September 14, 2013

"Because Obama"... Second City... Ouch !!!

September 14, 2013

JFK... On Being A Liberal...

JFK: Acceptance of the New York Liberal Party Nomination
PBS
September 14, 1960

<snip>

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

But first, I would like to say what I understand the word "Liberal" to mean and explain in the process why I consider myself to be a "Liberal," and what it means in the presidential election of 1960.



In short, having set forth my view -- I hope for all time -- two nights ago in Houston, on the proper relationship between church and state, I want to take the opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the state and the citizen. This is my political credo:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it. And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them.

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies. And the only basic issue in the 1960 campaign is whether our government will fall in a conservative rut and die there, or whether we will move ahead in the liberal spirit of daring, of breaking new ground, of doing in our generation what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson did in their time of influence and responsibility.

Our liberalism has its roots in our diverse origins. Most of us are descended from that segment of the American population which was once called an immigrant minority. Today, along with our children and grandchildren, we do not feel minor. We feel proud of our origins and we are not second to any group in our sense of national purpose. For many years New York represented the new frontier to all those who came from the ends of the earth to find new opportunity and new freedom, generations of men and women who fled from the despotism of the czars, the horrors of the Nazis, the tyranny of hunger, who came here to the new frontier in the State of New York. These men and women, a living cross section of American history, indeed, a cross section of the entire world's history of pain and hope, made of this city not only a new world of opportunity, but a new world of the spirit as well.

<snip>

More: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/jfk-nyliberal/

And (Kicks Ass):

September 13, 2013

Ya Know... Non-Liberals Talking About The "Conscience" OF A Liberal... Should STFU...

That is all.

September 13, 2013

Obama's NSA Surveillance Review Panel Did Not Discuss Changes, Attendees Say - GuardianUK

Obama's NSA surveillance review panel did not discuss changes, attendees say
Pair say meeting was dominated by tech firms' interests and session did not broach the topic of changes to data collection
Spencer Ackerman in Washington - theguardian.com
Thursday 12 September 2013 15.42 EDT

<snip>

A review panel created by President Obama to guide reforms to US government surveillance did not discuss any changes to the National Security Agency's controversial activities at its first meeting, according to two participants.

The panel, which met for the first time this week in the Truman Room of the White House conference center, was touted by Obama in August as a way for the government to consider readjusting its surveillance practices after hearing outsiders' concerns.

But two attendees of the Monday meeting said the discussion was dominated by the interests of major technology firms, and the session did not address making any substantive changes to the controversial mass collection of Americans' phone data and foreigners' internet communications, which can include conversations with Americans.

Robert Atkinson, the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and an attendee, told the Guardian the he "did not hear much discussion" of changes to the bulk surveillance activities.

"My fear is it's a simulacrum of meaningful reform," said Sascha Meinrath, a vice president of the New America Foundation, an influential Washington think tank, and the director of the Open Technology Institute, who also attended. "Its function is to bleed off pressure, without getting to the meaningful reform."

<snip>

More: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/12/obama-nsa-review-surveillance-changes

September 13, 2013

Time To Tame The NSA Behemoth Trampling Our Rights - GuardianUK

Time to tame the NSA behemoth trampling our rights
From leaks and Fisa court papers, it's clear the NSA is a bloated spying bureaucracy out of control. It can't be reformed by insiders
Yochai Benkler - theguardian.com
Friday 13 September 2013 08.15 EDT

<snip>

The spate of new NSA disclosures substantially raises the stakes of this debate. We now know that the intelligence establishment systematically undermines oversight by lying to both Congress and the courts. We know that the NSA infiltrates internet standard-setting processes to security protocols that make surveillance harder. We know that the NSA uses persuasion, subterfuge, and legal coercion to distort software and hardware product design by commercial companies.

We have learned that in pursuit of its bureaucratic mission to obtain signals intelligence in a pervasively networked world, the NSA has mounted a systematic campaign against the foundations of American power: constitutional checks and balances, technological leadership, and market entrepreneurship. The NSA scandal is no longer about privacy, or a particular violation of constitutional or legislative obligations. The American body politic is suffering a severe case of auto-immune disease: our defense system is attacking other critical systems of our body.

First, the lying. The National Intelligence University, based in Washington, DC, offers a certificate program called the denial and deception advanced studies program. That's not a farcical sci-fi dystopia; it's a real program about countering denial and deception by other countries. The repeated misrepresentations suggest that the intelligence establishment has come to see its civilian bosses as adversaries to be managed through denial and deception.

We learned months ago that the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to Congress. Now, we know that General Keith Alexander filed a "declaration" (which is like testifying in writing), asserting an interpretation of violations that the court said "strains credulity". The newly-disclosed 2009 opinion includes a whole section entitled "Misrepresentations to the Court", which begins with the sentence:



General Alexander's claim that the NSA's vast numbers of violations were the consequences of error and incompetence receive derisive attention. But this claim itself was in a court submission intended to exculpate the agency from what would otherwise have been an intentional violation of the court's order. There is absolutely no reason to believe the claims of incompetence and honest error; there is more reason to assume that these are intended to cover up a worse truth: intentional violations.

Second, the subversion...

<snip>

More: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/13/nsa-behemoth-trampling-rights

September 13, 2013

The Totally Unfair And Bitterly Uneven 'Recovery,' In 12 Charts - HuffPo

The Totally Unfair And Bitterly Uneven 'Recovery,' In 12 Charts
Mark Gongloff, Jan Diehm, & Katy Hall - HuffPo
9/13/13

<snip>

The financial crisis was hell for pretty much everybody, rich or poor. But the recovery that has followed has not been nearly as fair.

Wall Street, the wealthy and the powerful have done amazingly well since the crisis ended. Little of that has trickled down to everybody else, in what has been the most uneven recovery in at least several decades.

How about some charts to illustrate this infuriating result?

1. The first sad chart might tell most of the story. It tracks the growth in corporate profits, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and average hourly wages of the typical worker since the crisis. To quote Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong. (Hint: It is your pitiful wages.)





<snip>

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/13/uneven-financial-crisis-recovery-charts_n_3913882.html

September 13, 2013

Minimum Wage In California To Be $10 An Hour - Reuters/MSNBC

Minimum wage in California to be $10 an hour
Reuters/MSNBC
9/13/13

<snip>

Reuters Minimum wage workers in California would earn $10 an hour by 2016 under a bill passed by the legislature on Thursday, making the state likely to become the first in the nation to commit to such a high rate.

The bill, which Governor Jerry Brown said he will sign, would increase the minimum wage for hourly workers in the most populous U.S. state from the current rate of $8 an hour to $9 in July 2014, and to $10 by January 2016.

"The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs," Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement. "This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy."

Brown, protective of the state's tenuous economic recovery, had initially opposed the bill but agreed to support it on Wednesday after leaders of both houses of the Democratic-led state legislature agreed to postpone the effective date of the raise until 2016.

The measure won support from Democrats, passing the Senate on a vote of 26-11 and the Assembly on a vote of 51-25. But it was opposed by many Republicans who said it would hurt small businesses and ultimately cost some low-wage workers their jobs.

<snip>

More: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/minimum-wage-california-be-10-hour-8C11144323

September 13, 2013

And Finally... Lastly... :(::::::::::::::: Thank You Eternally, Carl...

September 13, 2013

Happy Carl Sagan Day !!! (Just Trying It Out... Check The Post...)

snip>

...

Alexandria was the publishing capital of the planet. Of course, there were no
printing presses then. Books were expensive; every one of them was copied by hand. The
Library was the repository of the most accurate copies in the world. The art of critical
editing was invented there. The Old Testament comes down to us mainly from the Greek
translations made in the Alexandrian Library. The Ptolemys devoted much of their
enormous wealth to the acquisition of every Greek book, as well as works from Africa,
Persia, India, Israel and other parts of the world. Ptolemy III Euergetes wished to borrow
from Athens the original manuscripts or official state copies of the great ancient tragedies
of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. To the Athenians, these were a kind of cultural
patrimony - something like the original handwritten copies and first folios of Shakespeare
might be in England. They were reluctant to let the manuscripts out of their hands even for
a moment. Only after Ptolemy guaranteed their return with an enormous cash deposit did
they agree to lend the plays. But Ptolemy valued those scrolls more than gold or silver. He
forfeited the deposit gladly and enshrined, as well he might, the originals in the Library.
The outraged Athenians had to content themselves with the copies that Ptolemy, only a
little shamefacedly, presented to them. Rarely has a state so avidly supported the pursuit of
knowledge.

The Ptolemys did not merely collect established knowledge; they encouraged and
financed scientific research and so generated new knowledge. The results were amazing:
Eratosthenes accurately calculated the size of the Earth, mapped it, and argued that India
could be reached by sailing westward from Spain. Hipparchus anticipated that stars come
into being, slowly move during the course of centuries, and eventually perish; it was he
who first catalogued the positions and magnitudes of the stars to detect such changes.
Euclid produced a textbook on geometry from which humans learned for twenty-three
centuries, a work that was to help awaken the scientific interest of Kepler, Newton and
Einstein. Galen wrote basic works on healing and anatomy which dominated medicine until
the Renaissance. There were, as we have noted, many others. Alexandria was the greatest
city the Western world had ever seen. People of all nations came there to live, to trade,
to learn. On any given day, its harbors were thronged with merchants, scholars and tourists.
This was a city where Greeks, Egyptians, Arabs, Syrians, Hebrews, Persians, Nubians, Phoenicians, Italians, Gauls and Iberians exchanged merchandise and ideas. It is probably here that the word cosmopolitan realized its true meaning - citizen, not just of a nation, but of the Cosmos. To be a citizen of the Cosmos . . .

Here clearly were the seeds of the modern world. What prevented them from taking
root and flourishing? Why instead did the West slumber through a thousand years of
darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work
done in Alexandria? I cannot give you a simple answer. But I do know this: there is no
record, in the entire history of the Library, that any of its illustrious scientists and scholars
ever seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society.
The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not. Science and
learning in general were the preserve of a privileged few. The vast population of the city
had not the vaguest notion of the great discoveries taking place within the Library. New
findings were not explained or popularized. The research benefited them little. Discoveries
in mechanics and steam technology were applied mainly to the perfection of weapons, the
encouragement of superstition, the amusement of kings. The scientists never grasped the
potential of machines to free people.* The great intellectual achievements of antiquity had
few immediate practical applications. Science never captured the imagination of the
multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject
surrenders to mysticism. When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Library down, there
was nobody to stop them.

The last scientist who worked in the Library was a mathematician, astronomer,
physicist and the head of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy - an extraordinary range of
accomplishments for any individual in any age. Her name was Hypatia. She was born in
Alexandria in 370. At a time when women had few options and were treated as property,
Hypatia moved freely and unselfconsciously through traditional male domains. By all
accounts she was a great beauty. She had many suitors but rejected all offers of marriage.
The Alexandria of Hypatia’s time - by then long under Roman rule - was a city under grave
strain. Slavery had sapped classical civilization of its vitality. The growing Christian
Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and
culture. Hypatia stood at the epicenter of these mighty social forces. Cyril, the Archbishop
of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and
because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the
early Church with paganism. In great personal danger, she continued to teach and publish,
until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s
parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with
abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated,
her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.

The glory of the Alexandrian Library is a dim memory. Its last remnants were
destroyed soon after Hypatia’s death. It was as if the entire civilization had undergone some
self-inflicted brain surgery, and most of its memories, discoveries, ideas and passions were
extinguished irrevocably. The loss was incalculable. In some cases, we know only the
tantalizing titles of the works that were destroyed. In most cases, we know neither the titles
nor the authors. We do know that of the 123 plays of Sophocles in the Library, only seven
survived. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex. Similar numbers apply to the works of
Aeschylus and Euripides. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named
William Shakespeare wereCoriolanus and A Winter’s Tale, but we had heard that he had
written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized in his time, works entitled
Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet.
Of the physical contents of that glorious Library not a single scroll remains.

...

<snip>

http://socialuprooting.tumblr.com/post/4973251068




Thank you, Carl... for the reminder.

September 13, 2013

I Would Like To Propose To The Group... Ideas To In Someway Honor Carl Sagan For This !!!

Take a trip...

That is...

If This is true/confirmed/agreed upon: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023657017

And...

DULink: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023657824

And...



Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

It is one of the most major milestones of humanity. In numbers of ways.

It may not cause us to go from B.C. to A.D....

But... it's goddamed close.