Noan Chomsky vs. William F. Buckley

Making My Morning

It's too easy for a baseball manager to get thrown out of a game these days––at least according to Tim Murphy at Slate.com. Bobby Cox will soon break "John McGraw's 75 year old record of 131 career ejections," without earning it.

Cox should take a lesson from Phillip Wellmen...

The Bikini Turns 60!

Check out this slide show at Slate.com chronacling the history of the bikini. It was first doned in public in 1946, and was shunned by Americans for two decades.

The first designer, Jacques Heim, created a tiny suit called the atome. The second, Louis Reard, introduced his design on July 5, four days after the United States had begun atomic testing in the Bikini Atoll. In a rather bold marketing ploy, Reard named his creation le bikini, implying it was as momentous an invention as the new bomb.

Click here for Maxim slideshow on the bikini.

Before You Buy a Mother's Day Card

I just read about this on The Nation's website.

In the United States, Mother's Day was originally suggested by poet and social activist Julia Ward Howe. In 1870, after witnessing the carnage of the American Civil War and the start of the Franco-Prussian War, she wrote the original Mother's Day Proclamation calling upon the women of the world to unite for peace. This "Mother's Day Proclamation" would plant the seed for what would eventually become a national holiday.

After writing the proclamation, Howe had it translated into many languages and spent the next two years of her life distributing it and speaking to women leaders all over the world. In her book Reminiscences, Howe wrote, "Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?" She devoted much of the next two years to this cause, and began holding annual "Mother's Day" gatherings in Boston, Massachusetts and elsewhere.

In 1907, thirty-seven years after the proclamation was written, women's rights activist Anna Jarvis began campaigning for the establishment of a nationally observed Mother's Day holiday. And in 1914, four years after Howe's death, President Woodrow Wilson declared Mother's Day as a national holiday.

American Colonists killed similarly to African rebels

I have begun reading A People's History of the Supreme Court by Peter Irons to gain a broad legal understanding and to fill in some holes in my knowledge of U.S. history.

Irons begins by discussing the painful ironies of the founders and our Constitution.

Ironically, the colonists who had deprived most of the population––religious dissenters, women, slaves, and Indians––of legal rights and voices in governance based their Declaration of Independence on pious claims that "all men are created equal" and that governments must derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed."

The vastness of this injustice alone defies comprehension.

While America cannot erase its bloody history of intolerance, we, the citizens, must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that it took two centuries for our laws to match the "unalienable rights" professed in the constitution. While we must demand human rights world-wide, leaders and advocates must respect the role time plays when changing laws and cultural practices. i.e. Iraq cannot transform from authoritarianism to participatory democracy in a few years. Africans are no more brutal than Westerners; we burned "witches," hung religious dissidents, and condoned slavery just a few generations ago.

Reading the following account drew up images of rebels in Sierra Leone or Rwandan warlords massacring villages of woman and children:

Conflicts with the Pequot Indians of southern New England simmered until 1636, when the murder of a white trader accused of kidnapping the Indians led Governor Winthrop to give his troops a "commission to put to death" the Indian men of Block Island and to seize "some of their children as hostages" for the surrender of the murderers.

The Puritan soldiers not only killed the Pequot men of Block Island but went up and down the coast of Long Island Sound, burning villages and crops. Winthrop's military commander, Captain John Mason, decided to avoid facing Pequot warriors in open combat and instead to burn all the villages and massacre those who could not escape.

William Bradford, former governor of the colony, celebrated the results in these words: "Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sigh to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfuly for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting and enemie."

Speedy victory over unarmed villagers? Among all the talk of spreading democracy and expecting peaceful democractic revolutions, remember how our democracy was founded. Genocide. Slavery. And the powerful elite forcing the masses to conform.