Free(?) Will

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue."

-Karl Marx


Sam Harris

The Death Penalty Costs $300 Million Per Execution*


"Capital punishment is absurd for a lot of reasons: It's racist, classist, and it doesn't even deter crime. And yet two-thirds of Americans still support the practice, which has been abandoned in every other Western democracy. In the midst of America's great recession, perhaps an appeal to citizens' pocketbooks will change their minds about the death penalty."

-Cord Jefferson

*INFO:
http://www.good.is/post/capital-stupidity-the-death-penalty-costs-california-300-million-per-execution/

http://beadle-bug.tumblr.com/post/3068995681/most-painful-execution-technique-electric-chair

By Any Means Necessary

"... in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.”

-John Brown
(above) in 1846, holding the flag of Subterranean Pass Way, his militant counterpart to the Underground Railroad.

INFO:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1550.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_any_means_necessary

Proud Abominators