Podcasts about american declaration

Happy Independence Day! Our Declaration of Independence is unique--it's different than any other political document for one main reason.

“Be temperate in wine, eating, girls, and sloth; or the gout will have you both.” - Benjamin Franklin Everyone knows America was born on the Fourth of July, but what brought about the Declaration of Independence? Paul and Mikey dissect the politics, the economics, and the often overlooked role of gout… Yes that's right, we said ‘gout'.  Facebook Twitter InstagramSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1947, on the eve of Partition, a young man left Lahore and came to Shimla. What makes his journey unique, amongst the millions who must have undertaken this voyage is what he ended up doing in Shimla. What started out as a stationery shop went on to become a storied institution. This week, we travel to Shimla and learn about a rare bookshop which through a hand of chance, came in possession of a piece of history - A copy of the American Declaration of Independence. But that was not the only piece of history that the book store held - It also held a piece that went back to the very beginnings of an ancient religion. Tune in, and discover the magic of a rare book store, and what lessons in travel it holds for as we step into 2022. Till then Check out the other episodes of "India's Linguistic Heritage" The Hidden Story of Sanskrit, and the North-South Divide : https://ivm.today/3CpKQuO Reclaiming India's Linguistic Heritage: 300 Ramayanas?: https://ivm.today/3kgataz Partitions Unknown: Hindi, Urdu and the Umbilical Cord: https://ivm.today/3DhQCz2 The Hidden Injustice in India's Languages: https://ivm.today/3HA6YWo Breast Tax, Brahmins and the Bizzare origins of Modern Malayalam: https://ivm.today/3nQyuam The Improbable Impact Of Nature On 2000 Languages: https://ivm.today/3EvvmXz You can check previous episodes of 'Podcasts from Nowhere' on IVM Podcasts website https://ivm.today/3xuayw9 You can reach out to our host Utsav on Instagram: @whywetravel42 (https://www.instagram.com/whywetravel42) You can listen to this show and other awesome shows on the IVM Podcasts app on Android: https://ivm.today/android or iOS: https://ivm.today/ios, or any other podcast app.

Lecture summary: In a series of recent decisions related to same-sex relationships, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has stated that the American Convention on Human Rights does not advance a singular notion or closed conception of family. A 2017 Advisory Opinion from the Inter-American Court also concluded that the American Convention demands that same sex couples have equal access to de jure marriage. This lecture considers what is to be gained from more broadly contending with the question, ‘what is a family’ in the Americas’ regional human rights system. Even though the inter-American system now clearly rejects ‘a limited, stereotyped perception of the concept of the family’, it has only infrequently considered the question, ‘what is a family?’, across the diversity of the Americas. That question matters not only to determining the scope of various rights to family life in inter-American instruments. Rethinking the family as a ‘basic element of society’ (American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man), grounded in time, space, human mobility and our political-economic systems, could help us see more fully ‘who’ constitutes the Americas, which is an essential for a human rights system aspiring to be universally applicable across the Americas. Tracy Robinson is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law, The University of the West Indies, Mona, and serves as Deputy Dean, Graduate Studies and Research. She researches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, family law, human rights law and gender, sexuality and the law. She is a co-founder and co-coordinator (with Arif Bulkan) of the Faculty of Law UWI Rights Advocacy Project (U-RAP) that led successful strategic litigation in Belize and Guyana on the criminalization of LGBTQ persons. She served on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as a Commissioner, President of the body (2014-2015), Rapporteur on the Rights of Women and inaugural Rapporteur on the Rights of LGBTI people. In 2020, she was appointed as one of three experts on the Independent Fact Finding Mission on Libya, a mandate established by the UN Human Rights Council.

Lecture summary: In a series of recent decisions related to same-sex relationships, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has stated that the American Convention on Human Rights does not advance a singular notion or closed conception of family. A 2017 Advisory Opinion from the Inter-American Court also concluded that the American Convention demands that same sex couples have equal access to de jure marriage. This lecture considers what is to be gained from more broadly contending with the question, ‘what is a family’ in the Americas’ regional human rights system. Even though the inter-American system now clearly rejects ‘a limited, stereotyped perception of the concept of the family’, it has only infrequently considered the question, ‘what is a family?’, across the diversity of the Americas. That question matters not only to determining the scope of various rights to family life in inter-American instruments. Rethinking the family as a ‘basic element of society’ (American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man), grounded in time, space, human mobility and our political-economic systems, could help us see more fully ‘who’ constitutes the Americas, which is an essential for a human rights system aspiring to be universally applicable across the Americas. Tracy Robinson is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law, The University of the West Indies, Mona, and serves as Deputy Dean, Graduate Studies and Research. She researches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, family law, human rights law and gender, sexuality and the law. She is a co-founder and co-coordinator (with Arif Bulkan) of the Faculty of Law UWI Rights Advocacy Project (U-RAP) that led successful strategic litigation in Belize and Guyana on the criminalization of LGBTQ persons. She served on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as a Commissioner, President of the body (2014-2015), Rapporteur on the Rights of Women and inaugural Rapporteur on the Rights of LGBTI people. In 2020, she was appointed as one of three experts on the Independent Fact Finding Mission on Libya, a mandate established by the UN Human Rights Council.

George III ruled through an extraordinary period of revolutionary change, political upheaval, gigantic war and scientific, industrial and technological revolution. However, he is now most famous for being the king who lost America and for his mental illness. These two events are undoubtedly important parts of his reign but is George III perhaps the most underrated monarch in British History? To find out Dan spoke to historian Andrew Roberts biographer of Churchill, Napoleon and now George III. They examined the American Declaration of Independence to see whether George really was as tyrannical as it claims, what the reality of George's mental illness was and why he deserves to be remembered as one of Britain's great kings. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

George III ruled through an extraordinary period of revolutionary change, political upheaval, gigantic war and scientific, industrial and technological revolution. However, he is now most famous for being the king who lost America and for his mental illness. These two events are undoubtedly important parts of his reign but is George III perhaps the most underrated monarch in British History? To find out Dan spoke to historian Andrew Roberts biographer of Churchill, Napoleon and now George III. They examined the American Declaration of Independence to see whether George really was as tyrannical as it claims, what the reality of George's mental illness was and why he deserves to be remembered as one of Britain's great kings. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“Today is the 4th of July. It's the celebration of the American Declaration of independence, which was signed on this date in 1776. There's no question that document—inspired as it was by ideas from the Stoics—was an essential one. As we have talked about before, it asserted man's inalienable rights and began a great experiment in human liberty and equality under the law that was, and continues to be, unparalleled in history. But it is important that today, and on all days, we do not mistake July 4th or the Declaration's signing as the accomplishment we should be celebrating.” Ryan discusses the meaning of the 4th of July, and the work we all must do to make sure that its promised freedom is one day fulfilled for all of us.Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase.LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It's the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook

We look at a map of the British Caribbean to understand why losing the British north American colonies after 1783 mattered to British enslavement. We explore how the trade winds helped create the four-cornered ‘triangle' of the British slave trade involving North America, Africa, England and the British Caribbean – and how this didn't work once the North American States were out of bounds for British trade. And we begin to see why the British government, having fought at great expense to protect the British Caribbean in the American War of Independence, began to isolate the British planters in the Caribbean and favour the East India Company instead.

A new MP3 sermon from Shenandoah Valley Reformed Presbyterian is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: History of the American Declaration of Independence, Part 2: Scots Subtitle: SVCC Lecture Series Speaker: Rev. Adam Brink Broadcaster: Shenandoah Valley Reformed Presbyterian Event: Sunday Service Date: 4/30/2021 Bible: Romans 13 Length: 24 min.

History of the Statue of Liberty - Lesser Known FactsThe Statue of Liberty has become such a legendary representation of New York City and America itself, it's hard to imagine a time before it found a place in the skyline. It all began in the 1860s when French poet and antislavery activist Édouard de Laboulaye proposed the idea of a post-Civil War commemoration of America's newfound freedoms and democracy. He believed France should give a great monument as a gift to the United States to celebrate both the Union's victory in the Civil War, and the abolition of slavery.The idea resonated with a young French sculptor named Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi who'd been experimenting with large-scale works. Bartholdi started drafting designs, and the original goal was to complete the ambitious artistic endeavor by 1876, to mark the centennial of the American Declaration of Independence. The statue was set to represent the goodwill between America and France.

Negative rights and positive rights are not the same things. To provide what you do not have is a positive, to keep you from losing what you already have is a negative. Are either of them truly rights in the way that the American Declaration describes unalienable rights? The government is geared to provide the second, that is, protection by law, but completely unable to provide first, that is, charity, without coercion. Director Hodges discusses this aspect of our cultural debate with Dr. Cal Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of the Earth. The hope is to clarify what we can and should expect from government and from the Church by considering the government's role in God's economy. Government, charity, rights, church, critical theory, racism, sexism

Constituting America's 90 Day Study of the United States Constitution

“Be temperate in wine, eating, girls, and sloth; or the gout will have you both.” - Benjamin FranklinEveryone knows America was born on the Fourth of July, but what brought about the Declaration of Independence? Paul and Mikey dissect the politics, the economics, and the often overlooked role of gout… Yes that's right, we said ‘gout'. FacebookTwitterInstagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

First hour: news, saint of the day, Gospel of the Day, Dr. Alan Keyes from his website: "For a long while I have been involved in government, politics and citizen activism. I am Christian, Catholic, Pro-life and pro-liberty. I am sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and the republican form of government it establishes. I uphold and seek to preserve the sovereignty of the American people, and to restore respect for the principles set forth in the American Declaration of Independence. In light of those principles, I believe the top priority of our political life is to restore respect for the existence and authority of the Creator, God and to rebuild the moral conscience and character of the American people on the basis of that respect; For God, Liberty and the Constitution." Second Hour: breaking news, saint of the day, Gospel, Plus New Round of the Catholic trivia game show Fear and Trembling!!!

Only devoted students of history have heard of him, but in the years leading up to the American Declaration of Independence, John Dickinson, next to Benjamin Franklin, was probably the most famous American. He was renowned as a champion of American rights and liberty. His writings during this period did more than any others to defend and define the American Cause. But one decision would cast Dickinson from fame into obscurity.

Calling yourself a minority is leaving yourself in the childish status according to law. Being a minority is keeping you classified as a 14th Amendment citizen. We also went over the The American Declaration on rights of Indigenous people "they" only oppress the ones who have ownership of the land not anyone else. Our key to true freedom is finding out who we are and taking our land back!! Tap in.

 A few days before inauguration day and a day before Martin Luther King Day, Charles Ortel sees no chance of healing in a deeply divided USA. Again he invokes the words written by the father of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson: «…our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.»Those very words are found in the book Notes on the State of Virginia (full text on this link), published in 1782. From an advertisement of the book in 1787: THE following Notes were written in Virginia in the year 1781, and somewhat corrected and enlarged in the winter of 1782, in answer to Queries proposed to the Author, by a Foreigner of Distinction, then residing among us. The subjects are all treated imperfectly; some scarcely touched on. To apologize for this by developing the circumstances of the time and place of their composition, would be to open wounds which have already bled enough. To these circumstances some of their imperfections may with truth be ascribed; the great mass to the want of information and want of talents in the writer. He had a few copies printed, which he gave among his friends: and a translation of them has been lately published in France, but with such alterations as the laws of the press in that country rendered necessary. They are now offered to the public in their original form and language.To find out what Charles Ortel sees in this quote, you have to see this week’s edition of Dagsorden International. The program may be found on YouTube and Rumble, on our Facebook pages and as a podcast on PodBean.We would also like to recommend our viewers to subscribe to Charles Ortel and Jason Goodmans show, which is on air every Wednesday and Sunday.We appreciate everyone who find it worthwhile to support Document as a free media outlet. Our account number is 1503.02.49981 – from abroad it’ll be IBAN. NO3615030249981, BIC: DNBANOKKXXX or paypal@document.no Support DocumentYou may easily support our work with a regular monthly donation: 100 kr per mnd200 kr per mnd300 kr per mnd500 kr per mnd1000 kr per mndBetal med kort Or a single amount: krBetal med kort Our to our Bank account no.: 1503.02.49981 -IBAN no.: NO3615030249981 and BIC: DNBANOKKXXXOur Vipps number is 13629Support through Paypal:  200,00 NOK – monthly100,00 NOK – monthly300,00 NOK – monthly500,00 NOK – monthly1 000,00 NOK – monthly  

In this episode, I will continue to talk about how rights are objective correct behaviors. I will also talk about: the responsibilities that go along with our natural rights, the American Revolutionary War, the second amendment in the U.S. Constitution, the American Declaration of Independence, the right to use self - defensive deadly force against enforcers of your own government and how I am against all people who initiate violence.

In today’s episode, in honor of Bastille Day next week, and Fourth of July last week, I want to talk about the ongoing evolution in elitism, and the problem of how the emerging new elites can be better than the old ones being toppled.1/ Elites are a constant and arguably necessary presence in history. Political revolutions that try to do away with elites invariably seem to either fail quickly, or install new elites without meaning to. So the question for me is not how to get rid of elites, but how to try and ensure the ones we end up with are better than the last lot.2/ I’m going to sketch out a rough theory of elitism and its dynamics, and then get to posing the question itself, and then propose an answer, from the perspective of both the new TBD elites, and the masses they define, so let’s get started.3/ First, the concept of an elite is not dependent on a particular structure of society. Elites might be kings, nobles, elected leaders, bureaucrats, scholars, scientists, priests, cult leaders, media leaders, business executives, or subcultural inner circles. The prevailing idea of masses is induced by the prevailing idea of elites as a complement.4/ So there’s always a subset that regards itself, and is regarded as, entitled to a sustainably better than average human condition, with attendant privileges. And importantly, it is a stable equilibrium. Those who are worse off, the non-elites, and think the elites don’t deserve their better conditions, still live with it. The masses rarely disturb the peace unless they are under extreme stress.5/ Elitism and privilege go together of course. The word privilege literally means private law. Elites are a group for whom laws apply differently, or a different set of laws apply. In the most extreme case, they are formally above the law entirely. That’s the usual definition of a monarch and the dividing line between monarchs and ordinary nobles. 6/ The nobility might have a privileged code of law, but they are still governed by a rule of law, even if it’s not the same one as applies to non-elites. This special treatment has to be pretty special though, so I don’t use privilege in the broad social justice sense of the term, as in white privilege. That’s a different, more diffuse sense of privilege as a structural advantage. I’m talking narrow privilege where you can get exceptional, personalized treatment under whatever rule of law applies to you. 7/ For example, in medieval Europe, the nobility had hereditary property rights, governed by Church law, and the commoners mostly didn’t have the same sorts of property rights, only duties. But what made the law for the nobility special was that it was personally administered, with exceptions being more important. Laws honored in the breach rather than observance, as Shakespeare put it. 8/ So for example, there were laws against consanguinous marriages, but the Church did brisk business in allowing exceptions. Or you have indulgences absolving you of sins that are more easily available to nobility. Or in more modern times, draft exemptions. That’s what privilege looks like.9/ So one way or the other, some subset of humans will create not only better than average conditions for themselves through private laws, they will even get exceptional treatment under that private law. Or a position above the law entirely.10/ A big part of the stability of this condition is personal social capital: knowing the right people, with the right level of trust, to get rules bent or interpreted in your favor. Or being treated as an exception. Or in the extreme case, laws simply made to your specifications to benefit you and disadvantage others. In the most extreme case, they simply don’t apply to you.11/ If you ignore human fallibility and corruption, and look at this as a systems design, it is actually kinda smart to divide the world into 3 zones this way: a zone where the rules apply absolutely, a zone where they can be bent and exceptions are possible, and a zone outside the laws. It gives you a broad ability to evolve the system. 12/ It’s like how, in The Matrix, the architect declared that the city of Zion, Neo, and the Oracle were as much part of the design of the system as Agent Smith. You could even argue that though the architect was God, Neo was the emperor, the citizens of Zion, both red-pilled and native-born, were the nobility, the Oracle was the chief priestess, and the bots like Agent Smith and the blue-pilled people in the Matrix were the non-elites.13/ But back in our world, I asked my Twitter followers whether they consider themselves part of the current elites. Out of 468 respondents, 34% said yes, and 66% said no. Which seems about right since I write for a pretty privileged class of readers.14/ Okay, so with this definition, if you look back at history, it looks like a series of experiments in elitism rather than a series of experiments in governance. Some of them end well, some end badly. But all of them end. The conceptualization of an elite class is not stable.15/ Definitions of elites shift pretty slowly, and typically only move significantly when the technology of trust changes. It used to be about provably noble blood-lines. Then it was about visibly living by a particular code, noblesse oblige. Then it was about money, then it was about education. Maybe in the far future, it will be about being red-pilled out of an AI simulation, so the rules don’t apply to you.16/ Now, while a notion of elite is stable, there is what Vilfredo Pareto called circulation of elites. He traced how two kinds of elites, which he called lions and foxes based on earlier terminology from Machiavelli, tend to simply take turns being the elites. Foxes rule by the power of the pen, lions through the power of the sword. 17/ As I have said, the economy of elitism is sort of system independent, and is based on personal trust and social-capital based computing within a calculus of privileges — exemptions from the law. 18/ A good model of this calculus is Selectorate Theory, which is described in The Dictator’s Handbook, compares all kinds of political systems in terms of 3 groups: influentials, essentials, and interchangeables. Influentials are always elites, interchangeables are never elites, and some essentials are elites. It doesn’t matter whether it is a dictatorship or democracy. This is how governance by elites happens.19/ My final theoretical point is about knowledge. The relation among elites and masses is one usually based on what are called noble lies, where elites exploit their privileged access to ideas, information, and education, to craft false consciousnesses for the masses to inhabit. Think of them as blue pills. How you feel about these noble lies, or blue pills, is a big part of your philosophy of elitism.20/ You can distinguish two basic approaches of elitism. There is what is sometimes called Straussian elitism, which is generally conservative, but not always, and is based on the paternalistic belief that elites lying to the masses for their own good is a good thing. So you get a distinction between esoteric elite red-pill knowledge and exoteric, non-elite blue-pill knowledge meant for the general public.21/ The other approach, which you could broadly call pluralism, is more democratic in spirit, and eschews noble lying, at least conscious noble lying, based on the principle that even if it gets noisy, messy, uninformed, and ignorant, it’s a good thing to level the epistemic playing field, and not privilege some flavors of knowledge structurally. I’m pretty strongly in this camp. There is no blue versus red pill. Everything is available for anyone to learn.22/ Okay, now that we have this basic historical sense of what elitism is, and how it works, we can ask, what makes for good elites versus bad elites? It is important to keep a sense of the real history of elitism when you talk about this question, because it is easy to get caught up in theories. In the collage image accompanying this podcast, I’ve included several famous historical examples. 23/ The storming of the Bastille, the American Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, and Lee Kuan Yew, Nehru, and Jomo Kenyatta giving their famous speeches. I also included a picture of Muammar Qadaffi’s corpse after he was killed by a mob — it is important to remember that elitism can end like that. So this is the gestalt of what elitism as a historical practice is. Or to use an esoteric word, the praxis of elitism as a consciously held philosophy.24/ But we shouldn’t anchor too much on these iconic moments when one set of elites takes over from another, or when non-elites temporarily bring down elites altogether, creating a vacuum. The essence of elitism isn’t in these moments of creative destruction of elite power, but in quieter unaccountable workings away from public scrutiny.25/ So think of closed-door board meetings, experts in a committee meeting setting health standards, Congressional committees hashing out the details of a bill, lobbyists waiting to meet a senator to push some agenda, unaccountable editors in a press room deciding which public figure to attack. Unaccountable tech leaders deciding how an algorithm should work. That’s day-to-day elitism.26/ This unaccountability by the way, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is what it is. To the extent the elites are agents of the will of society at large, there is just so much detail involved in the exercise of actual power that there is no possible way all of it could be made transparent to everybody. At best you can be slightly less opaque and unaccountable than the last crowd.27/ There’s also a middle-class, provincial version I don’t want to discount too much, like a local city leader calling in a favor with the local police chief, or a powerful business person talking to a school principal about their child. Any behavior that exercises privilege is elite behavior. The defining bit is not amount or scale of power, but the fact that it is exercised in privileged ways — private law, with a degree of unaccountability and exceptionalism.28/ Now that I’ve painted a portrait, there’s a fork in the road. You can either accept that this is the way the world works and always will, or you can imagine some sort of utopia where there are no elites and no zone of society that operates on the basis of privilege. 29/ Whether you are a commune anarchist who believes direct democracy or consensus will get rid of elites, or a blockchain libertarian who thinks code-is-law will get rid of elites, down that road I think is mainly delusion. I’ll just point to a famous article, the Tyranny of Structurelessness and leave it at that. Getting rid of elites does not work.30/ One reason is of course that elites have power and they use that power to keep themselves in power even as structural definitions and models of elitism change, become more or less informal, and ideologically different and so on. Angry masses understand this aspect of the persistence of elites. But this is not the biggest reason.31/ The biggest reason, which revolutionaries routinely discount, is that humans seem to desperately want elites of some sort. Maybe not the current sort, or the current model, and definitely not the current specific people, but some elites. Maybe you want black instead of white, women instead of men, techies instead of lawyers, or trans instead of cis, the point is, you want elites.32/ There may be strong preferences for a system of choosing elites. That’s kinda what ideology is. Or looser preferences. For example, I tend to prefer fox elites over lion elites, a large selectorate to a small one, and pluralism over noble lies. I also prefer strong mid-level mini-oligarchic patterns of power to either imperially centralized patterns or extremely fragmented, decentralized patterns.33/ The psychological function of elites appears to be to model how life can and ought to be lived. But this is a pretty loose specification. Christians think in terms of What Would Jesus Do. Confucians in ancient China thought in terms of how to codify the will of the Emperor into law. Woke elites think in term of how to turn intersectional theory into prescription, and anti-Woke elites think in terms of making classical liberalism great again.34/ It’s important to keep your definition of elites broad. For example, many people pretend that people like court jesters (and people often classify me as one) are among the non-elite. Maybe formally, but informally, they wield power and privilege — in my sense of access to exceptional treatment — in ways that makes them elite. So today in the US, the cast of Saturday Night Live, stand-up comics, and people like Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah are definitely elites. 35/ Anti-elite philosophy and philosophers are also necessarily elite simply by virtue of how their influence operates. So whether you’re taking about the Taoist sage Zhuangzi in ancient China or important figures like Robert Anton Wilson in the Discordian subculture of modern America, they’re all elites. Just because you laugh at other elites with sticks up their asses doesn’t make you not elite.36/ There’s many theories of this psychological function. There is a basic ethics theory of people just wanting guidance on how to have a good life, and looking for teachers. There is the theory of elites as surrogate parental figures. There is the Girardian theory of mimetic envy. Each theory explains some aspects and some situations well, and others poorly, but the point is, that psychological function exists. Elites are models of how to live life.37/ Okay, so now that we know what elites are, who counts as elites, how elitism and privilege work, and why they are both psychologically necessary for societies and structurally hard to eliminate, you can finally ask, what makes for good elites.38/ It’s an important question to ask right now, because the current regime of elites is definitely nearing its end. Chris Hayes wrote a good book about this back in 2012, called Twilight of the Elites, and there’s been a lot of other writing about it, like Moses Naim’s End of Power, and Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public. 39/ The elites are of course not going quietly. My friend Nils Gilman wrote a great article about the reaction, called The Twin Insurgency, and there is in general a lot of attention on how the current elites are rapidly trying to secure what they have, and sort of batten down the hatches. 41/ But I think the old elites are kinda done for in the next decade. My hypothesis about this is a simple one about how elites fail. In general, elites fail when their relationships with each other become more important than their relationships with the world. Not just masses, the world. The inner reality of the elites absorbs all their attention: whether it is court intrigues, scholarly debates in journals, boardroom battles, product architecture arguments, rivalries among schools of economists, or media wars. 42/ Once an elite class has turned into this kind of inward-focused blackhole unmoored from the larger universe, it’s only a matter of time before it self-destructs. With or without help from the revolting masses. It doesn’t really matter how much power they have. Their hold on that power is a function of the strength of their connection to the world.43/ This is one reason the function of policing is in the spotlight, because the job of the police is to enforce a particular relationship between elites and masses. When this enforcement gets particularly one-sided, they turn into a Praetorian Guard like in ancient Rome. So calls to defund, deunionize, or demilitarize the police, and theories of how policing itself can be ended as a function, are also part of new experiments in elitism.44/ Whether it goes down in flames or more peacefully, change of some sort is coming. If my theories are correct, any non-elite period will be short-lived. The shorter, the bloodier. The current idea of power may be ending, but the role of elite power and privilege will not end. Policing as we know it may end, but some enforcement of elite-mass relationships will remain. It will simply take on a new form in the new medium.45/ Already you see weird kinds of new elites, like online personalities, offline protest coordinators, skilled hackers, and people who are good at crafting spectacles like videos of bad “Karen” behavior. Much of this gets labeled populism, but it’s important to note that each of these manifestations of so-called populism comes with its own breed of new elites, mostly descended from old elites.46/ I think the populist phase of the culture wars might even be over. The actual commoners are exhausted from decades of violence, both physical and cultural. They can at most come out to riot online and offline occasionally. The real battle now is between old and new elites, and within old and new group. And of course, it’s confused by lots of overlapping membership.47/ For example, in the last few weeks, an open battle has broken out between tech industry thought leaders and media leaders. And right now there’s a weird letter doing the rounds on Harpers magazine, signed by a bunch of old elites denouncing a bunch of the new elites. 48/ The elite wars have really gotten going now, because everybody senses old institutions are dying, and emerging ones are at the point in their evolution where they are ripe for capture by one faction of wannabe elites or another.49/ Basically, you could say a new era of experiments in elitism is about to get underway, with more or less blood on the streets around the world. The question again is, what experiments should you support? How can you minimize the bloodshed? How can you try and ensure the new elites are good. If you’re a candidate elite, how do you plan to be good?50/ I don’t know the general answers to these questions, but I suspect I have an approximately equal claim to being a D-list member of the elite in both the old and new worlds. So I can only share my answer. I think the key to being a good elite is to take your function — serving as a model of how life should be lived — seriously. This means thinking more about your connection to the world than your connection with other elites.51/ If you want to define this function more precisely, I think it has to do with the idea that humans are ideally the measure of the world, not the other way around, and privilege is about being among those who get to measure the world rather than being measured by it, and in doing so, create ways to measure non-elites. So if you voted to self-identify as an elite in my Twitter poll, ask yourself: how do I measure the world with my life. 52/ The price of your privilege — which, remember, is special, personalized treatment under private law via access to social capital — is that you are expected to be at the forefront of relating to the wider world, and taking its measure on behalf of all humans. Which means facing uncertainty, and taking on risks, physical, intellectual, and psychological. This is why there is a natural relationship between being a member of the elite, and being expected to lead in the fullest sense of the word. 53/ To lead is to ultimately function as a model to non-elites on how to live, and not just live, but live with, for want of a better word, courage. Since that’s what it means to be the measure of the world, take risks, and deal with uncertainty. Otherwise you’re just a parasite pretending to be a lordly predator. And there’s no real way to fake this. People can tell when you are living courageously.54/ To be non-elite in 2020, on the other hand, is to be measured in a hundred different industrial-bureaucratic ways. The world measures you. Height, weight, gender, wealth, skin color, zip code, credit score, criminal record, degrees, job titles, parentage, and so on. This is what makes you part of the industrial-age masses. This idea didn’t come from nowhere, and is only a century or so old. It’s the complement of the industrial age definition of elites.55/ Being utterly unique and specialized with your 100-dimensional address in society is pretty new. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset studied how this industrial non-elite human differed from the peasants of the past. My gloss on his theory is that the masses were measured the way they were because the elites were measuring the world in a specific way: through science and rationality.56/ One of the main proposals for new elites on the table right now looks like an extreme form of industrial bureaucratism, namely intersectional bureaucratism. The other one looks like a throwback to agrarian feudal elitism, with nobility and peasantry. Both are of course lazy and lousy, and you can tell because neither is in the least bit courageous, and both involve an existing set of elites primarily dealing with each other rather than with the world.57/ If you think you aren’t elite now, or won’t be elite in the future, your part of the equation is to ask, first, whether you think elites are necessary, and if so what kind you want. A way to restate that question is to ask: how do you want to measure yourself against the world? The elites you want are the ones measuring the world itself in a complementary way.58/ Whatever it is, it is a particular model of courage that inspires you enough to follow. Your main challenge is spotting real courage facing the world, which does not lie in facing competing elites. If your chosen elites are elites primarily by virtue of battling or beefing with the elites you don’t choose, they are not good elites, and you are not choosing particularly good elites to define who you are. Both of you are going to be miserable.59/ The good news is, there’s never been such a culture of widespread experimentation in new modes of being elite, so you have a lot of choices. The bad news is, it’s going to get really ugly while it plays out. The future elites are going to be playing Game of Thrones for a while, and the future masses are going to be playing Hunger Games for a while.60/ So all I can say is, may the best elites win, and may the best measure of the masses prevail. Get full access to Breaking Smart at breakingsmart.substack.com/subscribe

P&C drink and review Southern Comet, a New England IPA, then discuss the American Declaration of Independence. People have a right to decide what kind of government they want. That is the amazing, radical idea that has led to hundreds of years of liberty. Pigweed and Crowhill review some of the history -- the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, and other things -- and then run into the fundamental problem with the declaration. "All men are created equal." Really? What about the slaves?

“Today is the 4th of July. It’s the celebration of the American Declaration of independence, which was signed on this date in 1776. There’s no question that document—inspired as it was by ideas from the Stoics—was an essential one. As we have talked about before, it asserted man’s inalienable rights and began a great experiment in human liberty and equality under the law that was, and continues to be, unparalleled in history. But it is important that today, and on all days, we do not mistake July 4th or the Declaration’s signing as the accomplishment we should be celebrating.” Ryan discusses the meaning of the 4th of July, and the work we all must do to make sure that its promised freedom is one day fulfilled for all of us.This episode is also brought to you by Felix Gray, maker of amazing blue light-filtering glasses. Felix Gray glasses help prevent the symptoms of too much blue light exposure, which can include blurry vision, dry eyes, sleeplessness, and more. Get your glasses today at http://felixgrayglasses.com/stoic and try them for 30 days, risk-free.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoic

On a date, which at one time would have marked the celebration of the 300th Anniversary of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, the National Security Force (NSF) for the Democratic Republic of Islamic American States (DRIAS) pushed back angry demonstrators attempting to gain access along the northern border wall of the District of Columbia Quarantined Neutral Zone (DCQNZ). Armed with sledge hammers, iron rods, and paint filled balloons; the zealous followers of Abal Ismael, thought to be the most radical leader within the Alishi Mulgaric movement, repeatedly surged forward toward the border wall in an attempt to overpower the NSF defenders. The insurgent’s ultimate goal – gain access to the restricted former “first city” and then destroy, or at least deface, all war memorials and monuments which the group consider anti-Islamic or derogatory toward the Muslim faith. . Support Our Podcast - Find 1st Amendment News T-Shirts and Travel Mugs at:https://www.zazzle.com/store/pop_and_kks_place/products Support the show (https://paypal.me/1stAmendmentNewsPodc?locale.x=en_US)

Introduction.  Out podcast today is titled, Chinese Covid Lockdowns, Black Economic Dysphoria, Global Crony Capitalism, and the Killing of George Floyd, and the podcast is the introduction to a much longer article. We begin our podcast with the ideological distinction about societal racism revealed in Rush Limbaugh’s discussion with 3 Black media hosts on the Black radio program The Morning Breakfast Club.  Rush explains that he initially sought out the discussion to see if he could find common understanding with Black activists about the killing of George Floyd. Most of his commentary was with one of the three hosts, named Charlamagne tha God, (hereinafter CTG).  The distinction we make, using Rush’s discussion, is the difference between an individualistic perspective and a group-identity collectivist perspective about racism, in the United States.  Those ideological differences are irreconcilable, and we argue that the two ideologies cannot be reconciled, under Madison’s Constitution.  Part of our argument is that the United States, under Madison’s representative republic, ended in the failure of a centralized global elite tyranny, disconnected from the will of the voters.  We make a distinction between the rules of civil procedure in the Constitution of the United States, and the promise of liberty in the American Declaration. The two documents are not connected in Madison’s Constitution.  This is the same distinction between the United States, and the American promise of liberty in the Declaration that Candace Howze writes about in HuffPost.  She states,            “I admit it, the idea of America is super cool. It really sounds amazing and    yes, it’s a geographically and culturally influential and beautiful place. But     America isn’t really America.”  We agree with her point that the nation of the United States is not the same thing as America.  The founding documents of the new nation were Jefferson’s Declaration, followed by the nation’s first Constitution, The Articles of Confederation, drafted by Thomas Burke, of Hillsborough, N. C., and ratified in 1781. And third, Madison’s Constitution of 1787, followed by the Bill of Rights, in 1791.   Madison organized 38 elites, who met in secret, and executed a quiet coup in replacing the Articles with his Constitution. His rules did not provide a mechanism for citizens to protect their own liberty from the current entrenched elite tyranny.   Only 37 elites signed the Constitution because one elite signed twice, once for himself, and second as a proxy for another elite, not in attendance on the signing day.   Not one common citizen participated in the drafting, and not one common citizen signed the document.   The distinction about the ideology of racism revealed in Rush’s discussion is relevant for the broader distinction in logic between the social construction of reality of socialists and the philosophy of empiricism in Western logic.   In the social construction of reality, the mental image of the cop killing Floyd will never cease to be a useful tool for promoting the socialist agenda because it so perfectly confirms the prior premise that America is a brutal white supremacist society.   We argue that the difference in language and logic between socialists and conservatives is one reason, but not the only reason, why the differences between socialists and conservatives are irreconcilable, under Madison’s Constitution,   As the discussion between Rush and CTG shows, the cultural and moral values of the two-world views, individualism and collectivism, do not connect anywhere. There is no common ideological agreement on the mission of the Nation.   The Black Democrat socialists are correct that the United States must change its economic system, but they are incorrect to argue that the economic change needed is a socialist dictatorship.   The Black socialists will never reject the premise of socialism because their end goal is to replace the existing Constitution with a panel of socialist elites who make judgments about income fairness and justice.   The panel of socialist elites is similar in concept to the non-constitutional authority of Democrat governors to judge what is essential and non-essential, and how long the Covid lockdowns continue.   Rush began his discussion with CTG by making the obligatory genuflection to the murder of Floyd by cops.   Rush states,           “RUSH: ‘Cause I’m fed up with it. (the police killing Black people) I mean,           I’m not tolerant of any of them, but I’m fed up with it, Charlamagne. None         of this, to me, and I know that you’re gonna disagree with me on this. To          me, this is not America.” CTG responded, not on the topic of the cops killing Floyd, but with a much broader statement about institutional, systemic racism.                     CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: “Oh, no, it’s definitely America.” Rush interprets racism from the individualistic perspective that individual white people are not racists, and CTG interprets the killing from the perspective that the entire white American society is racist. Rush makes his case by using the individualistic evidence that white DNA does not contain a gene for racism.             Rush: “White supremacy to me means somebody, a white person who thinks           that they’re better, that they’re superior, that the white race is superior based       on DNA, based on science. White supremacy and white privilege is a catch-          all for the way the country was designed. It’s a way of saying that America         as constituted will never be fair, will never be not racist. It’s a way of laying          the groundwork for getting rid of the Constitution and transforming the        country, starting over into something it was never intended to be.” CTG does not disagree with Rush about getting rid of the Constitution, but counters with a robust condemnation of the capitalist economic system, that he cites as evidence of systemic, institutional racism.   His main point is that the economic system only works for white privileged people, like Rush.             CTG: “I do think America does work, but it works for the people that it was    designed to work for. It doesn’t work for everybody else the way it works          for you. Let’s not act like there isn’t 40 million people who have filed   for     unemployment in America, folks that have been sitting around   the last three      months waiting on stimulus checks, more than 44% of those people have been   denied unemployment checks are still waiting on ’em tocome.        People of all races are broke. They don’t know where their next meal is         coming from.”   Rush bristled at being called a privileged white person, and noted that he had worked hard for his success, and that if he could do it, anyone could achieve success.           RUSH: “Well, it can work for everyone. That’s the point of America, it can     for anybody who   wants to adapt to it, for anybody who wants to try to take    advantage of the unique opportunities that exist in the United States.We’re          the only nation that’s ever enshrined the concept of individual liberty and       freedom in our founding documents.” The error in the statement Rush made is to conflate and combine the American promise of liberty, in Jefferson’s Declaration, with Madison’s civil rules of procedure, of the United States, that permanently stacked the economic deck in favor the natural aristocracy, which eventually ended in the crony corporate globalist tyranny. Madison feared that the majority of common citizens would use their majority voting power to oppress the minority of wealthy citizens, and his rules for the Senate, the Supreme Court, and runaway slaves, were all part of his grand design to overweight the power of the elite against the common citizens. While Rush can see and condemn the unelected power of the deep state, he cannot bring himself to extend that condemnation to Madison’s rules, which empowered the deep state crony capitalist system of the Republican Party, which is odd because Rush often cites Codevilla’s work on the American ruling class. Rush provides the right analysis of Codevilla’s ruling class, but he never identifies the actors who make up the deep state ruling class. Those actors are the corporate military industrial complex, the unelected deep state bureaucrats, and the newly enriched technology information companies. Combined, those actors constitute the crony corporate capitalist class. Rush states, that from his individualistic perspective, the collectivist notion of white privilege, and its near cousin, white supremacy, does not exist, as it is applied by Black activists to all white people, collectively.                     RUSH: “No, wait a minute, I don’t buy into the notion of white privilege.           ‘Cause I hate it, we’re all Americans here and I don’t like the fact that           you’re (using the term white privilege)”   The two are talking past each other, and their discussion never connects on a common understanding of racism, or the mission of the Nation.   Rush misses CTG’s ideological point entirely. Without the notion of white privilege, CTG cannot make his extended argument that the capitalist system is systemically racist. And, without the ideology of racism, CTG cannot get to his main goal of eradicating the individualism of capitalism.            CTG: “Here’s the thing. I think that we gotta stop acting like white           supremacy isn’t done by design, the whole function of systemic racism is to       marginalize black people… So, once again, we need people that are willing         to dismantle the mechanism of white supremacy, period. This is America’s    fault, and the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, segregation, slavery, all   of those things are and have been the proverbial knee on the back of black       folks’ neck. And ’til somebody’s willing to dismantle the mechanism of        white supremacy, nothin’ is gonna change.” CTG misses Rush’s ideological point entirely. CTG assumes that the current crony capitalist system is the only form of capitalism. Rush is arguing for a free market entrepreneurial economy, but Rush fails to make the distinction between crony capitalism and entrepreneurial capitalism.  Two days after his conversation with CTG, Rush had an opportunity to reflect on the significance of his call with one of his callers, named Sherry. Rush reverts to his earlier, individualistic interpretation of white supremacy.            Rush: “White supremacy to me means somebody, a white person who thinks           that they’re better, that they’re superior, that the white race is superior based       on DNA, based on science.I think, Sherry, that white supremacy is another       name for hate. And it’s an umbrella under which a number of guilty traits     that are alleged to part of being white. It’s a way of laying the     groundwork           for getting rid of the Constitution and transforming the country,          starting over           into something it was never intended to be. That’s really what        the ultimate purpose of all of these terms is, I believe.”   Rush is correct in his assessment of the end goal of the socialist Black activists, like CTG, is to use the hatred of racism as a weapon to eradicate the Constitution and replace it with a socialist dictatorship.   CTG is correct in his analysis that Madison’s Constitution stacked the deck in favor of the natural aristocracy. CTG is incorrect to argue that the main economic issue to be solved in the United States is racism.   The bigger war to be fought by the Black activists is over the disappearing Black middle class, and fighting against the global corporate, and deep state elites, who use Madison’s rules to distort the flow of economic benefits to themselves.   The bigger issue for CTG to solve, is what type of economic system generates fair economic outcomes for Black people, while preserving individual freedom.   The statement by CTG that the economic system only works for white supremacists, like Rush, needs to be revised slightly. The U. S. economic system only works for Black people when the benefits of economic growth and prosperity are fairly distributed to them, as reward for their work.   The solution to racism is the same as it has always been, since Jefferson’s Declaration: a fair economic system where all individuals are treated as equals, and obtain their just rewards.   Or, to paraphrase the political slogan of agrarian populists, in the 1880s, who confronted the same set of unfair policies as Blacks do today: Equal Rights For All. Special Privileges for None. (Equal Rights For All. Special Privileges for None. Re-examining the Agrarian Arguments Against a Centralized American Government, Laurie Thomas Vass, GabbyPress. 2017.   The solution to racism is more democracy, and more economic freedom, at the most local level of government, not more globalist, centralized tyranny, under Madison’s flawed document.   Oddly, CTG is great at pointing out the flaws in the existing political system, but woefully deficient in offering a compelling economic alternative to crony capitalism for the Black middle class to achieve individual freedom and success.   In the Black social construction of reality, CTG adopts a Pollyanna economic myth that the existing crony capitalist economic structure can be modified to function, like Chinese Communist state capitalism, and that racism will disappear when the agents of government take wealth from the rich and give to the poor.   And, to help CTG imagine that fair economic system, it is not a communist dictatorship of the proletariat. We cite the historical example of Durham’s Black Wall Street, in the 1920s, as the goal of Black economic freedom to achieve financial success.   The most fair economic system that generates fairness and freedom is called competitive free market entrepreneurialism. (The American Millennial Attraction to Socialism. Laurie Thomas Vass. GabbyPress. 2020).   We conclude that the competitive free market entrepreneurial economy cannot be obtained under the existing Constitution, because the ideology of racism, as a tool of Democrat socialists, prohibits authentic discussion between people like Rush Limbaugh and CTG about a better economic system.   This podcast is the introduction of a much longer article, available at the clpnewsnetwork.com   The other sections of the longer article include:   Section 1. The Origins of Modern Racism in the United States.   Section 2. Black Economic Dysphoria Under Global Corporate Capitalism and the Covid Lockdowns.   Section 3. Globalism and the Killing of George Floyd. Conclusion: Re-connecting a New Constitution to the Principles of Liberty in the Declaration. The full text and audio of the most recent podcast is available for free at clpnewsnetwork.com. The entire historical text and audio archive of all the CLP News Network podcasts are available for an annual subscription of $30.  I am Laurie Thomas Vass, and this podcast is a copyrighted production of the CLP News Network.  

Now here’s a good question: “How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world?”That we take for granted this enduring influence is the main point of Tom Holland’s new book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, published by Basic Books.Holland is an award-winning historian of the ancient world and regular contributor to the Times of London, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He observes that Romans saw worship of the crucified Jesus as scandalous, obscene, and grotesque. And yet this same Roman Empire would eventually come to worship Jesus as God. Holland writes:The relationship of Christianity to the world that gave birth to it is, then, paradoxical. The faith is at once the most enduring legacy of classical antiquity, and the index of its utter transformation.In our own day Holland finds pervasive Christian influence everywhere he looks in the West. The self-evident truths of the American Declaration of Independence—that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are not remotely self-evident to a student of antiquity or other world religions. But that’s the genius of this Christian revolution, Holland argues. He writes, “The surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity."Holland joins me on Gospelbound to discuss why Christianity is the most difficult legacy of the ancient world to write about, and why this Christian revolution is the greatest story ever told. This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a disenchanted world looking to themselves for answers, Southeastern’s three-year Doctor of Ministry in Faith and Culture plants graduates at the intersection of theology, culture, and church to bring the world a better story—the gospel. Learn more at sebts.edu.

Dr. Jerome Huyler is a former assistant professor at Seton Hall University (NJ) and the author of Locke In America: The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era, Everything You Have: The Case Against Welfare and "Only In America: The Goodness That Greatness Begot."  He is that rare combination of educated scholar and devoted, down-to-earth patriot.     Dr. Huyler is the exclusive admin and contributor to the FB group, The American Declaration.  His website address is https://www.jeromehuyler.com.  His twitter handle is huylerje. 

Happy Friday Everyone! Alex is in the hot seat today playing Aussie Classics as Ali is searching for treasure off a map she found on the American Declaration of Independence...... apparently.  Don't worry though we still got Tinder Chat, as well as an interview from the wonderfully talented James Franklin! Plus The Sports Desk boys come in for a chat too! Listen folks, its a good one today! #sneakyfridayswithdoubleabatteries 

Our 4th of July special! Julia Roberts discusses her fear of giants invading the US, we discuss 1986's 'Big Trouble in Little China' and speak to a very hungover Thomas Jefferson on the time phone. SHOW NOTES 'Big Trouble in Little China' was released in 1986 by 20th Century Fox. It was written by Gary Goldman, David Z Weinstein & W.D Richter. It was directed by John Carpenter and stars Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall and Dennis Dun. Julia Roberts is an academy award winning American actress and has starred in many films and TV shows, including 'Pretty Woman', Erin Brockovich & Notting Hill. Thomas Jefferson was an American politician and freedom fighter. He was one of the principle architects of the American Declaration of Independence.

In the wake of recent dreadful events, Daniel decided to talk to Jack about the ideology of mass shootings, especially with reference to the 'Might is Right' tract cited by one of the killers. Content warnings. *** Show Notes: "Might is Right" at RationalWiki: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Might_is_Right "Might Is Right" full text at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/cu31924029107907/page/n3 "Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooting," at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shooting Santino William Legan: Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooter's Instagram Page: "https://heavy.com/news/2019/07/santino-william-legan-gilroy-shooters-instagram/" "“Read ‘Might Is Right’ by Ragnar Redbeard,” Legan wrote. His caption further asked rhetorically, “Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?”" * From Might Is Right, Chapter Three: "You have only to look at some men, to know that they belong to an inferior breed. Take the Negro for example. His narrow cranial developittent, his prognathous jaw, his projecting lips, his wide nasal aperture, his simian disposition, his want of forethought, originality, and mental capacity: are all peculiarities strictly inferior. Similar language may be applied to the Chinaman, the Coolie, the Kanaka, the Jew, and to the rotten-boned city degenerates of Anglo- Saxondom: rich and poor. Vile indeed are the inhabitants of those noxious cattle kraals: London, Liverpool, New York, Chicago, New Orleans: and yet, in those places is heaped up, the golden plunder of the world. [...] "No one can study the laborers on a farm, the 'hands' in a big foundry or factory, the seamen in a large seaport, the nomadic hirelings on a railroad construction gang: or the clerks and salesmen in a city warehouse, without perceiving at a glance, that the vast majority of them are extremely poor specimens of humanity. The ideal type of manhood or womanhood, (that is to say, 'Ye Thoroughbred") is not to be found among these captive hordes — for captives they really are. Their heads are, to a large extent unsymeterical- their features distorted, ape-like, unintelligent. Their bodies are out of all proportion, dwarfed, stunted, diseased, malformed, cretinous. Their movements are contracted, artificial, ungainly, and their minds (outside of routine) are utter vacuums." * "What We Know About the Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooting Suspect." https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-29/what-we-know-about-gilroy-garlic-festival-shooting-suspect-santino-william-legan "No clarity yet on motive behind Gilroy gunman's attack, investigators say," https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/30/gilroy-garlic-festival-shooting-california-white-supremacy-links "The FBI is continuing to investigate if the alleged shooter “was in line with any particular ideology”, Craig Fair, a deputy special agent in charge with the FBI in San Francisco, said on Tuesday, including by reviewing social media accounts, digital media, conducting interviews and investigating what thoughts and ideas the shooter may have shared with others. He also did not confirm whether the widely-publicized Instagram account was linked to the shooter." "'Erroneous reporting' on Garlic Festival shooting suspect's ideology: FBI" https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/erroneous-reporting-garlic-festival-shooting-suspects-ideology-fbi/story?id=64706955 ""I can tell you there has been no determination on ideology. There's reports out there has been information found and books referenced on that, we are not in a position at this stage of the investigation to make a call on ideology," John Bennett told reporters on Wednesday. "The information that's out there, it's being reported that there's white nationalism or any type of those ideologies," Special Agent John Bennett, said. "That has not been determined and I wanted to knock that down." Bennett said that through the course of the investigation they are finding literature from "left to right" and said they can't put the suspect, 19-year-old Santio Legan, in an ideological "box." He wouldn't characterize the literature as extreme, either." * "Radical: The Story of Arthur Desmond" (article and podcast): https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/black-sheep/story/201859191/radical-the-story-of-arthur-desmond "However, he alienated the settler community with his support for the former Māori guerrilla leader and founder of the Ringatu church, Te Kooti. When public meetings were held to protest a planned trip by Te Kooti to Gisborne, Desmond was the only Pākehā who raised his voice in support. “It was a very brave thing to do,” says Mark Derby. “He was bodily thrown out of the meetings and even beaten up, but it didn’t stop him from taking this stance.” However, Derby doesn’t think Desmond’s support for Te Kooti was rooted in heartfelt sympathy for the plight of Māori. Instead, he says it was linked to Te Kooti’s violent past as a guerrilla leader. “He liked Te Kooti’s style. He admired the idea of a very strong and even ruthless leader who was prepared to go to any lengths, including extreme violence. [Desmond’s] whole career and all his political writings were based on an admiration and exultation of such figures.” [...] "On war he wrote: “The natural world is a world of war; the natural man is a warrior; the natural law is tooth and claw. All else is error.” On Jesus Christ: “... the prophet of unreason — the preacher of rabble-rabies. All that is enervating and destructive of manhood, he glorifies, — all that is self-reliant and heroic, he denounces.” On the American Declaration of Independence: “Its ethical and most of its political conclusions are shams, deceptions, and cold-blooded dishonesties — incandescent Lies.” On women: “Women and children BELONG to man; who must hunt for them as well as for himself. He is their lord and master, in theory and in fact.” On race: “The African, Mongolian, Semite, or Negro breeds are all fundamentally different in formation, constituents, and character; from men of Aryan descent. … Some men ARE born better, born nobler, born braver than others.”" * Robert Evans, "The EL Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror" https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror/ "This poster and several others lambasted the shooter for his “shitty” and “0 effort manifesto”. There is nothing new in this killer’s ramblings. He expresses fears of the same “replacement” of white people that motivated the Christchurch shooter, and notes that he was deeply motivated by that shooter’s manifesto. In the article I wrote after the Poway Synagogue shooting I noted that 8channers had dedicated a great deal of time to spreading that manifesto, in an effort to inspire more shooters. The El Paso shooting is further proof that this strategy works. [...] "What we see here is evidence of the only real innovation 8chan has brought to global terrorism: the gamification of mass violence. We see this not just in the references to “high scores”, but in the very way the Christchurch shooting was carried out. Brenton Tarrant livestreamed his massacre from a helmet cam in a way that made the shooting look almost exactly like a First Person Shooter video game. This was a conscious choice, as was his decision to pick a sound-track for the spree that would entertain and inspire his viewers. [...] "In the wake of the Christchurch shooting I published my first Bellingcat article about 8chan. I was interviewed by numerous media agencies about the website, and I warned all of them that additional attacks would follow – every month or two – until something was done. This prediction has proven accurate. Until law enforcement, and the media, treat these shooters as part of a terrorist movement no less organized, or deadly, than ISIS or Al Qaeda, the violence will continue. There will be more killers, more gleeful celebration of body counts on 8chan, and more bloody attempts to beat the last killer’s “high score”." ContraPoints: "Incels." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0

The Pursuit of Truth has been the passion of philosophers, preachers, scholars, scientists, and countless others throughout the ages. What is truth and how does one find it? The American Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In Pursuit of Truth, W. V. Quine says, "The pursuit of truth is a quest that links observation, theory, and the world." This week's Torah portion is Parashah Vayeitzei. Parashah Vayeitzei consists of Genesis 28:10 to 32:3. Vayeitzei means, "And He Went Out." In this Torah portion, Jacob escapes from his wicked brother, Esau and flees toward Haran: [Genesis 28:10 RSV] "10 Jacob left Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran." Jacob encounters something in his flight from Beer-sheba towards Haran. His flight was for the pursuit of truth. In his pursuit of truth, he came to a certain place: [Genesis 28:11 RSV] "11 And he came to a certain place, and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep." What is this certain place? This certain place is the place of truth. Jacob arrived at the place of truth. I would personally like to invite you to join me on this journey. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/destined4torah/support

The Un-Pursuit of Happiness Do you struggle to find happiness within yourself? Do you despair every time you watch the news? In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how to get over this despair and how pursuing happiness may not be the best to actually finding happiness. There’s an interesting trend in a lot of things I’ve been reading online, namely a sense of despair, hopelessness, and depression almost manifesting itself as nihilism. And why is this? Why do we feel like we’re in such hard times? Is it that things were better in the past and we’ve just lost our way, as many in some circles seem to think? If we look at how things were 100 years ago, most people were likely to be farmers, living a life with a lot of hard work keeping farm animals and harvesting crops - certainly not a life of leisure or comfort. If you lived in the city, you were very likely a factory worker, with less than ideal conditions, often with very long hours because there weren’t a lot of labor laws in place. So why are we, with so much leisure time and modern conveniences, so unhappy? I think that ironically it’s because as a society, we focus so much on trying to be happy. Now, why would this, the search for happiness, make so many people unhappy? Isn’t this what we’re supposed to do with our lives? It even says in the American Declaration of Independence from the British that we have the right to “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But that’s the thing - we’re not guaranteed happiness, we’re only given the opportunity to pursue happiness. But I think it’s this dogged pursuit that gives us so much anguish. So why does pursuing happiness not bring happiness? I mean we’re taught from an early age that when we want something that we go out and get it. I think that happiness it a byproduct of doing useful and good things in our lives. When we try to make ourselves happy, we can’t. It’s like trying pet a cat. The more you chase after the cat, the more it runs from you until you stop chasing it and ignore it, then it suddenly shows up trying to snuggle itself right into your face. It isn’t until we stop trying to be happy, and just focus on trying to live a good life, that happiness finds us. Happiness is what happens when we making other plans or while we’re doing other things. Gratitude >“If what you have seems insufficient to you, then though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.”  >― Seneca If you were to ask yourself what you want in your life, what would be on that list? Would you list the things that you already have? One of the most important things that I’ve learned in studying stoicism it to be grateful for what we have, and to learn to want what we already have. If we’re always chasing some shiny object to fill that hole inside of us, we’ll always feel empty. Appreciating what we have - a place to live, family and friends, food, even the most basics of things, can immediately improve our level of happiness. When I was in high school me and my friends used to say, “Wherever you go, there you are.” At the time it was just us being silly. I think we’d heard it on some TV commercial or show, but as I’ve gotten older, I realize that there is a profound truth in it. You can’t ever escape who you are. If you’re unhappy with who you are, if you don’t like yourself, nothing that you have, nothing that you do will ever fix that. Learning to be okay with yourself, learning to love yourself, and be good to yourself, is one of the biggest keys to happiness. I think loving who you are is an overlooked part of loving what you have. To recognize you are worthy of love despite, or maybe even because of your faults, is not an easy thing. But remember, we are all imperfect and messy and full of doubts, and every single one of us is worthy of love. Purpose >“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” >— Emerson I read an essay a while back from Darius Foroux and he proposed that life is not about being happy, it’s about being useful. That idea really struck a chord with me, because when I really think about it, the times in my life when I’ve felt the best are when I’ve taken on the challenges that I'm facing and I work at them, and I make some headway. When I’m serving other people, and I’m trying to help others through their challenges, I feel energized. When I’m working on creating something, whether that’s music or writing or this podcast, I feel like there’s purpose to my efforts. When I’m challenging myself in some way that somehow adds value to the world, I feel like I’m contributing, and that I’m helping move the world forward in some way. Service >“One cannot pursue one’s own highest good without at the same time necessarily promoting the good of others. A life based on narrow self-interest cannot be esteemed by any honorable measurement. Seeking the very best in ourselves means actively caring for the welfare of other human beings. Our human contract is not with the few people with whom our affairs are most immediately intertwined, nor to the prominent, rich, or well educated, but to all our human brethren.” >— Epictetus I think the last, and most important part of allowing happiness to find you, is serving others. When we focus on ourselves and only look after ourselves, we miss out on adding to something to the world. When we only look after our own happiness, remembering that happiness is a byproduct of action, the more we can give to the world, the more chances happiness will have to show up in our lives. Rather than complain about all the things that are wrong with the world, what can you do to be part of the solution? We all have something to offer, some unique talent that the world needs. Even if it’s just showing up and supporting causes that you believe in. Every good movement in the world needs people that are willing to show up. I know that it seems like there’s so much wrong in the world. I think every age has had its struggles with problems that seem insurmountable and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But remember, you can only do what you can do, and that will be enough. Don’t get discouraged because you can’t save the world in a day. But add something good, be on the positive side of the equation, and know that you’re being part of the solution. Hey friends, thanks for listening to the podcast. If you like what you hear, I would really appreciate it if you could help support me by making a pledge on Patreon. You can find me at patreon.com/stoiccoffee. Even just a small amount helps in keeping this podcast going. Also, head on over to my website at www.stoic.coffee and sign up for our weekly newsletter. And lastly, if you know of someone that might like or could benefit from this podcast, please share it with them. Word of mouth is one of the best ways to help this podcast grow. Thanks again for listening.

Summary Classical Liberalism was birthed over eight hundred year ago with the signing of the Magna Carta, Magna Carta Libertatum, Medieval Latin for “Great Charter of the Liberties”, in 1215. This was the first crack in the “Divine Right of Kings”, which eventually led to the recognition of the “divine rights” of all people as endowed by their Creator as proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence. Links and References Economics 101 Size of Government We Must All Hang Together Contact Please do reach out with comments or questions.  You can email me at will@revolution2-0.org, or connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And you can subscribe to the podcast on your favorite device through Apple Podcasts, Google, or Stitcher. Transcript The beginnings of Classical Liberalism began over eight hundred years ago with the signing of the Magna Carta, Magna Carta Libertatum, Medieval Latin for “Great Charter of the Liberties”, in 1215. This was the first crack in the “Divine Right of Kings”, which eventually led to the recognition of the “divine rights” of all people as endowed by their Creator proclaimed publically in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. With this document, the world’s oldest democracy was founded. How did we get from that historic moment of fierce bravery and unity to today’s deep and growing divisions? Classical Liberalism continued to find its voice. By the mid-19th century, it stood for economic and civil liberties, including the separation of church and state, with a limited government under the rule of law, private property, and market-based economies. Simply put, Liberalism stood for economic and civil liberties. Remember, under various monarchies and dictatorships in previous centuries, limited government, the rule of law, civil liberties and free economies were simply unthinkable. By the early 20th Century, a schism appeared with Liberals emphasizing the civil liberties part, and Conservatives emphasizing the economic liberties. Why the schism? Was it legitimate in that certain people thought that one or the other was getting short shrift and needed more attention and resources? Or was it artificially created to give the impression that one view, either the Liberals’ or Conservatives’, was correct, and the other incorrect--dead wrong, in fact? My guess is that both Liberals and Conservatives started on this divided road with the best of intentions; however, once they discovered that each part of the split in Classical Liberalism had its own enthusiastic audience, those two parts of the Classical movement, the two political parties, Democrats and Republicans, warmed to the self-serving task of widening the divide. But the answer to this who dunnit does not matter; today, most voices are all in on deepening and widening the gap--the division--in the body politic. And they are doing it for their own--and their party’s--benefit. For all they care, the country can pick up the pieces later. And whatever happens, both parties will blame the other. And you and I will be left holding the bag. Most certainly our children or grandchildren will be left with the empty bag. Worse, this is clearly a false choice: Why would an entire country be pushed unnecessarily--and dangerously--into choosing between civil and economic liberties? And how did the definition of civil liberties come to include an expanding welfare system? For that matter, how did those espousing economic liberties allow a huge and growing bureaucracy, including a 70K federal page tax code? While we are at it, how did it happen that the separation of church and state part of Classical Liberalism's civil liberties now prohibits things like a high school coach praying on the field at a game? At the time we revolted against England, the Church of England, established by Henry the Eighth’s ego and lust, was their main religion. Our Founders were not exorcising God from all public places.

  The normal (Christian) journey of faith Chapter 11:Journeying through the wilderness Unless you are very fortunate you will discover that you have to travel through times of spiritual wilderness or desert. These are the times when your spiritual life seems to go dead on you, nothing goes right, you seem to be as far away from the Lord as it is possible to get, you just want to give it all up. It can happen to the best of us! Why should you be any different? But when that happens what can you do to get out of the hole you seem to be in. On the whole Scripture is not a lot of use here. The reason is not far to seek. The people we read about in Scripture, or who wrote it themselves, tend to be those all action, all vigorous type that are not always quite like us. Paul is not much help. He said, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.” Great – if you have got that far on the Way of faith, but not all of us have; or if you are that sort of strong personality – but not all of us are! To be sure, just occasionally Paul says something that might suggest he did struggle sometimes, things like “Do your best to come to me quickly, for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me.” Do you agree that he does not sound all together happy when he says things like that? If all the big guys of Scripture are not much use to us in the desert, then who is? We might expect it to be the Psalms perhaps. Yet few of the Psalms relate to the wilderness experience that is wholly within us rather than caused by a breakdown between us and other people. Only Psalm 107:4,5 “Some wandered in desert wastelands, finding no way to a city where they could settle. They were hungry and thirsty, and their lives ebbed away” This could be taken as referring to the sort of problem we would call a desert. And the proffered solution is people in verse 7, “He led them by a straight way to a city where they could settle.” This, and all the other psalms probably reflects the much more social society of those days. We, in spite of all our communication technology, often feel much more isolated. Loneliness is a very modern disease in many societies. If we are the lonely one we have great difficulty doing anything about it. If we can identify someone else who is lonely we can do a great deal about it by befriending them. Aside then from the Psalms and a few small comments here and there, the answer seems to come in only 2 places: Jeremiah and the Israelite journey through the desert. Jeremiah struggled a great deal with the tasks the Lord had set before him to do. And we can draw lessons from the experience of the Israelites as they journeyed through a real desert. First, Jeremiah. He was only a village lad, who lived in a time of great political upheaval for his nation. He never did want to be a prophet. When it became clear to him that the Lord wanted him to be a prophet he said, “Alas, Sovereign Lord, I do not know how to speak; I am too young.” But the Lord said to him, “Do not say, ‘I am too young. ’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you.” Going around the country telling the leaders, including the king, things the Lord wanted them to hear but they did not want to hear was not an easy job, and a distinctly dangerous one. In fact he ended up down a well and was only rescued because one man was brave enough to ask the king to organize his rescue. So it is not altogether surprising that he says: Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, “A child is born to you—a son!” May that man be like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame? This brings one difficult and important message to us. We are not the Lord’s people for our own enjoyment and improvement but because he is the Lord! Our whole culture – at least the one I live in – tells us everything we do should be for our own benefit. And it isn’t the only one to do so. The American Declaration of Independence talks about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Fortunately I know many Americans who have not really taken that pursuit of happiness to heart but have made the service of other people, and the Lord, their primary objectives in life rather than those self-centered ideas. When we turn to the story of the Israelites travelling through the desert we find less worthy motives for being down. They had no sooner escaped the Egyptian army at the Red Sea than they started complaining when things did not go exactly the way they wanted them to. So we read, “Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert of Shur. For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water. When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah.) So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, ‘What are we to drink?’” Perhaps that complaint was excusable; it was about water, never more necessary than when you are in a desert. But then it wasn’t long before “In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord ’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” That sounds very like there had been a lack of foresight in preparing enough food for the journey. And so the story goes on with them grumbling, complaining, and blaming poor old Moses for every little problem they encountered. Not clever! So What? Wilderness times will come to us at some time, as they came to Jesus. Some of them will not be our fault as they were not for Jeremiah. But some of them will be our fault as they very largely were for the people of Israel. Either way they will be for the same reason: we too need to be tested and hardened by some of our experiences. Of Jesus the writer to the Hebrews said “In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered.” And “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” (Hebrews 2: 10, 18). So it is that Peter says, “Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh. For it is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because they are conscious of God. But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.”  Which isn’t exactly about a wilderness experience but I am sure you will see why I quote it here. In the wonderful passage of Isaiah 43, we read: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior;” That is not a promise that we shall avoid the rivers, or the fire, but a promise to be with us in those times of supreme difficulty. That promise is for us too. We shall have our difficulties but the Lord will be with us through them. Thank you, Lord for all the good things you give me, but I do not follow you because of those good things but because you are Lord! Click or Tap here to listen to or save this as an audio mp3 file~ You can now purchase our books! Please do click here to visit our Amazon site! Click on the appropriate link below to subscribe, share or download our iPhone App!

On May 1, 1776, Adam Weishaupt, a professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt, established a secret society in Munich Bavaria known as the Order of the Illuminati. From that time until today, May Day, which has origins in ancient Rome, has been observed as an international holiday by Socialists, Communists, and by other so-called progressives. The modern origin of May Day is well known and is viewed as accepted history in Europe, yet the origins of May Day, which commemorates the founding of the Illuminati, is virtually unknown to Americans. Adam Weishaupt described the immediate goal of his secret society, originally called the Perfectablists, as nothing short of the abolition of the Monarchies and religion in Europe. The ultimate goal of the Illuminati, a goal to be achieved gradually, was what Weishaupt, who used the name Spartacus in his secret society, referred to in his writings as the creation of a “New World Order.” The Illuminati then, like the left today, was largely made up of wealthy aristocratic types and middle class intellectuals, those to whom we now refer to as the top 1% and their supporters. The exclusive club back then, as it does today, marketed itself as the champion of the poor while gradually gathering the strands of wealth, power and influence into their own hidden hands. After its 1776 founding, which was ironically the same year as the issuance of the freedom oriented American Declaration of Independence, the Illuminati spread rapidly across Europe by means of its initiates infiltrating and attempting to dominate the already existing and generally conservative Freemasonic lodges of the major European cities. The Illuminati was exposed when a currier carrying its secret papers was arrested in Bavaria in 1784. Further investigations by Bavarian authorities led to the banishment of Weishaupt and his organization. Weishaupt spent the rest of his life under surveillance as a court councilor to Duke Ernst of the Duchy of Gotha where he died in 1811. In exile, Weishaupt wrote A Complete History of the Persecutions of the Illuminati in Bavaria (1785), A Picture of Illuminism (1786), An Apology for the Illuminati (1786), and An Improved System of Illuminism (1787). According to the French Jesuit priest Agustin Barruel, 1741-1828, who published an authoritative four volume set entitled “Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism”1798-1799, the Illuminati established the Jacobin Club that would subvert and disseminate the otherwise peaceful and pro-American 1789 French Revolution in 1793. The Jacobins, who were responsible for beheading the popular French King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette, launched the Reign of Terror and established the world’s first Communist regime. Fr. Barruel claimed to have gathered his information for his books from the Illuminati papers that had been confiscated by the Bavarian authorities. George Washington, whose presidency coincided with the Jacobin Reign of Terror, expressed concern about the Illuminati coming to America in a letter, archived in the Library of Congress, dated October 24, 1798, in which he wrote: it was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am. Whether the Illuminati continue in the formal sense is not known and is not relevant. What is known is that the ideas initiated by the Illuminati, ideas that were expounded upon by Karl Marx and Frederick Engles, continue marching through history. Marx manifesto expanded the initial proposition of Weishaupt, an end to governments and Christianity as a means to create a new world order, by proposing, in addition, an end to private property, the family, business, free trade and, indeed, to end individual identity itself. Once these goals were accomplished, according to Marx, once mankind had become collectivized, than all government would “wither away” and man would exist in a state of perfect equality. May Day should be observed as a day to remember the tens of millions of victims of the demented utopian fantasies that were launched on that day by Adam Weishaupt. Their blood cries out from the grave for truth and for justice.

On August 4, 1789, the National Assembly of France adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which asserted the Enlightenment ideals of universal rights and democracy. Though the French Declaration shared a common ideological lineage with the American Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution took a very different path: fifteen years after their founding revolutionary documents, the US had George Washington and France had Napoleon.   In this episode of The Road to Now we talk to Dr. Peter McPhee, who is an expert on the history of the French Revolution at the University of Melbourne (Australia). Peter explains the ways that geography, religion, and the French effort to fundamentally redefine society, shaped the complex course of the French Revolution. As Peter does well to show, the French Revolution changed the world, and left a legacy that is all around us today. (And for all you Hamilton fans- if you ever wondered what happened to the Marquis de Lafayette after Hamilton died, Dr. McPhee has the answer!)

Join us this week on Christian Devotions SPEAK UP! when Scott brings movie Director Chad Burns, of the movie Byeond the Mask to the show. Chad Burns is the award-winning director and co-producer of Burns Family Studios' first feature film, Pendragon: Sword of His Father. Chad completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Control Systems and Human Factors at the University of Illinois in the spring of 2011. Chad recently married Angie in August 2011 and lives in Champaign, IL. Beyond the Mask is an action-packed, Gospel-centered, historic, adventure film. It is set in the turbulent months leading up to the American Declaration for Independence. The story explores identity and redemption through the lens of one central question: "What does it take for a man to remake his name and redeem his identity?" The assassin-turned-vicar, Will Reynolds, tries two classic approaches to fixing himself. First, he hides behind a mask of assumed identity. Second, he works to do enough good to outweigh his bad past. When both approaches fail, he discovers that only in Christ's finished work can he find his own redemption.

Join us this week on Christian Devotions SPEAK UP! when Scott brings on home educated film producer Aaron Burns from the movie, Beyond the Mask. Aaron Burns graduated with his Masters of Business Administration from Oakland University in May of 2011. He served as the co-producer, production designer, score supervisor, and lead actor on Burns Family Studios' Pendragon: Sword of His Father. Aaron was recently married and lives with his wife Andrea in Lake Orion, MI. Beyond the Mask is an action-packed, Gospel-centered, historic, adventure film. It is set in the turbulent months leading up to the American Declaration for Independence. The story explores identity and redemption through the lens of one central question: "What does it take for a man to remake his name and redeem his identity?" The assassin-turned-vicar, Will Reynolds, tries two classic approaches to fixing himself. First, he hides behind a mask of assumed identity. Second, he works to do enough good to outweigh his bad past. When both approaches fail, he discovers that only in Christ's finished work can he find his own redemption.  

Join us this week on Christian Devotions SPEAK UP! when Scott brings on home educated film producer Aaron Burns from the movie, Beyond the Mask. Aaron Burns graduated with his Masters of Business Administration from Oakland University in May of 2011. He served as the co-producer, production designer, score supervisor, and lead actor on Burns Family Studios' Pendragon: Sword of His Father. Aaron was recently married and lives with his wife Andrea in Lake Orion, MI. Beyond the Mask is an action-packed, Gospel-centered, historic, adventure film. It is set in the turbulent months leading up to the American Declaration for Independence. The story explores identity and redemption through the lens of one central question: "What does it take for a man to remake his name and redeem his identity?" The assassin-turned-vicar, Will Reynolds, tries two classic approaches to fixing himself. First, he hides behind a mask of assumed identity. Second, he works to do enough good to outweigh his bad past. When both approaches fail, he discovers that only in Christ's finished work can he find his own redemption.  

Join us this week on Christian Devotions SPEAK UP! when Scott brings movie Director Chad Burns, of the movie Byeond the Mask to the show. Chad Burns is the award-winning director and co-producer of Burns Family Studios' first feature film, Pendragon: Sword of His Father. Chad completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Control Systems and Human Factors at the University of Illinois in the spring of 2011. Chad recently married Angie in August 2011 and lives in Champaign, IL. Beyond the Mask is an action-packed, Gospel-centered, historic, adventure film. It is set in the turbulent months leading up to the American Declaration for Independence. The story explores identity and redemption through the lens of one central question: "What does it take for a man to remake his name and redeem his identity?" The assassin-turned-vicar, Will Reynolds, tries two classic approaches to fixing himself. First, he hides behind a mask of assumed identity. Second, he works to do enough good to outweigh his bad past. When both approaches fail, he discovers that only in Christ's finished work can he find his own redemption.

Join us this week on Christian Devotions SPEAK UP! when Scott brings on two cousins whose backyard adventure hit the big screen, Aaron and Chad Burns. Aaron Burns graduated with his Masters of Business Administration from Oakland University in May of 2011. He served as the co-producer, production designer, score supervisor, and lead actor on Burns Family Studios' Pendragon: Sword of His Father. Aaron was recently married and lives with his wife Andrea in Lake Orion, MI. Chad Burns is the award-winning director and co-producer of Burns Family Studios' first feature film, Pendragon: Sword of His Father. Chad completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Control Systems and Human Factors at the University of Illinois in the spring of 2011. Chad recently married Angie in August 2011 and lives in Champaign, IL. These cousins have now created the Christian Hit, Beyond the Mask, an action-packed, Gospel-centered, historic, adventure film. It is set in the turbulent months leading up to the American Declaration for Independence. The story explores identity and redemption through the lens of one central question: "What does it take for a man to remake his name and redeem his identity?" The assassin-turned-vicar, Will Reynolds, tries two classic approaches to fixing himself. First, he hides behind a mask of assumed identity. Second, he works to do enough good to outweigh his bad past. When both approaches fail, he discovers that only in Christ's finished work can he find his own redemption.

Join us this week on Christian Devotions SPEAK UP! when Scott brings on two cousins whose backyard adventure hit the big screen, Aaron and Chad Burns. Aaron Burns graduated with his Masters of Business Administration from Oakland University in May of 2011. He served as the co-producer, production designer, score supervisor, and lead actor on Burns Family Studios' Pendragon: Sword of His Father. Aaron was recently married and lives with his wife Andrea in Lake Orion, MI. Chad Burns is the award-winning director and co-producer of Burns Family Studios' first feature film, Pendragon: Sword of His Father. Chad completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Control Systems and Human Factors at the University of Illinois in the spring of 2011. Chad recently married Angie in August 2011 and lives in Champaign, IL. These cousins have now created the Christian Hit, Beyond the Mask, an action-packed, Gospel-centered, historic, adventure film. It is set in the turbulent months leading up to the American Declaration for Independence. The story explores identity and redemption through the lens of one central question: "What does it take for a man to remake his name and redeem his identity?" The assassin-turned-vicar, Will Reynolds, tries two classic approaches to fixing himself. First, he hides behind a mask of assumed identity. Second, he works to do enough good to outweigh his bad past. When both approaches fail, he discovers that only in Christ's finished work can he find his own redemption.

Recognize this? “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Yup, it's the very first line of the American Declaration of Independence. And, yes, we know that the Declaration is not part of the Constitution. Sheesh. Give us a break - it's still pretty important. In fact, it's so important that we wonder: just what are these "Laws of Nature" and who is this “Nature’s God?” Jesus? Vishnu? Zeus? Or perhaps someone else? Author Matthew Stewart digs deep into history and philosophy and shares his findings with us in his new book, "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic."

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is the founder of the Cordoba Initiative, an independent, multi-faith and multi-national project that works with state and non-state actors to improve Muslim-West relations. Under his leadership, the Cordoba Initiative seeks to develop dialogue and solutions that address strategic areas of conflict impacting local and global security. In 1984, Rauf became Imam of Masjid al-Farah, a New York City mosque located 12 blocks from Ground Zero. In 1997, he founded the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), the first Muslim organization committed to bringing American Muslims and non-Muslims together through programs in academia, policy, current affairs, and culture. He is a Trustee of the Islamic Center of New York and a Vice Chair of the Interfaith Center of New York. Frequently asked to comment on issues pertaining to Islam and the West, Imam Feisal has spoken at the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum (Davos), and is regularly quoted in national and international media such as CNN, BBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, Frontline and Foreign Policy. Born in Kuwait to Egyptian parents and educated in England, Egypt, and Malaysia, Imam Feisal holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Columbia University in New York and a Master of Science in Plasma Physics from Steven Institute of Technology in New Jersey. He speaks English, Arabic, and Malay. Published Work Moving the Mountain: Beyond Ground Zero to a New Vision of Islam in America (Free Press, 2012) "Justification & Theory of Sharia Law: How the American Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and Constitution are Consistent with Islamic Jurisprudence" University of St. Thomas Law (2010) "What is Islamic Law?" Mercer Law Review (2006) What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America (HarperCollins, 2005) Islam: A Sacred Law (Threshold Books, 2000); Islam: A Search for Meaning (Mazda Publishers,1996) Awards Alliance for International Conflict Prevention and Resolution (AICPR) Annual Alliance Peace Builder Award Annual James Parks Morton Interfaith Center of New York Award Open Center of New York Interfaith Award Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2010 by Foreign Policy Magazine TIME Magazine 100 Most Influential People of the World in 2011 Unitarian Universalist Service Committee's Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award (with Daisy Khan)

Lynn Hunt, UCLA Professor of Modern European History, discusses the genesis of human rights, a concept that only came to the forefront during the eighteenth century. When the American Declaration of Independence declared all men are created equal and the French proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man during their revolution, they were bringing a new guarantee into the world. But why then? How did such a revelation come to pass? Series: "Ethics, Religion and Public Life: Walter H. Capps Center Series" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 14182]

Lynn Hunt, UCLA Professor of Modern European History, discusses the genesis of human rights, a concept that only came to the forefront during the eighteenth century. When the American Declaration of Independence declared all men are created equal and the French proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man during their revolution, they were bringing a new guarantee into the world. But why then? How did such a revelation come to pass? Series: "Ethics, Religion and Public Life: Walter H. Capps Center Series" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 14182]

It is the most natural thing in the world to want, even chase after, joy and happiness. (And by the way, those, to me, are two different things?) As a matter of fact, the American Declaration of Independence talks about ?life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.? So this isn?t new. It?s been important to...

Melvyn Bragg examines how English republicanism has developed from Cromwell to the present day. Before the French Revolution, before the American Declaration of Independence, before Rousseau, Thomas Paine and Marx there was the English Revolution. In 1649 England executed its King - Charles Stuart - and declared itself a republic.But was republicanism a reaction to the fact of the dead absolutist king, a pragmatic response to an absence of ruler as many historians have thought, or was there republicanism already embedded as a sentiment deep within the culture of England? And where is it now? From the marching out onto the scaffold in Whitehall of Charles I and the subsequent loss of his head, while England gained a republic - what has republicanism meant for Britain? With Dr Sarah Barber, lecturer in the Department of History, Lancaster University and author of Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution 1646-1659; Andrew Roberts, historian, journalist, conservative thinker and author of Salisbury: Victorian Titan.

In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity. This second episode of Consumed by Technology focused on the economics of moving around information on the Internet; it aired on July 16, 1996. Karen Mair was the host. In 1837, a retired school teacher named Rowland Hill wrote an essay which shook the world of “moving information from place to place,” an essay which is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when he wrote it. Show Notes These are the original links that I released with the episode; each is a link to the Internet Archive’s cache of the site at the time. About Rowland Hill and the Mail Royal Mail History Mass Postal Service after 150 Years: A Review Essay The Post Office Canada Post United States Postal Service The Royal Mail The Phone Company Island Tel Bell Canada AT&T; International Telecommunications Union Telecom Digest and Archives Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission Paying for the Internet Basic accounts fees at PEINet, Sympatico, Atlantic Connect (all here on Prince Edward Island) and AT&T WorldNet, Mindspring, The Well (all bigger U.S. Internet providers) How big is this? Anne of Green Gables The Canadian Constitution Transcript INTRO: In 1837, a retired school teacher named Rowland Hill wrote an essay which shook the world of “moving information from place to place,” an essay which is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when he wrote it. To talk about this retired school teacher and about “moving information around from place to place,” Peter Rukavina joins me now in another in the series “Consumed by Technology.” QUESTION: What exactly was in this essay that shook up the world? ANSWER: Well, in 1837, Rowland Hill was living in England after retiring from a career as a teacher and administrator. He was quite an eclectic man; he was know for his somewhat innovative teaching methods and his interests in printing, astronomy, mathematics, and transportation. And in that year, 1837, he produced a pamphlet called “Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability”. And, quite simply, the theories he forwarded in this pamphlet revolutionised the postal system, not only in England, but around the world. And not only in 1837, but in ways which live on today. You see up until that time, the cost of sending a letter was based on a rather complex set of factors like the distance the letter was to travel and the number sheets of paper you sent and so on. And in fact the cost was usually charged to the person receiving a letter, not the person sending it. This all resulted in the need for something of an overwhelming postal bureaucracy: not only did the people delivering the mail have to charge for every letter they delivered, but they had to charge a different amount for each one. And that amount had to be figured out. The system required large number of people, cost so much that is was hard for the common person to use it, and was just generally inefficient. And then Rowland Hill can along with three relatively simple suggestions: Postal rates should be lower. The cost of sending a letter should be the same, regardless of distance. Costs should be paid by the sender, not the recipient Although Hill faced some political challenges getting his ideas across, in the end, nothing could stop common sense and by 1840 uniform postal rates, and postage stamps purchased by the sender, were in place across England. Within 25 years his ideas had spread around the world. What we end up with, 159 years later, is a system here in Canada where you can send a standard letter to any of 12 million addresses in the country, for just 45 cents. QUESTION: So Rowland Hill gave us a world with cheap, universal postal rates? ANSWER: Exactly. And not only that, but his ideas changed the model for the way that information was moved from to place to place. Now that we live in an “information economy” where we’re moving around more and more information and less and less tractors and sheet metal and rolls of carpet, how we pay to send and receive information becomes only more important. Imagine, for example, a world where it cost $73 to send a letter to Toronto. Or what if international telephone calls were free? Or we had to pay for Island Morning by the minute? What if it cost five dollars to run a TV commercial during Compass? In a world where money is so important to us, how we pay to move information dramatically affects how we deal with that information. Generally, the cheaper it is, the more we use it. Now, in addition to the sort of “all you can eat” way we pay for postal service — one fee, as much information as you can stuff in an envelope — there are generally three factors used to charge for moving information from place to place: how much, how far, and how long. Which of these is in place for a particular “information moving device” tends to determine how we use that device in our daily lives. QUESTION: Well what about telephone service as an example? Telephone service is an interesting case because the way we pay for it changes depending on where we’re calling. Local calls are “all you can eat” and long distance calls are charged using a combination of time and distance — not unlike postal service before 1837. Now think of the difference in the way we make local phone calls versus the way we make long distance calls. In any given day, I might make 20 or 30 local phone calls. Because I don’t have to pay for each one, I don’t even think about picking up the phone at the drop of a hat to make a local call. Long distance calls, however, are a different matter. Because I have to pay for each one, even thinking about making a long distance call is a different kind of thing altogether from making a local call, to say nothing of the experience of actually making a long distance call with the clock silently ticking all the time in the background. Not it sort of seems a little silly to be describing all of this is such intimate detail; it seems like such a natural part of our lives that we just take it for granted that to call across the street is free and to call Halifax costs. But sometimes it’s useful to step back for a minute and realize that all of these distinctions are ones we’ve allowed to be put in place; take these arbitrary distinctions as to where is “near” and where is “far” and multiply their effect over millions of phone calls over the years, and you’re talking about a pretty major issue. And an issue which not only affects the size of our phone bills at the end of the month but which can determine how communities relate to each other. Take North and South Granville, for example, close to Hunter River in the middle of the Island. South Granville is in the Hunter River “964” telephone exchange and North Granville, just over the hill, really, is in the New London “886” exchange. Now I’ve been told that the natural inclination of people in South Granville is towards Hunter River and Charlottetown, both local calls, whereas the natural inclination of people in North Granville is towards Kensington and Summerside, again, both local calls. As a result, the natural inclination of North and South Granville is not towards each other. It seems like such a simple and insignificant thing on one level, but when you start to think about all of the friendships and marriages and business arrangements that have been subtly affected by this over the years, it looms pretty large in the grander scheme of things. And again, it’s really all about how we charge for moving information from place to place. QUESTION: You mentioned the “information economy”… how do things like the Internet fit into all of this? ANSWER: Well, although the Internet has been around, in one form or another, for over 20 years, it’s only in the last couple that people like you and me have started to use it. And so how we pay for using it — what “information moving” model will apply is only in the process of being figured out. By far the dominant model right now is something which shares something in common with long distance phone service and something in common with the revolutionary postal system of Rowland Hill. In most cases when you sign up for an Internet account you pay a certain fixed monthly fee which allows you to spend a certain number of hours connected to the Internet… $30 for 30 hours, for example. Any time that you spend online over that fixed monthly amount is billed by the hour. QUESTION: So the clock is always ticking? ANSWER: Yes indeed, and, as you might imagine, that affects the way that people use their time online. The Internet is often compared to the public library; they’re both places where lots of information is stored and organized. Think of the feeling you get from wandering around a public library: you might wander over to the magazine section and read the latest issue of the New Yorker, browse though the Irish travel book section for a while, maybe try and find the latest John Grisham novel. Because using public libraries is free, and because you can take as much time as you want to find what you need, there’s a certain kind of freedom that libraries bring to gathering information. On the “billed by the hour” Internet, however, that freedom is gone. Although you can wander around the Internet in much the same way you can wander around a library, and although you’re not paying for the actual information you’re browsing, there’s always that feeling that the clock is ticking. It’s not unlike the feeling that you get making a long distance telephone call. One of the reasons I know this is true is because I’ve experienced another way of using the Internet, a model which is gradually becoming more common, and that is paying a fixed monthly fee for unlimited Internet use. This is a model very similar to the way we pay for cable television; in essence, “all you can eat.” Without that invisible clock ticking in the background, “surfing the net” is an entirely different experience. QUESTION: Do you expect that this “all you can eat” approach is going to be the way of the future? Well, it’s certainly preferable from a consumer’s point of view, but it also makes it hard for someone in the Internet business to make any money. The third possible model for paying for the Internet, and the one which perhaps makes the most amount of sense for someone in the Internet business and the least amount of sense for consumers, is the “pay by the byte” model. This is similar to the way we pay for telegrams: by the word. In essence, we would pay for the actual amount of information we browsed on the Internet, no matter how long it took. If we look up two books in the Library of Congress online catalogue, it might cost us 5 cents. I we look up ten books, it might cost us 25 cents. Just to give you some idea of the relative size of pieces of information: the book Anne of Green Gables weighs in at just under half a million bytes — one byte equals one letter or space in the book. The entire Canadian Constitution is about 100,000 bytes long while the American Declaration of Independence is about 7,000 bytes long. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article on dandelions is 508 bytes long. Now remember, in this “pay by the byte” model, the clock isn’t ticking, but the “information meter” is. It’s more the bookstore way of doing things than the public library way of doing things. The “pay by the byte” way of charging for Internet use isn’t really common for consumers yet, but it’s becoming an increasingly common model for charging businesses for Internet access. QUESTION: So the Internet will be “pay by the minute,” “all you can eat,” or “pay by the byte?” ANSWER: In the end it will probably be some combination of the three. No matter what the final model is, however, its going to have a dramatic affect on the role that the Internet plays in our life. Just to introduce one final wrench in the works: there’s a lot of talk now about “convergence” — about telephone and television and radio and the Internet all merging into one sort of “digital appliance.” When you hear people talking about a “set top box” this is what they’re talking about. Things start to get really weird when you start thinking about telephone service — the new “digital appliance” telephone service — being billed not by the minute or by distance like we’re used to, but by the amount of information that is communicated. “Hello mother, I’m doing well” might cost you a tenth of a cent, “Hi Mom, all okay!” might cost you half as much. We could end up with a whole generation of people talking in a weird abbreviated code. QUESTION: We’d have old Rowland Hill rolling over in his grave… ANSWER: Indeed. Just remember, the next time that you pick up the phone or send a letter or pick up the newspaper, or watch TV, you’re helping to move information from place to place. And how you’re paying for it probably has a lot more to do with how you’re doing it than you realize. EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston. He’ll be back next week for another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”

In an article dated August 7, 2019, GQ magazine ( https://www.gq.com/story/what-is-eco-fascism ) defined ecofascism as “a belief that the only way to deal with climate change is through eugenics and the brutal suppression of migrants.” It’s a philosophy that has roots in the American environmental movement dating back to the 1800s, right down to the creation of our national parks system ( https://timeline.com/national-parks-native-americans-56b0dad62c9d ). Let’s start off with the recent events that inspired me to produce this episode. On August 3rd 2019, a shooter in El Paso, Texas killed 20 people at a Walmart near the border ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/us/patrick-crusius-el-paso-shooter-manifesto.html ) with Mexico. Nineteen minutes before the first 911 call, a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto appeared online, that was strangely called “An Inconvenient Truth.” In the document, the author makes his horrific case for ethnic cleansing as a solution to the climate crisis. I asked myself, could the shooter’s deadly words and actions have been inspired by the rhetoric that has been spoken, and tweeted, by the 45th President of the United States, who has verbally attacked communities of color on more than one occasion. After the El Paso tragedy, I started reading articles that referred to the term “ecofascism.” There seemed to be more than one example of racially motivated terrorist attacks in the news, from Christchurch, New Zealand, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Poway, California. But none so directly connected to the climate crisis as the El Paso shooting, which made me deeply concerned about the ways in which humans will react when the crisis worsens. Will it bring out the best in humanity? Or the worst? I began to think more deeply about the foundations of America. Post-colonial American history seems to be filled with examples of eco-fascist ideas and acts ( https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history ). The American Declaration of Independence ( https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-radical-suggestion-exci_b_888897 ) refers to indigenous people as “Merciless Indian Savages,” and yet this is still a document that Americans celebrate every year. The principles of Manifest Destiny and Eminent Domain made way for a government led genocide. Children being separated from their parents, put in detention centers, and even killed by the American government ( https://www.hcn.org/issues/51.17/indigenous-affairs-the-us-stole-generations-of-indigenous-children-to-open-the-west ) , these practices are also not a new. From the slave trade to Indian Residential Schools, American history has already set precedents. Every single day that we wake up, we are living out our lives on stolen land. This is our history. It’s history that we shouldn’t turn away from, no matter how hard it is to look at it. I know this is a dark subject, but it’s an important one. If we don’t look directly at our shadow selves, how will we ever heal?