Today is Memorial Day. We honor those who gave their lives in the nation’s defense and remember them for their selfless services to the nation and the American people. Thank you.
Please support our troops and officers currently deployed around the world.
Please visit Honor The Fallen website and check out their quilt project.
A noteworthy quote from the author of ‘‘Brave New World’’:
‘‘There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. Mind control. And this seems to be the final revolution.’’Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
I read “Brave New World”, published in 1931, twice over the years. Interestingly, his novel was meant as a social parody to H.G. Wells’ Utopian-themed work, “Men Like Gods”. BNW was the anti-thesis to Wells’ visions of a positive, Utopian society, albeit a highly-controlled, technologically-advanced one. Wells published another sci-fi work in 1933, “Shape of Things to Come”, which was adapted into an innovative 1936 film, “Things to Come”. Ironically, both the novel and the movie predicted the second World War, which came less than four years later.
In 1959, Huxley revisited his famous work, with the publication of “Brave New World Revisited”, which he touched on the subject of how the world had evolved and changed from 1931. He remarked that the world was becoming closer to what he had envisioned from his work, with a veiled warning for the future:
“…freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane. In the rest of the world freedom for individuals has already gone, or is manifestly about to go. The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner,”Since then, do you think the world may be gradually evolving and changing into a reality as envisioned from Huxley’s and Wells’ famous works? Or a reality as envisioned from George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm? Or maybe something totally different apart from their works? Are we heading toward a truly Utopian future or a dystopian future?
The bottom line is that Huxley’s words and veiled warning of mankind’s future rest in what we are currently doing to ourselves and what reality we are shaping for things to come. Hopefully, not a future where everyone is mind-controlled, drugged and enslaved to a technocratic system just for their own good.
UPDATE: I would suggest George Lucas’ 1st film, THX-1138, for a good measuring idea about mankind’s future. His film drew from a combination of ideas and works of Wells, Huxley and Orwell.
‘‘There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one ‘makes’ them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of law-breakers-and then you cash in on the guilt.’’From Ayn Rand (real name: Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum), ‘‘Atlas Shrugged’’
Wow. I’m simply awestruck by this time-lapsed video showing the galactic center of Milky Way Galaxy in the nightsky of Texas. The description of the video:
All night time-lapse video of sky over Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, Texas taken with 15mm fisheye lens. Stars, constellations, meteors and satellites can be seen passing overhead for most of the evening. The video ends with the bright galactic core of the Milky Way rising above the horizon and overhead.
Sit back and enjoy the video. 
I’ve been waiting for this news for quite awhile but I’m glad it is coming out to the public today: a 47 million years old fossil, the long-awaited missing link to humans and apes, is revealed to the public for the first time. It would rock the world of archaeology, anthropology, and evolutionary science and, perhaps, change the ways we view ourselves being descended from the most ancient primate species. This missing link would have vindicate Charles Darwin for his theory about being descended from the primates but he could not find and prove the missing link. The fossil was founded in an extinct volcanic lake in Germany about 25 years ago. The area would have been a new landfill dump at the time, but thankfully, that did not happen.
Well, “Ida” is 95% lemur-like primate and it’s the most complete fossil ever founded. It has anatomical traits very similar to our own and the apes. See here. Click on the red blinking dots. You’ll be surprised.
Do you remember the Disney movie, “Dinosaur” back in 2000? The primates that went with the dinosaurs on a quest to find a safe greenland after an asteroid strike on Earth and the devastation of the lands in the aftermath? Same idea, even it is a fictional premise (referring to the movie, not the actual fossil).
Monday night, May 25th, on the History Channel is broadcasting a show about Ida the Missing Link. Check your local listing for the time.
Fred Taub of Boycott Watch think so: “Emergency! DON’T PANIC!!: The CDC is out of control”. Read it all.
Excerpt:
In 2007, the CDC issued warnings about the avian flu, a.k.a. the bird flu, causing much panic in the U.S. while people were scurrying for inoculations and Tamiflu. In 2008, Boycott Watch reported how the CDC tomato salmonella scare cost the U.S. economy millions of dollars by shutting down the tomato industry in the U.S., forcing farmers to let their tomato crop rot in the field without any substantive evidence of which tomatoes, if any, where the cause of the breakout. In the end, spinach was discovered to be the culprit, but not until the tomato industry suffered severe losses. Then there was the salmonella peanut butter scare which caused panic and major economic loss as people and businesses threw away all peanut butter products before the CDC even had a clue as to the source.
Meanwhile, the CDC has issued an emergency swine flu declaration while telling people not to panic and advocating passing out surgical masks. The CDC said the emergency had to be declared to allow testing resources to be used nationwide. Oddly enough, the name Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alone indicates the government agency should be able to take action to control and prevent diseases without having to declare emergencies. That’s their job. Hospitals work with the CDC all the time, so there is no reason to declare an emergency, for which the name alone evokes fear in the public. Screaming “Don’t Panic” along with an emergency declaration is screaming fire in a crowded movie theater – people panic because there is nowhere to run.
I concur with Taub’s take on CDC going too far with the preparation measures, which led to the CDC’s “hyping” of the fear by peddling controlled information to the mainstreamed media, leaving them up to their own interpretations, which is problematic, given the MSM’s history of sensationalistic headlines. Prudent steps should have been taken without declaring a full-blown pandemic emergency and do the best to thoroughly contain the outbreak effectively. Instead, the CDC (and World Health Org) kept resigning themselves to the inevitability of mass infection among the population without trying to contain the outbreak and keeping the infection to absolute minimum. It seems that CDC and WHO have no desire to try their bests to contain the outbreak and to allow the mass infection of the population to occur anyway. 
Something’s wrong with this picture about CDC/WHO, don’t you think? 
On this day, 140 years ago, the two great railroad companies, Union Pacific and Central Pacific, enjoined their two tracks with a golden spike at Promontory, Utah, connecting Eastern and Western United States in one 2000 miles railroad track for the first time. This well-known but overlooked event in American history has unforeseeable consequences: the accelerated growth of the American economy for the next 50 years, the invention and distribution of electric light, the mass migration of European immigrants and African-Americans from the east to the west, the unfortunate reduction of Native American reservations, the remarkable contributions and sacrifices of Chinese and Mexican peoples, and the inspiration of a future industry: the automobile.
Excerpt from EyeWitnesstoHistory.com:
When they came to drive the last spike, Governor Stanford, president of the Central Pacific, took the sledge, and the first time he struck he missed the spike and hit the rail.
What a howl went up! Irish, Chinese, Mexicans, and everybody yelled with delight. ‘He missed it. Yee.’ The engineers blew the whistles and rang their bells. Then Stanford tried it again and tapped the spike and the telegraph operators had fixed their instruments so that the tap was reported in all the offices east and west, and set bells to tapping in hundreds of towns and cities… Then Vice President T. C. Durant of the Union Pacific took up the sledge and he missed the spike the first time. Then everybody slapped everybody else again and yelled, ‘He missed it too, yow!’
It was a great occasion, everyone carried off souvenirs and there are enough splinters of the last tie in museums to make a good bonfire.
When the connection was finally made the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific engineers ran their engines up until their pilots touched. Then the engineers shook hands and had their pictures taken and each broke a bottle of champagne on the pilot of the other’s engine and had their picture taken again.
Since that day in 1869, the nation was forever changed.
Other references: “Driving the Last Spike”, Chinese-American Contributions to the Transcontinental Railroad Construction, Wikipedia: the Golden Spike, and Wikipedia: First Transcontinental Railroad.
Finally, a rational, free-thinking Muslim from Saudi Arabia? Dr. Ibrahim al-Buleihi, a liberal Muslim reformist and thinker, aptly declared that Western Civilization has actually liberated mankind from the shackles of backwardness and criticized his own country’s cultural backwardness and dysfunctional tribal ways. I don’t know much about this man or his background, but I believe he may be his country’s best hope for the Arabs and Muslims, especially if he hopes to try to change their hostile attitudes toward Western Civilization and America. Read it all: Western Civilization Has Liberated Mankind.
Excerpt:
‘Okaz:“This may be so, and I’m with you in this demand but, sir, would you summarize for us the reason for your admiration of Western culture, so that we can have a basis for discussion?”
Buleihi: “There is no one reason, there are a thousand reasons, which all induce me to admire the West and emphasize its absolute excellence in all matters of life. Western civilization is the only civilization that liberated man from his illusions and shackles; it recognized his individuality and provided him with capabilities and opportunities to cultivate himself and realize his aspirations. [Western civilization] humanized political authority and established mechanisms to guarantee relative equality and relative justice and to prevent injustice and to alleviate aggression. This does not mean that this is a flawless civilization; indeed, it is full of deficiencies. (editor’s note: of course, what other civilization doesn’t have them?) Yet it is the greatest which man has achieved throughout history. [Before the advent of Western civilization,] humanity was in the shackles of tyranny, impotence, poverty, injustice, disease, and wretchedness.
“It is an extraordinary civilization, and it is not an extension of any ancient civilization, with the exception of Greek civilization, which is the source of contemporary civilization. I have completed a book on this great extraordinary civilizational leap, titled The Qualitative Changes in Human Civilization. Western civilization is its own product and it is not indebted to any previous civilization except for the Greek one … It has revived the Greek achievements in the fields of philosophy, science, literature, politics, society, human dignity, and veneration of reason, while recognizing its shortcomings and illusions and stressing its continuous need for criticism, review and correction.”
Even so, al-Buleihi declared himself a Muslim first and a liberal second, putting the Islamic religious principles as his foundation to promote liberal actions in a society, that he believes only through Islam it can be achieved. I digress, however, and I clearly draw the line in allowing a religion, less alone Islam, to mandate and dictate liberal actions in a society. Individual achievements and liberal actions can be made without any religion or religious guidance involved necessarily. Thomas Edison was not motivated or prompted by any religious principle to invent a light bulb and bring electric light to the masses, for example. Nevertheless, in this AAFAQ site, Dr. al-Buleihi put forth his concerns about his fellow Arabs and Muslims being perpetually mired in the dominant but dysfunctional tribal-cultural ways of his country, that which, he noted, are hampering their real developments to aspire and achieve themselves individually within a closed religious society, whether in Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE, Afghanistan or any other Islamic country:
“Humans are originally individuals, but cultures (including Arab culture) have dissolved the individual in the tribe, sect or state, so that the individual was unable to know his own identity and recover it, except with the diffusion of philosophical ideas from Greece, where, in the fifth century BC, philosophy produced elevated human values for the first time in human history, and the human being became an individual of value for himself and the ultimate goal, and not merely a means for others. (editor’s note: this is the most cherished belief of the Western civilization, which has formed the basis of individual liberty ever since. You are always your own person, never for others.)
“Regarding the current situation of Arabs and Muslims, Al-Buleihi says: ”I believe that the situation of the Arabs and Muslims is very bad. The reason is the closed culture and its inability to absorb modern civilization, to be aware of its shortcomings, and to be aware of the merits of other cultures.”
Even surprising to me is Dr. al-Buleihi’s acknowledgment that the whole world, most especially in western democratic nations, is regressing to the Muslim ways and restricting individual liberties by changing some laws, that is something I have acknowledged for so long: that Western political correctism and government pandering to the Muslims, in this age of Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism, are undoing all of the greatest achievements and liberties of the Western Civilization in the process. As a westerner and American, we cannot keep doing this just to pander and appease the Islamic world for long:
To those who contend that his prescriptions are too harsh and would frustration to those receiving them he answers that his “… views are not frustrating … but the real frustration is that we praise ourselves while we are in an terrible situation, and the Arabs and Muslims have become a joke to the rest of the world. That is, we are a joke, and no one is concerned with us. But now we announce that we innovate in cutting off heads, in killing, in bombings — that is the extent to which we can innovate. This is a major problem, I mean, that we are a burden not only to ourselves but to the whole world. I believe that the whole world is regressing because of our actions. For example, the countries of the West — democratic countries like America, Europe, Britain and others — have changed their laws in ways that restrict liberties. Transportation has become slow because … people have to stand in long queues to fly on an airplane, due to searches, something that was previously unknown. We have become a burden to ourselves, and to the world.”
Exactly! What the Islamic world needed is a “Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses (or more)” to the gates of Mecca, criticizing the dangerous excesses of Islam and condemning a large body of repressive rulers, mullahs, imams, clerics and followers for trying to impose Islam upon the world and peoples in the most unethical, dangerous and improper ways, even legal and “benign” ways, too! They cannot continue to follow the ways of the 7th century world and apply them in the 21st century world, thus expecting everyone to respect and conform to them. No way, not now, not ever. The world cannot be belong to Islam or any other religion in any shape or form. That being said, it is absolutely unacceptable for us to forsake our Western civilization, its great humanist achievements and individual liberties for the benefits of other civilizations still mired in the old ways and religious/cultural backwardness. For example, honor killing is still a way of life in the Islamic countries and, until recently, it’s being introduced into Western, democratic nations. It should be banned worldwide.
We may look forward to this Dr. Ibrahim al-Buleihi and his thoughts in the near future, if he is not being harassed, intimidated or killed by the backward practitioners of Islam so far. Here’s hope aspiring in the backward parts of the world and look to the Western civilization for inspiration and ideas.
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