1830 – Congress passes the Indian Removal Act, signed into law by President Andrew Jackson two days later.
1879 – Russia and the United Kingdom sign the Treaty of Gandamak establishing an Afghan state. Both countries fail miserably in their later attempts to invade and exert control over it.
COINCIDENCE? I think NOT!
"As president, I will be a champion of real education reform in America," said Willard Rmoney, as he promoted much larger class sizes as an efficient solution.
FROM THE CHURCH OF INEFFABLE STUPIDITY:
a. Today's winner: Jacob D. Kozak, 24, Plainfield, Illinois.
This racist shitheel was washing his car when a neighbor walked by and wished him a good morning. Kozak, most likely a TeaBuggering GOP christian freak, " responded by making derogatory comments about the man’s religion (Jewish) and then threatening (to shoot) the man and his wife."
The Will County Illinois judge sentenced this racist freak to 2.5 years in jail.
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Now for Voice of Sanity as an antidote:
"I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
Albert Einstein
b. Runner Up - Our TSA.
Thomas Harkin, a defrocked Philadelphia catholic priest, fucked two little girls repeatedly while he was a man of the "cloth." He was accused in several other cases, as well.
No problem! The TSA hired him as a security guard for the Philadelphia International Airport, where he inspects people and children for hidden weapons.
I don't know which is worse, his abuse of little girls, the twenty years that the Catholic church covered up his multiple crimes (and transfered him from one church to another) or the TSA hiring a known pedofile to INSPECT LITTLE KIDS FOR WEAPONS!
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Another voice of sanity for your reading pleasure:
"I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war."
W.E.B. DuBois
c. $37,000,000 in attorney fees.
This is the amount spent by the Catholic Church in the USA just in 2011. They did pay $50,000,000 in damages, and $6,000,000 in "therapy costs" for active child abusing priests.
Oh, the number of credible claims rose by 11% in 2010, and rose again in 2011.
Despite the increasing numbers of valid allegations, there is one faint, good sign. The amount spent on damages paid to its many victims finally exceeds the amount spent on lawyers defending the church. Until 2008, the reverse was sadly true.
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More words of bravery, honesty and insight:
Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws... It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men?
Zora Neal Hurston
d. Yet another breakthrough in Solar
This one's a doozy.
A new solar cell that is cheap, environmentally friendly, and durable has been developed by researchers from Northwestern University.
The solar cell is the first to solve the problem of the Grätzel cell, a low-cost, environmentally friendly solar cell that has one significant disadvantage — it leaks and causes corrosion of the solar cell itself.
Grätzel cells use a molecular dye to absorb sunlight and then convert it to electricity, in a similar way to chlorophyll in plants. The cells generally don’t last longer than 18 months though, and they are quite inefficient, making them commercially nonviable. People have been looking for a solution to this problem for two decades.
The researchers’ solution was to use a new material for the electrolyte that starts as a liquid but ends up as a solid, eliminating the problem of leakage.
Plants do a great job using the sun as a power source. I guess mommy nature has taught us a trick
or two.