Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Trying To Catch A Phish.

There are so many dangers out there on the Internet, just like in the world of reality. One cannot be naive. you must always be vigilant and on guard for those who wish to hurt you. The two worlds of virtual reality and reality are mirrors of one another. You would not walk down an unfamiliar street late at night because an inner voice tells you this is unwise. Well even when you are secure feeling safe and sound in your home that inner voice must be trained to warn you of the dangers that lurk on the Internet. Educate yourself, if something seems a bit phishy, it probably is and will do you harm. Please click this link for information and a video about phishing on the Internet.
http://www.thethinkingblue.com/other/phishing.html thinkingblue
CATCH A PHISH!
I just received this email in my yahoo
email account from this email address:
href="http://www.thethinkingblue.com/other/mailto:alert@yahoo-inc.com">color=#0000a0>alert@yahoo-inc.comcolor=#0000a0>
making this webpage to alert others who may possess a gullible nature
not only to, NOT PAY ATTENTION TO THIS "ALERT' but also to, TRY AND REPORT IT.
my response

ATTENTION YAHOO.COM
 I am forwarding this email to yahoo-inc because I believe something should be done to whomever is phishing/spamming these emails to unsuspecting victims. I know everyone should know, not to give out their information such as ID and password to some email address just because it sounds like it's coming from the official yahoo site.  Please let me know what else I can do to help eliminate such threats.

AN OVERVIEW OF PHISHING
Dear User
We are sorry to inform you that we are currently working on securing
our
server, during this process account which is not manually verified by us
will
be deleted,
confirm and submit your information
User Name:
User Id:
Password:
Date Of Birth:
Country
Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update
 blog it

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

The Big Takeover or Coup d'etat

The Big Takeover or Coup d'état

If I Suspected Something Was Very Rotten in Denmark, wouldn't you think the "EXPERTS" WOULD SUSPECT IT ALSO?

My husband and I use to scratch our heads, time and again... asking HOW CAN THIS CONTINUE??... We knew we didn't have any money and also knew that most were in the same boat... So how come housing prices kept going up...? How come the rich kept getting tax breaks when no trickling wealthy pennies were hitting us on the head...? We barely got by the 12 years we've lived in these parts... My husband had to work and live 90 miles away in the big city, while I lived here, near my grandchildren... His paycheck barely covered minimum payments on the debt we were in. When the "Contract Job Market's" bubble burst, he couldn't find work paying what we needed to stay afloat. With our 401K (from his forced retirement at AT&T) dried up, due to trying to keep him in the big city (it cost over $1200 a month, living costs and apartment.) and no job offers that paid enough to keep two households, I told him to just give it up and move back to our modest home in the country... "If need be", I told him, "we will go bankrupt".

The hardest thing my husband had to do was declare bankruptcy... He tried everything not to, but there really wasn't an alternative... The jobs here in rural America, only paid 8 dollar tops an hour (most were 5 or 6 dollar an hour) so even if both of us worked a 40 hour week, (which we did for a time) we only brought home poverty wages.

The biggest threat after that was to go bankrupt before the Republicans changed the rules, which would have made it almost impossible for us to use this tool. The tool, all the Big Fat Cats have privy to, and don't bat an eye of embarrassment, at using. Even with our hardships, I feel lucky right now. I know there are people in our age bracket that are hitting some impossible times without the recourse of being able to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" because they are just too damn old to try and grasp at that silly bootstrap, brass ring the assholes on the Right keep dangling in front of our faces.

Anyway, didn't read the whole article but printed it out to read later... One thing for sure... WE ARE F**KED...! I really don't have too much optimism... And the ones I really feel sorry for the most, is our grandchildren... I sometimes look out my window and ponder what will happen to them in this existence, that is so full of greed and sadness... thinkingblue

PS: You can read the article in its entirety CLICK HERE.

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution - MATT TAIBBI

Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year,
the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot
holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we
still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent
more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that
has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited
emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer
for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP.
Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout.

"These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without
government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single
unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional
investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts." Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds
took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets — some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in. READ MORE HERE

[From Issue 1075 — April 2, 2009]

Hmmmm, I wonder if my blog of yesterday can become a reality, after all...?
Click here for WHITE FEATHERS thinkingblue


Let's keep our heads, while we continue to watch

THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD!!!

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Credit Card Industry Will Cancel Your Card and Lie About It

I received correspondence from HSBC CREDIT SERVICES regarding an open credit card I had of theirs. They informed me that due to inactivity on this card they were closing my account. Realizing this will effect my credit score, I complained.

click


They wrote back and said it was within their right to close my account because the fine print on the loan agreement that I signed allows them to do anything they desire and could care less whether it is detrimental to me (IN SO MANY WORDS)


click


Feeling helpless, I wrote to my Congressman and he forwarded my complaint to Customer Assistance Group, Office of the Comptroller Currency, which set up a case # for me.

Because of this complaint, HSBC had to get off their BUTT and send me a consolation prize, via another letter informing me they are still within their rights to cancel my credit card and this will NOT effect my credit score in any way.

click

I can't help but think about the antiquated catch-phrase, LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE! As you will see in the video coming up next.



CREDIT INDUSTRIES CAN CANCEL YOUR CREDIT CARD AND LIE. @ Yahoo! Video


So as you can see from this video... When a bank closes your credit account IT WILL EFFECT YOUR CREDIT SCORE, proving that not only can banks do whatever the hell they negatively please, THEY CAN ALSO LIE ABOUT IT!

THE END, OF INTEGRITY AND HONOR!


thinkingblue.blogspot.com


Let's keep our heads, while we continue to
watch THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD!!!

So Ya Think It's Bad Now... WHITE FEATHERS

Today's Delanceyplace.com is about--the white feathers of cowardice an informational good read about the past.

WW1 doc British Propaganda



In today's excerpt--British men enlisted in droves at the outset of World War I, in part because British women handed men not in uniform white feathers symbolizing cowardice, and ministers and priests encouraged the idea that the war was a holy war. The fervor quelled as war casualties mounted to an unprecedented 23 million:

"Why then did British men volunteer in such numbers? Five motives suggest
themselves:

1. Successful recruitment techniques. The efforts of the Parliamentary
Recruiting Committee ... built up an impressive organization of 2,000 volunteers
who managed to organize 12,000 meetings at which some 20,000 speeches were
delivered, to send out 8 million recruiting letters and to distribute no fewer
than 54 million posters, leaflets and other publications. ...

2. Female pressure. There is ample evidence of women handing men not in uniform white feathers symbolizing cowardice. Government propaganda capitalized on this. The PRC poster, with its clever implication that the addressee's husband or son would survive either way, was well-aimed: 'When the war is over and someone asks your husband or your son what he did in the Great War, is he to hang his head because you did not let him go?' ...

3. Peer-group pressure. There is no doubting the importance of the so-called
'Pals' Battalions' in getting groups of friends, neighbours or colleagues to
join up together. ... As if to confirm the British thesis that the war was a
game, there was even a footballers' battalion and a boxers' company. To begin
with, exclusivity was possible: some battalions even demanded an entry fee of up to five pounds. ...

4. Economic motives. ... There is no question that the peak of enlistment in
Britain coincided with the peak of unemployment caused by the August
financial and commercial crisis. Nine out of ten of the working men laid off in
Bristol in the first month of the war joined up; enlistment rates were clearly lower in areas where business quickly picked up again. Men were not wholly irrational in 1914.

5. Impulse. Finally, as Avner Offer has pointed out, allowance must be made for the fact that some men volunteered impulsively, with little thought of the consequences for themselves, much less the causes of the war. ...

"As is well known, many ministers and priests encouraged the idea that the war
was a holy war, often in a quite grotesque way. ... The most egregious example
of militarist churchmanship in England was the shocking Advent sermon preached in 1915 by the Bishop of London, A. F. Winnington-Ingram (later published in a
collection of his sermons in 1917), in which he described the war as: 'a great
crusade--we cannot deny it--to kill Germans: to kill them, not for the sake of
killing, but to save the world.' ...

The Germans
, wrote Michael Furse, Bishop of Pretoria, were 'enemies of God.' ...
Billy Sunday included in his prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives that 'If you turn hell upside down, you'll find 'Made in Germany' stamped on the bottom.' ...

"For many, the First World War was thus a kind of war of religion, despite an almost complete absence of clear denominational conflicts, a crusade without infidels. ... The sense that the world had arrived at the Biblical Armageddon was the most powerful of all the 'ideas of 1914.' And how like Armageddon it proved."

Niall Ferguson
, The Pity of War, Basic Books, Copyright 1999 by Niall Ferguson, pp. 204-208.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

WE DO NOT LEARN FROM THE PAST

World War I the First World War was dubbed, The Great War and The War to End All Wars. How soon we forget the devastation of the wars governments seem so ready to order us off to. It's apparent that no one really learns from history, (especially governments) if they did, the term "WAR" itself would have been laid to rest alongside words like Shell-shock, and Trench Warfare: (I wonder who thought that one up?)

Following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, the then superpowers of Europe decided to carve up France because Germany wanted it for themselves, and Britain and its allies opposed this idea. In September of 1914 German commander General Erich von
Falkenhayn ordered the construction of defensive trenches to ensure that the
Allied forces couldn't overrun his own men. The Allies responded in kind and two
long trenches were dug from the coast of France to Switzerland, which was soon
dubbed the Western Front. The trenches mostly ran alongside each other, and
varied from a distance of over a kilometre to as little as 15 metres apart, such
as at Hooge, near Ypres1.

Soldiers who thought that joining up for the good of their country was all guns
and glamour were to be proved horribly, horribly wrong. Instead of dashing about
on horses, or fighting in the beautiful fields of Europe (and meeting lots of
nice French girls to boot), the soldiers found themselves facing their enemies
from inside a big hole in the ground. The trenches soon became extremely
inhospitable and terrible places and aside from the fact that some bloke a few
yards away was trying to kill you in a variety of ingenious ways, there were
many other things to contend with.
(From this site: Life in the Trenches of World War One)

We the people are led into war like lemmings. As soon as one of the world government, Big Kahunas decide it's time for a War, the propaganda machines start to sputter and all's fair in love and war. Of course if the moment is right, as in massive business failures and enormous unemployment, (sound familiar?) it's a lot easier to line the lemmings up for their cliff plunge. With times the way they are today, the probability that some world war will break out, is at full peak. So while we listen to the talking heads, go-to-town-with-their-Breeches-falling-down, on the AIG bonuses and FOX NEWS along with Limbaugh's DITTO HEADS, hoping President Obama will fail. Just remember, we do not learn from history and if ya think it's bad now... JUST WAIT, TILL A PRETTY MISS, HANDS YOU SOME WHITE FEATHERS. thinkingblue.blogspot.com

The Somme - Sneak Peek Part I

Let's keep our heads, while we continue to
watch THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD!!!

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Birthday Parties For Homeless Kids

BIRTHDAY PARTIES FOR HOMELESS KIDS


At First glance, reading "Birthday Parties For Homeless Kids", sounds so heartwarming. How great it is that volunteers give small homeless children a party. But, why is it acceptable to have homeless children? We're facing tough times that will get tougher as we make our way through the aftermath left by those who were hopelessly addicted to greed. Homeless children, in America, being acceptable is very unacceptable. As soon as families started joining the ranks of the homeless, someone, wielding power, should have said ENOUGH! And the NIP THIS IN
THE BUD should have begun. But today, it's OK to have homelessness, it's OK to
have medically uninsured people, it's OK to have hunger and the working poor? Well, they don't exist the sycophants who push the Horatio Alger nonsense clamor. Come on folks there are no social boogiemen waiting to pounce if the rich are made to pay their fair share of taxes. Let's all shout enough's, enough and the ills of our society will no longer be tolerated!

STATISICS

The most proximate cause of homelessness in America is poverty. Statistics
show between twenty and thirty percent of homeless families surveyed in 1996
said they had gone without food for part of the previous month. The homeless
also face persistent deprivation and constant threat of harm. They spend more
time in the hospital and in jail than their poor counterparts. The majority are
victims of violent crimes, and one fourth lack needed medical care. Children in
homeless families do worse in school and have lower attendance and more
long-term absences (National Alliance to End Homelessness*).



Let's keep our heads, while we continue to
watch THE

THEATER OF THE ABSURD!!!

Thursday, March 19, 2009

RELIGION, MORALITY AND EVIL, oh my!

RELIGION, MORALITY AND EVIL, oh my!


On Clipmarks today, I noticed a clip from member tabsey about how religion is
losing its power hold on people's mind, here is America. (thank all that is good
) Anyway, you can read tabsey's contribution to clipmarks.com here:
http://www.clipmarks.com/clipmark/5C8C6D1A-B58D-4B2D-9BB2-ABFEE500CC7E/ my
comment below:

It is so pathetic, no more at comical, that the ones who have had religion
pounded into their brains believe morals and religious piety go hand and hand.
In other words human beings are basically evil and religion makes them good and
able to live with one another. I am not going to go on a "crusade" to prove them
ever so wrong. (what a waste of time that would be) but I am going to comment by
submitting text from this site:
http://www.secularism.org.uk/uploads/moralswithoutreligion.pdf What a
"holy experience" this read is .
http://thinkingblue.blogspot.com/


MORALS WITHOUT RELIGION - MARGARET KNIGHT - NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY


THE WORD "religion" is used in a greater variety of senses, perhaps, than any
other word in the English language. For example: "Religion is a sense of the mysteriousness of the Universe" (W. A. Sinclair),

"Religion is the total response of man to all his environment" (C. A. Coulson).
"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness" (A. N.
Whitehead), "Religion is an active enthusiasm for a fine quality of
life” (Delisle Burns). Clearly, there can be no question of morals without
religion if religion is defined in any of the ways just quoted. But these definitions have no real authority. Those who coin them are behaving

like Humpty-Dumpty who said, it will be remembered, "When I use a word it means
just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less".

To find the "real" (i.e. the generally accepted) sense of the
word "religion" we must turn to the dictionary; and the dictionary definitions,
though their wording varies, all make it clear that the essence of
"religion" in its primary sense, is the belief in a SUPERNATURAL power or
powers. Thus Chambers' Dictionary gives ‘The recognition of supernatural powers, and of the duty lying upon man to yield obedience to these."

It is in this primary sense that the word "religion" will here be used; by
"morals without religion" is meant morals without supernatural sanctions".

Moral Training and Religious Instruction

The belief in the necessity for such sanctions is, of course, widespread.
Eminent persons repeatedly tell us that morals depend on religion, and that any decline in Christian belief must lead to a moral landslide.

This claim, indeed, is now one of Christianity's main lines of defense; for
today the case for Christianity — at any rate Protestant Christianity — is frequently argued on the grounds of utility rather than truth. It is not suggested that the Christian dogmas are credible, but rather that any reference to their incredibility is in poor
taste; that it is the duty of right-thinking people to endure a certain amount
of intellectual discomfort for the sake of their morals – or perhaps more often for the sake of other people's morals and, especially, for the sake of the children.

Because of this widespread feeling, many people who are themselves only
nominally Christian still want their children to be brought up in Christian belief, and to be given
religious instruction in school. They argue that the Christian stories appeal to the child and are suited to his stage of development, and that though he will probably cease to believe in the stories when he grows older, the moral training that has been based on them will be likely to stick.

But there seems little evidence for this optimistic view. If moral training
is tied up with religious instruction — to be more specific, if the child is
given the impression that the obligation to be honest and
truthful and kind is somehow bound up with believing what he is taught in “RI” —
there is an obvious danger that if he later casts off his religious beliefs he
may throw out the moral baby with the mythological bathwater.

'Though it does not conclusively prove anything (since many factors
contribute to causing delinquency) it is surely a striking fact that in this country those who receive the most intensive religious training, and for
whom moral training is most closely tied tip with religion — i.e. the Roman
Catholics — have a delinquency rate two to three times that of the population in
general. When this unwelcome fact is forced on their
notice, Catholics usually argue that most of the delinquents are not "true"
Catholics, but men and women who have lapsed from their faith. This may be so; but it has to be explained why lapsed Catholics are more prone to delinquency than lapsed members of other religious groups.

As will now be clear, Humanists do not deny that the current increases in
delinquency may be connected with the decline in Christian belief. But they
wholly reject the implied conclusion that the best way to reduce delinquency is
to step up religious indoctrination. What is needed is to base moral training on
a less precarious foundation than myth – in other words to replace a religious
by a Humanist ethic. There is considerable evidence that convinced Humanists –
as distinct from those who merely "couldn't care less" are the most law-abiding
group in the population. As Havelock Ellis long ago remarked "it seems extremely
rare to find intelligently irreligious men in prison" (The Criminal, 1895).

Christian and Humanist Ethics - The essential difference between Christian
and Humanist ethics is that while on the Christian view morality is concerned
with the relation between man and God, on the Humanist view it is concerned with
the relation between man and man. To the Christian, acting rightly means obeying
divine commands; to the Humanist, it means acting so as to promote human
well-being. To put it yet another way, the Christian regards morality as
something that has been imposed on man from above by a supernatural lawgiver,
whereas the Humanist regards it as something that has been worked out — and is
still being worked out — by men themselves, in the process of learning to live
happily together in communities. In brief, Christian morality is largely
authoritarian, while Humanist morality is social. On the Humanist view,
authoritarian morality is, quite literally, childish. It is like the morality of
small children, to whom "right" means simply "what pleases the grown ups" and
"wrong" means what makes them angry. As Professor Nowell-Smith has said, to the
small boy the reason he must not pull his sister's hair is that mummy will be
angry, or mummy will punish him. He has made a great step forward towards
maturity of moral judgment when he realizes that the fundamental reason why he
should not pull his sister's hair is that it hurts her. And there is a similar
step forward in the morality of communities, when they pass beyond the idea that
virtue consists in blind obedience to the arbitrary commands of some inscrutable
authority, to the realization that, basically, to act rightly means to act for
the common good – in other words when they pass from authoritarian to social
morality.

The Basis of Social Morality

Christians frequently ask what motive the Humanist can have for behaving
unselfishly if he does not believe in God. The Humanist answer is that the
mainsprings of moral action are to be found in the altruistic, co-operative
tendencies that are fundamental in human nature. Humanists do not share the
depressing Christian view that we are all "miserable sinners" and that there is
"no health in us." But, equally, they reject the starry-eyed notion that human
nature is entirely good. They realize that our nature is mixed, and that we are
often selfish, aggressive and cruel. But there is ample evidence that we have
also native, inborn tendencies towards co-operation and altruism. Man, after
all, is a social animal, and no social animal lives for itself alone. To look at
it from the evolutionary point of view, as Darwin long ago pointed out, one of
the qualities most conducive to the survival of a species is a high degree of
co-operation and mutual aid. So, inevitably, certain tendencies towards altruism
have been built into us in the course of our evolutionary history. Darwin called
these tendencies “social instincts", a modern psychologist might prefer some
term like "built-in-group-survival responses". But whatever term is used, the
tendencies it denotes provide an adequate basis for morals. There is no need to
postulate a God to account for social behavior. To quote Darwin himself: "The
social instincts—the prime principle of man's moral constitution—with the aid of
active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, lead naturally to the
Golden Rule ['do unto others', etc.] and this lies at the foundation of
morality" (The Descent of Man) .But obviously we do not always feel like helping
our neighbor; there are times when we feel more like knocking him down.
Humanists do not deny this self-evident fact, but what they do reject is the
distorted Christian view that if we attack our neighbor we are behaving
spontaneously, whereas if we help we are curbing our spontaneous impulses
because we want to please God or to earn an eternal reward. After all, the
social animals behave altruistically without (presumably) the support of
religious belief, so why should we deny that man can do likewise?

Moral Training

It would be unrealistic, however, to suppose that the “social instincts"
alone are enough to keep us morally on the rails. They have constantly to pull
against the selfish, aggressive tendencies that are also part of our biological
inheritance, and in a straight fight they would often prove too weak unless they
had been rein-forced by training and discipline, and were upheld by public
opinion and, in the last resort, by law. So moral training, in the Humanist
view, has a twofold function, first, to foster the social tendencies, and to
encourage the development of warm-hearted and generous natures that will
spontaneously want to behave co-operatively; and second, to instill habits and
principles that will reinforce the social tendencies, and make us behave kindly
and justly even when a good many of our spontaneous impulses are pulling us the
other way. How best to achieve this is of course a large question; but on the
Humanist view it can be done, and far better done, without the aid of
supernatural sanctions. As Einstein said "A man's ethical behavior should be
based effectively on sympathy, education and social ties; no religious basis is
necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear
of punishment and hope of reward after death" (The World as I See It).

Reprinted from The Freethinker THE NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY103 Borough High
Street, London, S.E.I. Printed by G. T. Wray Ltd., Andover, Hants.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excellent Video Below



Hitchens on the Morals of an Atheist (View it in its entirety by clicking this link.)



Sharpton / Hitchens Debate - Can Morality Exist Without God?



Let's keep our heads, while we continue to watch THE
THEATER OF THE ABSURD!!!

Carolyn aka thinkingblue

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Is the Light At the End Of The Tunnel, A TRAIN?

The other night I happened to tune in to PBS's "Now" with David Brancaccio. This week's segment had Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard economics professor and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, talking about the state of the world's economics. He spoke in a soft manner about the dire consequences of the toxic economic meltdown each and every one of us world inhabitants, will most likely be engulfed in. Mr. Rogoff tells it like it is. No soft peddling from this informative fellow who had once played chess professionally. With his chess ability to foresee things ahead of time, he contemplates a rough going for years to come and even if there is a light at the end of the tunnel it may very well be a massive fast moving train. This train will be in the form of a 9 or 10 trillion dollar debt that WILL HAVE TO BE PAID! All should listen to this interview, it may be alarming for many but that is exactly what we need to wake us from the 8 year long Dark Ages we've experienced. During which the supreme leaders told us all not to worry our little consumer heads about any threats; they would keep us safe, especially from the bad guys. All we had to do, all we should be concerned with, is going shopping and spending money. Money, not earned yet via plastic credit cards and loans. The irony of those years spent in the witless dark is…”THE THREAT” these guys were protecting us from was a hobgoblin, compared to the real threat. Which was the very advice the boss men were giving us! NOT TO WORRY AND SPEND BABY, SPEND BABY SPEND. I'll bet all the hobgoblins are laughing their (sometime in the future, severed) heads off. Please view video below.thinkingblue.blogspot.com

Previewing the Superpower Summit

The world's economic superpowers are preparing
to meet--will they devise a fix for the financial mess?

On March 13, financial ministers and central bankers of the
world's economic superpowers will meet in London to lay the
groundwork for next month's crucial meeting of their country's
leaders, known as the G20. Will their work revolutionize the
global economy and lift us out of this economic hole, or will
politics get in the way?

David Brancaccio interviews Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard economics professor
and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund,
about how high we should raise our hopes and what's at stake for
America and the world.

Related Link

London Summit

Let's keep our heads, while we continue to watch THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD!!!
Carolyn aka thinkingblue

Friday, March 13, 2009

THE RIGHT TO FORM A UNION

The “RIGHT” that all workers can unionize and be heard, finally made an appearance. For some unknown reason (unknown my foot) the Republicans have demonized the word UNION to mean something evil. Nothing is perfect and Unions have had their share of corruption but having said this, Labor Unions are the only way the average worker can have a say over their contributions to a capitalistic society. I hope eyes are open to the realization that inequality so rampant today is due, in part, because Conservatives, hand and hand with BIG BUSINESS, have made Labor seem irrelevant just so “THEIR” profitability will increase. I hope the gluttony we've lived with for too many (REPUBLICAN) years has finally been exposed. The passage of EFCA will be like a shovel of dirt thrown on the coffin of one small entity of GREED. This is encouraging but we still must remain vigilant. GREED will never die and WILL make an appearance wherever there’s a buck to be made or an easily deceived sucker to be had.

Fighting For Free Choice

Yesterday, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would make it easier for workers to form unions and diminish management's ability to intimidate and dissuade workers from unionization, was introduced in the House and Senate. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), the lead sponsor in the Senate, heralded the bill: "Today is one of those defining moments in history as we introduce legislation that puts power back into the hands of the people who are truly the backbone of this economy."
Rep. George Miller
"If we want a fair and sustainable recovery from this economic crisis, we must give workers the ability to stand up for themselves and once again share in the prosperity they help to create,"
Unionized workers earn 11.3 percent ($2.26 dollars per hour) more than non-union workers with similar characteristics,
RIGHT-WING LOBBYING CAMPAIGN:
he bill, which has been called  "a power struggle among labor unions and businesses,"
big business
will spend $200 million to defeat the bill
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A Breath Of Sanity with Frank Schaeffer "Crazy For God"

I saw this clip the other night on “D.L. Hughley Breaks the News" Late Night Show. His guest was Frank Schaeffer and although, I have never heard of this man before, what he had to say was so coherent and sane, I had to search youtube to see if anyone had copied this segment of Hughley's show and posted it to youtube. Sure enough, the video was not hard to find. If you would like an extra breath of sanity, please listen to Schaeffer's opinion on why our beautiful nation is suffering so, after the insane takeover by the Right Wing Nut zealots and neoconservative war mongers. Why would anyone want to be associated with these groups is beyond all that is rational. If I were a sound of mind conservative, I would distance myself and my beliefs as far away from these crazy, Rush Limbaugh "DITOHEADS" (Note, spell check gives the word "DICKHEADS") as I could get. Also on, “Democracy Now” Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tS7NTWNPe8 and
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_kaszMME3o
clipped from www.youtube.com
D.L. Hughley: Frank Schaeffer Author of "Crazy for God" on What's Left of the GOP
D.L. Hughley talks to Crazy for God author Frank Schaeffer who's father was one of the founders of the religious right. Schaeffer discusses his articles at the Huffington Post Why Obama Must Not Work With Republicans and Why Are the Republicans Such Anti-Obama Liars?. From the latter:
Today the Republican Party is rooting for doom. And since the Republicans are now anti-American members of an Obama-must-fail insurgency, lies become a self-fulfilling prophecy: talk doom, and keep the economy in a panic and we may get what we wish for.
Republicans don't have any actual and traditional conservative followers left. The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward -- there-is-no-global-warming -- rube reality.
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

RANTS AND RAVES FROM NORTH FLORIDA

A newspaper clipping from the folks who live and have lived for years and years in Bush/Limbaugh territories. http://www.thethinkingblue.com/other/RANT.html and http://thinkingblue.blogspot.com

This is a clipping from our local newspaper, in the North Florida Area. As I've stated before this is Bush territory, which has recently, (even though sanity has returned with Obama’s victory),
switched to... Rush Limbaugh.

Some of the rhetoric is tongue-in-cheek but most rants are based in some delusional twilight zone.

Just thought there may be a laugh or two in store, if you happen to be a bit closer to...

A REAL reality of the time we live in, (wherever it may be hiding). thinkingblue.blogspot.com


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