Open Letters: November 2011

Sunday, November 13, 2011

The Better Angels Of Our Nature

Those who can make you believe absurdities

can make you commit atrocities

Voltaire

via

The Better Angels Of Our Nature
by Steve Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0670022950

You can watch the video on C-Span:
http://www.booktv.org/Watch/12923/The+Better+Angels+of+Our+Nature.aspx

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Love - Truth - Dialogue

Facts - Truth - Honesty - POEMS - Opinions - Arguments - Blame

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." -FDR

Move to Amend the Constitution so that only human beings are entitled to constitutional rights like voting, funding campaigns and lobbying Congress, and that consequently corporations and other entities do Not have these rights and privileges.
Please SIGN the Petition Read the Amendment here
Other Amendments

PETITIONING - How To Guide

The Ultimate source of Corporate Power is our wallets. Buy from locally-owned businesses, your neighbors: local banks, credit unions, local restaurants...

Turn $100 Million Campaign Contribution into $0 - When a Campaign Advertisement comes on, don't watch it or change the channel. Force Politicians to use debates and interviews ($0) to communicate.

VOTE GREEN ! - The Green Party doesn't accept corporate money. Voting for the Green Party sends a message to our bought-and-paid-for political parties.

- www.gp.org -

Private Prisons incentivize imprisonment and crony capitalist alliances with government to extract more profit.

Excessive Income diverted from the middle class to the 1% Increases Unemployment and Reduces Demand because the top 1% saves 15-25% of its income and invests portions overseas and in derivative bets - paraphrasing Joseph Stiglitz, "The Price of Inequality"

Lower-income Americans pay out a larger share of their paychecks in payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls than everyone else. - Robert Reich

Business benefits from government for roads, highways and bridges to transport their goods, employees and customers. They benefit from courts and the local, state, and national judicial systems for laws that allow them to safely build and protect their assets and litigate infringements on their property rights. They depend on water and drainage systems, sea ports, airports, the electric grid, police, firefighters and the military. These benefits have a cost. If these things were private, business would be paying outrageous and different tolls on every road, bridge and port and fighting little battles at every turn. Business would be down, Somalia style.

The Right To Privacy

Some suggest that "If you are doing the right thing and minding your own business you have nothing to hide."

It's not a question of having something or nothing to hide. If you were at a dinner party and someone took out a dictaphone and said he just wanted to record the conversation so he could listen to it later, what sort of impact do you think this would have on people's behavior? Now, what sort of impact do you think there will be on the creativity, spontaneity, amount of dissent, and other aspects of the free flow of information that are critical to the healthy functioning of a free society if people have reason to believe the government is monitoring everything? If the framers had wanted the government to have a free rein surveilling the populace because 'if you are doing the right thing and minding your own business you have nothing to hide,' we wouldn't have or need a Fourth Amendment. - Barry Eisler, former CIA agent

NOTES

“The cry of the poor is is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.” ― Howard Zinn
MonoCultures - a single invader can wipe out the entire species - Potatoe Blight - Diversity - cultures, religions, symbols, languages, specialization, seeds, plant varieties,
To give love, we must become independent in ourselves and be a pillar in life for others to hold to us. Such an individual, who needs no crutches for his own existence, alone can have the power to give love. All others are receivers of love." - Swami Chinmayananda
‘‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. The beauty of nonviolence is that in its own way and in its own time it seeks to break the chain reaction of evil’’ (King, Where, 62–63).
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. —"The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr."[19]
"Good ends don’t justify corrupt means." - Robert Reich, on SuperPACs
"I have no enemies and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested, and interrogated me, none of the prosecutors who indicted me, and none of the judges who judged me are my enemies.” - Liu Xiaobo
"Adversity in any situation is the truly positive element... The Light is contained within the obstacles of life... Embrace life's difficulties." -Yehuda Berg
Free high school & College Courses - Finance, Calculus, Economics - Khan University
Free College Courses from Top Universities
Generally speaking, investing in yourself is the best thing you can do—anything that improves your own talents. Nobody can take it away from you. They can run up huge deficits and the dollar could become worth far less, you’re gonna have all kinds of things happen. But if you’ve got talent yourself and you’ve maximized your talent, you’ve got a terrific asset. -Warren Buffet
Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. THOMAS JEFFERSON
A steady Upright and Impartial administration of the Law is essential because no man can be sure he might not be tomorrow the victim of a spirit of injustice by which he might be the gainer today. -Alexander Hamilton
There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged war - Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Tea Party movement fulminating against a repressive, overweening regulatory regime (for SMALL Enterprise), and the Occupy movement railing against an extreme laissez-faire system bordering on lawlessness (for the MEGA Corporations). - Matt Taibbi, 03/29/2012
Business has been sitting on a couple of Trillion dollars of investment money for the last 2 or 3 years and they haven't been hiring, and the reason they haven't been hiring is that consumer DEMAND is low. - Hedrick Smith "Who Stole The American Dream? 09/17/12
Our DEFENSE BUDGET is bigger than the defense budget of the next 17 countries combined - David Wessel, "Red Ink" 2012
THE OPONENTS OF CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM: Corporations, Lobbyists and other major Fundraisers are not going to give up their death grip on politics easily and neither are many of the Politicians who have been successfull within the current crony system.
Seldom do businessmen of the same trade get together but that it results in some detriment to the general public - Adam Smith 1776
We must make our choice. We may have Democracy or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. - Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding. -Upton Sinclair
"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. - Warren Buffet, on CNBC, 7-7-11
The effective corporate tax rate (ETR) measures the taxes a corporation pays as a percentage of its profit. The Corporate Tax Rate is an arbritary number that doesn't reflect the percentage actually paid.
“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.” -John Stuart Mill, 'On Liberty' 1869
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. - Victor Frankl
"People fought to end slavery for generations, worked their entire lives, died, and didn't see any success, and helped end slavery." - David Swanson
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality -Martin Luther King Jr., Noble Price acceptance speech