Politically Aware

Political and Social Issues. I will put question marks on certain posts like this (?????) to ask for your opinions or your thoughts on things. But feel free to share them even if you do not see them because sometimes I will forget to put them. Thank you and draw your own conclusions. Please know that all of the content posted may or may not be my view. I will sometimes post things that aren't necessarily what I think but I do it to have a possible discussion over it. "Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)." -Ayn Rand For Quotes and Books follow this one, http://recitationzz.tumblr.com/ For less serious stuff follow this one, http://amuseness.tumblr.com/

[comedycentral]

[comedycentral]

"Spreading democracy in the Middle East is so hard. Maybe we shouldn’t have done it Second Amendment first." -Jon Stewart

[thebadgerman619]

[elfmud-deactivated20180529]

Why I’m A Feminist

[quickhits]

Michele Bachmann: Gays want to ‘freely prey on little children sexually’

(Raw Story) In a Wednesday appearance on the Christian radio show Faith and Liberty, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said that LGBT people are attempting to make it legal to rape children in the U.S. and impose their agenda of “deviancy” on the whole population.

According to Right Wing Watch, Bachmann said that the “gay community” is taking steps to “abolish age of consent laws, which means we will do away with statutory rape laws so that adults will be able to freely prey on little children sexually. That’s the deviance that we’re seeing embraced in our culture today.”

She also said that “national hate crime laws” are a form of “tyrannical” oppression that liberals will use to silence Christians in this country.

[quickhits]

I usually don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what Michele Bachmann says. Every other word that comes out of her mouth is basically stupid-Republican porn.

But this goes way beyond the normal “letting your mouth get ahead your tiny dinosaur brain” gaffes that people like Shelly and Louie Gohmert and Steve King so excel at. This is pure horseshit. There is no national effort to “do away with statutory rape laws so that adults will be able to freely prey on little children sexually. ” That’s just a lie.

And it’s a dangerous lie. Bachmann is a hero to the Tea Party crowd because the ‘baggers are so gullible that they actually prefer BS to reality. And if you want to rile wild-eyed, gun-waving crackpots into a murderous rage, then tell them the Homosexual Menace is coming to rape their children with impunity. They’ll believe it and — as we’ve seen happen again and again — some may want to act on those beliefs. The Second Amendment is a tyrant hunting license, after all — or at least, that’s another pile of horseshit the gullible have been sold by manure merchants like Bachmann. If a “deviant” coming to legally rape your child doesn’t qualify as tyranny, then I don’t know what would.

This is an especially dangerous lie from Shelly — and the media should be calling her out on it, people should be demanding she prove what she says — but as has happened with me, she’s rubbed the outrage nerve so raw that most don’t even hear her anymore.

As intellectually painful as it might be, maybe we should listen to Shelly more often. Lord knows unhinged and bottomlessly gullible ‘baggers sure are. People like her are the the screws loose in the Tea Party’s head. We should pay attention to what they’re telling them to do.

[cartoonpolitics]

So far .. deaths in Gaza are mostly civilians, many are children, the current death-toll has soared to over 1,000 and is still climbing,  thousands more have been injured, over 160,000 forced to flee their homes, hospitals and ambulances have been attacked, massive structural damage has been inflicted. In Israel three civilians are reported dead as a result of the conflict and forty Israeli soldiers engaged in attacks on Gaza have been killed, one of them shot accidentally by fellow Israeli troops. There is no permanent end yet in sight.

[omyt]

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

Richard Dawkins (via galaxyclusters)

[mapsontheweb]

The Louisiana Purchase On A Map of Modern Day America and Canada

[fullpraxisnow]

Gaza death toll over 1,000 - Israeli toll up to 42 | BBC

The death toll in Gaza has passed 1,000, Palestinian medical officials say, 19 days after Israel launched an offensive against Hamas militants.

It comes amid a 12-hour humanitarian truce, which Gaza residents have been using to gather essential supplies and retrieve bodies buried under rubble.

Forty-two Israelis have also been killed since the Israel-Hamas conflict began on 8 July.

International talks urging a longer truce were held in Paris on Saturday.

Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, raised the possibility of extending the ceasefire by four hours.

However, there is no official statement. Israel’s security cabinet will meet on Saturday evening.

A Hamas spokesperson in Gaza said the group was examining the possibility of an extension, but no decision had been made, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

(Read Full Text) (Photo Credit: AFP)

[mapsontheweb]

Percentage of slaves in the US over time, 1790-1860.

Data source: US Census data hosted by NHGIS.org, the National History GIS project at the University of Minnesota.

NHGIS is a great resource for historical GIS research on the US, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

[rosyln]

[rtamerica-blog]

Mississippi governor threatens to block transport of undocumented children

In a letter to President Obama, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said he would not allow the government to send immigrant children to sponsors within his state without consultation.

“To the extent permitted by law, I intend to prohibit the federal government or its agents from housing large numbers of new illegal immigrants in the state of Mississippi,” Bryant wrote, according to theAssociated Press.

“Illegal immigration imposes real and substantial costs on the states, and it is unfair to expect the states to bear the costs of a problem created by the federal government’s failure to enforce the law.”

[descentintotyranny-blog]

Breaking: Israel shelling hospital in Beit Hanoun, injured Palestinians and internationals trapped inside

July 25 2014

Over the past seven hours the Israeli military has shelled a hospital in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip where an injured international and Palestinians are trapped inside. I spoke to Swedish national Fred Ekblad briefly during a 15 minute lull in the fire.  He said the hospital was struck continuously since 7:00 pm this evening.

Although Ekblad described his injury as moderate, “I’m bleeding from my head in a few places. The bleeding has almost stopped,” he does have an open wound and is not receiving proper medical care in a facility that is under heavy artillery. When asked why Ekblad wasn’t being treated at the hospital in Beit Hanoun, Israeli activist Neta Golan who has been in touch with the foreign activist said due to the ongoing fire most were taking cover in the building’s corridors, including doctors, taking advantage of what little protection the hallways provided. Golan said the Swedish Embassy and the International Committee for the Red Cross had been notified, yet were not able to secure a medical transport for the young Swede. 

Below I’m posting the end of my conversation with Ekblad, before he abruptly ended the call. For the few moments we did speak, I could hear shelling in the background every few seconds, which Ekblad had said was striking the building next to the hospital.

Read More

[fullpraxisnow]

Students offered grants if they tweet pro-Israeli propaganda | The Independent

In a campaign to improve its image abroad, the Israeli government plans to provide scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and tweets to foreign audiences.

The students making the posts will not reveal online that they are funded by the Israeli government, according to correspondence about the plan revealed in the Haaretz newspaper.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, which will oversee the programme, confirmed its launch and wrote that its aim was to “strengthen Israeli public diplomacy and make it fit the changes in the means of information consumption”.

The government’s hand is to be invisible to the foreign audiences. Daniel Seaman, the official who has been planning the effort, wrote in a letter on 5 August to a body authorising government projects that “the idea requires not making the role of the state stand out and therefore it is necessary to adhere to great involvement of the students themselves, without political linkage or affiliation”.

According to the plan, students are to be organised into units at each university, with a chief co-ordinator who receives a full scholarship, three desk co-ordinators for language, graphics and research who receive lesser scholarships and students termed “activists” who will receive a “minimal scholarship”.

Mr Netanyahu’s aides said the main topics the units would address related to political and security issues, combating calls to boycott Israel and combating efforts to question Israel’s legitimacy. The officials said the students would stress Israeli democratic values, freedom of religion and pluralism.

But Alon Liel, the doveish former director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry, criticised the plan as “quite disgusting”. “University students should be educated to think freely. When you buy the mind of a student, he becomes a puppet of the Israeli government grant,” he said. “You can give a grant to do social work or teach but not to do propaganda on controversial issues for the government.”

(Photo Credit: Daily Slave)

[theblacksophisticate]

We as Black people have to tell our own stories. We have to document our history. When we allow someone else to document our history the history becomes twisted and we get written out. We get our noses blown off.

Erykah Badu, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. (via ovarycool)

[fullpraxisnow]

The U.S. media coverage of the Israeli occupation and invasion of Gaza is grossly biased against Palestinians. The litmus test should be what would U.S. media coverage look like of a nearly 50 year Palestinian occupation of downtrodden Jews or massive Palestinian military massacres of innocent Jewish men, women and children in homes and hospitals backed by U.S. politicians, money and military technology? Our moral and political response to the actual Israeli occupation and invasion should be the same as that of a non-existent Palestinian occupation and invasion. Our righteous indignation at the murder of hundreds of Palestinian babies should be the same as that of the murder of Jewish babies. Let us not forget that ugly war crimes of any occupying power always outstrip those of the occupied, yet every human life is precious and resistance to occupation is inevitable.

Cornel West (via america-wakiewakie)

[teapartycat]

Look, when Jesus wrote the Constitution, he had only 10 Amendments, so why do you liberals insist on all these new ones letting people vote?

(via teapartycat)

[moreleftthannot]

Dylan Barrow‎

Why do conservative women hate themselves and their gender so much they do everything they can to try and reinstate the sub human status established in the bible…did I just answer my own question?