Erdogan: Turkey's Facist Despot

JOAN (1922-2016)

Joan you were my big sister, 7 years older than me. When you were still in grade school you had a bad fall when skiing on Mount Royal in Montreal. Your back suffered multiple fractures and you ended up consigned to your bed in a full body cast. The doctors worried that you might not walk again. Up until then, I remember you as a carefree and popular young woman. The war was on and you and Margaret, joined the Officer's Club to socially mix with the young officers before they were sent overseas. Now in a body cast, our home became an open house with teachers, students and my mother helping you with your assignments and preparing for your tests. It turned you into a scholar and you never looked back. When the cast came off I thought at the time it should hae been plastered onto the wall because it was covered with signatures and mostly funny statements and drawings by your friends.

As your much younger brother I was proud of you, not because of your academic accomplishments,- I was too young to think about that-, but because you attracted so many men, mostly in uniform, and some academics including professors. You were a magnet. They were mostly nice guys and some gave me a penny or two to leave the room. I can say now that you combined a shapely beauty with with a happy intelligence that seemed to make all your male acquantances take you seriously, and many certainly smitten and developing a crush. Our mother was rooting for Bernie, a young man whose father was a General. Much to her dismay Stanley Jackson, from our high school, and now a navigator in the Canadaian Airforce, arrived from overseas.You knew he was the one. Mother was finally won over.

Later as I pursued my profession as an economist and management consultant I had occasions to visit with you and Stan in New Haven on several occasions and you arranged for me to attend lectures in Yale. I even had the rare privilege of meeting and listening to a lecture by the Nobel Prize-winning economist, James Tobin, just shortly before he died. When Stan died you invited me to share the pulpit in Yale's august halls to say our goodbyes. The hall was packed and in the line-up I learned of the deep affection employees and academics had for 'Joan and Stan', and the minister commented that in Yale you were always thought of as a team.

Joan many years have passed. We have talked daily and our affection for each other has grown. I will miss you terribly, but now it is time to say goodbye.

God, Voltaire, Huxley and doubt

• The secret of genius  is to carry the spirit and enthusiasm of the child into old age Aldous Huxley 
• Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy.Voltaire                                                                          

•  Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life. Voltaire

• Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.Voltaire
• Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without  having tp believe there are fairies at the bottom of it too? Adams
•  Organizing atheists can be compared with herding cats who tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. Dawkin

 When the first cavemen began asking the questions; why are we here? how did we get here? and what happens when we die? they came to the inevitable conclusion some higher mystical power had some answers.  Man invented God. 

The Horrible Real Hillary

“Come on Bill, put your d**k up!  You can’t f**k her here!!”  “Inside the White House” by Ronald Kessler, p.243-Hillary to Gov. Clinton when she spots him talking with an attractive female.

•  "I read that Hillary's staff is starting to worry that her campaign still doesn't have an official theme. Then Hillary said, 'Yes it does – revenge.'" –Jimmy Fallon

• To listen to a Hillary stump speech is to hear a tale of endless confrontations with enemies. Matt Thabi, Rolling Stones
  
  Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/hillary-clinton-is-turning-into-richard-nixon-and-bill-belichick-20150314#ixzz40v6boqAJ
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Hillary has clearly shown poor judgment before and during her role as Secretary of State in the Obama administration and is totally unqualified to become the President of the United States. Here are some reasons why:

1. Many months after the Bush administration itself acknowledged that Iraq had neither WMDs nor ties to Al-Qaeda, Clinton declared in a speech at George Washington University that her support for the authorization was still “the right vote” and one that “I stand by.” Similarly,  in an interview on Larry King Live April 2004, when asked about her vote despite the absence of WMDs or al-Qaeda ties, she acknowledged, “I don’t regret giving the president (Bill, her husband) authority.”
Hillary Clinton voted to authorize George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq. As a result of that war, tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis died needlessly, trillions of dollars were added to the debt, and the Middle East was destabilized in a way that led to the rise of ISIS, the Syrian Civil War, and the European refugee crisis is now threatening to unravel the European Union.

And no Apologies but now admits that she made a mistake.
 The 2016 Democratic presidential campaign is coming down to a race between Hillary Clinton, who supported the Bush Doctrine and its call for invading countries that are no threat to us regardless of the consequences, and Bernie Sanders, who supported the broad consensus of Middle East scholars and others familiar with the region who recognized that such an invasion would be disastrous.

 Electing Hillary Clinton — or anyone else who supported the invasion of Iraq — would be sending a dangerous message that reckless global militarism needn’t prevent someone from becoming president
Latest announcement is that Robert Kagan, an extreme right-wing pundit and author, has endorsed Hillary for President.

2. It also raises this ominous scenario: If Clinton were elected president despite having voted to give President Bush the authority, based on false pretenses, to launch a war of aggression — in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, and common sense — what would stop her from demanding that Congress give her the same authority?

3. punctuated by disasters she supported U.S. intervention in Libya and Egypt, undermining governments that were no threat to American interests,

.John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton.” The New York Times chimed in with an article on the “tough comparisons with Kerry” Clinton is now facing, summing up the debate as one over whether she was anything more than a loud-mouthed “pantsuit-wearing globe-trotter” in her years as Secretary of State. Irresponsibly referring to Putin as Hitler is hardly a pronouncement for building good relationships with Russia.

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