Topics of the day...

Let's start with Thanksgiving...

I've been seeing a lot of news about the native Americans protesting Thanksgiving... bitching about how it was the beginning of their downfall etc... while I can understand wanting to clarify the impact that the pilgrims had... we should probably take into account Columbus.. the "French" MILLENIA before that... (yes, the French... or neolithic Solutreans from what is now southern France, something like 16,000 years ago, landed in North America and their bloodline persists to this day in the northeastern "Native American" bloodlines etc.) and the Spanish... and how it was mainly the native American's lack of resistance to the imported diseases that led to their annihilation, and not purely a willful genocide by immigrants.

That aside, many of the "native Americans" today that bitch about their people etc... have never been directly oppressed. It's very similar to black people bitching about slavery and being called African American when likely nobody alive that they know was either a slave or came over from Africa.

You're in a "free" country now... one made up of many people from different cultures.. it's your job to make the best of what you have... not whine about things that happened to your ancestors centuries ago and demand restitution for ills that were never done to YOU.

Now, on to the next topic... gun laws.

I was astonished to hear anti-gun activists saying that their constitutional rights were being violated when they were prevented from suing gun manufacturers when a gun was used in a murder or violent crime.

*blink blink*

Umm.... what the fuck?!?

That's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard! You don't sue knife makers when someone is stabbed... you don't sue a car maker when someone is hit and killed by a car... or a carpenter when someone is pushed down a stairwell. You get the point?

You have a constitutional right to bear arms... far more so than the modern government would like you to believe. Trying to deprive that right is not only patently unconstitutional on the part of the anti-gun parties, but patently absurd to boot.

On to the final point... global warming.

Many people today would like to say that scientists and environmentalists etc are just playing Chicken Little and making a big deal of nothing about global warming... insisting that it's simply a part of the natural cycle of the earths global climate ebbs and flows... ie; that every few tens of thousands of years the earth gets hotter and colder naturally and that the current warming trend is purely natural and nothing to worry about.

Well, to soundly put the smack down on that nonsense, scientists have taken polar ice cores showing the earths atmospheric changes over the past 650,000 years and shown beyond a doubt that the current CO₂ levels are far higher now than EVER in the past 650,000 years due solely to human causes. The fact that the earth has gone through some severe global warming spells naturally throughout history, but still made it through... and that the levels now far exceed anything EVER in the past 650 millenia... what exactly are we in for? I would hope that it would cause the naysayers pause for a moment to consider just how seriously in trouble we are as a species... life as we know it... ALL life on earth... is in grave danger. A chain of events can very easily take place which would wipe out essentially all life on earth and lead to an evironment akin to the atmosphere on Venus.

A few follow ups to these points would be the study of the actual level of advancement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas before the intervention of the Europeans... how they were in many regards more scientifically advanced, by centuries in some respects, than their European counterparts. It would be interesting solely in that regard to study what factors led to the stunting of the advancement in the old world in relation to the advances in the new world. And to wonder which might be the dominant world culture had things gone a bit differently.

Also, would be to contrast the racism exhibited by modern day Native American and Black people in contrast to actual perception by the white majority. This was really brought home today when I say a man of native American lineage, from the tribe that met the pilgrims at Plymouth, leading a protest that was chanting "down with racism" etc. I'm sorry, but I didn't see any white people there bitching about the native Americans... I honestly saw them thanking them for helping their ancestors survive the first winters etc. I realize that there is a bittersweet history there, but if anyone is being a racist today, is it certainly not the whites, but the native Americans themselves... and justifying it under the age old guise of ills done to their distant forefathers etc.