Richardson and Jackson dialogue

"Man, we need some stuff, let's steal it. Okay, where should we steal from.  I dunno.  Aight, how about the that crappy gas station right next to campus, you down? I'm in, let's roll. Dude you're still wearing UT gear, apparel they ONLY give athletes. Do you think you should change before we go? Nah man, wearing this shit just makes me run faster."

Slip

"They'll put their political survival and their political power being gained over anything else. They'll use anybody and throw anybody away in order to achieve it."

- Rush Limbaugh, validating Freud

Knowledge and Priorities

"Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important."
- Eugene McCarthy

What if the Right was Right?

Authentic and productive.

"Despite our verbal proclamations to the contrary, Americans (Christian or otherwise) have such a negative visceral association with the concept of socialism that we-thus far-have been unable to have an authentic, productive conversation about whether greed or compassion is the more moral (and productive) incentive for human beings engaged in the social experiment of the democratic nation-state."

Cash for Clunkers

Cash for Clunkers is (was) a success.

CNN.com reports that:

"The most popular car being purchased under the program, according to the White House? The Ford Focus, which boasts up to 35 mpg."

While our clunker-upgraded ride doesn't get quite that high combined MPG, I'm glad that people are choosing to take fuel efficiency more seriously, despite the guy in the article who got a "crew-cab Silverado, four-door" under the program.

It's interesting that the reporter chose to lead off with a counter-example (fuel-guzzling truck) to the government presented data. Seems like a sign of conservative bias rather than left-wing bias.

Common cause?

Apparently Islamist regimes and Republicans have gathered around a common enemy: Barack Obama.

The AP reports that:

"Republican senators criticized President Barack Obama on Sunday for not taking a tougher public stand"

and Al Jazeera reports that Ahmadinejad:

"has told the US [...] to stop interfering in the country's internal affairs"

So, believing both the Iranian regime and the GOP, the Obama administration is oxymoronically "timidly" and "passively" interfering in the domestic affairs of Iran.

Straw Man Argument

Melanie Phillips goes ballistic on American Jews and their support of Obama saying he is preparing "to throw Israel under the bus."

Almost eighty per cent of American Jews voted for Obama despite the clear and present danger he posed to Israel. They did so because their liberal self-image was and is more important to them than the Jewish state whose existence and security cannot be allowed to jeopardise their standing with America’s elite.

I wonder what evidence Phillips has to explain how American Jews are not a great part of America's elite.

Existential debate

I have existential debates with myself about random stuff all the time. We caught a History Channel program about the Marianas Trench last weekend and I read an article by Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg. Steinberg wrote about how one way to check whether one is a a zealot or rational person is to try and argue the strongest case for an opposing viewpoint. If one can't argue convincingly for the other side, one may be an extremist.

So, avoiding the finer points of tectonic plates, subduction and the Pacific Rim of Fire, one scientist on the History Channel program held up a rock from the bottom and said something like, "This material is 173 million years old, it's one of the oldest rocks on the planet." Now, I'm watching and going, if someone is a Creationist, they don't believe that rock is more than something like 6,000 years old.

In order to not believe scientists or rational people on the matter of evolution, people must basically refute a whole lot of theories. Basically, everything from gravity to the second law of thermodynamics to evolution is a theory...it is the mainstream belief until a better theory comes along, whenever that is (if you got a better theory for gravity, I wanna invest in your company).

So, evolutionary theory is validated by carbon dating, which is rooted in the theory that atoms have a nucleus with various energy levels full of electrons and the different number of electrons, their degradation and release of energy is what radioactivity is all about. At that point, I began thinking that if a Creationist doesn't believe in evolution, then they also cannot believe in the nuclear bomb, because both are essentially rooted in the same theory of radioisotopes. How can a Creationist argue for their agenda in a school powered by a nuclear power plant? Something's gotta give.

This ended my internal debate trying to argue for Creationism. While I am not an atheist, I am apparently a scientific zealot.

I am a big fan of the Bible, Christian and other religious teachings.

I am not a big fan of religious dogma of any sort, be it Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, partly because I believe that religions are man-made institutions. I do fully reserve the right to believe in a God.

Gun Education

NYT columnist Bob Herbert lets off a rant about gun violence in an op-ed and concludes:

We don't really think about it. If the crime is horrible enough, we'll go through the motions of public anguish but we never really do anything about it. Americans are as blasé as can be about this relentless slaughter that keeps the culture soaked in blood.

The education and reflection needs to be on the benefits and power of having a firearm. The statistics may seem skewed to irrational uses of guns because sometimes the edges of rational society are the people taking advantage of the Second Amendment.

Let everyone who ever thought about having a firearm have one. And ensure proper education of their property, like driver's ed. Then it becomes a culture of discipline.

Definition

For the etymologically challenged, a refresher:

mortgage, equiv. to mort (dead) + gage (pledge).

It's a deathpledge, got that?

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