The First Thanksgiving and a turkey named Glen Beck‏

From:

newsviewsnolose@yahoogroups.com on behalf of DickM

Glen was preaching on his TV show last night that we need to tear down the wall of separation of church and state.

Help me jesus!!!

Fundalmentalist Christian radio talk show hosts have been saying that Thanksgiving was originally, declared by George Washington as a religious holiday and a day of prayer.

But..... according to anthropologist,, William B. Newell, the first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children.

"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn
dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their own house," Newell said.

"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and
Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they
came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the
building," he said.

Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13
volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and
reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in
England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian
agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.

Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the
Indians at what is now Groton, Ct.,rather than a celebration with them.

(Source: Community Endeavor News, November, 1995, as reprinted in
Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996
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In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.

The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607, inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people's land, but did not attack. And the English began starving. Some of them ran away and joined the Indians, where they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout colonial times tens of thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves -- from Wales and Scotland as well as from Africa -- ran away to live in Indian communities, intermarry, and raise their children there.

In the summer of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to return the runaways, who were living fully among the Indians. Powhatan left the choice to those who ran away, and none wanted to go back. The governor of Jamestown then sent soldiers to take revenge. They descended on an Indian community, killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the female leader of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and shooting out their brains in the water. The female leader was later taken off the boat and stabbed to death.

By 1621, the atrocities committed by the English had grown, and word spread throughout the Indian villages. The Indians fought back, and killed 347 colonists. From then on it was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians the English aristocracy decided to exterminate them.
And then the Pilgrims arrived.

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The story goes that the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland, and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they landed at Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts.

Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to rationalize their persecution of others. They appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." To justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

The pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, advised his parishioners: "And surely there is in all children a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon."

http://www.rense.com/general45/thanks2.htm


Is the Thanksgiving holiday at the heart of U.S. myth-building?

One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building.

Everyone understands we (Americans) are an inherently benevolent one, but all our history contradicts that claim. The history of the US must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.

The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians' land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape."

Thomas Jefferson -- president No. 3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian Savages" -- was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them."

Theodore Roosevelt (president No. 26) defended the expansion of whites across the continent as an inevitable process "due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."

Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th."

U.S. elites have a clear stake in the contemporary propaganda value of that history.

http://www.alternet.org/story/108876?page=2

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A Jane Goodall Thanksgiving

Thursday 26 November 2009

by: Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Give thanks. Because this isn't one of those Thanksgiving lists of things for which we should be grateful - although health, family, friends, laughter etc. would certainly all be on mine.

And Jane Goodall.

Yes, that Jane Goodall, the woman we all grew up with watching those National Geographic specials on TV as she communed with the chimpanzees of Tanzania's Gombe National Park in East Africa. Everyone I know seems especially to remember those scenes of chimps ingeniously utilizing straw and blades of grass to poke around in mounds hunting for termites, proof that they know how to make and use tools. I still have trouble opening a can of tuna.

Goodall was interviewed by my colleague Bill Moyers for this week's edition of "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS. She began her work in Africa in 1960 at the age of 26, spurred by the encouragement of her English mother and the great anthropologist Louis Leakey, as well as the African adventure books she read as a child. "I was in love with Tarzan," she told Moyers. "I was so jealous of that wimpy Jane. I knew I would have been a better mate for Tarzan."

I'm especially thankful to Jane Goodall after reading the passage in Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" in which the erstwhile vice-presidential candidate and governor of Alaska writes that she doesn't "believe in the theory that human beings - thinking, loving beings - originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea. Or that human beings began as single-celled organisms that developed into monkeys who eventually swung down from trees."

She could learn a thing or two from the chimps. Goodall sees our affinity with them as like "the bond between mother and child, which really for us and chimps and other primates is the root of all the expressions of social behavior you can sort of see mirrored in the mother/child relationship."

But chimpanzees can be violent, too, and Goodall says, "Some people have reached the conclusion that war and violence is inevitable in ourselves. I reach the conclusion that I do believe we have brought aggressive tendencies with us through our long human evolutionary past. I mean, you can't look around the world and not realize that we can be, and often are, extremely brutal and aggressive."

But, she adds, "Equally, we have inherited tendencies of love, compassion, and altruism, because they're there in the chimp. So, we've brought those with us. So, it's like each one of us has this dark side. And a more noble side. And I guess it's up to each one of us to push one down and develop the other."

Jane Goodall has never seen a conflict between religion and evolution. "I don't think that faith, whatever you're being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained," she said. "And I don't want to explain this whole life business. Truth, science. There's so much mystery. There's so much awe.

"I mean, what is it that makes the chimpanzees do these spectacular displays, rain dances - I call them waterfall dances. At the foot of this waterfall, [they] sit in the spray and watch the water that's always coming and always going and always there. It's wonder. It's awe. And if they had the same kind of language that we have, I suspect that [they would turn it] into- some kind of animistic religion."

In 1986, after two and a half decades of quiet research in the African forest, Goodall's career took a dramatic turn at a conference of scientists studying chimpanzees. During a session on conservation, she said that it was "shocking" to learn that across Africa, because of deforestation, the explosion of human population and commercial hunting of animals for food, the chimpanzee population had "plummeted from somewhere between one and two million at the turn of the last century to, at that time, about 400,000. So I came out - I couldn't go back to that old, beautiful, wonderful life."

She now spends more than 300 days out of the year traveling, speaking out, rallying people to see ourselves as caretakers of the natural world, and inspiring us with word that all is not yet lost. Her Jane Goodall Institute works ceaselessly for the worldwide protection of habitat, and her program "Roots and Shoots" now has chapters in 114 countries, working to make young people more environmentally aware. "I could kill myself trying to save chimps and forests," she said to Bill Moyers. "But if we're not raising new generations to be better stewards than we've been, then we might as well give up."

The worldwide chimp population is down to fewer than 300,000 now, spread across isolated fragments of forest, Goodall says, in 21 African nations. Moyers asked, what do we lose if the last chimp goes? "We lose one window into learning about our long course of evolution," she replied.

"I've spent so long looking into these minds that are fascinating, because they're so like us. And yet they're in another world. And I think the magic is, I will never know what they're thinking ... And so, it's like elephants and gorillas, and all the different animals that we are pushing toward extinction ... There's a saying, 'We haven't inherited this planet from our parents, we've borrowed it from our children.' When you borrow, you plan to pay back. We've been stealing and stealing and stealing. And it's about time we got together and started paying back."

That's as good a Thanksgiving wish as I can imagine.

Additional research provided by producer Candace White and associate producer Diane Chang.

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Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.

Jim Hightower | Giving Thanks for America's Good Food Movement

Thursday 26 November 2009

by: Jim Hightower, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

What better day than Thanksgiving to celebrate our country's food rebels!

I'm talking about the growing movement of small farmers, food artisans, local retailers, co-ops, community organizers, restaurateurs, environmentalists, consumers and others -- perhaps including you. This movement has spread the rich ideas of sustainability, organic, local control and the Common Good from the fringes of our food economy into the mainstream.

It began in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s as an "upchuck rebellion" -- ordinary folks rejecting the industrialized, chemicalized, corporatized and globalized food system. Farmers wanted a more natural connection to the good earth that they were working, just as consumers began demanding edibles that were not saturated with pesticides, injected with antibiotics, ripened with chemicals, dosed with artificial flavorings and otherwise tortured.

These two interests began to find each other and to create an alternative way of thinking about food. Today, more than 13,000 organic farmers produce everything from wheat to meat, and organic food sales top $23 billion a year. Some 4,800 vibrant farmers' markets operate in practically every city and town across the land, linking farmers and food-makers directly to consumers in a local, supportive economy. Also, restaurants, supermarkets, food wholesalers and school districts are now buying foodstuffs that are produced sustainably and locally.

No one in a position of power -- corporate or governmental -- made any of these changes happen. Instead, the movement percolated up from the grassroots, and it has become a groundswell as ordinary people inform themselves, organize locally and assert their own democratic values over those of the corporate structure.

Family by family, town by town, this movement has changed not only the market, but also the culture of food. That's a change worthy of our thanks -- and to do it up right, how about having an earth dinner?

Not that you'd eat earth, but that you and others would gather around a table for a social occasion to celebrate the bounty of our good, green earth. Whether you do it for Thanksgiving, Earth Day or just any old day, an earth dinner is a festive opportunity to have friends and family cook, eat and drink together while reveling in the culture of food.

Most of us don't realize that our dinner tells many stories, embodying our personal histories, family memories, music, art and other connections ... besides our tummies. To help reawaken those cultural links in a way that can be tasty, touching and fun, the folks at Organic Valley Family of Farms have come up with the novel idea of earth dinners.

The concept simply involves throwing some sort of dinner party at which the food is not merely consumed, but also is the focus of table talk, reminiscing, singing, laughing, game playing and whatever else you can dream up. It can be a potluck dinner, a buffet, a five-course gourmet meal, a backyard barbeque ... whatever suits you. The key is to know something about the food being served -- where it comes from, the history of some of the ingredients, songs written about it and so on.

The goal is to get everyone connecting in some personal or cultural way to the dinner as it progresses. Ask guests to tell about their very first food memory, or to recall any family member who was a farmer or a jolly cook. Invite people of diverse backgrounds and all ages. Ask a farm family to join you, or a cheesemaker or others involved in producing food. Then -- eat, talk, enjoy!

Organic Valley's Website offers a sort of earth dinner starter kit, with tips on everything from menus to party favors, as well as providing reports on successful dinners that others have put together. Check it out at www.earthdinner.org -- and have a good time!

Copyright 2009 Creators.com

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Columnist, national radio commentator, public speaker and author of the forthcoming book, "Swim Against The Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow," Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses and just-plain-folks.

Unhappy Thanksgiving

Thursday 26 November 2009

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

The calendar has come around again to Thanksgiving, and families all over the country will be gathering around dinner tables to celebrate. Or try to, anyway. With unemployment above ten percent, and with actual unemployment closer to twenty percent, with foreclosures all over the place, with wages dropping and food prices rising, with the economy improving only for those who have lots of money, there will be millions of people without a whole hell of a lot to feel thankful for.

Ten months after the inauguration of Barack Obama, those "Yes We Can" and "Hope" slogans have begun to ring more than a little hollow. Of course, the man inherited a vast array of ongoing catastrophes from his predecessor, and it is a dead-bang certainty that ten months under a McCain administration would have left us in far worse shape than we find ourselves in today, but the realization that matters are only slightly better than they would have been under the worst-case scenario doesn't go very far anymore. Some things are better, but the fact of the matter is that some things are worse, and most things are exactly the same.

The news on Tuesday was filled with reports that Obama intends to announce his decision regarding America's ongoing war in Afghanistan on December 1, and the early word is "expansion." McClatchy News reported, "President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional US troops over the next year to what he's called 'a war of necessity' in Afghanistan. Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on December 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the US Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said."

So, there it is. The US military is in terrible shape after two wars, and sending more troops into the Afghan conflict will only add to the damage. The cost of sending additional troops will further undermine our economy and make Obama's domestic agenda all the more difficult to achieve. The Afghan people, already deeply resentful after eight years of American occupation and warfare, will not greet a new investment of troops gladly. We can all hold hands around the Thanksgiving table and pray to whatever God may be listening that Obama will provide some sort of coherent exit policy, but the fact remains that no occupying force in more than a century has employed any effective exit strategy from Afghanistan beyond utter defeat.

Speaking of domestic policy, the much-ballyhooed push to reform America's health care system has gone completely sideways in the hands of Congress people bought off by insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and in the hands of a president who demanded change but has taken three steps back for every one step forward. The result looks to be a watered down farce of a bill that could very well make matters even worse than they already are. Economist Robert Reich recently wrote about the current state of affairs in the health care debate:

So the compromise that ended up in the House bill is to have a mere public option, open only to the 6 million Americans not otherwise covered. The Congressional Budget Office warns this shrunken public option will have no real bargaining leverage and would attract mainly people who need lots of medical care to begin with. So, it will actually cost more than it saves.

But even the House's shrunken and costly little public option is too much for private insurers, Big Pharma, Republicans and "centrists" in the Senate. So, Harry Reid has proposed an even tinier public option, which states can decide not to offer their citizens. According to the CBO, it would attract no more than four million Americans.

It's a token public option, an ersatz public option, a fleeting gesture toward the idea of a public option, so small and desiccated as to be barely worth mentioning except for the fact that it still (gasp) contains the word "public."

Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.

Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no pre-existing conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice - dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don't take our calls.

Pretty much says it all right there.

With public attention focused on the economy, Afghanistan and health care, the White House is moving in stealth to renew some of the worst Patriot Act provisions enacted by the Bush administration. Specifically, the administration seeks to renew three parts of the Act that are set to expire on December 31, according to the Inter-Press Service:

National Security Letters (NSLs)

The FBI uses NSLs to compel Internet service providers, libraries, banks, and credit reporting companies to turn over sensitive information about their customers and patrons. Using this data, the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people.

The 'Material Support' Statute

This provision criminalizes providing "material support" to terrorists, defined as providing any tangible or intangible good, service or advice to a terrorist or designated group. As amended by the Patriot Act and other laws since Sep. 11, this section criminalizes a wide array of activities, regardless of whether they actually or intentionally further terrorist goals or organizations.

FISA Amendments Act of 2008

This past summer, Congress passed a law that permits the government to conduct warrantless and suspicion-less dragnet collection of US residents' international telephone calls and e-mails.

All we as Americans can do is work to push these elected officials away from the abyss they have us teetering over, and hope that there will be something to be thankful for next year. For now, however, just about everything before us is either worse or exactly as bad as it was before. Not much to be thankful about here.

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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.

Our Economy Was a Scam and Now We're Dead Broke

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted October 27, 2009.

America is broke. And the easy credit, phantom "growth" economy has been exposed for what it was: a credit scam.

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When Barack Obama took office it seemed to some of us that his first job was to get the national silverware out of the pawn shop. Or at least maintain the world's confidence that it was possible for us to get out of debt. America is dead broke, the easy credit, phantom "growth" economy has been exposed for what it was. A credit scam. Even Hillary Clinton and Obama's best efforts have not coaxed much more dough out of foreign friends. But at least we again have a few friends abroad.

So now we must jackleg ourselves back into something resembling a productive activity. No matter how you cut it, things will not be as much fun as shopping and speculative "investing" were.

The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead.

The national money shamans have danced around the carcass of our dead horse economy, chanted the recovery chant and burned fiat currency like Indian sage, enshrouding the carcass in the sacred smoke of burning cash. And indeed, they have managed to prop up the carcass to appear life-like from a distance, if you squint through the smoke just right. But it still stinks here from the inside. Clearly at some point we must find a new horse to ride, and sure as god made little green apples one is broaching the horizon. And it looks exactly like the old horse.

Then too, what else did we expect? His economic team of free market billionaires and financial hotwires includes most of those who helped Bill Clinton sell the theory that Americans didn't need jobs. Actual labor, if you will remember, was for Asian sweatshops and Latin maquiladoras. We, as a nation one third of whose population is functionally illiterate, were going to transmute ourselves into an information and transactional economy. Ain't gonna sweat no mo' no mo' -- just drink wine and sing about Jesus all day.

Along with these economic hotwires came literally hundreds of K Street and Democratic lobbyists. Supposedly, every president is forced to hire these guys because no one else seems to have the connections or knows how to get a bill through Congress. Consequently, the current regime's definition of a recovery is more of the same as ever. A return of the mortgage market and credit to its former level -- the level that blew us out of the water in the first place. Ah, but we're gonna manage it better this time. There is no one-trick pony on earth equal to capitalism.

Somewhere in the smoking wreckage lie the solutions. The solutions we aren't allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some "public option" that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel.

Meanwhile we may all feel free to row ourselves to hell in the same hand basket. Except of course the elites, the top five percent or so among us. But 95 percent is close enough to be called democratic, so what the hell. The trivialized media, having internalized the system's values, will continue to act as rowing captain calling out the strokes. News gathering in America is its own special hell, and reduces its practitioners to banality and elite sycophancy. But Big Money calls the shots.

With luck we will see at least some reverse of the Bush regime's assault on habeas corpus, due process, privacy. Changing such laws doesn't much affect that one percent whose income is equal to the combined bottom 50 percent of Americans.

Beyond that, the big money is constitutionally protected. Our Constitution is first and foremost a property document protecting their money. In actual practice, our constitutional civil liberties, inspiring as they are in concept to people around the world, are mainly side action to make the institutionalization of the owning class more palatable. You can argue that may not have been the intent of the slave owning, rent collecting, upper class founding fathers. But you would be full of shit. We can keep on pretending to be independent, free to keep on living in those houses on which we still owe $300,000. But they own and control the money that comes through our hands. And they plan to keep on owning it and charging us to use it.

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Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working class America. A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website.

3 Silly Religious Beliefs Held By Non-Silly People

By Greta Christina, Greta Christina's Blog. Posted October 30, 2009.

Many of the beliefs held by religious moderates -- smart people who respect science and the separation of church and state -- are as untenable as the dogma of fundamentalists.

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"You can't disprove religion."

I'm seeing this trope a lot these days. "You can't disprove religion. At least -- not my religion."

"Well, of course," the trope continues, "many outdated religious beliefs -- young-earth creationism, the universe revolving around the earth, the sun being drawn across the sky by Apollo's chariot -- have been shown by science to be mistaken. But modern progressive and moderate beliefs -- these, you can't disprove with science. These are simply matters of faith: things people reasonably choose to believe, based on their personal life experience."

Then there's the corollary to this trope: "Therefore, atheism is just as much a matter of faith as religion. And atheists who think atheism is better supported by evidence are just as dogmatic and close-minded as religious believers."

The usual atheist reply to this is to cry, "That's the God of the Gaps! Whatever phenomenon isn't currently explained by science, that's where you stick your God! What kind of sense does that make? Why should any given unexplained phenomenon be best explained by religion? Has there ever been a gap in our knowledge that's eventually been shown to be filled by God?"

Which is a pretty good reply, and one I make a lot myself. But today, I want to say something else.

Today, I want to point out that this is simply not the case.

The fact is that many modern progressive and moderate religions do make claims about the observable world. And many of those claims are unsupported by science... and, in fact, are in direct contradiction of it.

I want to talk today about three specific religious beliefs. Not obscure cults or rigid fundamentalist dogmas; not young-earth creationism, or the doctrine that communion wafers literally and physically transform into the human flesh of Christ somewhere in the digestive tract, or the belief that the human mind has been taken over by space aliens. I want to talk about three widely held beliefs of modern progressive and moderate believers: beliefs held by intelligent and educated believers who respect science and don't think religion should contradict it.

And I want to point out that even these beliefs are in direct contradiction of the vast preponderance of available evidence -- almost as much as the obscure cults and the rigid fundamentalist dogma.

So let's go! Today's beliefs on the chopping block are:

1: Evolution guided by God.

Also known as "theistic evolution." Among progressive and moderate believers, this is an extremely common position on evolution. They readily (and rightly) dismiss the claims of young-earth creationists that humanity and all the universe were created in one swell foop 6,000 years ago. They dismiss these claims as utterly contradicted by the evidence. Instead, they say that evolution proceeds exactly as the biologists say it does, but this process is guided by God, to bring humanity and the vast variety of life into being.

A belief that is almost as thoroughly contradicted by the evidence as young-earth creationism is.

Nowhere in anatomy, nowhere in genetics, nowhere in the fossil record or the geological record or any of the physical records of evolution, is there even the slightest piece of evidence for divine intervention.

Quite the contrary. If there had been a divine hand tinkering with the process, we would expect evolution to have proceeded radically differently than it has. We would expect to see, among the changes in anatomy from generation to generation, at least an occasional instance of the structure being tweaked in non-gradual ways. We would expect to see -- oh, say, just for a random example -- human knees and backs better designed for bipedal animals than quadrupeds. (She said bitterly, putting an ice pack on her bad knee.) We would expect to see the blind spot in the human eye done away with, perhaps replaced with the octopus design that doesn't have a blind spot. We would expect to see the vagus nerve re-routed so it doesn't wander all over hell and gone before getting where it's going. We would expect to see a major shift in the risk-benefit analysis that's wired into our brains, one that better suits a 70-year life expectancy than a 35-year one. We would expect to see... I could go on, and on, and on.

And it's not just humans. We'd expect to see whales with gills, pandas with real thumbs, ostriches without those stupid useless wings.

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Read more of Greta Christina at her blog.

6 Signs That the American Empire Is Coming to an Early End

By Michael T. Klare, Tomdispatch.com. Posted October 27, 2009.

The day of America's global pre-eminence is over. We must face the new global realities.

In Special Coverage

Belief:
Oscar-Winning Hollywood Big Shot: Why I'm Leaving Scientology
Guy Adams

Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
Former Wall Street Player Reveals the Inside World Behind Shady Bailouts to Bankers
Joshua Holland, Nomi Prins

DrugReporter:
Pot Is More Mainstream Than Ever, So Why Is Legalization Still Taboo?
Steven Wishnia

Environment:
Putting Farm Animal Protection on the Map, One Step at a Time
Paul Shapiro

Health and Wellness:
There Is a Way to Help Avoid Heart Disease and Diabetes: You Are What You Eat!
Kathy Freston

Immigration:
Boss Tells Latino Workers to Ditch Spanish Names -- in What World Is this Guy Living?
Pilar Marrero

Media and Technology:
Glenn Beck Peddles Populism for Rich Guys
Brad Reed

Movie Mix:
The Yes Men: Pranksters Out to Fix the World
Mark Engler

Politics:
The Right Isn't Only Trying to Take Down ACORN, It's Got a 25-Year Project to 'Defund' the Left
Muriel Kane

Reproductive Justice and Gender:
Is the Catholic Leadership Trying to Silence Nuns?
Maureen Fiedler

Rights and Liberties:
16-Year Old Got Life Without Parole for Killing Her Abusive Pimp -- Should Teens Be Condemned to Die in Jail?
Liliana Segura

Sex and Relationships:
6 Marriage Myths Shattered: How Barack and Michelle Shun Fairy Tale Romance
Vanessa Richmond

Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
Laura Flanders

Water:
Environmental Groups Across California Oppose Legislative Water Package
Dan Bacher

World:
Hey Obama, Your General McChrystal Is Trying to Sucker You on Afghanistan
Scott Ritter

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Memo to the CIA: You may not be prepared for time-travel, but welcome to 2025 anyway! Your rooms may be a little small, your ability to demand better accommodations may have gone out the window, and the amenities may not be to your taste, but get used to it. It's going to be your reality from now on.

Okay, now for the serious version of the above: In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration. Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report entitled Global Trends 2025, it predicted that America's global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next 15 years -- in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025]," it stated definitively, the country's "relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained."

That, of course, was then; this -- some 11 months into the future -- is now and how things have changed. Futuristic predictions will just have to catch up to the fast-shifting realities of the present moment. Although published after the onset of the global economic meltdown was underway, the report was written before the crisis reached its full proportions and so emphasized that the decline of American power would be gradual, extending over the assessment's 15-year time horizon. But the economic crisis and attendant events have radically upset that timetable. As a result of the mammoth economic losses suffered by the United States over the past year and China's stunning economic recovery, the global power shift the report predicted has accelerated. For all practical purposes, 2025 is here already.

Many of the broad, down-the-road predictions made in Global Trends 2025 have, in fact, already come to pass. Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- collectively known as the BRIC countries -- are already playing far more assertive roles in global economic affairs, as the report predicted would happen in perhaps a decade or so. At the same time, the dominant global role once monopolized by the United States with a helping hand from the major Western industrial powers -- collectively known as the Group of 7 (G-7) -- has already faded away at a remarkable pace. Countries that once looked to the United States for guidance on major international issues are ignoring Washington's counsel and instead creating their own autonomous policy networks. The United States is becoming less inclined to deploy its military forces abroad as rival powers increase their own capabilities and non-state actors rely on "asymmetrical" means of attack to overcome the U.S. advantage in conventional firepower.

No one seems to be saying this out loud -- yet -- but let's put it bluntly: less than a year into the 15-year span of Global Trends 2025, the days of America's unquestioned global dominance have come to an end. It may take a decade or two (or three) before historians will be able to look back and say with assurance, "That was the moment when the United States ceased to be the planet's preeminent power and was forced to behave like another major player in a world of many competing great powers." The indications of this great transition, however, are there for those who care to look.

Six Way Stations on the Road to Ordinary Nationhood

Here is my list of six recent developments that indicate we are entering "2025" today. All six were in the news in the last few weeks, even if never collected in a single place. They (and other events like them) represent a pattern: the shape, in fact, of a new age in formation.

1. At the global economic summit in Pittsburgh on September 24th and 25th, the leaders of the major industrial powers, the G-7 (G-8 if you include Russia) agreed to turn over responsibility for oversight of the world economy to a larger, more inclusive Group of 20 (G-20), adding in China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and other developing nations. Although doubts have been raised about the ability of this larger group to exercise effective global leadership, there is no doubt that the move itself signaled a shift in the locus of world economic power from the West to the global East and South -- and with this shift, a seismic decline in America's economic preeminence has been registered.

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Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Owl Books). A documentary film version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation at Bloodandoilmovie.com.