Subito eliminato VIsta, subito installata HH, ben configurata è una scheggia su questo HW.

Here's the bas relief of Hammurabi from the display of lawmakers who gave us the heritage of U.S. laws, in the House of Representatives chamber:

The good news is that I am running for that office unopposed. 

The bad news, however, is that the overwhelming majority of voters don’t care about constitutions, and will almost certainly choose a “Governor” who’s job and powers are unrestrained by any laws, or even customs.  I don’t blame the candidates for that.  No, I grieve for what it says about just who Americans have become.

Despite Obama’s lofty rhetoric about “the American spirit,” modern Americans are no longer the self-governed patriots who kept their politicians on a leash, and who placed their trust in God instead.

Nope; just as foolish, barbaric people have done for thousands of years, we have once again bowed low to the Golden Calf of State.  We are not the Land of the Free or the Home of the Brave.  We are the Land of the Fearful, and the Home of the Dependent.

In other words, we vote for, and bow to, human kings.  Minor kings, major kings…their power is limited only by the king(s) above and the tolerance of oppression below.  Our tolerance is nearly unlimited, and their kingly power reaches into every aspect of our lives in a most destructive way.

They tell us what we can and cannot eat; who and how we marry, hire, live and die.  They take our money because we think they know best what to do with it, and they decide who works, how we work, and how much our wages are worth. 

Of course with that power comes a lot of greed, deceit and supplication. 

This is where the Golden Calf thing becomes truly grim - because such a political faith/ religion requires priests that today we call “lobbyists.”

As with the ancients, it’s all about robbing Peter to pay Paul, once again.  And your job in this Brave New World is to do whatever you can to be more Paul than Peter.  You join or form a special interest group in order to collectivize your power under a lobbyist to get a piece of the pie.  But as more special interest groups are formed and start their battle for the best priests and the best parts of the pie, the Golden Calf itself and the priests who serve it take a bigger and bigger cut.  The pie itself gets smaller through corruption, your piece of it becomes a smaller percentage; so you work harder and harder for less and less until, ultimately, the bread and circuses don’t work anymore, and the whole thing topples.

I’m afraid that our triune Golden Calf god (comprised of Democrat, Republican and Federal Reserve Bank) has won another, perhaps final victory over us.  Obama has turned away fears of his arrogance and terrorism ties with a really good speech (is a teleprompter another sort of god?  Hmmm.); and McCain has brushed aside conservatives’ righteous disgust with a pandering pick for Veep. 

(She’s a fine woman, and if she were the GOP’s pick for President, I’d think a lot differently about this election.  But they’re suckering you in knowing you’ll hope McCain dies or something.  Don’t fall for it.) 

You’re not even voting for President these days, you know…you’re now voting for his funding mechanism, his entrenched party’s leaders, and a system gone terribly, tragically wrong.

So I’m guessing that once again, we’ll vote the way we’ve been voting, and the Golden Calf will grow bigger, fatter, hungrier and more oppressively intrusive until, maybe 18 months from now, you’ll see just what the Federal Reserve and all our new debt instruments (credit cards, 40 year mortgages, etc.) have really wrought.

Disaster.

Please turn us away from this ancient pattern of destruction.  Demand Rule of Law under the state and federal constitutions which are already law and have been proven to work better than anything else ever tried.

Don’t let us fall back to ancient failures older than Hammurabi.  Don’t let them tell you that their schemes of shifting more power into fewer hands is “modern” or “a fresh start,” when it’s as old as the fall of Adam.

Do you want change?  Well, you’re headed for it one way or another.  You can choose change that goes the way of all fools, or you can do better.

Choose wisely.

John McCain just can't seem to scurry far enough away from George Bush. Every time he takes one step away, he takes two steps back. Whats the most recent connection?

They both love to kill criminals........

George Bush presided over 150 executions in Texas. John McCain recently spoke out against the Supreme Court's decision that the Louisiana's death penalty was not a justly applied punishment for child rapists in incidents when the child remains alive.

"As a father, I believe there is no more sacred responsibility in American society than that of protecting the innocence of our children. I have spent over twenty-five years in Congress fighting for stronger criminal sentences for those who exploit and harm our children. Today�s Supreme Court ruling is an assault on law enforcement�s efforts to punish these heinous felons for the most despicable crime. That there is a judge anywhere in America who does not believe that the rape of a child represents the most heinous of crimes, which is deserving of the most serious of punishments, is profoundly disturbing."

I mean, I'm not a father, but I find myself just as disgusted by the act as John McCain. What I don't share is McCain's criticism of the court, which has to consider such nagging things like THE CONSTITUTION.

Apparently he doesn't agree with Justice Kennedy's belief that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment when the victim remains alive.

Not that I don't think that child rapists deserve to rot in hell and spend their time living in something akin to a hell on earth, but I begin to worry when our culture becomes so severe as to be on par with some fairly severe ancient codes of law such as:

Hammurabi's Code:

"If a man violate the wife (betrothed or child-wife) of another man, who has never known a man, and still lives in her father's house, and sleep with her and be surprised, this man shall be put to death, but the wife is blameless."

Deuteronomy 22:25-29:

...if a man finds a young virgin in the countryside, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. But you shall do nothing to the young woman..."

-Marc-

For Part 1, click here.

For Part 2, click here.

AC: Going off of that in terms of revenue and economy, there has been a lot of talk of internet piracy hurting the income of musicians. In "Obnoxious," you advocate people to "burn it off the fucking internet and bump it outside," so you obviously don't feel that piracy is hurting you. What do you think the difference is between the reality of what musicians make from song and album sales on iTunes, and what the record industry wants consumers to believe they make in order to discourage music piracy?

IT: I definitely would like people to purchase The 3rd World in stores and purchase it online, but I think it was more of a way for me to express my frustration with the music industry. I can't believe they have the audacity to call anybody else a thief. As much money as they steal from artists, as much as they don't have a health care program for any of their artists, and I look at stuff like that and I'm disgusted. They go to these conferences and tell kids, "How can you steal a record?" I'm like really?

AC: They're stealing from their own artists.

IT: How come you steal from your own artists? How come you're selling the masters of your own stuff to be bootlegged in order to generate a buzz in the hood. You're doing it to yourself and then you want to blame other people? You Godless piece of shit. How dare you try to take the moral high ground with the rest of the society by claiming that someone else is a thief? Really? What about all the Black artists who R&B and Soul were based on, whose masters were bought up in a fucking fixed contract? How about all the people who never got the money that they deserved because someone else slapped their name on a fucking recording, who didn't have anything to actually do with the process of making this music, or didn't participate in any of the song writing? How about all the publishing that you owe people? That's tantamount to reparations that you owe the Latino and African-American communities. So before they talk about stealing money, they should realize that when you point the finger at somebody, there's three fingers pointing right back at you.

Besides all that, I think that even though it‘s a great thing to be able to download music, there's bad things to it too. Like when you don't want a record to leak yet and then it does. So it's not like I think downloading is great all the time. I definitely don't want my record to be leaked before it's ready to be leaked, cause it might not be the correct version of the song, or I might have wanted to change something to complete my artistic vision. But I think also that what needs to be said is that it's not downloading that's killing the music. It's the fact that a whole bunch of people who don't know shit about music are in charge of a music department. Like I'm glad that you went to the Wharton Business School, I'm glad that you know how to market a record, but that doesn't mean you know shit about music. Unfortunately, that's the problem with Hip-Hop, that's the problem with our culture. We have a whole bunch of people who have no connection to our culture dictating everything for us. We've given a valid opinion to people who are not connected to us, over us.

AC: In the musical aspects of your recordings, how much control do you feel it's necessary to have? Would you be in support of remix work as long as it didn't distort your artistic message?

IT: I don't know, remix work is touchy. I understand people sampling a track or something, but being able to take all of your work and re-do it and release the project and not give you a cut off anything, that's different. You want to take a song and burn it off the internet, that's fine. But if you're burning my music off the internet and then selling it, that's a whole different type of fraud. That's not just regular fraud, that's a violation. That's some shit that's going to get your IP address tracked down and beat the fuck up. If you follow my tour with a fucking camera and then try to release a DVD of all my shows, and you're trying to charge people for it, you know what, I'm not even going to let the law handle you, I'm going to handle you motherfucker.

And I think that this is the point that I'm trying to make…it's acceptable for people who can't afford your music or can't find it in the record stores, which was the issue with Revolutionary Vol. 2 to do that, but I always felt like it didn't affect me as much because the people that really believed in my work and really believed in my music, they were the same people that were willing to go to the record store after they heard it and try to find the album, or they downloaded it and said, "You know what, I really like this so I'm going to support it."

AC: Politically and philosophically, you're the most in depth rapper when it comes to discussing important issues. But a lot of them, racism, poverty, crime, terrorism, religion, breakdown in the educational system, corruption within the political system, these are all tied together, so it becomes like a ball of string. Where do you start unraveling?

IT: I think sometimes I try to take a historical approach more than anything else. Try to talk about how racism came about, talk about the history of terrorism and the history of our involvement in a country, talk about the history of a war and our dealings with specific countries. Then we create a chronological order to follow wherein we take note of specific time periods and the progression of the way in which we became enslaved or became free, or the way we advanced ourselves so we can break them down into subsections. That way we can say, "Ok, this is the origination of this, these are the contributing factors of what made this happen, this is how this plays to this." Then you start with the origin in history of all of these things because they all do have an origin in history.

Slavery has been around since the Hammurabi period in Mesopotamia, so I think we can look into the origin of lots of things. In terms of whether it's Communism or Socialism, I mean, it doesn't start with Karl Marx. I'm sorry to disappoint the adamant White left that sees him as a god. He's not the father of Communism, he just decided to write down some ideas that were prevalent in all societies going back thousands of years. African and indigenous peoples had a sense of collectivism before Europe even had a structured civilization. That's not to talk down to Europeans or anything, but just to make the point that this has been going on and the history of our people is older than we can imagine it being. Even the kingdom of Egypt is 4, 5,000 years old, and that doesn't even begin to describe the kingdoms that came from the Nubians that gave rise to the Egyptians, even though Egyptians are touchy about that subject. But it's true. These are things that we need to acknowledge, we need to embrace so we can understand our civilization better rather than just falling into the category we always do of being hateful of every civilization besides our own. We need to learn the lessons from history or we're going to be doomed to repeat them again.

AC: On that note Tech, I have one more question for you if you have time.

IT: Sure.

AC: Basically, our current Administration in this country is a joke. They've infringed on our civil rights, deleted emails, judicial firings, and they've gotten us into wars we shouldn't be in. On "Freedom of Speech," you say, "I love the place that I live, but I hate the people in charge." We have an election coming up. Do you see any real potential for change in either of these candidates or does it look like more of the same to you?

IT: I think it will be more of the different. It'll be different things. Obviously we've made trillions of dollars of investments in Iraq, and as much as I'd like to believe Barack Obama, who by the way I did vote for, because I vote in every election. Not because I necessarily believe Democracy can't be circumvented, but more so because when presumptuous motherfuckers come up to me and be like, "Did you vote dude?" and I'll be like, "well actually I did and it didn't make a motherfucking difference so get the fuck out of my face and organize something different. Stop thinking that the only way that we can appreciate the democratic rights that we fought for are by voting 25 times every century." I think that democracy is the institution we set up, not just for voting, and I think that Barack Obama, if he's elected, will be able to implement more social programs for the benefit of the average American than John McCain. The war will not end. Barack Obama talks about change. You know what's going to happen? The war's not going to end, the war's just going to change. It's going to be a different war. America tried having a war that was justified by nonsense, a war that was narrated by an idiot. Now they're going to have a war that is justified and narrated by an incredibly articulate and incredibly intelligent man, if Barack Obama is the one that's elected. But he'll have an excuse for it, and for everything, and just from his speech at AIPAC, I don't think that America's position on the Israeli-Palestine conflict is going to change. I really don't think that we're just going to up and leave Iraq, like I said, the war is just going to change.

AC: And again, that's assuming we're intelligent enough to put Obama in when this is a country that for 8 years went with Bush.

IT: Right. He might not even win. We have to realize that the places he beat Hillary Clinton were because people didn't want Hillary Clinton to win because of the Rush Limbaugh factor, where people were saying, "you know what? We need to smear Obama, we need to make sure he doesn't come out of this looking rosy, so I want Hillary Clinton to be voted for."

AC: Right. Well Tech, I won't take up anymore of your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk today.

IT: No doubt. And remember, June 24th, you've got The 3rd World, Immortal Technique and DJ Green Lantern, will be on sale in every store, be on myspace.com/immortaltechnique, and of course you can preview the record on viperrecords.com.

So there you have it folks, Immortal Technique's exclusive interview for Evolving Music. Start getting excited for The 3rd World to drop as the tracks I've heard off it are phenomenal. They continue the trend of excellent music supported and punctuated by vicious and powerful lyrics and masterful delivery. Evolving Music and MixMatchMusic would like to thank Immortal Technique for his time in doing this interview, as well as Dennis Paredes, Sam Donado, Public Wizard and Viper Records for helping to make it possible.

There is information on any subject you can imagine on the Internet (as I'm sure you all know), including original research papers on subjects relating to Biblical truth. The popular science-type magazines all have a web presence. And contrary to some Christians beliefs, they are not part of an evil cabal out to satanize all who view them.

I have a blogroll type list of websites I use to gather information from, on the right side of my site...if you're reading this...you will see it as you scroll down. These are legit sites and they have reliable, mainstream, real world information. If Christians were to ever actually seriously research their Biblical beliefs they would soon see how much they have been misinformed, and how wrong the Bible is.

I am a realist however, and I just put the stuff out there with the hope that it will strike a chord with someone who is searching for the truth, and maybe cause them to go to real world proofs, instead of Hebrew myths, that are a waste of precious time and energy.

The famous site listed below has all the answers to flood myth lined up and they are checkable. Other parts of the site have some of the best general information about scientific origins of the earth, universe, humans, etc. They have been around since the early nineties. If you take time to explore it thoroughly you will find links to original research and real world explanations of our earth, and all who live on, and in it. The people who write there are experts-who happen to not have a Doctorate of Divinity.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html

If the Noachian Flood can be disproven (and it has been), then other parts of the Bible are also suspect of being wrong. And there are many other disproven Biblical assertions. Many Christians just don't accept the truth. They cling very hard to a 2800 year old Hebrew myth, a view of a childish God, that people of the time didn't have enough knowledge, or intellectual sense of the world, to question.

That the Christian faith has survived this long is not an indicator of its being true. To the contrary, it is an indicator of how easily the church adjusts its theology to conform as much as possible to currant social conventions (think slavery, polygamy, prostitution, kings killing on a whim, etc.). The church is known to burn papers (and people) that disagree with currant theological thought.

Think about the currant ‘state of the religion.' Now, about 2008 years since the birth of Jesus (?) Roughly 1700 years since Christianity got the official ‘okey-dokey' from secular rulers, and its still in a state of disrepair. There are maybe thousands of sects and they all differ. Muslims believe in the same God...so they say, and they are out to kill us...for heresy. Catholics believe Protestants practice heresy, and vice-versa. Mormons...who knows what they believe. There is either one that is right...or none is right. There is not two of them who are right...or three, or four...

Through manipulation of human thought and incorrect reasoning, physical threats, actual physical harm, and burning at the stake, or as little as social/societal ostracism, Christians have spread their evil plot to take over the world and control humans...every actions and thought...for more than two thousand years. Think about it for a while; think about the whole long history of Jews and Christians and what they have always wanted from us.

What has been, and is, their ultimate goal? It's to take over control of all humanity and tell us how to think and act...they actually have that kind of control of a significant portion of the US population...think Bible belt and the Deep South. Churches are the social center and source of information, on how to conform...of many hundreds of thousands or millions of Evangelical Fundamentalist type people. I think those people are afraid that if they don't belong to a church, they'll automatically go out and start sinning in the worst possible way.

There is some evolving news about change in the Catholic position on humanity. They are actually starting to accept that humans have a looong history. Go to the site below and check it out. Notice in the upper right hand corner where the paper comes from. That old fossil...the Catholic Church...might have some life and intellect left after all. http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/zim/zim_251adamandeve.html

Below is a quote from the article mentioned above.

"The Catholic position on this is clear. St. Thomas says that "one should not try to defend the Christian faith with arguments that are so patently opposed to reason that the faith is made to look ridiculous." It is simply nonsense to say that the world is only 6,000 years old (Catechesis, Creation and Evolution, Zenit News, Dec. 19, 2005)." My emphasis.

The Catholics are leading the pack in the changing of theological thought to match what is known to be true nowadays, although their present thought is a little dopey. I look forward to following this change. I also look forward to how the Evangelical Fundamentalists will continue to deny In-Your-Face truth.

Some suggested Google search terms that I have followed: Religion, God, Jesus, El, Elohim, Yahweh, Jehovah, biblical tribes, Scripture, Noah's flood, Ur of the Chaldeans, city of Dan, city of Laish, sea people, Babylon, age of earth, Hebrews, Christian myth, Sumerians, Akkadians, Mesopotamia, Jericho, Chaldea or Chaldeans, Assyria, Indus valley civilization, ancient Egypt, Hammurabi, Gilgamesh, flood stories, flood myths, Myths, ancient native Americans, Solutrian, Clovis points, cave paintings, Adam and Eve, African civilization(s), Bronze age, iron age, ancient Briton, ancient Europe, Neanderthal, Hebron, Abraham, Lot, biology, Midrash, Torah, Jewish myths, ancient languages, archaeological dating, carbon dating, dating methods, Dendrocronology, stratigraphy, oil geology, Permian, Paleontology, DNA, rNA, genetics, human history, human pre-history, ancient India, ancient Iran, Stonehenge, henges, pyramids, stelas, Rosetta stone, cuneiform writing, hieroglyphs, Euphrates river, Tigris river, Geology, life sciences, and on and on....

The above terms represent maybe one twentieth of the search terms (sorry they aren't alphabetized) I have used in following the paths of Christian religion. I have been doing this for about two years now, in my spare time. If the site is religious sect sponsored, they will often try to deny real world science by any means they can, including, but not limited to, lying and misdirection. There are a few exceptions that are starting to tackle the problem head on though, and the Catholic Church, as mentioned above, is one of them.

There is not one or two sites that can disprove all things religious untrue, though talkorigins.com comes close. I find you have to visit and really absorb many, many different viewpoints and disciplines and slowly let them simmer in your head. Good hunting.

For latest post go: Here

FACT: Last month Egypt's parliament passed a new law on public demonstrations in the vicinity of religious facilities (churches, mosques, etc.).  Already, lawyers are planning for an appeal and review of the law before Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court (photo left), the nation's highest judicial body.  

ANALYSIS: I wrote earlier that at the Microsoft Institute we're thinking about ways to help improve the operations and capabilities of the judicial branch of government, at various levels. 

Perhaps my interest has been piqued by the fact that, for quite a while, I've been sleeping with a brilliant lawyer - oh, that would be my wife Kathryn. While she's retired from active practice, she spends some volunteer time each week at the U.S. Supreme Court, giving public lectures on the history of the Court and its justices for the Curator's Office.

One of the fun protocol aspects of her job there is periodically greeting jurists and legal groups from other countries - often their equivalents to our Supreme Court justices.  She'll give them a VIP tour behind the scenes and entertain their questions and observations about the comparisons and contrasts between legal systems. 

Anyway, while in Cairo this month, at my wife's behest I made sure to go by the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt (SCC). It is an absolutely stunning building; I have a few other photographs here.

There's a good Wikipedia article on Egypt's SCC, which points out that "The Court's new building is designed by an Egyptian young architect Ahmed Mito. The building is styled in a monumental scale. It includes counseling halls, a multi purpose hall for 450 people, offices, a library, a museum, and a large atrium that rises up to 18 meters and is covered by a dome."  And there's more architectural background and context at this link. 

Next visit, I would love to set up a meeting with Court personnel to learn more about their work.

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Poi ha detto che nonostante questo Hammurabi fosse un negro musulmano terrorista amico di Saddam, sapeva il fatto suo.

On Texas Primary Day, I'll be voting for Bruce Mosier for the 190th Civil District Court in Harris County.

Mr. Mosier is running in a contested Democratic Primary.

( Image above is of Shamash, the Babylonian Sun God, handing the code of laws to King Hammurabi.)  

Pleace click here for Mr. Mosier's web page.

Here is an interview with Mr. Mosier conducted by Houston-based blogger Charles Kuffner.

Mr. Mosier is endorsed by, among many other groups, the AFL-CIO, the progressive Harris County Democrats, the Association of Women Attorneys and the local Baptist Ministers Association.

Mr. Mosier brings has both extensive legal experience and the ability to draw people together. This combination of strengths will make all the difference on the campaign trail and on the bench.

 In addition to a wide range of experience as an attorney, Mr. Mosier served in the Texas National Guard. Please click here for his full resume. 

Like you, I've never heard of these people when it comes to contested judicial primaries in Harris County. All they are to me is a series of junk mail pieces and giant yard signs placed illegally on the public right-of-way. 

Annoyingly, I've have to do some research.

As I've looked around, Mr. Mosier is a candidate I feel comfortable in supporting.

He appears to be a good lawyer, a good Democrat and a good person.

Lorne Gunter though supports neither - he would rather there be one special exception for Orthodox Jews. Why? Well in part he trots out this old nostrum:

"Moreover, since our laws are based on our Judeo-Christian heritage, it could be argued that Jewish law has from the start been a vital strand in the braid of the western legal tradition."

The second part of Gunter's statement seems fundamentally correct to me, but the first bit - the bit about our laws being based on our "Judeo-Christian heritage" strikes me as a bit problematic.

Procedurally, our law owes more to the traditions developed by the English in the medieval period than anything else. The importance we place on precedent in our laws, jury trials, et cetera has much more to do with English tradition than anything else. If you look at, say, France's legal tradition (and remember that medieval English nobles were French-speaking and often Norman French themselves) it's entirely different from the English one. In France you have prosecutorial judges and relative disregard for precedent in deciding cases - stuff that wouldn't even be recognizable in Quebec. I mention this just to point out that it appears that two very similar cultures with a similar level of Christian influence came up with very different legal systems - appearing to indicate that other factors must play an equal or greater role.

So where does the Judeo-Christian thing come into play? Codification (i.e. the writing down of laws)? Hammurabi beat Moses to that by at least a couple centuries (maybe more depending on how you view the Pentateuch, but I really, really don't want to get into a debate about the dates and historicity of Moses). Most of the ten commandments appear in other legal codes independently - as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out: did the Israelites really have no inkling that murder was wrong until they got to Mt. Sinai?

It is inaccurate to say that Jewish or Christian thought has had no role in our legal heritage but it's just as inaccurate to suggest - to the exclusion of everything else - that it is the basis of our legal tradition. It's in there but it's cobbled together with Greco-Roman thought (which I haven't even touched on), Anglo-Saxon practices, classical liberal political philosophy (Locke, Rousseau) and a whole hodge-podge of other stuff. To attribute all of our legal tradition to "Judeo-Christian heritage" is to make a significant error of omission.

"2. If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser."

Yep, you'd probably sure think twice about accusing somebody of something back in those days, especially if you knew the other person to be a real good swimmer.