The American Form of Government

August 30, 2009 | Unknown 
Posted on 8/30/2009 4:21:53 PM by MosesKnows

Different Forms of Government

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When Benjamin Franklin exited the constitutional convention, a woman asked him, Sir, what have you given us? His immediate response was, a Republic mam, if you can keep it.
Yet many Americans today have come to believe that America’s governmental system is a Democracy and not a Republic. The difference between these two is essential in understanding Americanism and the American system.
Before we discuss political systems however, it is helpful to address the confusion about the political spectrum. Many people believe that the political spectrum places groups such as communist on the far left, fascists, or dictators on the far right, and political moderates or centrist in the middle.
However, a more accurate political spectrum will show government having zero power on the far right to having 100% power on the far left. At the extreme right, there is no government. The extreme left features total government under such labels as Communism, Socialism, Nazism, Fascism, Princes, Potentates, Dictators, Kings, any form of total government.
Those who claim that Nazis and Fascist are right wing never define their terms. This amounts to spreading confusion. The type of government limited to its proper role of protecting the rights of the people is toward the middle of the spectrum. That’s where the Constitution of the United States is. Those who advocate such a form of government are constitutional moderates.
So, let’s analyze the basic forms of government. They are, Monarchy or Dictatorship ruled by one, Oligarchy ruled by a few, Democracy ruled by the majority, Republic ruled by law, and Anarchy which is ruled by no one. A discussion of these five will narrow down the types of government.
Looking first at Monarchy or Dictatorship. This form of government doesn’t really exist. In the practical sense, it’s always a group that puts one of its members up front. A King has his council of nobles or Earls and every dictator has his bureaucrats or commissars, the men behind the scenes. This isn’t rule by one even though one person may be the visible leader. It’s rule by a group. So, let’s eliminate Monarchy Dictatorship because it never truly exists.
Oligarchy, which is rule by a group, is the most common form of government in all history and it is the most common form of government today. A powerful few rule most of the nations of the world and therefore Oligarchy remains.
At the other end, we find Anarchy, which means without government. Some people have looked over history and found that governments committed many of its worse crimes. Therefore, they decided that having no government might be a good idea but this is a mistake because as the ancient Greeks stated, without law there can be no freedom. America’s founding fathers agreed and held that some amount of government is a necessary force in any civilized orderly society. In a state of Anarchy, however everyone has to guard life, liberty, and property and the lives of family members. Movement is severely restricted and arming everyone is necessary to protect ones property at all times. Civilized people have always hired someone to do the guarding, a sheriff, a police force, or some branch of government. Once law enforcement was in place, the people were freer. They could leave their property, work in the fields, and so on. In short, the proper amount of government makes everyone freer.

There are some who advocate Anarchy however not because they want no government but because they don’t like what they have. They use Anarchy as a tool for revolutionary change. The condition of Anarchy is very much like a vacuum where something rushes in to fill in. These calculating anarchist work to break down the existing government with rioting, killing, looting, and terrorism. Tragically, the people living in such chaos often go to those best able to put an end to it and beg them to take over and restore order. Who is best able to put an end to the chaos, the very people who started it? The anarchist who created the problem then creates a government run by them, an Oligarchy, where they have total power. This is exactly what happened in Russia that led to Lenin taking total power and in Germany where Hitler’s Brown Shirts created the chaos that brought him to power.
However, Anarchy isn’t a stable form of government; it’s a quick transition from something that exists to something desired by the power hungry. It’s a temporary condition and because it isn’t permanent, we eliminate it as well.
The word Democracy comes from two Greek words, Demos meaning People and Kratein meaning to Rule. Democracy therefore means the rule of the people, majority rule. This of course sounds good but suppose the majority decides to take away ones home or business, or children. Obviously, there has to be a limit. The flaw in Democracy is that the majority is not restrained. Persuading more than half the people to want something in a Democracy means they rule.
What about Republic? Well that comes from the Latin, Res, meaning thing and Publica, meaning public. It means the public thing, the law. A true Republic is one where the government is limited by law leaving the people alone.
America’s founders had a clean slate to write on. They could have set up an Oligarchy. In fact, there were some who wanted George Washington to be their King but the founding fathers knew history and they chose to give us the rule of law in a Republic, not the rule of the majority in a Democracy.
Why? Let’s demonstrate the difference in the setting of the old west. Consider a lynch mob in a Democracy. Thirty five horseback riders chase one lone gunman. They catch him. They vote thirty five to one to hang him. Democracy has triumphed and there is one less gunman to contend with. Now consider the same scenario in a Republic. The thirty five horseback riders catch the gunman and vote thirty five to one to hang him but the Sheriff arrives and he says you can’t kill him; he’s got his right to a fair trial. Therefore, they take the gunman back to town. A jury of his peers hear the evidence and the defense and they decide if he shall hang. Does the jury even decide by majority rule; no, it has to be unanimous or he goes free. The rights of the gunman aren’t subject to majority rule but to the law. This is the essence of a Republic.
Many Americans would be surprised to learn that the word Democracy does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the U. S. Constitution. Nor does it appear in any of the Constitutions of the fifty states. The founders did everything they could to keep us from having a Democracy. James Madison, rightly known as the Father of the Constitution wrote in essay number ten of the Federalist papers, Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Alexander Hamilton agreed and he stated, we are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy. Samuel Adams, signer of the Declaration of Independence, stated, Democracies never last long. It soon waste, exhaust, and murders itself. The founders had good reason to look upon Democracy with contempt because they knew that the Democracies in the early Greek city states produced some of the wildest excesses of government imaginable. In every case, they ended up with mob rule then anarchy and finally tyranny under an Oligarchy.
During that period in Greece there was a man named Solon who urged creation of a fixed body of law not subject to majority whims. While the Greeks never adopted Solon’s wise council, the Romans did. Based on what they knew of Solon’s laws they created the twelve tables of the Roman law and in effect built a Republic that limited government power and left the people alone. Since government was limited the people were free to produce with the understanding they could keep the fruits of their labor. In time, Rome became wealthy and the envy of the world.
In the mist of plenty, however the Roman people forgot what freedom entailed. They forgot that the essence of freedom is the proper limitation of government. When government power grows peoples’ freedom recedes.
Once the Romans dropped their guard power seeking politicians began to exceed the powers granted them in the Roman Constitution. Some learned that they could elect politicians who would use government power to take property from some and give it to others. Housing and welfare programs followed the introduction of agriculture subsidies. Inevitably, taxes rose and controls over the private sector were imposed. Soon, a number of Rome’s producers could no longer make ends meet and they went on the dole. Productivity declined, shortages developed and mobs began roaming the streets demanding bread and circuses from the government. Many traded freedom for security. Evidentially the whole system came crashing down. They went from a Republic to a Democracy and ended up with an Oligarchy under a progression of the Caesars.
Thus, Democracy itself is not a stable form of government. Instead, it is the gradual transition from limited government to the unlimited rule of an Oligarchy.
Knowing this, Americans ultimately have only two choices. We can keep our Republic as Franklin put it or we will inevitably end up with an oligarchy, a tyranny of the elite.

Film link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DioQooFIcgE

Devo: A választás szabadsága

Annyira igazuk volt....
jegyzek: A dalszöveg: a kutya az ókori Rómában 2 csontot talál egy régi Aesopus mese.  Egy kutya sétál át egy hídon csonttal a szájában. Úgy néz le a vízbe, és lát egy másik kutyát egy csonttal a vízben, és olyan ideges lesz, hogy végül megtámadja  és elveszti a csontot.

ütközés áldozata volt a nyílt tengeren
Soha senki nem mondta, hogy az élet ingyen van
Elsüllyedt, úszott,  a hajóval ment le
De használta a választás szabadságát

Mondom még egyszer, a szabadok földjén
Használd a választás szabadságát
A választás szabadságát

Az ókori Rómában
Volt egy vers:
Volt egy kutya
Ki talált két csontot
Felvette az egyiket
Megnyalta a másikat
körbe-körbe szaladt,
Ősszeesett

A választás szabadsága
Adva van
A választás szabadsága!

Akkor, ha van, akkor azt nem akarja
Úgy tűnik, hogy a szabály
Ne csapjon be, amit látsz
Van két ut

Mondom még egyszer, a szabadok földjén
Használd a választás szabadságát
A választás szabadságát

A választás szabadsága
Adva van
A választás szabadsága!

Az ókori Rómában
Volt egy vers:
Volt egy kutya
Ki talált két csontot
Felvette az egyiket
Megnyalta a másikat
körökben ment
Ősszeesett

[Megismétli]
A választás szabadsága
Adva van
A szabadság a választástol
Amit akarsz

Devo: Freedom of Choice

These guys were so right....
note: >The lyrics about the dog in ancient Rome who had 2 bones are based on an old Aesop's fable about a dog that's walking across a bridge with a bone in his mouth. He looks down in the water and sees another dog with a bone, and he gets so upset that he finally goes to attack the other dog and loses his bone. Or, as Mark Mothersbaugh explains, "It could have been about the Cocker Spaniel that lives in my house. There's 2 Pugs, and if I give the Cocker Spaniel a treat, she's happy until I give one to the other dogs, and then she drops hers and can't believe that they have the treats too. She thinks they've gotten her treats, so she's upset until that's over."

A victim of collision on the open sea
Nobody ever said that life was free
Sank, swam, go down with the ship
But use your freedom of choice

I'll say it again in the land of the free
Use your freedom of choice
Your freedom of choice

In ancient Rome
There was a poem
About a dog
Who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom of choice!

Then if you got it you don't want it
Seems to be the rule of thumb
Don't be tricked by what you see
You got two ways to go

I'll say it again in the land of the free
Use your freedom of choice
Freedom of choice

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom of choice

In ancient Rome
There was a poem
About a dog
Who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead

[Repeats]
Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want

Grumphenge

The mysterious Grumphenge

Elhunyt Alan Myers, a Devo korábbi dobosa

2013.06.26. 10:42 - Lángoló Gitárok

Rákban elhunyt Alan Myers a kultikus Devo posztpunk-szintipop együttes legismertebb dobosa. A hírt először Ralph Carney - a Black Keys-dobos Patrick Carney nagybátyja - dzsesszzenész osztotta meg Facebookon, azóta többen is alátámasztották ezt, köztük Josh Freese, az együttes korábbi ütőse és Gerald Casale alapítótag is. Myers 1976-ban váltotta Jim Mothersbaugh-t a dobok mögött és egészen a '80-as évekig játszott a zenekarban. Tagja volt annak a Devónak, amely a Whip It című dallal érte el a legnagyobb kereskedelmi sikerét és olyan meghatározó albumokon működött közre, mint a Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, Duty Now for the Future vagy a Freedom of Choice. Végül 1986-ban távozott a zenekarból, mivel nem talált már elég kreatív kihívást a Devóban, így kimaradt a turnézásokból és stúdiófelvételekből a 2000-es években. A hajtás után mi is megemlékezünk Alan Myersről, akit sokszor egyszerűen csak emberi metronómnak hívtak.

Grumpy Easter Island

The grumpy statues on Easter Island. Who knows how they got there?

Transylvania Hay

Hay. Beautiful.

Farmers in Transylvania have created a landscape of flower-filled hay meadows. Can they endure?

By Adam Nicolson

Photograph by Rena Effendi

You can’t help but smile as you walk in early summer through the grass-growing valleys of Transylvania. They ooze a kind of sweet-smelling well-being, largely because these valleys in the Carpathian Mountains in the center of Romania contain one of the great treasures of the cultivated world: some of the richest and most botanically diverse hay meadows in Europe. You can find up to 50 different species of grass and flowers growing there in a single square yard of meadow, and even more within reach as you sit down among them. This flowery miracle is maintained not by nature but by nature worked with the human hand. The richness is there only because a meadow stays a meadow if it is mown every summer. Abandoned, it will be filled with scrub in three to five years. As it is, for the moment anyway, Transylvania is a world made beautiful by symbiosis. All day long the smell of the meadows gradually thickens, and as the sun drops, the honey-sharp smell of the butterfly orchids, night scented, pollinated by moths, comes seeping out of the hillsides.

Go for a walk, and you’ll find the flowers crowding around your feet. Practically no chemical sprays and no artificial fertilizers—too expensive and distrusted by these poor, small-scale farmers—mean the hillsides are purple with meadow salvia and pink with sainfoin. Globeflowers, a sort of enlarged buttercup, stand in the damper patches like Japanese lanterns. The little burnt-orange hawkweeds called fox and cubs are interspersed with the sorrel and the orchids, the campanulas and the yellow rattle. Hares appear on the track in front of you. In places, the grasses have been roughly crushed and pushed aside—bears have been through here, looking for anthills to raid or fungi to plunder.

But if you go with Attila Sarig—a powerful and articulate 30-year-old farmer from Gyimes in Transylvania—the experience deepens. Sarig, sometimes with a murmured “Aha,” pauses now and then to pick the medicinal herbs that grow among the grasses: sorrel, snapdragon, gentian, marjoram, thyme, meadow salvia, all of which will hang and dry in his house or barn for winter infusions. “I know that I make this landscape by what I do,” he says.

The ethnoecologists Zsolt Molnár and Dániel Babai have found that among the people of Gyimes anyone over 20 years old can on average recognize and name more than 120 species of plants. Even young children know 45 to 50 percent of species. “It is because they still depend on biomass,” Molnár says. “They need to know what it is that is feeding them. Among the people I’ve surveyed, 72 percent of the visible flora and 84 percent of the botanical cover is known.” It’s a handmade world, largely unmechanized, too steep for reseeding, so people have come to know exactly what is there. Nowhere else, Molnár suggests, can people distinguish in their local vocabulary such a high number of separate habitats: shady, damp, steep, woody, mossy, and so on. “The average in the world is between 25 and 40,” he says. “The maximum anyone has found elsewhere is 100. Here in Gyimes it’s at least 148.”

There is a powerful chain of connections at work here. In the summer the grass of the pastures feeds the one or two family cows. But in the six-month stretch from mid-November to mid-May, they must remain inside, where the hay provides their only sustenance. Only hay makes keeping cows a possibility, and only milk from cows makes human life viable here. People in Transylvania live on the nutrient transfer from meadow to plate. That is why, in these valleys, hay is the measure of all things.

When Réka Simó, Attila’s wife, who was brought up in Budapest in Hungary, first came to Gyimes, she could not believe how “people would only ever walk in single file through the meadows.” It was as if, she says, “the meadows were holy ground. As though these Transylvanians were living in a world dedicated to St. Grass.”

In a sense these Transylvanian farmers do live on the hay. Across the whole region, from Romanian-speaking Maramureş in the north to the ethnically Hungarian provinces in the center of the country and to villages occupied by German-speaking Saxons, the scale of their operations is essentially medieval. Millions of people in Romania work on farms, with the smallest herds, the lowest yields, some of the highest levels of self-sufficiency, and among the lowest incomes in Europe. The average farm is eight acres. More than 60 percent of the milk produced in the country comes from farmers with two or three cows, almost none of it leaving the farm where it was produced. The mathematics is both simple and tyrannical. One cow eats four or more tons of hay in winter. That amount of hay needs up to five acres of ground to grow and might take ten hot, hard days just to mow. If you’re mowing alone and with a scythe, as still happens over large areas of the uplands, three cows mean a month of mowing.

But that is only the start of it. Each piece of grass must be handled ten or more times. First it is mown; then the mown stems must be raked into small heaps that don’t absorb the dew; then spread again in the next day’s sun to dry; then turned in the sunshine to dry the underlayers; gathered into a haystack in the field; eventually loaded onto a cart, a haystack on wheels, with the butterflies dancing up above the loaded hay; driven down the lanes to the homestead, where the horses are fed on the hay they have drawn there; unloaded at the barn into a deliciously rich-smelling heap like a dry, summer bouillabaisse; stacked high into the eaves of the barn—the chickens kicked out first so they aren’t smothered under the arriving hay—where it gathers as a rustling green fabric (“it must sound right; unless it sounds right, it won’t taste right”) in which the flowers retain their blues and yellows and reds; then, when the winter comes and the cows are brought in from the pastures, the hay for their daily bite must be cut from the dense body of the stack and finally fed to the animals beneath in their mangers.

The milk of the cows in summer, when the grass in the pastures is rich, is made into soft cheeses, usually eaten at home or shared with the neighbors. Milk is also sold in the village or the nearby town. Or drunk at home. Young calves are given milk before being sold live or eaten, as the best possible meat. Very little butter is made nowadays. Instead, heart-threateningly delicious pig fat is eaten on bread. Occasionally, even the pigs are also fed on milk. By these various routes, the goodness of the grass makes its way into every corner of life.

But have no doubt: This is a world of no great riches. You can feel the hard work that keeps it going in the honed muscularity of every hand you shake, male or female. A farming family here can expect to live on around 4,000 euros ($5,235) a year, often supplemented by income from another job. Less than half of the households have bathrooms. The price of horses is high because few people can afford a car. I’ve sat at a dinner table where the family have discussed whether they should buy a horse or a tractor. The answer: a horse, because no one has yet invented a tractor that will give birth to another version of itself. On the other hand, you don’t have to feed a tractor on the day it does no work.

During the communist years, from 1947 until 1989, the mowing regime on the high meadows was maintained. But after the revolution, which got rid of the Ceauşescus at the very end of 1989, the cooperative farms were dismantled, and lands returned to previous owners. People resumed the sort of small-scale farming they had practiced before communism, but from the mid-1990s it started to decline. Farmers got older. Young farmers thought they could make more out of arable farming or in city jobs. Milk could be bought cheaply from industrial-scale producers elsewhere. There was no sense then of the hay meadows being a rich, inherited asset.

As the old farmer Vilmos Szakács from Csíkborzsova says, in Western Europe “the general approach was to leave the old things behind.” Working abroad looked more tempting than staying home with the cattle and the hay. Two months’ work in Norway or Sweden on construction now earns a man enough to buy a house and some land in Transylvania. As in other Transylvanian communities, animal numbers in Csíkborzsova—a charming village in the east—crashed, from 3,000 cattle and 5,000 sheep in 1990 to 1,100 cattle and 3,500 sheep in 2012. Alternative employment meant fewer animals, fewer animals meant less hay needed, and less hay needed meant unmown meadows.

The forest started to creep back into them. As the shade of the trees closed over, the meadow flowers began to disappear. “We’ve seen the spruce trees coming up over the ridge to the south,” Rozália Ivácsony told me of her neighbor’s meadows west of Csíkborzsova. “The old man died, and the young one didn’t want it.” Of her own grown-up family, she says, “The children come and look at the view and eat and drink and go away. We’ve taught all of them not to become farmers. This land”—she waved her arm slowly around her own wonderfully beautiful mown hillsides—“is useless now. No foreigners want it, and it will be abandoned.”

Foreign money, earned by young men and women working abroad, began to flood into these villages. Houses that “in communist times cost six haystacks,” as the farmer Gheorghe Paul from Breb, in Maramureş, told me, “now wouldn’t cost less than 500 haystacks.” Old wooden dwellings have been demolished or renewed. In their place have emerged large houses with microwaves on melamine counters and eye-level grills looking out on farmyards where the old world persists: chickens and turkeys pecking under the plum trees; the cow waiting patiently in her low, lightless byre; the pigs snuffling in the sty; and the grandparents bringing in the hay from the meadows.

The problems were exacerbated by Romania joining the European Union in 2007. The clumsy definitions for European grant allocations prevented many small Transylvanian farms from getting European money. More than 70 percent of the intensely subdivided individual farms were too small for the Romanian bureaucrats in Bucharest even to consider them as farms. The EU says that nothing under three-quarters of an acre is an eligible plot, but most Transylvanian fields are smaller than that. Cow numbers have increased on some larger farms, but hygiene regulations designed for high-tech German and Scandinavian dairies cut into the viability of the old ways. Cottage cheese, for example, was always made in birch tubs. (“You must do everything gently,” Attila Sarig told me as he kneaded the curds, “like with a girl.”) The EU insisted that it be made on a stainless steel table. The traditional Transylvanian date on which to start mowing the low meadows in certain parts of Transylvania is St. John’s Day, June 24, but the Romanian government set the date at July 1. Additional European subsidies are available only if the meadow is mown on or after July 1, to allow flowers to seed and young birds to mature.

As they saw their world draining away, people wanted to save it. “I want to hold on to the country my father and grandfather have made,” Józef Szőcs says. And so, here and there, in small ways, they began to take control of their own lives. Local conservation organizations got to work. Milk had previously been bought from the villages by large dairy companies that ran the milk collection points and controlled the price. Starting in 2006, one or two communities, including Csíkborzsova, set up their own milk collection points, buying the storage and cooling equipment and establishing hygiene systems that conformed to EU standards. Every farmer who brought his milk in pails and buckets to the collection point was paid—but only if his milk was clean and of good quality.

Results were immediate. The milk from those Csíkborzsova farmers who had joined the new system was collected and sold separately from other milk. The price of the clean milk rose at first by 50 percent and by 2012 was three times as high as for milk from other villages. At the milk collection point in Csíkdelne, I met Jenő Kajtár one evening. Still in his blue farm overalls, he had brought in the 50 liters (13 gallons) from the five cows he had milked. Things were going well. Previously he had four cows, now he had six, and in three years the price of milk had gone up fourfold, doubling when the new milk collection point had been installed, and again when the village cooperative had set up a direct sale point in Miercurea-Ciuc, the nearby town. Fresh, unpasteurized milk was now available at an automated milk machine, filled twice a day via a refrigerated delivery truck from the village. I asked Kajtár why he thought the city folk were buying his milk. “Because it is real whole milk,” he said, smiling under his mustache, “a piece of the past which their city life has left behind.”

I never thought the sight of a milk-dispensing machine would move me. But here was a symbol of people trying to keep something valuable in a world whose forces were doing their best to erode and destroy it. The milk machine in Miercurea-Ciuc might, amazingly, guarantee the continued life of those flowery meadows high in the mountains above us.

The economics remain fragile. The Swiss milk dispenser costs about $13,000, and it earns about $40,000 a year, but this kind of direct sale means that if one farmer puts bad milk into the system, those buying it fall ill, trust disappears, sales collapse, and the whole village suffers. The week I was in Csíkdelne, 4 out of 22 farmers had been banned for one week because they had submitted substandard milk. One or two had been banned permanently for chronic failure to meet the required standards.

Yet in a generally diminishing market, with the higher prices, cow numbers in the milk collection villages are going up. With increasing cow numbers, the demand for hay is increasing too, and meadows that would otherwise have returned to forest are being mown again.

And the people feel some deep pride in not abandoning the beauty they’ve inherited. “It is our land,” Anuţa Borca, a young mother from Breb, insisted to me about her family meadows. “We have to take care of it. We have to teach the children the traditions. And teach them something that allows them to survive if they have no job.” She paused from the embroidery she was making on a linen shirt for her son. “It’s important because tradition is a treasure. If they learn it, they will be richer.”

I found another lady in Breb one day, Ileana Pop, embroidering a linen shirt for her son-in-law. Where, I asked, did the patterns come from? “Oh,” she said casually, “they come from the beginning of the world. But we mix old patterns with our own ideas. We never leave the style. We just play with the style.”

If only the economics could be sorted out, if only European agricultural subsidies were more attuned to local variation, if only the Romanian government were more alert to the astonishing landscape riches of Transylvania, then it might be possible to save this hay world. Transylvania is not yet a fossil. It is still alive—just—if in need of life support. But it represents one of the great questions for the future: Can the modern world sustain beauty it hasn’t created itself?

Timeline of Obama’s ‘Evolving’ on Same-Sex Marriage

By Devin Dwyer
@devindwyer
Follow on Twitter

May 9, 2012 12:25pm

President Obama will sit down with “Good Morning America”
anchor Robin Roberts today at the White House for a wide-
ranging  interview, his first since Vice President Joe Biden 
publicly voiced his support for same-sex marriage and North 
Carolina voters imposed a new ban on all same-sex unions.

Asked Tuesday whether Obama was prepared to opine on the
debate, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “I can tell you
that I’m sure it is the case that he will be asked again at some point
when he gives interviews or press conferences about this issue,
and I’ll leave it to him to describe his personal views.”

Here’s a look back at the various positions he has held on the issue:
from appearing to support the unions as a young state senate
candidate, opposing them outright as a matter of faith in 2004,
to suggesting a shift in line with public opinion:

FEBRUARY 1996: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages,
and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages,” reads a typed,
signed statement from then-Illinois state senate candidate Obama
in response to a questionnaire by the Chicago LGBT newspaper
“Outlines.”
  White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer later
publicly disavowed the statement, claiming in June 2011 that the 
questionnaire was “actually filled out by someone else.”

OCTOBER 2004: “What I believe is that marriage is 
between a man and a woman … What I believe, in my faith, 
is that a man and a woman, when they get married, are performing 
something before God, and it’s not simply the two persons who are 
meeting,” then-U.S. Senate candidate Obama said in an interview 
with WTTW Chicago public television.

“That doesn’t mean that that necessarily translates into a position
on public policy or with respect to civil unions. What it does mean 
is that we have a set of traditions in place that, I think, need to be 
preserved, but I also think we need to make sure that gays and 
lesbians have the same set of basic rights that are in place.

“I don’t think marriage is a civil right,” Obama said when asked
whether there’s an inherent right to marry.

OCTOBER 2010: “I have been to this point unwilling to 
sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my 
understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage,” 
President Obama said during an interview with liberal bloggers. 
“But I also think you’re right that attitudes evolve, including mine. 
And I think that it is an issue that I wrestle with and think about 
because I  have a whole host of friends who are in gay partnerships.”

DECEMBER 2010: “My feelings about this are constantly 
evolving. I struggle with this.At this point, what I’ve said is, is 
that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the 
protections and the legal rights that married couples have,” 
Obama said in response to a question from ABC’s Jake Tapper at 
a White House press conference.

“I recognize that from their perspective it is not enough, and I
think is something that we’re going to continue to debate and 
I personally am going to continue to wrestle with going forward,”
 he said.

JUNE 2011: “The president has never favored same-sex 
marriage. He is against it. The country is evolving on this, and 
he is evolving on it,” Pfeiffer told progressive activists at the Net 
Roots Nation conference.

JUNE 2011: “I think it’s important for us to work 
through these issues because each community is going to be 
different, each state is going to be different,” Obama said when 
asked during aWhite House news conference about New York 
becoming the latest state to legalize same-sex marriage.

“I think what you’re seeing is a profound recognition on the part
of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender 
persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, 
our friends, our co-workers, and that they’ve got to be treated like 
every other American,” he said. “And I think that principle will win 
out. It’s not going to be perfectly smooth, and it turns out that the 
president — I’ve discovered since I’ve been in this office — can’t 
dictate precisely how this process moves.”

OCTOBER 2011: “I’m still working on it,” Obama said
when asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos whether he
would move from supporting civil unions for same-sex couples
to supporting gay marriage.

“I probably won’t make news right now, George. But I think that
there’s no doubt that as I see friends, families children of gay
couples who are thriving, you know, that has an impact on how
I think about these issues.”

TERRORISTS VS. BATHTUBS

Transcript

Friday, June 21, 2013

In an online forum hosted by the Guardian newspaper this week, NSA leaker Edward Snowden advised Americans to think hard about how much privacy they're willing to trade for security. To make his point, he used an increasingly familiar construction. He said, quote, “Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, and yet, we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.”

You hear this “X kills more than Y construction” everywhere. Here's Georgia State Senator Bill Jackson.

SENATOR BILL JACKSON:  There’s more murders with hammers last year than there was shotguns and pistols and AK-47s.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  That’s not true, by the way. Peter Sandman specializes in outrage management. That would be for his industry clients. Also, precaution advocacy, for the activists, and crisis communication for organizations confronting say epidemics or natural disasters. When I called him for an interview, he preferred I came to record him at his home, where I asked him about that “X kills more people than Y” rhetorical device. He says it doesn't really work.

PETER SANDMAN:  If you distinguish two characteristics of a risk, how dangerous is it versus how upsetting is it – let’s give ‘em labels. Let’s call how dangerous it is hazard. Let's call how upsetting it is outrage. The correlation between hazard and outrage is extremely low. It's about .2. What this means is if you know a risk is dangerous, that tells you almost nothing about whether it's upsetting. If you know a risk is upsetting, that tells you almost nothing about whether it's dangerous.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  What are the elements that make something terrifying, even when it isn't so dangerous?

PETER SANDMAN:  Trust is a biggie. If I trust you, I'm going to find the risk that you are exposing me to much more acceptable than if I don't trust you. If you trust the government to tell you that surveillance is no big deal and they’re gonna do it responsibly, you’re gonna have a different response than if you think the government is not to be trusted. So trust is one.

Control is one. If it’s under my control I’m going to be less upset than if it’s under your control. Memorability goes in the other direction. If you can remember awful things happening or you can imagine awful things happening, that makes the risk more memorable, that makes it more a source of outrage. But what's key here is that outrage has a much higher correlation with perceived hazard than hazard has with perceived hazard.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But isn’t it helpful to set our priorities to know that household accidents, which are preventable, cause more deaths than terrorism?

PETER SANDMAN:  Yes. It's not like I, you know, go around urging people to ignore hazard and focus on outrage.

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

On the other hand, it's very pointless to go around urging people to ignore outrage and focus on hazard because they won't do it. If hazard is low and outrage is high, that is, you’ve got a risk that’s not very dangerous but is very upsetting, then the job is outrage management. Then you’re trying to calm people down.

Let's take a situation that most of your listeners are going to think is genuinely low hazard, like vaccination. But if you're the CDC or you’re some public health department and you’re dealing with a parent who's anxious, it's not mostly telling the parent that it's foolish to worry about vaccine. It's much more listening to the parent’s concerns. It's partly acknowledging that there is some truth to those concerns. The strongest argument in the toolkit of opponents of vaccination is the dishonesty of vaccination proponents about the very small risk that's real. If you’re 98 percent right and pretending to be 100 percent right, then the advocates of that two percent nail you!

When people don't understand the data, it's not because they can't. It's because they choose not to. And that's a function of outrage. So if you can reduce the outrage, then they’re more interested in the data. Then you can begin to educate them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So how do you increase the outrage?

PETER SANDMAN:  That's what I sometimes call precaution advocacy. The paradigm in precaution advocacy is watch out, this could kill you. Do something. Wear a seatbelt, wear a hard hat, wear a condom, not necessarily all at the same time.

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

All right? [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  I’m sure it’s happened.

PETER SANDMAN:  [LAUGHING]  Yeah, and there there’s a variety of strategies, some of them very simple and very obvious.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Give me an example.

PETER SANDMAN:  One of the things that demonstrably works well with seatbelts and well generally in precaution advocacy is scaring people. So those scary drivers at movies that, you know, they make teenagers watch actually do a lot of good. Role models work.

One of the most effective things in persuading people to get vaccinated against the swine flu pandemic a couple of years ago was when President Obama got his children vaccinated. One  example of a strategy that’s very powerful is if you can get people to do a behavior that doesn't necessarily make sense to them, because they don't have the attitude to support that behavior, once they have done the behavior, they begin to wonder why they did it. This is called cognitive dissonance. And, and cognitive dissonance is a very strong motivator for learning things that you wouldn't otherwise want to learn.

A nice example of this is most people who have ever tried to ask people to sign petitions notice that more people sign your petition and then read your literature than read your literature and then signed your petition. They sign the petition to be courteous, and then the act of signing the petition makes them wonder, what did I do, what did I sign? Then they read the literature, in order to teach themselves that what they did made sense and, and to develop an attitude that supports the behavior.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Now, let's take today the argument over NSA surveillance. Where would you come down on this?

PETER SANDMAN:  Well, it would depend on who my client was -  

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

- I guess. If you are the NSA, you have two possible things you can do. One is to ramp up the outrage about terrorism, and the other is to ramp down the outrage about surveillance. And you can see the government trying to do both.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  I was thinking that the government’s best move would be to offer actual stories of plots that were foiled through this kind of surveillance.

PETER SANDMAN:  Which it – as, as you know, it’s in the process of doing. But whether they’re actual stories or fictional stories is really –

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

- [LAUGHS] remains to be determined. But they, they are telling us stories.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So now, let's say you're working for civil libertarians who have long spoken about the lack of transparency when it comes to these kinds of surveillance techniques?

PETER SANDMAN:  I'm not gonna want to focus on telling people they’re fools to worry about terrorism, I would make much more progress telling people that the privacy worries that they have suppressed – I mean, it’s not like people don't care about their privacy. People do care about privacy. And I would try to reawaken those worries. So I’m talking about this means you. You know, you don't say anything on the phone that you're worried about the government knowing, but here are the ways this might get in your way.

The government is doing it now about terrorism, maybe they’re gonna be doing it in 10 years about tax evasion. And suddenly, it occurs to you that you weren’t entirely honest about your taxes! And could they find that out from an algorithm grounded in all the data about your phone calls and emails? And you begin to think, oh!

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

I would be be trying to make real, emotionally real, real in outrage terms for people, that invasion of privacy isn't something they shouldn’t care about.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  One more question for you: fracking. The industry seems to be winning this issue. What would you do for the other side?

PETER SANDMAN:  I would focus on uncertainty.  Who knows, maybe it can be done safely, but they don’t know that for sure. And this is the same industry that got this right, wrong and got this wrong and got this wrong and got this wrong and got this wrong. Some of these companies are losing their shirts on shale gas exploitation. And what do companies do when they're not making as much money as they promised their shareholders they were gonna make? They cut corners!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And if you were the industry?

PETER SANDMAN:  Well, for one thing, if I were the industry, I wouldn’t be cutting corners. I would be saying, look, this may be more dangerous than wind, but nobody knows how to produce enough power with wind to power your stereo, much less your car. So maybe renewables are the future, maybe they’re not the future. We don’t know that. What we know is they’re not the present. So our choices in the here and now are gas, oil, coal and nuclear. And you got to decide which one you hate the least. And, you know, there's a very good case that the one you hate the least, especially if you're an environment that’s worried about all the wars we’ve been fighting for – you know, in the, in the Middle East, you start thinking, “Oh well, what I really want is a source of energy that's domestic and isn’t coal.”

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

That's the argument I’d be making.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [PAUSE] I can see why you have such a nice apartment.

PETER SANDMAN:  [LAUGHING]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Peter, thank you very much.

PETER SANDMAN:  My pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Peter Sandman is a risk communication consultant.

Hun szótár került elő Iránból ie: 5-700-ból

Ajánlom Mellár Mihály krétai és Borbola János egyiptomi kutatási
eredményeinek megtekintését is. (rendkívüliek)                Hun-magyar nyelv
 Félelmetes.... /!!!

 Áttörés a nyelvészetben!

 Hosszú ideig ismeretlen volt a nyelvészek számára a hun nyelv, mert
mindössze 3 ital nevét ismertük.
Az Iránban nemzeti kincsként őrzött Iszfaháni kódex és a Krétai kódex
azonban most feltárja a hun nyelv rejtelmeit. A kódexek i.sz. 500
körül illetve 700 táján készültek. Végtelenül érdekes a két kódex
által feltárt hun nyelv összevetése a mai magyar nyelvvel:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/26166273/Hun-magyar-szotar

Szavak:

Nap = napi
víz = vezi
tenger = tengir
rengeteg, tengernyi = tegngirdi
só = sava (v.ö. sava borsa)
tó = tava
hó = hava, havas
szél = szele
száraz = sziki (v.ö. "Ég a napmelegtől a kopár szík sarja")
lejtő = lüthü
völgy = vüldi
folyómeder = tur (v.ö. "hol a kis Túr siet beléje, Mint a gyermek
anyja kebelére")
erdős hegyvidék = kert
hegyalja = soprun
ország, uralom: urruság
lakatlan határsáv = gyepű (v.ö. honfoglalás utáni gyepű rendszer)
kapu = kapu
vár = vara
szó = szava
had = hada
kard = szurr (v.ö. "szúr is dőf is" :-)
nyil = neil
tegez = thegisz
balta = balta
sisak = sisak
sarló = sarlagh
harcos = vitesi
kincs = küncse
kéz = kézi
szem = szöm, szüm
száj = szá(h)
kopasz, tar = tar
ősapa = ise (v.ö. a halotti beszédben: "terümtevé miü isemüköt,
Ádámut" = teremté ősapánkat Ádámot)
felmenők = elüd (v.ö. előd)
úrnő = aszuni (v.ö. asszony: a korábbi emelkedettebb jelentésű szó módosulata)
(halotti) tor = tor
bor = bor
sör = ser
vásár = vásár
por = poura
göröngy = bog
sár = sár
szar = sara
út = utu
kút = kutu
lyuk = liku
szag = szaghu
gömb = theke (v.ö. "nincs nálam boldogabb e földtekén")
piramis = gula
vm.-nek a fele = vele
ma = ma
szám = szán
nem = nen
igen = éjen
kicsi = kücsü
baj = bű (v.ö. bűbáj mint rossz irányú báj)
ész = esze
eszes, okos = eszisi
régi = avesi (v.ö. avitt, avas)
kettő = keltü
tíz = tíz
tizenkettő = tiz hen keltu
húsz = khuszi
hatvan: hotu ben tiz
én = ejn
mi = minkh
ti = tikh
engem(et) = inkmüt
minket = minkhüt
nekem = nikhüm
én leszek = ejn leszim
mi leszünk = minkh leszinkh
te leszel = ti leszil
ti lesztek = tikh lesztikh
ez = ejsz
az = ajsz
ez itt = hit
az ott = hot
az ott távol = oti
kívül = küivüle
belül = béivüle
külön = klün
élő, eleven = eleved
bogár = mütür (v.ö. mütyür)
ló = lú
kutya = kutha
sáska = saska
légy = ledzsi (v.ö. "madzsar")
béka = béka
bagoly = bagialu
sas = sas
hal = kala
teve = tüve
sás = sás
virág = viragh
moha = muha
alma = alma
árpa = árpa
fa = fo(a?)
tő (növény töve) = tüvi
fű = föve (v.ö. föveny)
falevél = zize (v.ö. hangutánzó szavak)
menni = menin
jönni = jüven
járni = járin
teremni = termin
tűrni, elviselni: türen
szagolni = szaghin
tudni = tondin
(fel)avatni, felkenni = kenin
fújni = fuvin
közösülni = batten (v.ö. b@-ni)
ha = cha
hol? = chol
hová? = chowrá
mi? = mi
ki? = ki
hány? = kháni
be = béh
át, által = alta
szét = szeit
rá = wra
Ragozás:
-on, -en, -ön = hen
-ban, -ben = ben
-ba, -be = be
-ra, -re = wra

A főnevek többes száma végmagánhangzó nélküli tő + -ekh. A
mássalhangzóra végződő szavak nál tő + -kh.
A tárgy ragja: magánhangzóra végződő szavaknál -t végződés;
mássalhangzóra végződő szavaknál -et végződés.
A birtokjel: magánhangzóra végződő szavaknál -je végződés;
mássalhangzóra végződő szavaknál -é végződés.
A részeshatározó ragja: egyes szám: -neki; többes szám: szótő +
-ekhneki. A hely- és képeshatározó ragja: tő + -étül szóvégződés.
Birtokos személyragos főnevek:

nyilam = neilim nyilaim = neiliam
nyilad = neilit nyilaid = neiliat
nyila = neilej nyilai = neiliaj
nyilunk = neilinkh nyilaink = neiliankh
nyilatok = neilitekh nyilaitok = neiliathakh
nyiluk = neilekh nyilaik = neiliakh

A fellelt hun szavak mintegy fele mutat magyar nyelvi rokonságot. A
fenti válogatás közülük is csak azt a keveset tartalmazza, amelyek
most 1500 évvel később a mai magyar fülnek egyértelműen
beazonosíthatóak. A fenti kivonat Dr. DETRE CS A B A írása alapján
készült. A felfedezés mind a nyelvészetnek, mind az őstörténet
kutatásnak hatalmas lökést ad.

Mérvadó nyelvészi vélemények szerint a kódexekből napvilágot látott
részek egy olyannyira egyedi nyelvi rendszert fednek fel, hogy
gyakorlatilag kizárt a hamisítás lehetősége. A Magyar Tudományos
A kadémia nagyon hallgat a témáról. Én egyetlen reakciót tartok
elfogadhatónak részükről:

"Minden követ megmozgatunk, és ha léteznek ezek a kódexek, akkor a
föld alól is előkerítjük őket."

De ezt sajnos még nem mondták. Bármi más válasz pedig mellébeszélés.
Mert ha már a nyomára bukkantunk ennek az anyagnak, akkor az MT A
feladata az eredeti kódexek felkutatása. ( A neten megjelent, hogy az
MT A egy irodistája küldött valahova Iránba egy levelet, amire nemleges
választ kapott, vagyis lerázták, és az MT A ezzel lezártnak tekinti az
ügyet.)

Tény, hogy az MT A nem tett közzé hivatalos állásfoglalást az ügyben.
Noszogassuk őket emberek, hogy dolgozzanak a pénzükért!!!
És hogy ne kelljen annyi évet várni, mint amennyit a Tárih-i Üngürüsz
krónika napvilágrahozására kellett.

Források:
http://www.varga.hu/OSKOR_ELO_NYELVE/HUN%20szavak_%20hun%20szotar.htm
http://www.dobogommt.hu/dobogo/cikk.php?id=20050101092756&evfolyam=IV&szam=4
http://corpuscuit.us/joma/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=677:dr-detre-csabahun-szavak-szoevegek&catid=63:figyeloe-2009&Itemid=45
http://www.magyarrovas.hu/files/Tortenelmunkhoz_magyarul_4_kiadas.pdf
http://www.magyartaltos.info/index.php/irasok/draga-magyar-anyanyelvunkrol/964-lajdi-peter-a-hun-magyar-testveriseg-ujabb-bizonyitekai
http://www.magyarmegmaradas.eoldal.hu/cikkek/nyelvunkrol---irasunkrol/4676