Obama Backlash Growing Quickly

For the last eight years, the fear and doubt crowd have had one of their own in the head office. Comforted that science will be suppressed and church programs will be federally funded, the vocal conservatives fell into relative complacency. Or did I miss it? But now, the flood gates are opening. The "gun nuts" are buying up weapons and ammunition creating a price spike never before seen. Why? Because they are convinced that Obama is a communist who will outlaw their guns and tax their ammo. The anti-family-planning crowd is staging bigger sit-ins at health clinics. They are also submitting bills to local, state, and federal government to restrain the feared upsurge in availability of contraception and related information. He overturned the stem cell funding ban. Now discarded blastocysts are again eligible research subjects rather than just trash. The humanity! After all, they quail, if we don't respect trashed cell clusters as people, how can we possibly value adult citizens? Anti-science groups are pushing ever more vocally for science in schools to be properly tempered by religious counterpoints. Bills appear in state after state calling for "Academic Freedom," meaning to give the Bible equal weight as proven science in schools. Yes, this started long ago, but now they have greater urgency. The conservative media is calling Obama's initial tax cuts a hike, and his pushing through of the stimulus package (that had been in the works for months under his predecessor) as typical unrestrained Democrat unilateral spending. They can get away with it because they knew that the necessary spending will pass whether or not they approve it. Looking tough with no teeth is all they have, at present. Recall the political fury during the 1930's depression. A Democrat prevailed over strong Republican objections and turned the country around doing basically what Obama is now doing. He kept getting re-elected because he got results. Results directly opposite of all the dire predictions of the Republicans. Basically, the same arguments being made now against Obama.

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Color-coded history

Consider this description of a significant and tragic event in American history:

[Occurring in May and July 1917, this event] was an outbreak of labor and racially motivated violence against blacks that caused an estimated 100 deaths and extensive property damage in [an American industrial city]. It was the worst incident of labor-related violence in 20th century American history, and one of the worst race riots in U.S. history. It gained national attention. The local Chamber of Commerce called for the resignation of the Police Chief. At the end of the month, ten thousand people marched in silent protest in New York City over the riots, which contributed to the radicalization of many.

[paraphrased from Wikipedia]

Do you know anything about the event described above? The above passage describes the East St. Louis race riot that occurred on Monday, July 2, 1917. I learned about this riot for the first time tonight when I had the opportunity to hear a talk by Harper Barnes, a St. Louis journalist who has recently written a book called Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement. [caption id="attachment_5419" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Harper Barnes - Photo by Erich Vieth"]Harper Barnes - Photo by Erich Vieth[/caption] In 1914, the first world war was heating up and so were the heavy industries. East St. Louis, Illinois, located right across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri, was the home of large aluminum and steel plants. To backtrack, through the 1910s, one-half million blacks who had resided in the rural South moved up to northern cities. Employers made use of these blacks as strikebreakers. The blacks certainly wouldn't have felt much loyalty toward the unions, because the white unions banned black workers.

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Who were the prisoners of Guantanamo?

Who were the prisoners of Guantanamo? Andy Worthington has compiled a four-part series telling us their stories. Here's the disturbing bottom line:

[A]t least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

I don't pretend to know enough to know whether these accounts are totally accurate, but they are filled with details, personal anecdotes, statistics and reports regarding individual court cases. It has a strong ring of authenticity. Further, these individual accounts corroborate general accounts produced elsewhere. I have no reason to disbelieve any part of Andy Worthington's work. He is a well-reputed journalist who has published elsewhere, such as this post at Huffington Post. I am proud to be an American. America does much right in the world and has the potential to do much more that is admirable. This account by Andy Worthington, however, describes America at its shameful worst.

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Can Science Trump Religion?

This is not a question of whether science can or should prove or disprove the existence or non-existence of God or gods. Some of us believe that we are living in an era of rationalism, or enlightenment. Some, like Dawkins, even hope to see rational thinking purge religious clap trappings from society. The question is, can rational thinking ever purge society of silly ideas? I was reading the Dale McGowan post Best Practices 4: Teach engaged coexistence and he obliquely gives the answer. Consider:

  • Coperincus (ca. 1500) decisively proved that Astrology was unfounded.
  • Avagadro (ca. 1800) proved that Homeopathy was bunk.
  • John Philips (ca. 1840) proved that the Earth was at least 90 million years old (before Darwin published, or more accurate isotopic dating techniques were even imagined)
  • Hubble (ca. 1920) proved that not only was our solar system tiny compared to the galaxy, but that our galaxy is infinitesimal compared to the visible universe.
Surely we would no longer find anyone to believe that the stars predict our future, that water has memory, that the Earth is young, or that the Earth is the sole point of all creation. No amount of education of thinking individuals will ever remove the comforting effects of belief in paranormal salvation for the majority of mankind.

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