READY OR NOT, IRAN, HERE WE COME!

Here’s some inside news from Scott Ritter on the Randi Rhodes show today (April 13, 2005). Scott Ritter is the Republican, Marine officer, weapons inspector who got it all right about Iraq long before our invasion. Now he’s laying the truth out about Iran.

Mark your calendars for June. The President has already signed off on military plans for a massive bombing attack on Iran.

Even though the Iranians do actually need nuclear power plants for energy purposes (so Pres. Ford and Shaw of Iran agreed many years ago) we will not let them have them. Bolton is in place at the U.N. because he has contempt for the U.N. and will not hesitate to do the nasty deeds Bush will require. Negroponti is in place to feed false intelligence information to Congress and to the American public. Prepare for massive lie bombing of American public to commence about June also.

Mark your calendars for June. Lie to us once, shame on you. Lie to us twice shame on us.


STEVEN PINKER GOT THE “EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES” AWARD
AT ANNUAL FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION CONVENTION….

Leave it to Steven to clearly state the psychological facts behind the discussion of morality. Religeophils have for too long claimed the high ground when it comes to human value systems, but as we can see, human values arise out of the animal itself and don’t need a supposedly higher power to create a code of ethics. Even a dog has values. He chooses constantly to go to the left or the right, to value one motion above the other. If he didn’t, he’d be frozen in inaction.

“So the bible, contrary to what a majority of Americans apparently be-lieve, is far from a source of higher moral values. Religions have given us stonings [sic], witch-burnings, crusades, in-quisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombers, gay-bashers, abortion-clinic gunmen, and mothers who drown their sons so they can happily be unit-ed in heaven.

“To understand the source of moral values, we don’t have to look to reli-gion. Psychologists have identified uni-versal moral sentiments such as love, compassion, generosity, guilt, shame, and righteous indignation. A belief in spirits and angels need not have any-thing to do with it. And moral philoso-phers such as Peter Singer (one of to-morrow’s honorees) who scrutinize the concept of morality have shown that it [morality] is logically rooted in the inter-changeability of one’s own interests and others. The world’s enduring moral systems capture in some way the notion of the interchangeability of per-spectives and interests, the idea that ‘I am one guy among many’; the golden rule; the categorical imperative; Singer’s own notion of ‘the expanding circle’; John Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance,’ and so on. A retributive, human-like deity meting out justice doesn’t have a role in our best explanations of the logic of morality.” —Steven Pinker


RECENT MOVIES

This past week (April 10 through 16) I watched “Two-lane Blacktop”, Brazil’s “Carandiru” (a prison movie reminiscent of Attica), “Journey To The Sun” from Turkey (about Kurdish troubles in Turkey) and an American film, “Scotland, PA”, with the ever effervescent, Christopher Walken playing the role of a detective out to solve the murder of the king (?)—a modern Macbeth. Lot’s of dark humor.

Surprise was the “Two-lane Blacktop” film of 1971 that starred singer/songwriter James Taylor. He plays a driver of a hot rod who with his mechanic partner (Dennis Wilson of “The Beach Boys”) scoots across the United States racing for money.

Most moving was “Journey To The Sun” which followed a disenfranchised Turkish youth in Turkey as things go from bad to worse for him within a government which doesn’t like non-conformity. The final passages that involve his taking the body of a Kurdish, rebel friend back to his hometown in Kurdistan for burial build to a wonderfully passionate finish. It’s a message for brotherhood in an unlikely setting.


ENTER CARL SAGAN, GHOSTING UP A PLANETARY VISION

Has anyone actually witnessed one of the planets of our solar system colliding with another planet? But could we come to any more reasonable conclusion than what follows? Although the obvious answers do not always prove true in scientific inquiry, how can we not love and delight in the kind of description that leads to the following conclusions about the nearly circular periods of all the planets of our solar system? This is the predictive power of science which supernatural thinking cannot match.

“Why are planetary orbits nearly circular and neatly separated one from the other? Because if planets had very elliptical orbits, so that their paths intersect, sooner or later there would be a collision. In the early history of the solar system, there were probably many planets in the process of formation. Those with elliptical crossing orbits tended to collide and destroy themselves. Those with circular orbits tended to grow and survive. The orbits of the present planets are the orbits of the survivors of this collisional natural selection, the stable middle age of a solar system dominated by early catastrophic impacts.” (from Sagan’s COSMOS, p. 81


STARDUST MEMORIES MAKES ME THINK OF WOODY AND CARL

"Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter are countless asteroids, tiny terrestrial planets. The largest are a few hundred kilometers across. Many have oblong shapes and are tumbling through space. In some cases there seem to be two or more asteroids in tight mutual orbits. Collisions among the asteroids happen frequently, and occasionally a piece is chipped off and accidentally intercepts the Earth, falling to the ground as a meteorite. In the exhibits, on the shelves of our museums are the fragments of distant worlds. The asteroid belt is a great grinding mill, producing, smaller and smaller pieces down to motes of dust." (Sagan's COSMOS, p. 87)

If this stellar dust has been falling on Earth since time immemorial, then we can understand why some have said we are all made of stardust.
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"It's not what we don't know that hurt's, it's what we know that ain't so." —Will Rogers