The only opportunity we have.

[hester prynne]

With all this war overload going on, the folly of it becomes more than crystal clear.
Why are we so blind? Why can't we see how futile and base the whole concept of war is?
I mean really, how can you not take a step or two back from it now and see it, now that it is so glaring. Why in the hell won't our sleeping collective perspective wake up!!!!!

War is high noon, the Hatfields and McCoys, a learned behavior that is ridiculously obsolete, yet has expanded in form to include whole countries where innocent bystanders, usually women and children, (fuck, that's me!), die!

War does not resolve anything. It just kills to bully-prove who's right. Bullying is never an ideal, nor an authentic "win".

If this planet is going to survive, the concept of war so deeply engrained in us so as to be automatic, has got to be unlearned, looked at, redefined, pain and all, until it automatically is perceived by all as absolutely barbaric, punishable by law, zero-tolerance, period.

Deep down, we all know war, i.e. violence, is a rotten tack to take for resolving any issue between individuals. Well, how about religions and countries too? What's the difference really?
And why are we so powerless to it?

It's time to act.
I ask you to rethink your thinking on war itself. Step out of automatic brain, into your own. Tell me what you get.
This the only opportunity we have, within what is happening now, that could be considered as a win.
H

[mtmynd]

Right on, Hes! Lookin' pretty snappy in them shades, kid. The reality of war is too friggin bright for any of us, but as long as ignorance rules the world, I fear war will continue following seeking an answer.

[e_dog]

you go, girl!

bring out the 'Oppose the Troops' bumperstickers.

Soccermoms of the world unite! You have nothing to gain except your sons!

[mnaz]

For once, Bush has the right idea. "They need to stop doing that shit".... his war-drunk Imperial Corporocracy, and friends, namely.

[stilltrucking]

Out of the ashes hester
out of the ashes
I do believe
a new day is coming
Meanwhile the Genghis is still with us.
and I think we blew it this time (by we I mean mankind, by mankind I mean men.)
Where the fuck is Emma Goldman when we need her.

Cut and paste

"Man's greatest joy is to slay his enemy, plunder his riches, ride his steeds, see the tears of his loved ones and embrace his women."
-- Genghis Khan

Nicholas Wade's book "Before the Dawn" and learned that the late Genghis Khan had about 500 wives and concubines, producing enough children so that now, if you do the math, they have generated 16 million males alone -- or "about 0.5 percent of the world's total." ...

Wade, a science writer for the New York Times, is a robust and refreshing critic of scientific political correctness. There is nothing in the scientific record, he points out, to validate the romantic notion that primitive man was essentially peaceful. On the contrary, our ancestors made war incessantly -- just as primitive societies did in the modern era until the authorities told them to cut it out.

Another myth concerns those cute chimps, one of whom, J. Fred Muggs, once co-hosted the "Today" show. They have 99 percent of a human being's DNA sequence, which may explain why humans and chimps are the only creatures to make war. (Their cousins, the bonobos, make love -- incessantly.) Still, there is hope. Evolution is making us less aggressive and smarter, since, clearly, brains are better than brawn in the modern world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01275.html

Edison was such an optimist.

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so
abandon war forever
- Thomas Edison

"They need to stop doing that shit"....

Nice bumper sticker.

[e_dog]

What's the orig. source of that Ghengis Khan quote? the Mongol Empire press corps?

sounds like this: http://www.studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtop ... ght=#48503
(scroll down to the quote from Boorman's film.)

boy, that Tommy Edison is some kinda hippie, like the old kook Einstein!

[firsty]

time to act indeed!

http://stealthiswiki.nine9pages.com

[stilltrucking]

What's the orig. source of that Ghengis Khan quote? the Mongol Empire press corps?

A fair question Professor. I suppose someone must be able to find the original manuscript for those words. They certainly had writing of some sort in the 13th century Mongolia. Even if he was illiterate there must have been some written record.

: "Man's greatest joy is to slay his enemy, plunder his riches, ride his steeds, see the tears of his loved ones and embrace his women."

That is from the honors program at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Not exactly Princeton or Yale but it is all I can come up with tonight. They say he killed every man woman and child in Persia.



http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/historypro ... ption.html

Genghis Khan] sallied forth, a single man, with few troops and no accoutrement, and reduced and subjugated the lords of the horizons from the East unto the West . . . and when through pride of wealth, and power, and station the greater part of the cities and countries of the world encountered him with rebellion and hatred and refused to yield allegiance (and especially the countries of Islam, from the frontiers of Turkestan to uttermost Syria), then wherever there was a king, or a ruler, or the governor of a city that offered him resistance, him he annihilated together with his family and followers, kinsmen and strangers.
—cAla al-Din cAta Malik Juvaini, The History of the World Conqueror1

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Genghi ... _essay.htm

The famous chronicler of the early Mongol Empire, Ata-malik Juvayni, stayed in Almaliq in 1253 and on one or two other occasions while on administrative assignment.

http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/ci ... maliq.html

Genghis Khan: The History of the World-Conqueror (Paperback)
by Ata-Malik Juvaini, John Andrew Boyle (Translator), David O. Morgan
This may be the source.

He ruled an empire four times as large as the Romans and twice as large as Alexander the Great.

John Man: It’s pretty certain, I’d say it’s 90% certain, he was what I call the alpha male, and women were a pretty important part of his booty of dominance, if you like. And the empire spread all over Eurasia and it has been found that there is a genetic marker which indicates nothing more than for sex of those who own it, but it affects now some 16-million males across Eurasia, which is something like 1 in 200 of all men living owe a tiny bit of their genetic inheritance to 'Chingis', not Genghis as he seemed to be spelt in English, but 'Chingis
That happened to those cities that refused to give up, refused to acknowledge his supremacy, and there the killing was absolutely thoroughgoing and we would regard it as completely racist and more in line with a minor Holocaust than anything before or since.

There was one city, for instance, called Merv, which is present-day Mary, where something like a million people were killed in absolute cold blood. The numbers are much disputed but it seems to me likely that in all of the Empire, that is perhaps a dozen major cities, and many dozen, perhaps hundreds of smaller ones, there were such massacres, and they amounted in all to well over a million people. Given the smallest of the population then, this was absolutely huge catastrophe for the Islamic world.


'.

This is the best I can do for you at this point in time.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/ark/stories/s1141918.htm