Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Interesting
If only I can find a webring devoted to philosophy, politics, scotch, and Asian women. I have my lantern and I will not stop searching.
Friday, November 25, 2005
Too sick
CNN has headlined Jessica and Nick's breakup.
Note: I can't link to the damn site because I am working on a damn Apple.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The illogical faith of Penn Jillette
"So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God."
Then he says that his disbelief is belief.
"But, this "This I Believe" thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life's big picture, some rules to live by. So, I'm saying, "This I believe: I believe there is no God.""
He goes on to talk about how cool not believing in God is. Of course he told us that it was perfectly logical, so why the leap of faith? Because it is illogical, because like he said you can't prove a negative.
To ask the question you could rationally start by saying "There is a God, I will try and dissprove him." Or, as Jillette says, you could say "There is no God, I will try and prove his existence." But the objective starting point would be "I don't know if there is a God." The first two hypothesis just frame the question so it can be discussed.
The logical starting point is agnosticism. So where is Jillette's argument against the existence of God? Oh, he doesn't need one, he has a leap of faith. Isn't it wonderful that he is so much more rational than those believing fools?
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Up the Jews!
And after seeing the beautiful women in that video I was tempted to buy a plane ticket, fly to Tel Aviv, join the Israel Defense Force, and convert to Judiaism. Thank God I was sober when I saw it.
And here is the original.
Up the Chinese
Saturday, November 19, 2005
I am a dunce.
This is not a solution to the problem. Which mirrors the fact that the Democrats are not a solution to the problems of the Bush administration.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Why isn't this treason?
I agree with Minus quite often. I should note that his is a Conservatism of Right and Wrong, hard nosed reality, faith, and dedication to this country. While mine is a Conservatism of .... well, getting drunk. However, Minus went easy on this guy
Minus, this guy needs to get his ass kicked.
About damn time
Now this does not mean that the war was the right action, or that we fought it correctly. There are legitimate arguments about these points. There are arguments that the Administration believed that democracy would florish as soon as the 101st Airborne hit Baghdad and that this mistake was tragic. However, there is no argument that they were manipulating the intelligence on WMD. None.
Everytime the Democrats go off on this loony tangent, I think "As angry as I am at Bush, how can I vote for a party that is completely partisan and dishonest when my brothers-in-arms are at war?" I cannot trust a party that seats Jimmy Carter next to Michael Moore at their own convention. What the hell has happened to them?
Noonan on the Decline
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
A Lost Art
Two cases: my friend at Oracle and my business development friend. The Oracle girl is currently working from home, hanging out, and working on certifications while she waits to be placed on another contract which could be a few weeks. She said to me that if she was an executive she would lay herself off. The development guy is very business savy. He spent 15 minutes talking about the costs of contracting with the government. I learned a lot.
The problem is that the Oracle girl doesn't see the benefit of developing and respecting human capital, and the development guy thinks about numbers and not about people. They are both smart people who I expect will manage organizations and retire young and wealthy. However, they are not managers. They don't think conceptually, and they don't think of management as a liberal art that they need to learn.
Luckily, they will both still get rich. Why? Their brains and work ethic will still beat the competition, because nobody thinks about management as a liberal art. There is still much to be learned from Drucker's body of work, and society will be better off for it.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Peter Drucker, R.I.P.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Hope in Jordan
Interesting, is the Arab street anti-American, or, shades of Nixon, is the Arab silent majority for peace and democracy? That is the vital question.
Note: Gateway Pundit has great international news. Whoever he or she is, the blog is worth reading. So it is going on my blogroll.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Liberate France!
The riots in France are out of control. They are facing an intifada and possible total social breakdown. The 82nd Airborne must be alerted. As Churchill gave De Gaulle safe haven when the Germans rolled into Paris, we should give the decent people of France safe haven as the rioters burn Paris. Due to my love of the First Amendment, I will give safe haven to this intrepid reporter. Depending on how you define the word "safe."
Note: If I did have a relationship with a French woman, is there anyone out there who thinks she is the one in danger? Didn't think so.
HatTip: The Corner
Up the Kurds!
The single unalloyed good that has resulted from the Iraq War is the freeing of Kurdistan. The Kurds have been knocked around and subjugated by the Arabs of the region for centuries. It was Kurdish men, women, and children that Saddam gassed. Under the protection of the no-fly zone, the Kurds developed two stable political regimes. Now that Saddam is gone, they are have an autonomous region within a Federal Iraq. Even if the nightmare scenario happened and Iraq falls into a civil war, Kurdistan would probably remain intact and become an independent country.
Americans always forget our friends in faraway places. Few of us realize that Australia has fought alongside us in every major conflict for the last one hundred years. Almost no one seems to know that Thailand is a staunch U.S. ally, and they fought with us in Korea and Vietnam. The Kurds are thanking us with commercials on U.S. TV. Let us hope that the next administration does not forget them.
Intelligent Design or When the Right acts Left.
The whole Intelligent Design (ID) fandango is important on two levels: one intellectual and the other (more ominously) political.
I will not pretend to be a scientific authority. I read a large amount of philosophy every year, but I am also not an authority on Metaphysics (Ethics is my thing.) Having said that Intelligent Design poses a scientific threat to Darwinism. This threat is considered impotent by most scientists. The idea should be debated, however the scientific community does not currently agree with the paradigm shift needed to accept ID. As far as the existence of God goes, Darwinism was never the the threat that people expected it to be. Of course it destroys a literal interpretation of scripture. The existence of God is not predicated on scripture. The best arguments were laid out by St. Thomas of Aquinas, and I have yet to see that Darwinism overturns any of them (the argument from first cause still seems particularly strong.)
This debate is politically important because it has the potential to morally bankrupt the intellectual right. How? Well, you see that the scientific community has a consensus for Darwinism, and the the ID supporters have not been able to convince the community otherwise. So have they redoubled their arguments? No, they have sidesteped the academic process and tried to use local school boards to force biology teachers to teach ID. Isn't this just the same strong arm tactics that we howl about when done in the name of Political Correctness?
When the Rights acts like the Left has for the last 50 years, it is a sign of the end. It is a sign of arrogance and it makes the truth subservient to the expedient.
**Note: Not being very religious, I have no urge to get into a theological argument. But I will say that if Evangelicals and Fundamentalists had not taken Luther's sola scriptura to it's logical yet completely irrational extreme the "threat" of Darwinism would be non-existent. The average Fundamentalist is completely unfamiliar with C.S. Lewis, Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Augustine, or with any of the other major theologians after Paul. The ignorance of this rich intellectual tradition, leaves the fundamentalist with a brittle faith that is threatened by anything that does not conform to a literal acceptance of the Biblical text. The Catholic Church has not lost this tradition and subsequently that Church does not fear science.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
I am missing something here....
Sarah Silverman Rules!
"I got raped by my doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl."
Oh what the hell.
Maybe not. I actually like California. I have some family out there and at least one friend from that fair state. I have been to San Francisco twice: great town. But California really blew it.
Arnold's initiatives should have passed. And they were defeated by well organized special interests (Yes, Virginia unions are a special interest group.) Without realizing it, Californians have voted for the status quo of deficit spending and political corruption.
Most egregious was their rejection of the initiative to reform redistricting. Right now, every ten years the census happens. At which point, in every state in the Union, the legislatures redraw the districts. They are always drawn along partisan lines. In 2004, Delay redrew Texas along Republican lines, because a judge had redrawn them in 2002 to support Democrats. There are plenty of Republicans in Massachusetts, we have had Republican Governors since 1990. Yet there are no Massachusetts Representatives in Congress that are Republican. The Democratic state legislature would never allow it.
If California had shifted the redistricting to a panel of non-partisan retired judges, this system could have ended. And the rest of the country would have followed. We would have a more representitive government, the voters would have more incentive to vote, and the republic would have been strengthened.
When California failed, we all suffered.
Monday, November 07, 2005
I am Back and I am Mad
First, we have our President. Allow me to pile on to the attacks about Miers. I don't give a goodgoddamn if Alito is an excellent judge. He'll get approved and the court gets more rational. Hurrah! But when Bush nominates his personal lawyer to the court he told Conservatives one simple thing: He doesn't get it. We don't want judges who are pro-life. We want judges who are pro-Constitution. And running around assuring religous conservatives that she is pro-life is a pro-ignorant move. He doesn't get it. We have a "conservative" President who doesn't have a clue about Constitutional law. Lucky for America that Congress stomped on the nomination fast.
But of course they are idiots too. Since 1994 I have been voting for Republicans for what damn purpose? I seem to remember something about balanced budgets, a flat tax, strong defense, and term limits. I did not vote for extraordinary government deficits, tax cuts without any hope of tax reform, a drastically overstreched military that should have been expanded two years ago, and Congressmen that won't leave office until they have taken enough pork to cause a coronary. A friend asked me "How can we have a Republican President, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House, yet nothing in the Conservative agenda is getting passed?" The answer is that about 40% of the Republicans in congress are principled and the rest are useless. No, they are not just useless, they are dangerous to anyone who truly wants reform.
Don't even get me started about that slack-jawed Alabama judge Roy Moore. Yes yes yes, it is ridiculous that cities are forced to take a cross off of their seal that has been there for centuries. That cross is part an acknowledgement of religoun, that in no way establishes a specific church. However, this guy put a gigantic 10 Commandments monument in the Alabama Supreme Court building. AND he said that he put it there because the 10 Commandments are the moral foundation of our law. No. They. Are. Not.
Mr. Madison was a pretty smart guy. If that was true Jimmy would have wrote "We the people of the United States in order form a more perfect union, found our Constitution on the Bible." If that was what he meant to write than that's what Jimmy would have written. Judeo-Christian values informed the founding, along with Locke, ancient Greek history, and many other thinkers. Thaere is no excuse to ignore the plain text of the 1st Ammendment and attempt to establish a Christian government.
Trust me when I say that you don't want to hear about how depressed I was when I debated gay marriage with my old and dear friend Mikey. It was a fun debate and we both made good points. I laid out an argument against gay marriage based on societal norms, respect for human history, and the idea that you don't alter a 5,000 year institution without a damn good reason. The problem was that Mikey had never heard an argument against gay marriage that wasn't based on Bible quotes. He thought all conservatives were religous fundamentalists. I've known this guy for 15 years! How did we let this happen? How did we let a healthy respect for religoun turn to supporting people who want to legislate the Bible into law?
And there is the problem. P.J. O'Rourke's Republican Party Reptiles are hibernating. The Republicans are not the fun smash the Federal government types anymore. The party is no longer about limited government, it is more interested in creating Federal laws to enforce a conservative lifestyle and belief system. Well, count me as a fan of a Conservatism of Debauched Drunkeness. I will not support anything that goes against mixing qualudes in your scotch and watching asian porn!
Conservatives, it is time to take back our party!
