Could global warming be good? Well, not for us, but for the world as a whole?

The sun is getting hotter (The sun gets about 10% hotter every billion years.) but the world is getting colder.

The earth is thought to be about 4.6 billion years old so that would mean (alllie figures) the sun has gotten about 70% hotter since the earth formed. The earth was hotter when life originated. That is probably why there are heat-loving (or at least heat tolerant) bacteria (thermophiles) that can live above the boiling point of water. Maybe it was that hot when they evolved. But why, you ask, if the sun has gotten hotter, has the earth gotten colder? And the earth has gotten colder. For instance, the earth is generally free of snow and ice even at high altitudes except during ice ages so we have been in an ice age for about 40 million years. During an ice age there are cycles of advancing and retreating glaciers. Just as we see now. The realization that we are in an ice age once made scientist think that the earth was in danger of turning into a “snowball earth.”

So why has the earth gotten colder?

There are lots of theories but the main one has to do with the atmosphere. With what we call greenhouse gases.

When the early earth coalesced out of the protoplanetary disk and stabilized, it is thought to have had an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. That got blasted away by the solar wind. This early earth was bombarded by asteroids and comets. It grew. The bombardments brought gases from space or released them from under the earth’s surface. The new atmosphere was thought to be mostly hydrogen(H2), water(H20), methane(CH4) and ammonia(NH3). The sun’s radiation (no ozone to block it out back then) broke water into oxygen(O2) and hydrogen(H2). The oxygen reacted with methane to form carbon dioxide(CO2) and water and with the ammonia to form water and free nitrogen(N2). This produced high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which would have given the ancient sky a reddish cast. Methane and carbon dioxide are greenhouse gases. As is water vapor. It is thought they kept the earth from turning into a snowball. Kept it warm. But not so warm as Venus with its almost pure carbon dioxide atmosphere holding in its heat and turning it into a hot, dark burning hell.

Life evolved. It metabolized. It reproduced. Then life developed a neater trick. Through mutation it learned to turn light energy into chemical energy using carbon dioxide and water. This was the most popular trick of all, the trick on which almost all life on earth came to depend. Photosynthesis. But photosynthesis does two things, that, in the long run, proved disastrous. One, it produces a poisonous pollutant, a pollutant that, as it grew in concentration in the atmosphere and in the water, killed almost all life. The poison? Oxygen. That was a big change. Almost everything died. Except for a few organisms that hid away from the poison. And a very few that evolved to tolerate it. Or use it. That path leads to us.

The second thing photosynthesis did was use up the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, to bind it in a thousand different compounds that, when an organism died, ended up in the rocks and ocean bottoms of earth. As carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere, heat radiated back into space and the world began to cool. Then earth suffered its first ice age (as far as we know) and one of its most severe. It lasted 300 million years.

Then carbon dioxide slowly weathered out of the rocks, by erosion, and when volcanoes dissolved calcium carbonate rock laid down in previous eons and spit out carbon dioxide. The earth warmed. As it did, the oceans were able to hold less carbon dioxide and released more of it to the atmosphere. The glaciers retreated. The ice melted. The plants grew and multiplied in the oceans (and later on the land), burying the carbon in the ground (say as coal and oil) until there was so little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the world again cooled and the poles froze and the glaciers marched south.

This has happened many times in earth’s history. All of the carbon in the oil and coal and most carbonate rocks was once in the atmosphere. Much of it while there was life on earth. There is no reason that higher levels of carbon dioxide would kill everything. It didn’t before. It was the ice ages that killed, sometimes killed most forms of life. As time passed more and more of the earth’s carbon ended up underground until now the atmosphere is only about 0.04% carbon dioxide.

Maybe that is why we are here!! To help the carbon get out of the ground, to forestall snowball earth!! Some carbon deposits would never weather out. They are too deeply buried. Maybe we are doing a good thing digging up the carbon compounds and burning them. Maybe we are SAVING the earth, helping in a cycle that will make life on earth possible long into the future! Maybe we are Gaia’s trick to save the world!

We have already increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about a third in the last 150 years. There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than any time in the last 20 million years. But that isn’t much when you consider that there was ten times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere 200 million years ago and 20 times as much 400 million years ago. William Ruddiman claims we have already disrupted the cycle of glaciation as far back as 8000 years ago due to our intense farming.

But wait. The sun is getting hotter. If we put all that carbon back into the atmosphere, will the earth get hotter and hotter too? We will end up like Venus? Well, the scientists say yes. Perhaps within the next billion years. Hmmm, hard to worry about that. But if we are here to save the world, it matters.

Should we care if it gets hotter?

We evolved in a narrow range of temperature. We are adapted to the way it is NOW. We did not evolve in a hotter earth, an earth so hot that most reptiles did not need to generate their own heat. The action of the sun and the atmosphere on them was sufficient to keep them warm enough to keep their temperatures in an optimum range for the activity of their enzymes. But WE evolved during an ice age. We made our great leap forward to civilization during an ice age!! The hotter climate may not suit us. The ice will all melt. The oceans will rise. And all the coastal cities will flood. Even far inland the earth will subside under the weight of water and there will be less and less land. Many forests will become deserts. Much farm land will be lost. Millions, maybe billions will die!! And it will be… hot.

I hate hot.

So what should we do!! If we were as smart as we think we are we would figure out what temperature is best for us and keep atmospheric carbon dioxide in the range that is most likely to maintain that temperature. Instead we blindly go on our greedy way, spilling carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like that bunch of mindless cyanobacteria excreted the oxygen that once destroyed the living world.

Haven’t we learned anything in 3 billion years?

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I have thrown in the towel where wikipedia is concerned. I used to think it was lame and I could find better information on my own but more and more I find if I look at a hundred pages I rarely find anything as good as wikipedia. At least for science.

The new study helps explain how Earth may have avoided becoming frozen solid early in its history, when astrophysicists believe the sun was 25 percent fainter than today. http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2232

In the very long term, astrophysicists believe that the sun’s output increases by about 10% per billion (109) years. In about one billion years the additional 10% will be enough to cause a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth – rising temperatures produce more water vapour, water vapour is a greenhouse gas (much stronger than CO2), the temperature rises, more water vapour is produced, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_ages#Major_ice_ages

On long timescales, atmospheric CO2 content is determined by the balance among geochemical processes including organic carbon burial in sediments, silicate rock weathering, and vulcanism. The net effect of slight imbalances in the carbon cycle over tens to hundreds of millions of years has been to reduce atmospheric CO2. The rates of these processes are extremely slow; hence they are of limited relevance to the atmospheric CO2 response to emissions over the next hundred years. In more recent times, atmospheric CO2 concentration continued to fall after about 60 myr BP, and there is geochemical evidence that volume concentrations were less than 300 ppm by about 20 myr BP. Low CO2 concentrations may have been the stimulus that favored the evolution of C4 plants, which increased greatly in abundance between 7 and 5 myr BP. Present carbon dioxide levels are likely higher now than at any time during the past 20 myr[17] and certainly higher than in the last few hundred thousand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth%27s_atmosphere

William Ruddiman has proposed the early anthropocene hypothesis according to which the anthropocene era, as some people call the most recent period in the Earth’s history when the activities of the human race first began to have a significant global impact on the Earth’s climate and ecosystems, did not begin in the eighteenth century with advent of the industrial era, but dates back to 8000 years ago, due to intense farming activities of our early agrarian ancestors. It was at that time that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations stopped following the periodic pattern of the Milankovitch cycles. In his overdue-glaciation hypothesis Ruddiman claims that an incipient ice age would probably have begun several thousand years ago, but the arrival of that scheduled ice age was forestalled by the activities of early farmers. Other important aspects which contributed to ancient climate regimes are the ocean currents, which are modified by continent position as well as other factors. They have the ability to cool (i.e. aiding the creation of Antarctica) and the ability to warm (i.e giving the British Isles a temperate as opposed to a boreal climate). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_ages#Changes_in_Earth.27s_atmosphere

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To comment email comments to alllie at alllie@newsgarden.org

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© alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

They raised him on a farm with others of his kind, all of them doomed, but he was special. With the food and the care he grew to over twice the size of a normal male. His size only made him slow and clumsy, like a morbidly obese person who can barely carry his own weight. They fed him more and more and gave him growth hormone and steroids till he was a giant of his kind, an ill and clumsy giant.

Then one day they ran him out of the barn, away from food, they struck him with sticks and electric prods till he screamed in pain and tried to get away. They ran him toward the trees, with dogs chasing him. Now it was time for him to pay for the food and care he had received and he would pay in pain. There was someone willing to pay to hurt him, to make him suffer, because this was a commercial game farm and pain and death was their stock in trade.

Sometimes the prey was just quail, birds raised in a cage, given food, kept from learning about survival, until one day they were released in a field. The first time they took to wing, they would be shot out of the air. It’s called a canned hunt. In the fun of causing their suffering and death, once the evil old man who ruled the country had the pleasure, not just of shooting them, but of shooting another evil old man. Sort of a human hunt. Little consolation to the quail.

But this animal wasn’t a quail. He was a pig. The drugs and the food and the captivity had made him a leviathan, a helpless one. So he ran to the forest, fleeing from pain, followed by two farm workers with high powered rifles (called guides), a paying customer and his 11-year-old son. They tracked him through the trees but how hard is it to track a tame animal that weighs over a thousand pounds, a hormone swollen freak who can barely walk.

The boy was given a pistol and told to shoot the animal. He did and the poor creature suffered and ran and was followed and shot again. They didn’t use a rifle, just a pussy handgun, so it would take longer for the animal to die and the customer would get his money’s worth. Finally, with the fifth shot, and the animal died. The boy’s picture and the picture of his tame victim was put on the news, as though killing a frightened and ill animal was a feat worth taking notice of when all that was noteworthy was how big the hormones had made the poor animal grow. The head was taken for a trophy and the rest of the flesh to be made into hormone sausage. The father celebrated the suffering and death as proof of his family’s Christian values.

Here’s hoping the game farm owner, the man and his son all get what they deserve.

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© alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

Back to the green. That is what some breeders call it when they cross purebred animals with wild individuals in an attempt to bring health and vitality back into a degenerate strain of animals. Hybrid vigor and all that.

Many people believe Harry, Lady Diana’s second child, to be the son of her lover James Hewitt. He does look like Hewitt, though Hewitt denies that he could be Harry’s father. But the doubt still remains.

Prince Harry	James Hewitt

If he is, this seems like a good thing to me. The Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family, which, in 1917, changed its name to Windsor to distract the British people from the royal family’s German origins, needs to cross with some sturdier stock to overcome its upper-class twit genes. Hewitt, though not perfect, seems to have more merit than anyone in the royal family. Without their money and position I can’t image any of them being anything more than a cashier in a shop or someone’s mum. The cross between Elizabeth and Phillip produced a homely couple of kids, typical interbred idiots. One would think with their money they could at least marry good-looking people. But like the Saudi Royals, who appear to be devils in drag, the English royals are an ugly, undistinguished group.

It must have been exciting for Diana to make love to a man who she loved and who loved her, unlike with the degenerate twit Charles, using her as a brood mare while he cavorted with his aging mistresses and expected even his masseuse to give him a hand job at the end of a massage. If Hewitt is indeed Harry’s father Harry should be glad, glad that he was sired by a man who loved his mother instead of by the aging pervert Charles who cared nothing for her.

So a cross with James Hewitt seems to be a good thing. A child of love and back to the green. Some nice British genes to overcome the royal family’s superboob ones. Since the British Royal family is mostly German with a sprinkling of Dutch, for a long time Britain has had Kings and Queens that were, genetically, foreign invaders. If Harry is Hewitt’s son that would make him more British/English than any royal offspring in centuries. He would seem to have more right to the throne than his brother William, who is mostly German.

It seems to me that the British people should favor him more, he being their own kin, than they do the more foreign Prince William.

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© alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

I used to be a vegetarian.

It happened this way.

I was at the grocery store in the meat department looking at all the dead flesh, all the bloody bits and pieces of animals murdered for their meat and I got to thinking about my ferret. Farris, fairest of the ferrets, was a little albino ferret. My vet claimed she was the sweetest ferret in town. Indeed, I told him, “What had she not got to be sweet about. She is spoiled rotten, loved to death, and gets to do exactly what she wants to do whenever she wants to do it. She’s never penned up. She’s never punished. Of course, she’s sweet.” And she was.

Farris weighed just a pound and a half but she could play and be happy and suffer and be sad. She was a person. Not a very bright person, you understand, but a person, nonetheless, a person with her own personality, her own spark of being and knowing and feeling. I got to thinking, if my little ferret was a person, how much more must a four or five pound chicken be a person, much less a 200 pound pig or a thousand pound cow. Why, a cow’s brain was bigger than my ferret’s entire body. A cow or a pig must be person too even though it couldn’t do trig or read a book or shoot a gun. I found I couldn’t make myself buy any pieces of their plastic-wrapped pain and I left the grocery store in a state of incipient vegetarian grace. Thus began my 18 months as a vegetarian.

I wasn’t a very good vegetarian. I was more a junk food vegetarian. I figured there weren’t any dead animals in a Snickers and a Dr. Pepper. It’s difficult to be a vegetarian in the US. So many foods have hidden bits of dead animals in them. Take… Jello. Dead cow. Boiled bits of bones and hoofs seasoned with fruit flavors. And lots of things you would think would be free of dead animals have animal extracts for flavoring. Say you eschew the Big Mac but take the fries. Well, there’re meat extracts in the frying oil to give fries that meaty potato flavor. When you eat out you can’t even look at a list of ingredients to avoid animal products. No telling what foods have been made at the cost of an animal’s pain and suffering.

It’s not that easy to get complete proteins without eating meat. I was never good at it.

If you give up dairy and eggs, it’s really gonna be hard. And there is no need for it. If egg and milk producers could be persuaded to treat their animals kindly and let them live out their lives there would be no reason not to eat eggs and dairy. My grandmother had chickens and they didn’t have bad lives. Even the ones she killed and cooked. It was very quick when she killed them. No long drawn out trip to the slaughter house to be hung upside down on a conveyor and then be killed by a clumsy machine. I look at chickens now and often see bruises on their legs. They… well let’s not go into that. It’s even worse for fish. Fish are put through a machine that disembowels them while they are still alive. There are recent studies that show that fish feel pain, if you had any doubt. And let’s not talk about lobsters.

Anyway, after 18 months my protein and iron levels were so low, according to my doctor, that it was making me feel weak and sick. So I fell off the wagon and began to eat meat again. After a year or so I was in the meat department and couldn’t make myself buy any meat and went vegetarian for 6 months. Then I got sick again.

I eat meat now. But I have to be careful in the grocery store. If I linger around the carcasses I will not be able to buy any meat. I believe I am going to hell for not being a vegetarian. I know it’s wrong to eat meat and still I do it. I think if you do wrong things that you know are wrong that you are likely to go to hell for it. Let’s just hope there is no hell.

Even though I am not a vegetarian I still have rules about what meat I will eat. I won’t eat companion animals, baby animals, animals raised cruelly, killed cruelly, killed kosher (very cruel) or cooked alive. That means no veal, no lamb, no lobster, no shellfish, etc.

But I am thinking I need to put more restrictions on my meat eating.

Since suffering is by the individual rather than by the pound surely it would be more moral to eat beef than anything else.

Think about it. You can eat dozens of shrimp at a sitting. I’ve eaten 3 or 4 small fish at a meal as well. It’s not hard to eat half a chicken. But you have to eat a LOT of beef (or pork) before you are responsible for the death of one animal, particularly if you eat different cuts. Also there are laws mandating the humane slaughter of cows and pigs. Such laws do not apply to poultry or fish. So if you can’t be a vegetarian and want to minimize the suffering you cause you should probably stick to beef. And NOT kosher beef. Kosher slaughter is very brutal and causes terrible suffering.

We can’t eliminate all the suffering we cause in the world, but we should at least try to minimize it.

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© alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

I was watching a clip of Borat getting a group of rednecks in a bar to sing “Throw the Jew down the well” and it just seemed bogus. The scene was supposed to illustrate southern or redneck racism. I thought it only illustrated the power of a camera crew and the ability of an entertainer to get people to sing along. I figured the bar patrons were paid and directed, directed to sing along. They didn’t seem that enthusiastic but I am a southerner and redneck is my heritage. And that wasn’t redneck enthusiasm.

Also we don’t throw anything down a well. You throw a person down your well, he dies, your well is contaminated, ruined. Enough rednecks grow up using well water that we don’t find the idea of throwing a dead or living person down a well attractive. Talk about “don’t shit where you eat.” It’s just alien. Southerners lynch. Not throw people down wells.

And we don’t call them wells. A well is a pipe that is sunk down into the water table and a pump is used to bring the water up. Even if you took the pump apart you couldn’t put anything down a well bigger than a mouse. What Borat calls a well we call a cistern.

Also anti-Semitism is not common in the south. At least not among rednecks. First of all Jews are mighty thin on the ground in the rural south. Second, redneck prejudice is aimed at blacks. There isn’t much room for any special prejudice against Jews. It is true that the average Southerner believes all Jews will go to hell but he believes that all members of every Christian sect but his own will go to hell too. As well as some member of his sect. There is plenty of hell to go around.

When I was growing up the few Jews in town seemed just another sect. And there are so many sects in the south. The Church of Christ, Church of God in Christ, Baptist, Southern Baptist, Assembly of God, Methodists, Seventh-Day Adventist, and so on and so on. Many little churches have no wider affiliation, just a group of maybe a hundred people with their own tiny sect. I’m still amazed the Republicans were able to weld these sects into a political force. Maybe the Democrats need to emphasize their differences to break that coalition apart.

The Jews were no different. They were going to hell but so was everyone else except your own little sect. The weirdest thing about the Jews was they weren’t actively recruiting new members. That is what southern religion is about: Proselytizing. Evangelizing. Trying to convert people, mostly other Christians, to your sect.

I never heard a redneck say that the Jews were guilty of killing Jesus. That idea would have been thought pretty weird since Jesus and the apostles were Jewish and since the Bible pretty much pinned that on the Romans. I know sometimes Jewish people see themselves at the center of the world, at least as victims. Not so in the South. The central victim in the south is always black.

Jews were always a tiny minority in the south and were pretty assimilated.

During the Civil War, just to name a few prominent Jews in the South, the Speaker of the Louisiana House (Edwin Moise) and Louisiana’s Lieutenant Governer (H.M. Hyams) were Jews, and during the Civil War, the Mayor of Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, was a Jew (later connected by family ties to Confederate president Jefferson Davis), and of course Judah Benjamin was variously the Secretary of State and Secretary of War of the Confederate government.
http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/wais/cgi-bin/index.php?p=387

There were even Jews in the original KKK.

But Jews will point out the lynching of Leo Frank as southern anti-Semitism. But Frank was lynched not because he was Jewish but because he was a rich Yankee factory manager forcing some of his female employees into sex as the price of keeping their jobs and who was convicted of raping and killing a 12 year old girl who worked for him. It’s best to remember that the Klan was founded as a vigilante group to punish criminals when there was little or no law after the civil war. Not just black suspected criminals. I was reading about lynchings in the town where I was born. Most of the victims were black but the local paper also exhorted the citizenry to lynch various white alleged criminals as well.

So when Borat gets the rednecks to sing “Throw the Jew Down the Well” he is working out his own cultural stereotype of victimization (Cohen/Borat is Jewish). Not a southern one.

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© alllie 2006

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

Once upon a time, long ago, there was a beautiful girl called Safiyya. She was 17. Her father was chief of the Jewish tribe of Banu Nadir. She was married to the tribe’s treasurer. Things being what they were in those days, she might not have chosen her husband but she might have had some say. There was a WarLord raging through her world. He conquered her people and killed her father and brothers. Her husband was taken and tortured for the location of the tribe’s wealth. A fire was kindled on his chest and he was burnt till he was nearly dead. Then his head was cut off.

Once all the men of the tribe were dead the warlord and his men began dividing up the women. They were now slaves. Their lives would be dark indeed. They would be raped, humiliated, beaten, sold, worked to death, even outright killed. That was what captivity and slavery was and had always been.

The men bartered Safiyya and her cousins. Hearing of her beauty the WarLord decided he wanted her for himself. He exchanged seven heads for her. Safiyya and her cousin were led past the bodies of their friends and families into the presence of the warlord. Safiyya’s cousin was hysterical. Safiyya was silent with shock. The Warlord had the cousin removed. He put a cloak over Safiyya. His men thought this was very kind. He killed her people, bought her with body parts, readied to rape her, yet because he covered her nakedness with a cloak, this was a sign of his kindness.

The Warlord had her prepared for him. She washed, cleaned her body so it would be sweet for her rapist. And probably she thought: “How can I survive?” And survive as well as possible.

She was brought to the Warlord’s tent. The Warlord later called what he did “marriage.” Safiyya spent the night trying to please the monster. He was 60 and the murderer of her father and brothers and husband. She was 17. How she must have loathed the old man’s touch. But she succeeded in pleasing him. When the WarLord left in the morning she must have heard him talking through the thin walls of the tent. A close companion and minion of the Warlord had spent the night at the tent’s door, the minion armed with a sword. The man told the Warlord, “…she was a newly married woman, and you killed her father, brother, and husband, so I did not feel secure about you with her.” The Warlord laughed and said, “It all went well.”

Safiyya had spent the night weaving stories with her body and mind, much as Shahrazad in a Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Only the story she told was not about Alibaba and the Forty Thieves but to the Warlord with his thousand or ten thousand thieves.

The Warlord was clever. He had devised a way to recruit infinite numbers of men to fight for him. The first of these stratagems was pillage. Each man was allowed to keep 80% of what he stole and 80% of the human beings he enslaved. That was why Safiyya’s husband was tortured, so the thieves could find more to steal. Thus the women were enslaved. Later most were sold or ransomed, so they would bring more wealth to the thieves.

There have been other thieves. More than we can name. That is what war is about, stealing and defending against theft. That is what Alexander and Genghis Khan and Hannibal and Bush are about, about stealing from the lands they conquered, stealing the lands themselves, stealing the goods and enslaving the people. The Warlord and his band were just more of the same. And while each thief kept 80% of what he stole, the Warlord (and later his family), the needy and orphans got 20%. (http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/008.qmt.html#008.041)

In addition to pillage, the Warlord had a second stratagem that made him and his band of thieves even more dangerous and deadly. When previous Warlords died, their armies generally dispersed. This Warlord built his army, not just around theft, but around religion. He devised a religion, good in a few parts and bad in many others, but which was aimed at convincing his thieves that they could be rich on earth (if they stole enough), rich in property and women, and God would approve and then they would go on and be even richer in heaven. Because of this, and the wonder of successful theft, his army went on past the Warlord’s death, went on to conquer more and more lands, to pillage and rape and enslave people, to commit the greatest genocides in history (this in India). The WarLord called himself Mohammed.

But Safiyya, in her cleverness, clutched by fear and a desire to survive, did survive. She became one of the monster’s many wives and at his death was able to accumulate some wealth and help the son of a surviving sister. A wife had some rights while if she had resisted and been merely a slave girl, she would have not helped herself or her family. She would have been passed around by the Warlord and his men like a bag of potato chips. But, like Shahrazad, Safiyya dealt with a monster and lived.

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© alllie 2006

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

Bush is acting like the dictator he wants to be, claiming there are no laws that apply to him. He is daring us to stop him. If Congress doesn’t act we may lose democracy forever. We may still be called the United States of America but everything that made us special will be gone. There was a time when Athenian democracy was lost, when the Roman Republic was lost. Even though cities named Athens and Rome continued to exist, the freedom and democracy that had made them good places to live was gone. Their people became virtual or literal slaves. The people of Athens and Rome let representative government slip away, let themselves become dictatorships. Will we?

How much easier could Congress have made it for the Bush Administration to conduct legitimate intelligence operations within the United States when there already was a special secret court that would even grant a warrant after the spying had been done?  Out of 19,000 warrants this secret court had only refused five. Still the Bush Administration insists that they can spy on Americans without getting a court order. What possible reason could there be for Bush to ignore such a court? They must have wanted to spy on Americans who could not be classified as terrorists or potential terrorists by any stretch of the imagination. It’s been reported that current and former government officials were targets of NSA spying as well as were some reporters. Who else? Maybe Democratic politicians? Or maybe Bush just wants to be king, to be free of the rule of law.

Will we let Bush turn us into a police state where any American can be spied on, locked up indefinitely without being charged or being allowed to see a lawyer, even a place where people can be tortured? Will we do nothing to stop it?

This is just Watergate without the burglary, Watergate with the NSA doing the spying.

WAKE UP PEOPLE!!! BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!!

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© alllie 2006

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I get sick of people claiming Islam is a religion of peace so I decided to post the quotations from the Koran included in Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. I despise Islam for its treatment of women but Harris makes me look moderate in comparison. However, the Koran itself makes Harris seem tolerant and reasonable. Note that Harris provides the Koran chapter and verse after each quotation. This makes it easy to check the accuracy and context of the quotes if you have any doubts. You can check them with USC Compendium of Muslim Texts. This site provides three different translations for each verse as well as allowing keyword searches.
http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/

To convey the relentlessness with which unbelievers are vilified in the text of the Koran, I provide a long compilation of quotations below, in the order of their appearance in the text. This is what the Creator of the universe apparently has on his mind (when he is not fussing with gravitational constants and atomic weights):

“It is the same whether or not you forewarn them [the unbelievers], they will have no faith” (2:6). “God will mock them and keep them long in sin, blundering blindly along” (2:15). A fire “whose fuel is men and stones” awaits them (2:24). They will be “rewarded with disgrace in this world and with grievous punishment on the Day of Resurrection” (2:85). “God’s curse be upon the infidels!” (2:89). “They have incurred God’s most inexorable wrath. An igno-minious punishment awaits [them]” (2:90). “God is the enemy of the unbelievers” (2:98). “The unbelievers among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews], and the pagans, resent that any blessing should have been sent down to you from your Lord” (2:105). “They shall be held up to shame in this world and sternly punished in the hereafter” (2:114). “Those to whom We [God] have given the Book, and who read it as it ought to be read, truly believe in it; those that deny it shall assuredly be lost” (2:122). “[We] shall let them live awhile, and then shall drag them to the scourge of the Fire. Evil shall be their fate” (2:126). “The East and the West are God’s. He guides whom He will to a straight path” (2:142). “Do not say that those slain in the cause of God are dead. They are alive, but you are not aware of them” (2:126). “But the infidels who die unbelievers shall incur the curse of God, the angels, and all men. Under it they shall remain for ever; their punishment shall not be lightened, nor shall they be reprieved” (2:162). “They shall sigh with remorse, but shall never come out of the Fire” (2:168). “The unbelievers are like beasts which, call out to them as one may, can hear nothing but a shout and a cry. Deaf, dumb, and blind, they understand nothing” (2:172). “Theirs shall be a woeful punishment” (2:175). “How stead-fastly they seek the Fire! That is because God has revealed the Book with truth; those that disagree about it are in extreme schism” (2:176). “Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage. . . . [I]f they attack you put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbe-lievers be rewarded: but if they desist, God is forgiving and merci-ful. Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme. But if they desist, fight none except the evil–doers” (2:190-93). “Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dis-like it. But you may hate a thing although it is good for you, and love a thing although it is bad for you. God knows, but you know not” (2:216). “They will not cease to fight against you until they force you to renounce your faith–if they are able. But whoever of you recants and dies an unbeliever, his works shall come to nothing in this world and in the world to come. Such men shall be the ten-ants of Hell, wherein they shall abide forever. Those that have embraced the Faith, and those that have fled their land and fought for the cause of God, may hope for God’s mercy” (2:217-18). “God does not guide the evil-doers” (2:258). “God does not guide the unbelievers” (2:264). “The evil-doers shall have none to help them” (2:270). “God gives guidance to whom He will” (2:272).

“Those that deny God’s revelations shall be sternly punished; God is mighty and capable of revenge” (3:5). “As for the unbeliev-ers, neither their riches nor their children will in the least save them from God’s judgment. They shall become fuel for the Fire” (3:10)-”Say to the unbelievers: ‘You shall be overthrown and driven into Hell-an evil resting place!”‘ (3:12). “The only true faith in God’s sight is Islam…. He that denies God’s revelations should know that swift is God’s reckoning” (3:19). “Let the believers not make friends with infidels in preference to the faithful–he that does this has nothing to hope for from God–except in self-defense” (3:28). “Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people. They will spare no pains to corrupt you. They desire nothing but your ruin. Their hatred is evident from what they utter with their mouths, but greater is the hatred which their breasts conceal” (3:118). “If you have suffered a defeat, so did the enemy. We alter-nate these vicissitudes among mankind so that God may know the true believers and choose martyrs from among you (God does not love the evil-doers); and that God may test the faithful and annihi-late the infidels” (3:140). “Believers, if you yield to the infidels they will drag you back to unbelief and you will return headlong to perdi-tion…. We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers…. The Fire shall be their home” (3:149-51). “Believers, do not follow the example of the infidels, who say of their brothers when they meet death abroad or in battle: ‘Had they stayed with us they would not have died, nor would they have been killed.’ God will cause them to regret their words…. If you should die or be slain in the cause of God, God’s forgiveness and His mercy would surely be better than all the riches they amass” (3:156). “Never think that those who were slain in the cause of God are dead. They are alive, and well provided for by their Lord; pleased with His gifts and rejoicing that those they left behind, who have not yet joined them, have nothing to fear or to regret; rejoicing in God’s grace and bounty. God will not deny the faithful their reward” (3:169). “Let not the unbelievers think that We prolong their days for their own good. We give them respite only so that they may commit more grievous sins. Shameful pun-ishment awaits them” (3:178). “Those that suffered persecution for My sake and fought and were slain: I shall forgive them their sins and admit them to gardens watered by running streams, as a reward from God; God holds the richest recompense. Do not be deceived by the fortunes of the unbelievers in the land. Their prosperity is brief. Hell shall be their home, a dismal resting place” (3:195-96).

“God has cursed them in their unbelief” (4:46). “God will not for-give those who serve other gods besides Him; but He will forgive whom He will for other sins. He that serves other gods besides God is guilty of a heinous sin…. Consider those to whom a portion of the Scriptures was given. They believe in idols and false gods and say of the infidels: ‘These are better guided than the believers”‘ (4:50-51). “Those that deny Our revelation We will burn in fire. No sooner will their skins be consumed than We shall give them other skins, so that they may truly taste the scourge. God is mighty and wise” (4:55-56).

“Believers, do not seek the friendship of the infidels and those who were given the Book before you, who have made of your reli-gion a jest and a pastime” (5:57). “That which is revealed to you from your Lord will surely increase the wickedness and unbelief of many among them. We have stirred among them enmity and hatred, which will endure till the Day of Resurrection” (5:65). “God does not guide the unbelievers” (5:67). “That which is revealed to you from your Lord will surely increase the wickedness and unbe-lief of many among them. But do not grieve for the unbelievers” (5:69). “You see many among them making friends with unbeliev-ers. Evil is that to which their souls prompt them. They have incurred the wrath of God and shall endure eternal torment…. You will find that the most implacable of men in their enmity to the faithful are the Jews and the pagans, and that the nearest in affection to them are those who say: ‘We are Christians”‘ (5:80-82). “[T]hose that disbelieve and deny Our revelations shall become the inmates of Hell” (5:86).

“[T]hey deny the truth when it is declared to them: but they shall learn the consequences of their scorn” (6:5). “We had made them more powerful in the land than yourselves [the Meccans], sent down for them abundant water from the sky and gave them rivers that rolled at their feet. Yet because they sinned We destroyed them all and raised up other generations after them. If We sent down to you a Book inscribed on real parchment and they touched it with their own hands, the unbelievers would still assert: ‘This is but plain sor-cery.’ They ask: ‘Why has no angel been sent down to him [Muhammad]?’ If We had sent down an angel, their fate would have been sealed and they would have never been reprieved” (6:5-8). “Who is more wicked than the man who invents falsehoods about God or denies His revelations?” (6:21). “Some of them listen to you. But We have cast veils over their hearts and made them hard of hearing lest they understand your words. They will believe in none of Our signs, even if they see them one and all. When they come to argue with you the unbelievers say: ‘This is nothing but old fictitious tales.’ They forbid it and depart from it. They ruin none but themselves, though they do not perceive it. If you could see them when they are set before the Fire! They will say: ‘Would that we could return! Then we would not deny the revelations of our Lord and would be true believers’ (6:23-27). “But if they were sent back, they would return to that which they have been forbidden. They are liars all” (6:29). “Had God pleased He would have given them guidance, one and all” (6:35). “Deaf and dumb are those that deny Our revelations: they blunder about in darkness. God confounds whom He will, and guides to a straight path whom He pleases.” (6:39) “[T]heir hearts were hardened, and Satan made their deeds seem fair to them. And when they had clean forgotten Our admonition We granted them all that they desired; but just as they were rejoicing in what they were given, We suddenly smote them and they were plunged into utter despair. Thus were the evil-doers annihilated. Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe!” (6:43-45). “[T]hose that deny Our revelations shall be punished for their misdeeds” (6:49). “Such are those that are damned by their own sins. They shall drink scalding water and be sternly punished for their unbelief” (6:70). “Could you but see the wrongdoers when death overwhelms them! With hands out-stretched, the angels will say: ‘Yield up your souls. You shall be rewarded with the scourge of shame this day, for you have said of God what is untrue and scorned His revelations” (6:93). “Avoid the pagans. Had God pleased, they would not have worshipped idols…. We will turn away their hearts and eyes from the Truth since they refused to believe in it at first. We will let them blunder about in their wrongdoing. If We sent the angels down to them, and caused the dead to speak to them, . . . and ranged all things in front of them, they would still not believe, unless God willed otherwise…. Thus have We assigned for every prophet an enemy: the devils among men and jinn, who inspire each other with vain and varnished false-hoods. But had your Lord pleased, they would not have done so. Therefore leave them to their own inventions, so that the hearts of those who have no faith in the life to come may be inclined to what they say and, being pleased, persist in their sinful ways” (6:107-12). “The devils will teach their votaries to argue with you. If you obey them you shall yourselves become idolaters…. God will humiliate the transgressors and mete out to them a grievous punishment for their scheming” (6:121-25). “If God wills to guide a man, He opens his bosom to Islam. But if he pleases to confound him, He makes his bosom small and narrow as though he were climbing up to heaven. Thus shall God lay the scourge on the unbelievers” (6:125).

This is all desperately tedious, of course. But there is no substitute for confronting the text itself. I cannot judge the quality of the Ara-bic; perhaps it is sublime. But the book’s contents are not. On almost every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise non-believers. On almost every page, it prepares the ground for religious conflict. Anyone who can read passages like those quoted above and still not see a link between Muslim faith and Muslim violence should probably consult a neurologist.

Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death. Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential thinkers in the Islamic world, and the father of modern Islamism among the Sunni, wrote, “The Koran points to another contemptible characteristic of the Jews: their craven desire to live, no matter at what price and regardless of qual-ity, honor, and dignity”" This statement is really a miracle of con-cision. While it may seem nothing more than a casual fillip against the Jews, it is actually a powerful distillation of the Muslim worldview. Stare at it for a moment or two, and the whole machinery of intolerance and suicidal grandiosity will begin to construct itself before your eyes. The Koran’s ambiguous prohibition against suicide appears to be an utter non-issue. Surely there are Muslim jurists who might say that suicide bombing is contrary to the tenets of Islam (where are these jurists, by the way?) and that suicide bombers are therefore not martyrs but fresh denizens of hell. Such a minority opinion, if it exists, cannot change the fact that suicide bombings have been rationalized by much of the Muslim world (where they are called “sacred explosions”). Indeed, such rational-ization is remarkably easy, given the tenets of Islam.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith

Globalization: the goal of the global plutocracy, so they can make money everywhere, exploit everyone, sell to everyone in the world. Globalization: One world ruled and exploited by a small class of people. They try to convince us it’s a good thing even for us and sometimes it is but globalization is predicated on an abundance of cheap oil and those days are ending. As it does and globalization become less possible, the plutocracy (a controlling class of the wealthy) pushes for it even harder. They are trying desperately to squeeze every last little bit of profit out of the world before the global collapse that will come with the end of the cheap energy that sustains the world’s huge populations.

Let’s talk a little more about globalization. Dell, for instance, makes computers in China and sells them in the US. The US computer industry is gone, killed off by foreign competition, killed off with government complicity. If the US is cut off from the rest of the world, if it is no longer economically feasible to ship computers from Asia to the US, then we will no have computers (or TVs) because America no longer has the factories to make its own.

The grocery store is filled with celery and onions from Mexico, grapes from Chili, and other produce from even farther away. Where once most food came from local farms, or at most, from California and Florida, now it doesn’t. The US is no longer a net exporter of food. We no longer produce enough food to feed our own. When there is no more cheap gas, how will we feed ourselves?

So globalization makes us dependent on foreign sources of food and manufactured goods. Soon we be unable to import these goods cheaply and our own industry is gone. When we need American industry to make things that we can no longer get globally, it won’t be there. The Bush Junta and the Clinton fools, pushed by the Rockefellers and the Council on Foreign Relations, have killed off our industry in their search for cheaper labor and higher profits abroad.

We will be sorry we can’t get our cheap computers and cell phones from China, but we will be very, very sorry that we can’t get the foreign food on which we have come to depend since the deliberate destruction of much of US food production.

Without oil, what? Back to the days of slow and stinking steamships, their smokestacks visibly belching pollution that makes the average car look like a clean alternative? Or maybe we’ll have nuclear powered ships. Instead of oil spills like the Exxon Valdez, we’ll get Chernobyl/Titanic disasters till the oceans are poisoned with radioactivity.

They will try everything, but in the end, without oil, globalization isn’t possible. You can’t depend on foreign imports without cheap transportation. As globalization fails each region will be forced to fall back on its local resources, its locally grown food, and its locally manufactured goods. Will American have anything to fall back on?

With the disappearance of cheap oil, it will become more and more difficult to support our population. Already we have to import food and half our oil. With the collapse of oil as a significant energy source, any country whose population exceeds its carrying capacity, i.e., its ability to feed its population, will have famines and massive population reductions.

With the luring of up to 66 million (the illegal immigrants and their families) additional people to the US we are assuring that we won’t be able to feed or provide for our population in the post-globalization world. It’s like adopting ten kids when you know that in six months you will only be able to feed two of them.

By allowing immigration, by encouraging it, legal or illegal, we are blighting our future and dooming our country and our children. We should be working to reduce US population. Instead the plutocracy works to increase it, first by trying to end abortion and birth control, then by massive immigration. Their ideal is China, China with its surfeit of cheap labor, China with its 1.4 billion, China with its history of famine and overpopulation and environmental degradation and its millennia of political repression. That is where they are trying to lead us. Because they think it is good for them.

We need leaders who will prepare us for the coming oil crunch and not just by trying to steal the oil of Iraq and Iran. We need leaders who will help the US to become self-sufficient, and not just for energy, but for food and manufactured goods.

I think we need Al Gore. He’s the only candidate I see that seems to recognize the finite nature of our planet and its resources.

But with or without him I think we are due for some hard times. I am reminded of Joseph in the Bible counciling the Pharaoh to prepare in the fat years for the coming lean ones. This seems common prudence. Instead we have a leadership whose motto seems to be “Eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow we don’t care if you die.”

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© alllie 2006

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