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Fact Paradox and Random Musings

Posted by midcan5 On March - 10 - 2010

The birth of time and space occurred some 15 billion years ago.
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Bill Clinton when asked about having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.
Dick Cheney, a four time draft dodger justified the Iraq invasion, claiming ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).’
If opinions are only opinions what are opinions.
There is only one Matriarchal society in the world, the Mosuo.
Thousands of Americans and it is estimated over a million Iraqis have died so far over these WMD.
Japan invaded the United States on December 7th, 1941. Today American flags adorn Japanese cars in America.
Free will is an essential myth, is it.
Do politicians ever wake up thinking about poverty in America or the world.
Recently I noticed a shirt made in Vietnam. Fifty six thousand Americans died in Vietnam fighting the spread of Communism.
A human would not be a human outside society.
Seinfeld was about nothing, John Cage once said he was saying nothing.
All industrial nations have universal healthcare except for the United States
‘Semper Fi’ stickers have been seen on Japanese and German cars.
The earth is four and one half billion years old.
What is a picture really worth. Robert Musil said pictures on the wall soon disappear.
The life span of elephants is 70 years.
Drawing came first then writing then reading so humans could understand what they drew what they wrote.
George W. Bush was AWOL during Vietnam.
Our language of nouns divorced from context, makes for easy classification but little thought.
John Kerry served in Vietnam; Dick Cheney obtained four deferments.
Music and art make us human.
Each weekend at Mass, we prayed for the conversion of Russia from Communism.
Evil is the reason hell is required.
During the week we hid under our school desks preparing for nuclear holocaust.
All religions have as a central tenet the Golden Rule - none follow it.
George Tenet claimed WMD were a slam dunk; he received the Freedom Medal.
There are a hundred billion synapses in the brain.
The earth does not require humans.
Is language essential to dreams, I think no.
All debate should be enthymematic; 98 percent of all Internet debate is ad hominem.
Gossip is universal, so is the blame game.
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Do American boys still work on cars.
Try to think without words.
Do dreams mean anything. Do nightmares.
The Iraq invasion has cost over 700 billion dollars and counting.
In just ten generations you have 2048 grandparents.
The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe.
Fossil fuels are the result of life death and time.
Does birth order matter.
Labels or categories isms are often only meaningful to the speaker.
Colin Powell provided complex testimony at the UN for WMD.
Many Americans believe in an America that never existed.
Are cynicism and conspiracy close relatives.
Hiroshima was bombed on August 6th, 1945. Approximately eleven more ovulations occurred before the egg dropped that became me.
My mother says my first love was a car, a 1955 Chevy.
Fiction often serves as conscience.
George W. Bush praised Michael Brown after Katrina struck New Orleans.
Movies mirror our dream world, Hollywood movies often mirror nightmares of individual revenge and widespread catastrophe.
L. Paul Bremer was awarded a Freedom medal. So was Rosa Parks.
Photo Postcards of lynchings in America from 1883 till 1960 were displayed in February, 2000 in New York.
There are over four million porn websites in the world.
Empathy is missing in so many Americans, why.
Evolution was never controversial in Asian; Asians never considered themselves top dog.
While Satan still lingers in the minds of people, Government has replaced him in America.
If you do nothing you cannot be criticized, if good happens great, if bad it is always those who acted.
What if there were no affirmative action.
Sarah Palin is the right wing Chauncey Gardiner.
I love a new book.
The Bo language is now extinct.
Ronald Reagan had the highest peace time tax increase in America history.
The earth has had two deep freezes that killed most life on earth.
Laughter is an evolutionary tool for it’s OK.
Does anyone diagram sentences or practice Palmer penmanship.
The Romans used roads for soldiers and communications.
What is the need and appeal of speed.
Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway system because of war.
The Black Plague killed 25 million people.
Mornings make me high, is that consciousness or dopamine.
In 1918 the Spanish Flu killed over twenty million.
How do we know we are thinking.
It is estimated that 110 million died in wars in the 20th century. Some place the estimate as high as 140 million.
The first victim of war is truth.
Propaganda regardless of truth works if it fits a worldview.
At one time the sun never set on the British empire.
In Asia silence is a demonstration of knowledge.
Communist Russia was an ally during the second world war.
There are 80 Wal-Marts in Communist China.
I am therefore I think.
The world didn’t end at the first millennium. Nor the second.
In 1999, manual apparatus sold well because of fear electricity would not work in the new millennium.
Jim Thorpe, an American Indian, was probably the greatest athlete of all time.
Among our closet relatives in the animal kingdom are the peaceful Bonobo.
The universe is flat. The end point of the universe is estimated but not known.
Humans date back 150,000 years.
Edit to Bible: money is the root of most evil, or much evil. Fear, insecurity are big factors too.
Schopenhauer said reading was thinking with the mind of another.
A British newspaper marveled at the number of stupid people in America after W won the second time. No testing to confirm ’stupid’ was conducted.
Fascism is of the right, Communism of the left, Dictatorship personal.
Hitler was a Catholic, so was Timothy McVeigh, so is Antonin Scalia.
A child dies of preventable causes every 15 seconds in the world.
Is the primitive mind the source of conspiracy thinking.
The time circumstances and accomplishments make Franklin Delano Roosevelt our greatest president.
Jonas Salk took no profit from his team’s development of the Polio vaccine.
Wittgenstein said if all science problems were solved it would not touch any of life’s problems.
Between 2003 and 2007 the profits of the nation’s largest medical insurers rose 170.2 percent to $12.6 billion.
Experts and throwing darts are equally reliable prognosticators.
America ranks 37th in the world in healthcare, right next to Costa Rica.
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, is ugliness.
In geologic time, human history is a few seconds, our life less.
If Think Tanks are only about partisan and corporate ideology, why are they called think tanks.
Coffee sex books and the open road all I need.
The richest 1 percent in America saw their wealth triple from 1980 to 2006. The bottom 90% went down 20 percent.
If free will exists how do we justify our politics in a world of poverty and disease.
Sixty percent of U.S. corporations failed to pay any federal taxes from 1996 through 2000.
Liberalism and conservatism equiponderate Tao.
Corporate tax amounted to just 7.4 percent of total federal tax revenue in 2003.
The sun is middle age in sun time and should burn out in roughly another 5 billion years.
I had a much stronger fantasy life young.
The war on drugs was started in 1969 and is still in progress.
Tobacco kills approximately 400,000 people each year. Alcohol about 80,000, illegal drugs kills only a few thousand.
Beckett wrote I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
The war on terrorism, a noun, started during the Bush administration.
I do not understand cults, nor the Tea Party.
Only two chromosomes separate us from the great apes.
Has the debate over nature versus nurture been resolved.
Combined taxes consume 21 percent of the poor person’s earnings, but only 7 percent of the earnings of the rich.
Each breath is a million billion billion atoms of oxygen.
I find honest people interesting but so very rare.
If all conceptions are children, when and where do they grow up.
Do birds think as they fly south, then north.
Somethings are givens, our parents.
Do animals have nightmares.
Sartre thought other people were hell.
The majority of drug offenders are white, but blacks comprise the great majority of drug offenders sent to prison.
Humans are distinct from animals because we know we are animals.
Why do no religions preach being good.
Being guillotined was for the privileged during the religious heresies. Being burned alive for the common people. People arrived early at both for a good view.
What part of ourselves do we see in our children.
Wal-mart insures its workers and designates the corporation the beneficiary.
The individual with inherent rights was created in the 18th century, but suffrage didn’t happen till the 20th.
Wittgenstein thought all problems, problems of language.
Maybe life on earth is a first draft or one of many.
When asked a stupid question Obama smiles nicely, I cannot do that.
Language is the reason we know that we know.
It could be said that Indulgences brought down the Holy Roman Empire.
If all work is outsourced how will we know. Suppose robots do the rest.
Is America the first working plutocracy.
There are approximately 3.5 million homeless in America.
If actions are additive, how can we ever tell if any action is the right action.
Neither marriage nor God is mentioned in the US Constitution.
Consider how much money corporations could funnel back into the community if they outsourced executives and their boards.
Kafka said the meaning of life is death.
Money is worshipped most in America, next comes sport.
Will humankind ever attain immortality on earth.
Which would you choose, great beauty, intelligence or long life.
Sometimes the best you can do is live long.
In the end it is what we value that creates complexity.
I am a liberal, a progressive, a democratic socialist, an economic democrat, a radical conservative, a social democrat, an economic humanist, wrote Martin Gardner, me too.
It is the journey that matters.
I’ll go on….

Independent Voters Are Just Plain Dumb?

Posted by midcan5 On January - 20 - 2010

What conclusion can one come to after Obama won Massachusetts by 26% and now Brown wins. Their values and policies are diametrically opposed. So then what do independents want? What motivates their vote? What does it say when voting changes so quickly and is no longer about issues and values?

Obama ran on a retreat from hubris of imperialism, healthcare for all, improvements for the middle and working class, and change. Brown is opposed to healthcare for all, and for that matter opposed to all of the above. Brown is pro all the policies that since Reagan have diminished the middle class in America. And yet these negative attitudes and values seem to always win when money enters the picture. The Bible was right.

Does the reactionary propaganda coming from certain conservative supported media have so strong an effect that people, independents in this case, actually believe America is moving too far left? And what does ‘left’ mean. Given our healthcare is ranked 37th in the world, you’d think Americans would want improvement. We used to consider our nation exceptional, today we are happy with mediocre.

Americans will vote for war, vote to remove the rights of gays, vote to reduce taxes as our infrastructure collapses, so really maybe independents represent a strain of thought that simply reverses the golden rule. A ‘I got mine’ you get yours attitude. The irony of all this is the last presidency and the republican ascendancy failed America. The 2008 election demonstrated that so well and yet….

So what is it independents want? We know there are some who will always vote republican and some democratic, but now we have a group that clearly has no idea what it wants. Mention the old fashioned American value of making all of America great but it will cost you - whether true or not - and you’ll lose. And so it goes….

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Winston Churchill

Global Warming Made Easy

Posted by midcan5 On December - 18 - 2009

The world cannot argue for itself
The seas and lakes cannot say stop
The air cannot use a ventilator
A dying tree cannot see a doctor
Buffaloes wolves and bears disappear

“We challenged two leading British scientists to try to prove the science of global warming to a group of people whose views very loosely reflect national opinions.

And, as if that wasn’t tough enough we asked them to do it in my kitchen.

Can they do it? Well, you can see for yourself.”

400,000 year view global warming.

GW Information.

Hugh Hewitt - Troll

Posted by midcan5 On October - 25 - 2009

I am watching Hugh Hewitt on Cspan’s In-Depth, I am trying to understand what values Hewitt brings to the party. Hewitt is one of the gang of maybe ten key spokesmen for conservatism and the republican party. It is impossible in his case and others to separate them from simple party power politics. He pretends to be a conservative Christian, but the one question concerning Christianity and healthcare received the usual reactionary reply that bad things will happen when government tries to help people. That refrain is repeated too often by conservatives to even be taken seriously.

Hewitt is an ideologue, and that brings me to the Troll label. A troll disrupts intelligent dialogue. Hewitt is a troll plain and simple, everyone is wrong who has a position different than him. And they are completely wrong as if some all-knowing god is in his head steering him. He repeats the same tired stereotypes, and on any issue he mentions, the opposite could just as easily be said as his every word comes from no valid or relevant source. He demonstrates his troll status when he denied that a majority of doctors supported the public option. (See link below) He lies with the straightest face and a weird sort of twisted smile that only the holier than thou possess.

He talks over the caller when they disagree and then asked for specific information when he himself has given none. His reply to a woman who called Rush a racist was a disgrace. He asked that she provide quotes (see link below) and then went on a troll rant. He provides no sources, and hides behind being a lawyer as if that alone supports his debate. It is an odd position, but consistent with his holier than thou attitude.

So why mention him at all. I do so because he engages in the worst sort of repetitive nonsense and it is this constant BS that needs to be countered by thinking people. Life is full of things to do, people are busy, but those like Hewitt stand in the way of simple progress and hope. Republican policy since Reagan has been a complete failure and the statistics prove it. Conservatives politics has only accomplished: debt, war, and increased poverty, but Hewitt like other trolls lends nothing to the debate except a demonization of the other.

Oh, and Hugh we bought an American car as some of us support American workers. You would too if you weren’t simply a troll.

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/8141
http://newsone.com/obama/top-10-racist-limbaugh-quotes/

PS The show can be viewed on the cspan’s web, search indepth. And for an excellent review of reationary politics see, “The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy” by Albert O. Hirschman.

Christians on Healthcare Reform

Posted by midcan5 On August - 18 - 2009

An Open Letter On Health Care to Conservative Christians in the U.S.

by Brian McLaren

Dear Friends,

“…Now, in the debate about health care, I am similarly disheartened to see the relative silence of thoughtful Christian voices as counterpoint to the predictable rhetoric of the more reactive voices. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been getting mass e-mails and Web links from evangelical and charismatic organizations that present frightening and outlandish claims about what President Obama is planning to do regarding health care. I’ve checked into these claims, and in case after case, they are simply false. They’re based on rumors spread by certain dramatic radio and cable-tv personalities, but they are not based in truth.”

Rest here.

Have a say in the discussion.