and into the hearer at almost the same time so that I am differentiated from myself because I must be both hearer as well as speaker,

 Jürgen Habermas (1929-) German – Greatest 2nd Generation Frankfurt School Critical Theorist, critical theory is not unique because it endorses this or that theory or method but because it unites the normative with the empirical, philosophical fallout from Heideggar’s silence about rejecting Nazism led him to Anglo-Analytical Philosophy especially pragmatism and participatory democracy, methodological atheism of radical demythologization, counterculture student protests of the 60’s led him to criticize the elitist technocracy of scientific political and bureaucratic experts because by reducing all questions about goodness and morality and policy to these experts, these elitists eliminate the need for public democratic dialogue about values which thereby depoliticizes the non-expert population, but this doesn’t necessarily lead to oppressive social domination like Horkheimer and Adorno thought, ideal speech situation

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Religiously Moral Anachronisms in the Post-modern Post-metaphysical Instant Information Age

So what does the Bible tell us about what is sexually and morally correct in regard to this person? It's hard to use moral codes created for societies thousands of years ago and apply them to the increasingly complex modern world.  The only thing we can do is extract the moral values, the general and universal moral concepts like justice health and cleanliness, not the specific moral laws, 'thou shalt lay with a women who is menstrating or they will be impure and must be stoned to death' from these antiquated notions and try to apply them to today.  But we must adjust the universal we learn from the particular Biblical situation, not try to fit the ancient situation into this modern situation, which I believe is what is happening in the glbt political debate today, most specifically all the ethical arguments against lgbt that are coming from the Right.  It seems the tide is turning, but it just burns my hide when I encounter people trying to look at ancient situations and when they look at how different the modern situation is, they automatically say it's bad and immoral simply because it does not fit into what the ancient situation actually was, the only real priority the ancient situation has over the modern one is that the former is an example found in a book that their community raised them to believe was sacred and infallible and yadda yadda.  When if you would actually penetrate the text a little deeper, you would find a whole infiniverse of deeper meanings and values that would change your whole attitude about your own existence, the existence of others, and the infinixistence of the entire infiniverse.  Talk about not seeing the entire infini-forest from the small branches which are barely even a tree.

Parents sue South Carolina for surgically making child female

By Holly Yan and Joe Sutton, CNN
May 15, 2013 -- Updated 1552 GMT (2352 HKT)
(CNN) -- The adoptive parents of a child born with male and female organs say South Carolina mutilated their son by choosing a gender and having his male genitalia surgically removed.
The surgery took place when the child was 16 months old and a ward of the state, according to a lawsuit filed by the parents against three doctors and several members of the South Carolina Department of Social Services.
The child's biological mother was deemed unfit, and the biological father had apparently abandoned him, according to the suit. So others made the decision.
The child, now 8 years old, feels more like a boy and "wants to be a normal boy," said Pamela Crawford, the boy's adoptive mother.
"It's become more and more difficult, just as his identity has become more clearly male, the idea that mutilation was done to him had become more and more real," she said in a video released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is assisting in the case.
"There was no medical reason that this decision had to be made at this time."
Marilyn Matheus, a spokeswoman for the South Carolina Department of Social Services, said the agency does not have any comment on the pending litigation.
The defendants named in the suit also include doctors from Medical University of South Carolina and Greenville Memorial Hospital.
Sandy Dees, a spokeswoman for the Greenville Health System, said she could not comment because of the litigation.
Assigned to be a girl, but identifying as a boy
The child, identified in the lawsuit as "M.C.," refuses to be called a girl and lives as a boy. His family, friends, school, religious leaders and pediatrician support his identity.
"We just let him follow his instincts as much as we can," his adoptive father, John Mark Crawford, said in the video.
Pamela Crawford said performing gender assignment surgery on a baby robbed her child of the ability to make the decision for himself.
"I would have never made the decision to choose the gender either way," she said. "What I would have been working with is how do we preserve as much functioning in either direction because we can't know what this child's gender identity is going to be."
The lawsuit claims doctors at a state hospital and Department of Social Services workers "decided to remove M.C.'s healthy genital tissue and radically restructure his reproductive organs in order to make his body appear to be female."
The suit says the surgery violated the 14th Amendment, which says that no state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."
The suit also asks for "compensatory damages in an amount to be determined at trial."
But the adoptive father said the real intent of the lawsuit "is just to uphold these constitutional principles -- integrity of a person's body, and some kind of due process for infants where people around them in power are considering doing surgeries like this."
Pamela Crawford agreed.
"I would give anything for this to not have been done to our child," she said. "I don't want it to happen to any more kids."

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Thursday, May 09, 2013

En Sabuh Nur's Reign has Already Begun! Xavier's Dreamers Unite!

 

Are bionic superhumans on the horizon?

By Ramez Naam, Special to CNN
April 25, 2013 -- Updated 1227 GMT (2027 HKT)
Editor's note: Ramez Naam is the author of "More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement,"and "Nexus," a near-future thriller about a technology that can boost and link human minds, and the struggle to control it.
(CNN) -- We're in the midst of a bionic revolution, yet most of us don't know it.
Around 220,000 people worldwide already walk around with cochlear implants -- devices worn around the ear that turn sound waves into electrical impulses shunted directly into the auditory nerve.
Tens of thousands of people have been implanted with deep brain stimulators, devices that send an electrode tunneling several inches in the brain. Deep brain stimulators are used to control Parkinson's disease, though lately they've also been tested -- with encouraging results -- in use against severe depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.
The most obvious bionics are those that replace limbs. Olympian "Blade Runner" Oscar Pistorius, now awaiting trial for the alleged murder of his girlfriend, made a splash with his Cheetah carbon fiber prostheses. Yet those are a relatively simple technology -- a curved piece of slightly springy, super-strong material. In the digital age, we're seeing more sophisticated limbs.
Consider the thought-controlled bionic leg that Zac Vawter used to climb all 103 floors of Chicago's Willis Tower. Or the nerve-controlled bionic hand that Iraq war veteran Glen Lehman had attached after the loss of his original hand.
Or the even more sophisticated i-limb Ultra, an artificial hand with five independently articulating artificial fingers. Those limbs don't just react mechanically to pressure. They actually respond to the thoughts and intentions of their owners, flexing, extending, gripping, and releasing on mental command.
The age when prostheses were largely inert pieces of wood, metal, and plastic is passing. Advances in microprocessors, in techniques to interface digital technology with the human nervous system, and in battery technology to allow prostheses to pack more power with less weight are turning replacement limbs into active parts of the human body.
In some cases, they're not even part of the body at all. Consider the case of Cathy Hutchinson. In 1997, Cathy had a stroke, leaving her without control of her arms. Hutchinson volunteered for an experimental procedure that could one day help millions of people with partial or complete paralysis. She let researchers implant a small device in the part of her brain responsible for motor control. With that device, she is able to control an external robotic arm by thinking about it.
That, in turn, brings up an interesting question: If the arm isn't physically attached to her body, how far away could she be and still control it? The answer is at least thousands of miles. In animal studies, scientists have shown that a monkey with a brain implant can control a robot arm 7,000 miles away. The monkey's mental signals were sent over the internet, from Duke University in North Carolina, to the robot arm in Japan. In this day and age, distance is almost irrelevant.
The superhuman frontier
The 7,000-mile-away prosthetic arm makes an important point: These new prostheses aren't just going to restore missing human abilities. They're going to enhance our abilities, giving us powers we never had before, and augmenting other capabilities we have. While the current generation of prostheses is still primitive, we can already see this taking shape when a monkey moves a robotic arm on the other side of the planet just by thinking about it.
Other research is pointing to enhancements to memory and decision making.
The hippocampus is a small, seahorse-shaped part of the brain that's essential in forming new memories. If it's damaged -- by an injury to the head, for example -- people start having difficulty forming new long-term memories. In the most extreme cases, this can lead to the complete inability to form new long-term memories, as in the film Memento. Working to find a way to repair this sort of brain damage, researchers in 2011 created a "hippocampus chip" that can replace damaged brain tissue. When they implanted it in rats with a damaged hippocampus, they found that not only could their chip repair damaged memory -- it could improve the rats' ability to learn new things.
Nor is memory the end of it. Another study, in 2012, demonstrated that we can boost intelligence -- at least one sort -- in monkeys. Scientists at Wake Forest University implanted specialized brain chips in a set of monkeys and trained those monkeys to perform a picture-matching game. When the implant was activated, it raised their scores by an average of 10 points on a 100-point scale. The implant makes monkeys smarter.
From disabled to super-capable
Both of those technologies for boosting memory and intelligence are in very early stages, in small animal studies only, and years (or possibly decades) away from wide use in humans. Still, they make us wonder -- what happens when it's possible to improve on the human body and mind?
The debate has started already, of course. Oscar Pistorius had to fight hard for inclusion in the Olympics. Many objected that his carbon fiber prostheses gave him a competitive advantage. He was able -- with the help of doctors and biomedical engineers -- to make a compelling case that his Cheetah blades didn't give him any advantage on the field. But how long will that be true? How long until we have prostheses (not to mention drugs and genetic therapies) that make athletes better in their sports?
But the issue is much, much wider than professional sports. We may care passionately about the integrity of the Olympics or professional cycling or so on, but they only directly affect a very small number of us. In other areas of life -- in the workforce in particular -- enhancement technology might affect all of us.
When it's possible to make humans smarter, sharper, and faster, how will that affect us? Will the effect be mostly positive, boosting our productivity and the rate of human innovation? Or will it be just another pressure to compete at work? Who will be able to afford these technologies? Will anyone be able to have their body, and more importantly, their brain upgraded? Or will only the rich have access to these enhancements?
We have a little while to consider these questions, but we ought to start. The technology will sneak its way into our lives, starting with people with disabilities, the injured, and the ill. It'll improve their lives in ways that are unquestionably good. And then, one day, we'll wake up and realize that we're doing more than restoring lost function. We're enhancing it.
Superhuman technology is on the horizon. Time to start thinking about what that means for us.

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Monday, May 06, 2013

Great Article about Normative Equivalence between Islamic Terrorism and Chicago's Gang Violence

I think it's sad that if this was happening in a white neighborhood or city with a predominately white population, I bet more would be done in order to try to prevent it, but because it's black people in predominately black neighborhood, nobody seems to care.  Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm not, how sad is that. But why aren't we going into these high crime areas with armies of social workers, special education teachers, job training specialists, police officers, etc. and really making a concerted effort to stop this violence and lack of education, which is affecting a whole generation of black children who can't even go to school without thinking they may not make it home that day.  Just another example of how the priorities in this country are totally messed up.

Treat Chicago gangs as terrorists

By LZ Granderson, CNN Contributor
April 24, 2013 -- Updated 1919 GMT (0319 HKT)
Editor's note: LZ Granderson, who writes a weekly column for CNN.com, was named journalist of the year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and was a 2011 Online Journalism Award finalist for commentary. He is a senior writer and columnist for ESPN the Magazine and ESPN.com. Follow him on Twitter: @locs_n_laughs.
(CNN) -- You know things in Chicago are bad when 70 murders in the first quarter can be seen as a good thing. But context is everything: Last year at this time there had been more than 120 murders, so I guess we should thank God for small favors.
It seems inconceivable that the city President Barack Obama calls home is also the city where his family may be least safe. Just this Monday a 15-year-old boy was found shot dead in a backyard only four blocks from the president's house.
What's responsible for the bloodshed? Gang violence, as usual. Police estimate that of the 532 murders in 2012 -- nearly 1.5 a day -- about 80 percent were gang related. And yet, despite that rather staggering statistic, the national outcry is muted at best -- nothing, to say the least, like the kind we saw last week in Boston. What is it about the word "gang" that brings out the apathy in us? Would we view Chicago differently if we called the perpetrators something else?
I'm not saying the people of Boston do not deserve our sympathy; they do. Nor am I suggesting the apprehension of Boston terror suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not essential. But how do we explain our habit of greeting terrorists with 24-hour news coverage and relentless wrath while overlooking the gangs that terrorize our streets daily -- as if terrorism were only an enemy state and not a concept.
The murder numbers may be slightly better in Chicago, but they do not fully communicate the city's state of siege. In February CNN reported that some children living in gang-ridden parts of the city carry guns because, to them, getting caught and serving time for possession of a gun is better than getting caught without one and dying.
Last month, city officials announced the closure of 54 "under-resourced" schools, which will force some kids to walk across warring gang territory to get to school. For example, in the seven blocks between George Manierre Elementary and Jenner Elementary there are three gangs fighting over territory: Black P Stones, Conservative Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples.
If it all sounds scary, it's only because it is.
And if the name attached to all of this violence were al-Qaeda instead of Gangster Disciples; or if instead of "gang violence" the bloodshed were called "terrorism;" or if instead of calling the people spreading fear and mayhem gangs we were to call them what they really are -- terrorists -- the nation would demand more be done.
After all, if children are afraid to walk to school because they might get killed or if residents are afraid to identify perpetrators for fear of retaliation, I think it's safe to say they are being terrorized.
What seems like a linguistic shell game is really an exercise in empathy. The thought of elementary school kids walking across areas of a city controlled by three terrorist groups becomes unacceptable to everyone, not just their parents. Hearing that 25 Chicagoans were shot in one weekend becomes a threat to national security, and not just the mayor's problem.
The story of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, who was caught in the crossfire of a turf war days after performing during the presidential inauguration, was of interest briefly but her story has since faded. She, too, died just a few blocks from the Obama's home. Jonylah Watkins, a 6-month-old girl, was shot in March while sitting on the lap of her father, Jonathan, the intended target and a gang member.
Last week, millions watched as an entire city was shut down to look for one guy. Every major news station was covering the pursuit of one guy. We all know the face and relatives of this one guy. And it's all because he is an alleged terrorist. But more American were murdered in the south and west sides of Chicago than there were U.S. servicemen killed in Afghanistan last year, and yet for some reason we don't view those neighborhoods as terrorized.
Last week, Abdella Ahmad Tounisi was arrested at O'Hare Airport because the FBI believed he was on his way to Syria to join a terrorist organization. Tounisi reportedly thought he was in contact with a recruiter for a jihadist militant group, but it was actually an FBI agent. I would love to see the FBI's anti-terrorism resources used in that matter to stop would-be gang members from flooding the streets of the country's third-largest city. Maybe Cornelius German, the boy found dead down the street from Obama's house, would still be alive.
Maybe Pendleton, who was playing in a park with her friends, would still be alive. Maybe Watkins, who was sitting on her father's lap, would have had a chance to live.
Their deaths wouldn't be considered "Chicago's problem" if authorities suspected terrorists were involved. But it's "gang-related," so...

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Thursday, May 02, 2013

Real Proof of Leftist or Liberal Media Bias

This is why I try to watch FoxNews and CNN and just about never watch MSNBC, to get the truth, you have to hear both sides of the story, and some stories are more important than others, I guess.

Skipping 'Controversial Stings' of the Left

Brent Bozell's column is released twice a week.


The Washington Post reported something surprising on April 29 — a hidden-camera expose by pro-life advocates. On the front page of the Metro section, the Post reported how a veteran D.C. abortion doctor named Cesare Santangelo told a 24-week pregnant woman that in the unlikely event that an abortion resulted in a live birth, "we would not help it."
"(T)echnically, you know, legally, we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive, but it probably wouldn't," he said in a way to reassure the woman who was working for the undercover group Live Action.
The legal technicality is the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, to insure that that any baby "mistakenly" born during an abortion has all the rights of any other living, breathing human. When it passed and was signed by President Bush, the networks also completely censored that.
It tells you something about the precarious nature of America's soul that such a law even needs to exist.
Live Action also released an expose of another abortion clinic, Dr. Emily's Women's Health Center in the Bronx. The Live Action mother in that video asked what happens if a child is accidentally born during an attempt at a late-term abortion. An unnamed staffer advised on the video to "flush" the baby down the toilet if he or she was delivered at home before the final stage of the two- or three-day abortion procedure. "If it comes out, then it comes out. Flush it.. ... if anything, you know, put it in a bag or something or somewhere and bring it to us."
When Live Action's undercover investigator asked what the clinic would do if, after the abortion, the baby was moving, the counselor responded: "If it did come out in one piece, it's very small. So they would still have to put it in a container — like, a jar — with solution and send it to the lab." But if the baby is breathing or twitching? "The solution will make it stop. It's not going to be moving around in the jar. That's the whole purpose of the solution."
All on tape. This callus murder plot sounds all too familiar to those following the just-concluded trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia. It is the culture of death on display — pure evil.
The networks adore hidden-camera stories when the targets are conservative. Last September, they gave 88 minutes when Mother Jones reporting Mitt Romney was secretly recorded dismissing the "47 percent" that would never vote for him, which probably cost him the election.
When Mother Jones recently leaked video of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's team talking about the vulnerabilities of actress Ashley Judd as a Democratic opponent, ABC and NBC reported it in the evening and then again the next morning, with CBS just catching up in the morning. ABC's Jim Avila said the Republican leader's "private and politically embarrassing strategy session" showed a "cutthroat attack on a Hollywood opponent."
Undercover videos by conservatives — Those don't deserve the light of day. When Live Action exposed Planned Parenthood clinics in New Jersey and Virginia in 2011, with its clinic staff advising a "pimp" on how to evade the law with underage prostitutes, these three networks simply pretended the tapes didn't exist. When James O'Keefe and his activists exposed the leftist pro-Obama group ACORN with hidden cameras in 2009, the networks waited for days to touch it and then aired just one solitary story (ABC, CBS) or three (NBC) once Congress moved to defund them. But Mother Jones is somehow a non-ideological outfit of journalistic integrity.
The Washington Post explained, "Live Action was founded by Rose, a former associate of conservative activist James O'Keefe, whose controversial stings contributed to the demise of the liberal group ACORN." But on April 11, the Post wrote a story celebrating how David Corn at Mother Jones, the "liberal-leaning magazine" was striking "audio gold." They didn't talk about "controversial stings." The Post rounded up other liberal journalists to laud Corn as "passionate, innovative and always at the edge."
The Post also felt it necessary to reflect on the controversial nature of these (conservative) videos. Dr. Santangelo was very upset about how he was "tripped up" by a "hypothetical at a moment when he was trying to reassure a client." He said he has not watched the video because "I don't like to feed into these people. I really consider them terrorists."
The Gosnell murder trial is now in the hands of the jurors. While they ponder, let us ponder:
CNN: Some coverage, not much.
Fox News: Some coverage, not much.
CBS: Two segments and a couple of tiny updates.
NBC. One question to Obama.
ABC: Nothing.
The Live Action videos? Crickets on ABC, CBS and NBC.

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Who Will Represent the GOP in 2016?

So I'm fascinated, well, maybe that's too strong of a word, but I am definitely interested in the internal politics of the right, especially when it comes to the USA presidential election of 2016 and how they have dealt with and continue to deal with the loss to Obama (again) in the 2012 election.  Maybe to truly understand ourselves, we have to truly understand the opposite of ourselves, or the 'Other,' if you will.  So since I"m left on most political issues, it's interesting to me to hear the other sides arguments, they interest me more than the internal politics of the left, that's for sure.

Rand Paul: The next and last GOP nominee?


If the Kentucky senator is the Republican Party's standard bearer in 2016, it is not inconceivable that he could destroy the party
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is for real. He currently leads the Republican field in the 2016 New Hampshire presidential primary, and places a close second among Republican voters nationally. It's still very, very early to be making 2016 predictions, but it's undeniable that Paul is a real contender.
And yet... there's no getting around the fact that Paul holds views that are anathema to many other Republicans, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
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For instance, in a major foreign policy address to the Heritage Foundation, Paul touted "a foreign policy that is reluctant" and "restrained by Constitutional checks and balances." He claimed that "Western occupation fans the flames of radical Islam," a view derided as "blaming America" by some conservatives. In July 2011, Paul wrote a New York Times op-ed with two Democratic senators calling for full withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2012. He has even characterized aid to Israel as "welfare."
Could someone committed to moving the Republican Party toward isolationism really win the presidential nomination?
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Yes. There is a road that leads to a Paul acceptance speech. But that road might also lead to the end of the Republican Party.
History suggests Paul will come up short in the primaries. When the Republican "establishment" squares off with the right-wing "base" in presidential politics, the establishment almost always wins. Not since 1980 has the conservative movement successfully nominated one of its own.
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The impotence of the hard right was evident in 2008 and 2012, as conservative leaders furiously tried to stymie the respective campaigns of Sen. John McCain and former Gov. Mitt Romney, and failed. Why? They couldn't consolidate their forces.
In 2012, conservatives abandoned Romney but couldn't find a serious alternative among the laughable field of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, and Herman Cain. In 2008, conservatives splintered between Romney, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, and former Sen. Fred Thompson, letting McCain win key early primaries with less than 40 percent of the vote.
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Since you don't need 50 percent of the vote to win primaries in a crowded field, all the victor needs to do is consolidate more factions than everyone else. Typically, the well-financed establishment candidates prove best able to woo the, shall we say, earthbound Republican voters, while the wingnuts scatter.
But in 2016, this historical pattern may well be broken.
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The emerging field looks top-heavy with establishment-friendly candidates: Obama-hugger Gov. Chris Christie, immigrant-defender Sen. Marco Rubio, Gov. Bobby "Stop Being The Stupid Party" Jindal and Mr. Establishment Jeb Bush. Even Ayn Rand-disciple Rep. Paul Ryan recently distanced himself from the Tea Party by voting for the partial repeal of the Bush tax cuts and embracing immigration reform.
Meanwhile, Rand Paul is beginning to lock up the base.
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In the Public Policy Polling survey of New Hampshire, Rand Paul has 28 percent, Rubio and Christie also score double digits, followed by Bush and Ryan with 7 percent each. Elsewhere on the far-right flank, neither Santorum nor Perry can break 5 percent. At least at this early stage, Paul has the market cornered.
Of course, there is no guarantee the establishment will remain split and the base will solidify around Paul in the end. The above simply shows there is a plausible scenario in which Paul can snatch the nomination without the establishment's blessing.
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That raises a very important question: Would the subsequent divide between Paul and the Republican establishment lead to the party's eventual collapse? This is not as farfetched as it might sounds. There is certainly a risk that this might happen, as Paul breaks with party orthodoxy and threatens the fundamentals of the Republican coalition.
Republicans have long characterized their coalition as a "three-legged stool" of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and national security conservatives. Paul's vision of a "reluctant" foreign policy saws one of those legs clean off. We saw a preview of how deep the rift could be when McCain called Paul and his allies "wacko birds" for filibustering President Obama's CIA nominee to protest drone policy.
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More important but less noticed was McCain's April 18 speech to the Center for New American Security that threw down the gauntlet against the Paul forces, lashing out against isolationism and calling for "a new Republican internationalism." He concluded by lamenting, "There are times these days when I feel that I have more in common on foreign policy with President Obama than I do with some in my own party."
Where might the "new Republican internationalists" go if Paul wins this intra-party battle? Considering that likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton helped engineer the U.N.-backed military coalition that ousted Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, and reportedly pushed Obama to directly arm the Syrian resistance, it's not hard to envision a "Republicans for Hillary" campaign if the alternative is Rand Paul.
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Such a scenario could prove to be only a temporary decampment. The 1972 "Democrats for Nixon" effort helped sink Sen. George McGovern, but it did not doom the Democratic Party. George Romney's prediction that the 1964 nomination of Barry Goldwater spelled the "suicidal destruction of the Republican Party" did not prove prophetic either.
Even the rift caused by Teddy Roosevelt's walkout from the 1912 Republican convention to form a new Progressive Party was healed four years later. Roosevelt, itching to enter World War I, was determined to defeat Woodrow Wilson (then running for re-election on the slogan "He Kept Us Out Of War") and was willing to overlook the isolationism that remained among Republicans. Often, a common enemy forces factions to paper over differences.
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But sometimes the differences are too great. The last major party to collapse was the Whigs, formed in 1834 to oppose the policies of Democratic President Andrew Jackson. But by the 1850s, the issue of slavery was unavoidable and the Whigs fatally split.
A Paul nomination would bring with it, at minimum, the risk of Republicans going the way of the Whigs. The dueling speeches between Paul and McCain represent an enormous divide over bedrock principles of foreign policy that may not be easily tolerated, especially if the 2016 campaign is fought against the backdrop of a pressing foreign policy crisis.
And if any contemporary politician might be willing to bet his political legacy on supplanting a wayward Republican Party with a new party, it would be John McCain. He has long branded himself a "Teddy Roosevelt Republican."