INTERESTING TIMES

Here find five links to youtube to follow a brilliant debate on the proposition "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world." The Intelligence Squared debaters include Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry against the proposition, and Archbishop Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe attempting to defend it. Hitchens and Fry utterly devastate the Catholics, and I was frankly cracking up.

the Gankyil:

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Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.
---Cicero

I have long suspected as much, and every time that I pass an exam that I should have flunked, I wonder. How long will we continue in this direction? How empty will our educations be, by the time that we realize that we don't know how to run a free society, we don't know how to save the world, we don't even know how to save ourselves? Below you will find an 8th grade exam from Kansas in the year 1985. No doubt I would have flunked that exam, even though its contents appear to be quite important general knowledge. Ironically, the only exam that I flunked in high school was 9th grade grammar. I thought grammar was boring and useless.

Could You Have Passed the 8th Grade in 1895?
( ...Take a Look: )

Ron Paul quote of the day:
"When the value of American's savings is deliberately eroded through inflation, that is a tax, albeit a hidden one. I call it the inflation tax, a tax that is all the more insidious for bing so underhanded: most Americans have no idea what causes it or why their standard of living is going down. Meanwhile, government and its favored constituencies receive their ill-gotten loot. The racket is safe as long as no one figures out what is going on."
( on inflation and central banking history )

We're slated to hit 7,000,000,000 in 2012.
We hit 6 billion in 1999.
Thirteen years to add a billion.
We hit 1 billion in 1800.
In 1930, 130 years later, we made 2 billion.
(data from the AP)
So between 1930 and 1999 we added 4 billion in 69 years.

Political awareness dawns slowly for me. I was not a good student of history in school. I lasted nearly 4 years after the airplanes hit the world trade center before I viewed video of that event. I am like the proverbial ostrich with my head in the sand. But today I came to a new understanding of JFK. He really was working for peace. He was in opposition to the military industrial complex. Eisenhower had recognized and named it, but he did not attempt to restrain it. Kennedy did. And there is no politico-economic force more brutal than that which specializes in death and world domination. Of course he was assassinated. Of course.

JFK had a prayer, borrowed from Abe Lincoln, that he said to himself to maintain calm in the face of incredible pressures for war. The prayer ended with "I am ready"....and it seems he was ready to accept full responsibility for his actions and the retaliation that took his life. No wonder this man is so often referenced by presidents and peace advocates. He lives in our subconscious as a warrior for truth, good and right. And he was martyred. And as for the conspiracy theorists; yes, there must have been a conspiracy. Such actions are rarely random. I don't know the details, but just like 9/11/01, JFK's assassination was intentional and for profit. The stench lingers in the story. The executor of such action is carefully and completely separated from the planners so as to insure "plausible deniabililty", but the link is there, somewhere.

Many thanks to my local radio station, KBOO, for the history lesson, and for the inspiration.

I recently re-purchased a copy of a book that I have read before. It is called Watch For Me on the Mountain by Forrest Carter. It is a story about Geronimo. I just read the first two chapters out loud to Suzanne. I had forgotten that they said Geronimo was a War Shaman. He would chant and dance alone with the spirits of the mountains. He could not be captured but only allowed himself to be captured in order to infiltrated enemy camps. He spoke little and was able to operate outside the bounds of time and space. The stories are amazing.
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Last night I *finally* finished reading this book: Flu; The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. The last third of the book was less interesting to me than the first part. It followed the stories of many assorted researchers who were trying to recover live virus from bits of frozen bodies that had been buried in the permafrost layer of the northern tundra, or bits of viral genes from samples of lung tissue that had been saved in blocks of parafin by military doctors.
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