Nuclear Roulette…

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From RON JACOBS
The Rag BLog

Despite spending several days in detention facilities in the late 1970s and early 1980s because of my opposition to nuclear power and its consequent dangers and debris, I honestly never thought nuclear power would be gone by 2013. The setup for the industry was just too sweet of a deal.

However, I did have hope that nuclear power’s reputation would be so tainted that no new plants would ever be considered. Unfortunately, even those hopes were for naught. To make matters even worse, nuclear power — perhaps the most wasteful and most dangerous form of power generation — is actually being touted as a “green” source of power.

This support is not just coming from the industry, either. One-time opponents like Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand and former Greenpeace president Patrick Moore are now on record as supporters of a power source and industry they used to oppose vehemently. When considering these retreats, the phrase “two steps forward, one step back” comes to mind.

How Christian Myth Overinflates the Religious Right’s Sense of Self Importance…

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From PoliticusUSA

We have been seeing a lot lately of the fundamentalist Christian self-identity of being a persecuted minority despite their own religion’s long history of persecuting every alternative to itself. Tied in with this persecution complex is an inflated sense of self-importance, which we also see manifested in their demand to have their own beliefs privileged over all others. In Pope Benedict XVI’s words, Truth triumphs over tolerance.

How could it not?

Think of the Moral Majority, which was neither moral nor a majority. Think about Rand Paul’s speech this past week at Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to the Majority Conference.

Demographics will tell any discerning observer that there is no road for fundamentalist Christianity that will lead to a majority in this country.

Think of the Ten Commandments posted everywhere. Their law code. Not, if you want a really early law code, the Code of Urukagina (c. 2380 BCE), or the Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2050 BCE), or the well known Code of Hammurabi

The Full Text of David Guterson’s Controversial Commencement Speech on Happiness…

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From DOMINIC HOLDEN
The Stranger

There are a lot of questions about what local novelist David Guterson actually said during his gloomy talk at Roosevelt High School’s graduation ceremony, a speech that had some parents in the audience heckling him and trying to cut his address short. Here’s the full text, which Guterson shared with some folks this morning:

Thank you. And thank you to the organizers of this event for giving me the opportunity to speak. I don’t take it lightly. Life’s short, and we don’t often have the chance to share what we think and feel is most important. This, for me, is exactly that chance, and I don’t want to waste it by talking to you casually. Right now, I have 15 minutes, and after that I will leave this podium, and it might be the case that never again will I have the microphone at a ceremony like this one, where it’s perfectly acceptable for me to offer up my take on things—where it’s even expected that I’ll offer my take on things. That take on things, most of the time, remains private, which is how it should be. You have your own—everyone here has their own vision of life. But right now I’ve been invited to share mine