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Russell was a prominent anti-war activist; he championed free trade and anti-imperialism. Russell went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Later, he campaigned against Adolf Hitler, then criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the United States of America's involvement in the Vietnam War, and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. One of his last acts was to issue a statement which condemned Israeli aggression in the Middle East.
In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."

The Objections to Religion

The objections to religion are of two sorts -- intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.

To take the intellectual objection first: there is a certain tendency in our practical age to consider that it does not much matter whether religious teaching is true or not, since the important question is whether it is useful. One question cannot, however, well be decided without the other. If we believe the Christian religion, our notions of what is good will be different from what they will be if we do not believe it. Therefore, to Christians, the effects of Christianity may seem good, while to unbelievers they may seem bad. Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.

A certain kind of scientific candor is a very important quality, and it is one which can hardly exist in a man who imagines that there are things which it is his duty to believe. We cannot, therefore, really decide whether religion does good without investigating the question whether religion is true. To Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews the most fundamental question involved in the truth of religion is the existence of God. In the days when religion was still triumphant the word "God" had a perfectly definite meaning; but as a result of the onslaughts of the Rationalists the word has become paler and paler, until it is difficult to see what people mean when they assert that they believe in God. Let us take, for purposes of argument, Matthew Arnold's definition: "A power not ourselves that makes for righteousness." Perhaps we might make this even more vague and ask ourselves whether we have any evidence of purpose in this universe apart from the purposes of living beings on the surface of this planet.

The usual argument of religious people on this subject is roughly as follows: "I and my friends are persons of amazing intelligence and virtue. It is hardly conceivable that so much intelligence and virtue could have come about by chance. There must, therefore, be someone at least as intelligent and virtuous as we are who set the cosmic machinery in motion with a view to producing Us." I am sorry to say that I do not find this argument so impressive as it is found by those who use it. The universe is large; yet, if we are to believe Eddington, there are probably nowhere else in the universe beings as intelligent as men. If you consider the total amount of matter in the world and compare it with the amount forming the bodies of intelligent beings, you will see that the latter bears an almost infinitesimal proportion to the former. Consequently, even if it is enormously improbable that the laws of chance will produce an organism capable of intelligence out of a casual selection of atoms, it is nevertheless probable that there will be in the universe that very small number of such organisms that we do in fact find.

Then again, considered as the climax to such a vast process, we do not really seem to me sufficiently marvelous. Of course, I am aware that many divines are far more marvelous than I am, and that I cannot wholly appreciate merits so far transcending my own. Nevertheless, even after making allowances under this head, I cannot but think that Omnipotence operating through all eternity might have produced something better. And then we have to reflect that even this result is only a flash in the pan. The earth will not always remain habitable; the human race will die out, and if the cosmic process is to justify itself hereafter it will have to do so elsewhere than on the surface of our planet.. And even if this should occur, it must stop sooner or later. The second law of thermodynamics makes it scarcely possible to doubt that the universe is running down, and that ultimately nothing of the slightest interest will be possible anywhere. Of course, it is open to us to say that when that time comes God will wind up the machinery again; but if we do not say this, we can base our assertion only upon faith, not upon one shred of scientific evidence. So far as scientific evidence goes, the universe has crawled by slow stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth and is going to crawl by still more pitiful stages to a condition of universal death. If this is to be taken as evidence of a purpose, I can only say that the purpose is one that does not appeal to me. I see no reason, therefore, to believe in any sort of God, however vague and however attenuated. I leave on one side the old metaphysical arguments, since religious apologists themselves have thrown them over.

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Valter Lavitola, direttore ed editore dell’Avanti, imprenditore ittico, vasti interessi in Sudamerica, massone, grande amico di Fabrizio Cicchitto e di Sergio De Gregorio, animatore delle feste del premier a Tor Crescenza durante l’estate del 2010, nonché dossieratore di Fini nel caso Montecarlo.

Giusto per ricordare chi è l’uomo a cui Berlusconi versava 20 mila euro al mese (da passare a Tarantini) e a cui il 13 luglio scorso Berlusconi confidava di voler "lasciare questo Paese di merda".

"L’Italia è il Paese che amo" (Berlusconi, 1994)

"Paese di merda" (Berlusconi 2011).

Sarà mica che nel frattempo ha governato quasi sempre lui?

Autore: Alessandro Gilioli - Fonte: PIOVONO RANE

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Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the early 1900s. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege and his protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. He co-authored, with A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics on logic. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy." His work has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, computer science (see type theory and type system), and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Christianity and Sex

The worst feature of the Christian religion, however, is its attitude toward sex -- an attitude so morbid and so unnatural that it can be understood only when taken in relation to the sickness of the civilized world at the time the Roman Empire was decaying. We sometimes hear talk to the effect that Christianity improved the status of women. This is one of the grossest perversions of history that it is possible to make. Women cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered of the utmost importance that they should not infringe a very rigid moral code. Monks have always regarded Woman primarily as the temptress; they have thought of her mainly as the inspirer of impure lusts. The teaching of the church has been, and still is, that virginity is best, but that for those who find this impossible marriage is permissible. "It is better to marry than to burn," as St. Paul puts it. By making marriage indissoluble, and by stamping out all knowledge of the ars amandi, the church did what it could to secure that the only form of sex which it permitted should involve very little pleasure and a great deal of pain. The opposition to birth control has, in fact, the same motive: if a woman has a child a year until she dies worn out, it is not to be supposed that she will derive much pleasure from her married life; therefore birth control must be discouraged.

The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be legitimate, and even noble. Take, for example, the question of the prevention of syphilis. It is known that, by precautions taken in advance, the danger of contracting this disease can be made negligible. Christians, however, object to the dissemination of knowledge of this fact, since they hold it good that sinners should be punished. They hold this so good that they are even willing that punishment should extend to the wives and children of sinners. There are in the world at the present moment many thousands of children suffering from congenital syphilis who would never have been born but for the desire of Christians to see sinners punished. I cannot understand how doctrines leading us to this fiendish cruelty can be considered to have any good effects upon morals.

It is not only in regard to sexual behaviour but also in regard to knowledge on sex subjects that the attitude of Christians is dangerous to human welfare. Every person who has taken the trouble to study the question in an unbiased spirit knows that the artificial ignorance on sex subjects which orthodox Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dangerous to mental and physical health, and causes in those who pick up their knowledge by the way of "improper" talk, as most children do, an attitude that sex is in itself indecent and ridiculous. I do not think there can be any defense for the view that knowledge is ever undesirable. I should not put barriers in the way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age. But in the particular case of sex knowledge there are much weightier arguments in its favor than in the case of most other knowledge. A person is much less likely to act wisely when he is ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to give young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an important matter.

Every boy is interested in trains. Suppose we told him that an interest in trains is wicked; suppose we kept his eyes bandaged whenever he was in a train or on a railway station; suppose we never allowed the word "train" to be mentioned in his presence and preserved an impenetrable mystery as to the means by which he is transported from one place to another. The result would not be that he would cease to be interested in trains; on the contrary, he would become more interested than ever but would have a morbid sense of sin, because this interest had been represented to him as improper. Every boy of active intelligence could by this means be rendered in a greater or less degree neurasthenic. This is precisely what is done in the matter of sex; but, as sex is more interesting than trains, the results are worse. Almost every adult in a Christian community is more or less diseased nervously as a result of the taboo on sex knowledge when he or she was young. And the sense of sin which is thus artificially implanted is one of the causes of cruelty, timidity, and stupidity in later life. There is no rational ground of any sort or kind in keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter. And we shall never get a sane population until this fact is recognized in early education, which is impossible so long as the churches are able to control educational politics.

Leaving these comparatively detailed objections on one side, it is clear that the fundamental doctrines of Christianity demand a great deal of ethical perversion before they can be accepted. The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man. The usual Christian argument is that the suffering in the world is a purification for sin and is therefore a good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalization of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children's ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.

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La vicenda ha avuto inizio lo scorso lunedì, quando in chiusura del telegiornale di Dì Lucca, un'emittente locale visibile su Internet e sul digitale terrestre, il direttore Daniele Vanni si è rifiutato di trasmettere le immagini dell'elezione di Miss Trans Italia. Il tutto con un lungo monologo che ha toccato anche molti altri punti con una serie di giudizi personali considerati da molti come omofobi.

Dopo aver parlato di Miss Italia, ha affermato: "E poi devo chiudere con due concorsi di bellezza ma di altro tipo, dei quali mi rifiuto di passare le immagini anche se ne siamo in possesso. Infatti se era ingiusto schernire una volta o tenere addirittura chiusi in casa i diversi -anche gli omosessuali- a me sembra eccessivo il gay pride oppure farci sopra dei concorsi di bellezza. Così non abbiamo passato le immagini quando c'è stato il Mr Gay qualche giorno fa: ne abbiamo dato solo notizia. Fra l'altro Daniel Argentino, l'eletto, ha dedicato la sua vittoria a babbo e mamma che senz'altro ne saranno contenti. Così diamo atto del fatto che sabato sera si è votato per la più bella Miss Trans italiana e anche per la più bella Miss Sudamericana, sempre a Torre del Lago che sta diventando, da questo punto di vista, un problema di ordine pubblico, ma forse non ce ne accorgiamo".

A denunciare l'accaduto è stato il portale Gay.it che, su segnalazione di un lettore, ha pubblicato ieri il video di quello spezzone di telegiornale. L'indignazione generata è stata tale che ben presto un alto numero di blog e di siti di informazioni hanno rilanciato la notizia, sollevando un vero e proprio polverone mediatico.

L'emittente toscana è così corsa ai ripari e ha affidato al conduttore del telegiornale mattutino di ieri, all'indomani delle polemiche e a quasi una settimana di distanza dal fatto, le sue dovute ma un po' tardive scuse. Il tutto con tanto di dissociazione da parte dell'intera redazione e la richiesta di dimissioni del direttore: "La posizione espressa dal signor Daniele Vanni nel Tg di lunedì sera 29 agosto 2011 in merito alle manifestazioni Miss Italia Trans e Miss Gay Italia, è totalmente estranea alla linea editoriale di questa emittente, che sino ad oggi ha sempre rispettato qualunque posizione di natura politica, religiosa e sessuale. La proprietà di questa emittente, all'unanimità, ha deciso di chiedere al signor Vanni, per le sue dichiarazioni, le scuse pubbliche e contemporaneamente le immediate e irrevocabili dimissioni dal Suo incarico, ritenendo intollerabile nella forma e nel contenuto i giudizi espressi nei confronti delle manifestazioni sopracitate. La redazione e tutti i dipendenti di questa emittente si dissociano da tali posizioni e si scusano se tutti i giudizi espressi, dei quali erano totalmente all'oscuro, possano aver creato un danno ad una comunità che tanto si è impegnata per combattere ogni pregiudizio e discriminazione di orientamento sessuale".

Anche la replica di Vanni non si è fatta attendere. In un'intervista ha respinto le accuse di omofobia, sostenendo che il suo monologo non fosse altro che "una battuta infelice" per nascondere il fatto che in realtà non era in possesso delle immagini.

Fonte: gayburg.blogspot.com

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he imagined himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things, in any profound sense. He was born in Wales, into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Britain.

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.

The word religion is used nowadays in a very loose sense. Some people, under the influence of extreme Protestantism, employ the word to denote any serious personal convictions as to morals or the nature of the universe. This use of the word is quite unhistorical. Religion is primarily a social phenomenon. Churches may owe their origin to teachers with strong individual convictions, but these teachers have seldom had much influence upon the churches that they have founded, whereas churches have had enormous influence upon the communities in which they flourished. To take the case that is of most interest to members of Western civilization: the teaching of Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians. The most important thing about Christianity, from a social and historical point of view, is not Christ but the church, and if we are to judge of Christianity as a social force we must not go to the Gospels for our material. Christ taught that you should give your goods to the poor, that you should not fight, that you should not go to church, and that you should not punish adultery. Neither Catholics nor Protestants have shown any strong desire to follow His teaching in any of these respects. Some of the Franciscans, it is true, attempted to teach the doctrine of apostolic poverty, but the Pope condemned them, and their doctrine was declared heretical. Or, again, consider such a text as "Judge not, that ye be not judged," and ask yourself what influence such a text has had upon the Inquisition and the Ku Klux Klan.

What is true of Christianity is equally true of Buddhism. The Buddha was amiable and enlightened; on his deathbed he laughed at his disciples for supposing that he was immortal. But the Buddhist priesthood -- as it exists, for example, in Tibet -- has been obscurantist, tyrannous, and cruel in the highest degree.

There is nothing accidental about this difference between a church and its founder. As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress. The church opposed Galileo and Darwin; in our own day it opposes Freud. In the days of its greatest power it went further in its opposition to the intellectual life. Pope Gregory the Great wrote to a certain bishop a letter beginning: "A report has reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends." The bishop was compelled by pontifical authority to desist from this wicked labor, and Latinity did not recover until the Renaissance. It is not only intellectually but also morally that religion is pernicious. I mean by this that it teaches ethical codes which are not conducive to human happiness. When, a few years ago, a plebiscite was taken in Germany as to whether the deposed royal houses should still be allowed to enjoy their private property, the churches in Germany officially stated that it would be contrary to the teaching of Christianity to deprive them of it. The churches, as everyone knows, opposed the abolition of slavery as long as they dared, and with a few well-advertised exceptions they oppose at the present day every movement toward economic justice. The Pope has officially condemned Socialism.

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Come si forma il debito pubblico? Lo Stato spende soldi per tutti gli aspetti della vita sociale, per trovarli chiede alla Banca Centrale, di proprietà privata (si veda l’articolo sulla proprietà della Banca d’Italia), di stampare del denaro, che poi restituirà con gli interessi attraverso le tasse.

Fino al 1944 le banconote stampate erano coperte dalle cosiddette “riserve auree”, quantità di oro che gli Stati depositavano a garanzie del loro debito. Dopo la conferenza di Bretton Woods, questa riserva è richiesta solo per i Dollari statunitensi, tutte le altre monete sono “scoperte”.

Da quel momento in poi lo Stato chiede denaro in prestito alla banca in cambio di titoli di Stato, cioè altro denaro! Così pur volendo non potrà mai pagare il suo debito.

Normalmente si pensa che la banca guadagni la differenza tra i titoli presi in garanzia e il denaro dato allo Stato. In realtà, le Banche Centrali vendono allo Stato fogli stampati al loro valore nominale: se lo Stato compra 100 Euro, non li paga i pochi centesimi necessari per stamparli più un margine per la banca ma li paga 100 Euro più il tasso di sconto.

Questo è il reale guadagno delle Banche Centrali: la differenza tra il costo di produzione di una banconota, pochi centesimi, e il prezzo che si fanno pagare, nel nostro esempio 105 Euro. Questo guadagno si chiama signoraggio primario.

Secondo lo Statuto di Banca d’Italia (Art.39), solamente il 4% dei guadagni può essere distribuito ai soci, il resto va rimesso allo Stato. Significa quindi che alla fine i guadagni del signoraggio finiscono allo Stato?

Assolutamente no! Vediamo perché.

I bilanci delle Banche sono redatti secondo i G.A.A.P. (Generally Agreed Accounting Principles), norme internazionali stabilite dalle banche stesse e recepite dal nostro ordinamento.

Secondo la legge, le Banche segnano in passivo la totalità della moneta circolante, come se fosse un debito, quindi non versano allo Stato centinaia di milioni di Euro all’anno.

Approfondiamo il discorso. Come detto, fino al 1944 le banconote circolanti erano effettivamente un debito per la banca nei confronti dei portatori; infatti questi avrebbero teoricamente potuto chiederne il pagamento in oro. Ma da quel momento in poi, visto che le banconote non sono più garantite da nulla, che debito sarebbe per la Banca?

La risposta è ovvia: nessuno! In realtà le Banche continuano a segnarlo in passivo, proprio per intascare la cifra e non versarla allo Stato.

Ulteriore prova sia che, sulle banconote di Euro, non c’è la scritta “pagabili al portatore”, come invece c’era sulla Lira (moneta in vigore anche prima del 1944).

Questo significa che se lo Stato approvasse una legge, che rispecchiando la realtà dei fatti, imponesse alle banche di non segnare più in passivo il valore del denaro circolante, il debito pubblico sarebbe quasi estinto e quindi la pressione fiscale calerebbe vertiginosamente.

A questo punto sembra naturale chiedersi dove vanno a finire i soldi che le banche “sottraggono” agli Stati… nel prossimo articolo scopriremo anche questo.

Fonte: ilconsapevole.it - Autore: Manuel Zanarini

Lo ha scoperto Christofer Adams, endocrinologo dell’Università dello Iowa, che descrive sulle pagine di Cell Metabolism come questa sostanza sia capace anche di ridurre i lipidi, i livelli di zucchero nel sangue, il colesterolo e i trigliceridi.

“L’atrofia muscolare è piuttosto comune e colpisce soprattutto persone malate o anziane”, ha dichiarato Adams. “E non esiste un trattamento”. Per questo il ricercatore ha cominciato a studiare l’attività dei geni che sovraintendono allo sviluppo muscolare nei pazienti affetti da questa patologia, usando queste informazioni per individuare una sostanza chimica in grado di bloccare il processo. Da questa analisi è emerso il ruolo interessante dell’acido ursolico.

Da qui la decisione di somministrare questa sostanza a topi di laboratorio. L’esperimento ha dato i risultati sperati: negli animali trattati è aumentata sia la massa sia la forza del muscolo. “Questo accade perché l’acido ursolico agisce direttamente su due degli ormoni che partecipano alla costruzione muscolare: l’insulina e il fattore di crescita insulino-simile (IGF1)”, ha precisato Adams. Lo sviluppo della massa muscolare non ha causato un aumento del peso corporale; si sono invece registrati una riduzione dei lipidi grasso e un abbassamento dei livelli di glucosio, colesterolo e trigliceridi nel sangue.

Fonte: galileonet.it