If corporations are in the business to make money, why are the media losing money?... http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=35318

It takes a willingness to use speech to communicate knowledge to expand human knowledge as a whole. Alchemists discovered many scientific concepts and techniques but because of alchemy's occult, mystical quality, alchemists kept their knowledge to themselves. When alchemists started sharing their knowledge and started removing the mysticism, chemistry and physics were invented, i.e. true science. Francis Bacon was one of the fathers of modern science and an advocate of the free exchange of ideas.

Dave Wilbur is on to something. If you control language, you can control thought. That was the lesson of Orwell's '1984'. If you do not have the words to formulate complex ideas can those ideas even be formed? The concepts in our minds are formed out of words and pictures and if we have no words our thoughts and concepts (like freedom) are severely limited.

What the major media outlets exercise now is Freedom of Propaganda, Lies, and Distortions. They are not held accountable (at least not until lately) by public pressure or libel suits. Their bias is so blatant that even the most uninformed know who and what they are. Most newspapers are no better that the old Soviet's Pravda and Isvestia. Why would anyone want to subject themselves to 'when did you stop beating your wife' questions? Why are the traditional media outlets dying? Because they do not exercise the responsibility that comes with their freedom and people aren't buying what they're selling.

Everyday is the end of the world for somebody.

Every upcoming generation thinks it has the answers and their parents and grandparents are half senile, sticks in the mud, old fools. It's not surprising that they have to repeat the same old mistakes. Warning systems only work for those who pay attention to them, and only the exceptional few do. Hopefully they'll be the ones who are in the position to take the correct actions when they're necessary. Pick your leaders carefully.

Hey, Al! The science is settled, so shut the hell up. By the way, Albert didn't exactly practice what he preached. He never accepted quantum mechanics because he could not accept the idea of uncertainty in his ideal universe. For him, the science was settled and it did not include QM. As a result he wasted much of his later career trying to prove QM was wrong and the rest of science left him behind. It is sad when even a great mind cannot admit he's wrong, or maybe it's the hardest thing to do when you have a great mind.

There is some basic knowledge that everyone must know; there is knowledge that everyone ought to know; there is knowledge that would be good if everyone knew it; and there is knowledge that is only useful in specific circumstances and does not need to be known by everyone. Archer points out one of those basic, first pieces of knowledge and a skill that everyone must know. Without it, one cannot distinguish between objective reality and wishes and dreams. If you live your life based on the way you wish things were; how you hope things will be, you are bound for disappointment. It is the failing of Marxism and so many other 'isms', because they refuse to recongnize reality and exercise willful ignorance, and even rejoice in their lack of knowledge.

Persecution is force, not reason, and is used by those who either fail to reason or ignore reason for their own gain. No one is destined to reason wrongly. Faulty reasoning is either caused by willfully ignoring facts or having incomplete knowledge of the facts; that is, it is either malevolence or ignorance. In the end, however, ignorance and malevolence can lead to the same misery.

Live free or die. Without liberty you may be walking, talking, eating, breathing, working; but if you are at the point of a tyrant's gun, are you really living?

"Buried in history books" is an apt description considering that history is rarely taught anymore. What passes for history today is too often merely PC propaganda that turns a blind eye to 'white, European' people and events (and focuses on relatively insignificant people and events), even though that same 'white, European' history is what shaped our lives, society, and government that we have today. It's almost like somebody doesn't want the common folk to know what liberty is. As for propaganda, most movies today are loaded with it as well. It's just not American propaganda anymore.

I've always found it interesting that some of the most militant who espouse a "right to choose" actually only want you to have the right to choose when you choose what they want. Anyone who chooses to live their lives contrary to their wishes brings forth spittle flecked diatribes and wild eyed screaming, threats, and sometimes violence. They are not at all interested in liberty. It is only a mask for their fascism.

Those who are not free to choose are not truly moral beings. There is no morality to being charitable if it is at the point of a gun. It is neither charitable for your neighbor or you if you hire someone to force your neighbor to give to the poor at the point of a gun. It is not moral to create children out of men. Men, truly moral beings, have to have the ability to choose between right and wrong, justice and injustice, and to gain the benefit of good choices and suffer the consequences of the bad to really be human. When government takes all choice from you, you can neither be moral or immoral. You are an amoral being and just another animal in the jungle.

The man who stands in his house with the doors open and says, "Look at all that I have," and doesn't bother to stop the looter carrying away his TV is not going to have much soon. Freedom is always a struggle because there is always someone who wants to take it from you. Human nature always wants something for free but any thing that's "free" is taken at someone else's expense; and that expense is their liberty.

Democracy was invented by the Athenians, so they should know what it is. Athenians used their democracy and voted to murder Socrates for corrupting the youth with his ideas. The Athenians who voted were not a raucous mob, they were the cream of Athens society, yet since there was no concept of inalienable rights, they voted for murder. That is pure democracy.

Freedom is even more valuable to the minority who does not want to listen.

Democracy is dangerous and can be deadly. I think Socrates would agree.

We have gone from being free men to being property of government, insignificant, replaceable parts in a behemoth machine called "society" and language has been twisted to equate society with government. Government will regulate what you breath, eat, drink, where you can dig a hole on your own property, what you can say, what you can see. Society was created by individuals for the benefit of individuals. Now individuals' only function is to benefit "society." The servant has become the master, and the master the slave. Eventually every choice will be made by society for the benefit of society (at least for the tyrants who control government). They will tell you it is for the people. Free men must demand their rightsand recognize there source if we want to keep what few we have left. A vote for McCain /PALIN '08 is a vote for PALIN '12.

Well, everyone knows the old saying: "Wish in one hand, **** in the other and see which one fills up first." Self deception is easy and so are wishes, but eventually objective reality will catch up to you and in the end results matter.

A constant in human history........"Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past."---The Annals of Tacitus

We can never dethrone a despot as long as we give him legitimacy from within ourselves. Nobody rebels against a "rightful" king until they no longer believe he has a right to rule them.

As Archer demonstrates we also have the liberty not to listen.

What did the first truth begin as since there was nothing before it to blaspheme against?

If people have a right to the truth they also have a duty to give it.

Jim, I think Job would agree.