Exactly what event or piece of information finally made you decide that you should vote for one candidate over another or against one candidate over another?
Was it something that happened before the race began, such as 9/11 or the Iraq war, or was it something that happened during the race, such as an editorial or the debates? I'm curious as to how you were finally persuaded or what persuaded you on how to vote.
Should one have the "courage of their convictions"? Should one exercise humility in regards to their ideas? Are having the courage of your convictions and exercising humility necesarily in conflict with one another? How valuable do you think either of these general positions are to philosophy and life in general? There is no conflict between humility or courage any more than there is a conflict between principle and application or skepticism and faith. Both inform each other and form a dialectical composite. In politics, the inability of leaders to examine premises leads to dams in the middle of deserts and groud wars in foreign countries. In science, the inability the think indepedently of politics leads to Lysenkoism and mushroom clouds. In faith, the inability to embrace mystery, contradiction, and transcendence leads to scientism-- science and technology that is devoid of an awareness of human costs-- whereas the inability to embrace rigor and experimentation leads to a different kind of fanaticim-- astrology and cults. In art, the inability to expose your art to the criticism of others and yourself leads to artlessness or the sterility of artistic expression. At the base of each of these areas of human endeavors must lie one irreducable principle-- that rationality-- clear, disciplined, systematic thinking-- must govern all social interactions-- and that rationality itself will recognize its own limitations and defects-- that there are limits to rationality.
Integrity, another name for humility, is integral to epistomology. In a commencement at Caltech in 1974, Richard Feynman spoke of the need to relate integrity to our search for truth. “In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. “Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards.”
We are the greatest obstacle to truth, Dr. Feynman suggests. Our theories take on a momentum as we invest ego, money, and time. And sometimes the most difficult thing we can do—but the one essential thing we must do—is to be utterly honest with ourselves as we look for reasons as to why our theory is not valid. “For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated“
Andrew Sullivan publishes one of my favorite blogs, "The Daily Dish". Sullivan crisply summerizes the epitomological challenge for all citizen-journalists by quoting George Orwell: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constrant struggle."
Here he delineates the conservative case for voting for Obama.
10. A body blow to racial identity politics. An end to the era of Jesse Jackson in black America.
9. Less debt. Yes, Obama will raise taxes on those earning over a quarter of a million. And he will spend on healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan and the environment. But so will McCain. He plans more spending on health, the environment and won't touch defense of entitlements. And his refusal to touch taxes means an extra $4 trillion in debt over the massive increase presided over by Bush. And the CBO estimates that McCain's plans will add more to the debt over four years than Obama's. Fiscal conservatives have a clear choice.
8. A return to realism and prudence in foreign policy. Obama has consistently cited the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush as his inspiration. McCain's knee-jerk reaction to the Georgian conflict, his commitment to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and his brinksmanship over Iran's nuclear ambitions make him a far riskier choice for conservatives. The choice between Obama and McCain is like the choice between George H.W. Bush's first term and George W.'s.
7. An ability to understand the difference between listening to generals and delegating foreign policy to them.
6. Temperament. Obama has the coolest, calmest demeanor of any president since Eisenhower. Conservatism values that kind of constancy, especially compared with the hot-headed, irrational impulsiveness of McCain.
5. Faith. Obama's fusion of Christianity and reason, his non-fundamentalist faith, is a critical bridge between the new atheism and the new Christianism.
4. A truce in the culture war. Obama takes us past the debilitating boomer warfare that has raged since the 1960s. Nothing has distorted our politics so gravely; nothing has made a rational politics more elusive.
3. Two words: President Palin.
2. Conservative reform. Until conservatism can get a distance from the big-spending, privacy-busting, debt-ridden, crony-laden, fundamentalist, intolerant, incompetent and arrogant faux conservatism of the Bush-Cheney years, it will never regain a coherent message to actually govern this country again. The survival of conservatism requires a temporary eclipse of today's Republicanism. Losing would be the best thing to happen to conservatism since 1964. Back then, conservatives lost in a landslide for the right reasons. Now, Republicans are losing in a landslide for the wrong reasons.
1. The War Against Islamist terror. The strategy deployed by Bush and Cheney has failed. It has failed to destroy al Qaeda, except in a country, Iraq, where their presence was minimal before the US invasion. It has failed to bring any of the terrorists to justice, instead creating the excrescence of Gitmo, torture, secret sites, and the collapse of America's reputation abroad. It has empowered Iran, allowed al Qaeda to regroup in Pakistan, made the next vast generation of Muslims loathe America, and imperiled our alliances. We need smarter leadership of the war: balancing force with diplomacy, hard power with better p.r., deploying strategy rather than mere tactics, and self-confidence rather than a bunker mentality.
Those conservatives who remain convinced, as I do, that Islamist terror remains the greatest threat to the West cannot risk a perpetuation of the failed Manichean worldview of the past eight years, and cannot risk the possibility of McCain making rash decisions in the middle of a potentially catastrophic global conflict. If you are serious about the war on terror and believe it is a war we have to win, the only serious candidate is Barack Obama.
Mom collapsed again in the bathroom while at an overnight at my brother's house.
Mom is resting comfortably at Lancaster General. Her doctor is Dr. Garrido, a neurosurgeon.
Visting hours exclude 7-8:30 am and pm when there is a change in shifts.
Mom has bleeding on the brain, possibly due to a stroke and a concussion, and perhaps other internal bleeding manifested by a significant decrease in her hemogloblin level. She will have another CAT scan today and will be kept under observation at least for another day and then moved to another floor.
The doctor brought up Mom's living will and asked me if her refusal to use heroic measures accorded with my understanding of Mom's beliefs. I sadly said yes, remembering that Mom has always made a distinction between life and living. I however agreed they should use an IVC filter today, something that I don't think falls under the heroic measures category.
By Marsha WestI have a sign in my office that asks the question: If you were accused of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to prove it?"I am a Christian" Barack Obama proclaims. But is there enough evidence to prove it?. In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court granted Americans a constitutional right to destroy human life in the womb. Roe v. Wade is one of the most divisive issues of our time. The high court's decision gave American women the "right to choose" to terminate a human life.The pressing question is, How should Catholics and Protestants think about the issue of abortion? Somewhere around 75% of Americans say they are Christians. So it is reasonable to assume that a large number of "Christians" will go to the polls in November and vote for Sen. Barack Obama. Princeton professor Robert P. George calls Sen. Obama "the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States," and "the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate." Moreover, Obama is "the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress."
You are horrified at the "butchery" of a child get aborted in the first trimester. Do you have as much horror at a child getting aborted in his 61st trimester-- by dying as a soldier in an unnecessary war in Iraq?
Is Bush a Christian? Is McCain a Christian? Are you a Christian?
I know that Bush, McCain, and you believe you are Christians and sometimes say or do ostensibly "Christian" things-- go to church, pray, and vote Republican. But on what basis should I believe that any of you are Christians, especially when I see so much vileness and hate from folks such as you that has caused so much pain to so many people all over the world?
Based on the evidence that I see, I would say that Obama is indeed God's choice, and you will need to deal to come to terms with that as best as you can.
Marxism came out a reaction to the bleak, satanic mills of the Victorian Industrial Age. Today, we have the cratering of retirement accounts, an aging population with inadequate health and nursing care, high schoolers who have been priced out of a college education, and offshoring of employment. While no one discounts the engine of wealth that is capitalism, is is difficult today to also discount the harm done to countless people by unregulated capitalism. I think there is a distinction between the regulated capitalism of the New Deal and Great Society and the socialism of World War II England and Italy.
The middle ground, which I see the United States embracing, is not socialism but subsidiaritism, the principle that there are actions that cannot be executed at the individual or family level must be executed at a higher level. "The principle of subsidiarity goes back to Pope Leo XIII in RerumNovarum and holds that government should undertake only those initiatives which exceed the capacity of individuals or private groups acting independently. . . The principle of subsidiarity was developed in the encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, as an attempt to articulate a middle course between the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand and the various forms of communism, which subordinate the individual to the state, on the other."
This of course is a denial of the slogan chanted by McCain of "Country First." No, it is the individual who must be first, with government entities actiing only when the rights of individuals cannot survive. As to what exactly those rights are, of course, the heart and soul of political communal struggle.
Q: Brandon Garcia wants to know, “What does the Vice President do?”
PALIN: That’s something that Piper would ask me! … [T]hey’re in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom.
So Caribou Barbie continues to misinform her daughter Piper.
Article I Section Three defines that office as follows: "The Vice-President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they are equally divided." As this article deals with the legislative branch, the office clearly has a constrained role in the legislature. But it is in article two and the 12th amendment were the vice presidency is defined, essentially as an appendage to the president that becomes activated when the president can no longer perform.
I admire the governor for her poise, accomplishments, and love for family. However, I think her selection by McCain had more to do with getting elected than with governing. In effect, McCain passed his finger down the list of not dozens of potential vice presidents but tens of thousands of potential vice presidents-- an egregious example of affirmative action run wild. It was his first executive decision made after his nomination, and McCain failed in this test. This is not a question of gender or class but of temperament and judgement, both of McCain and Palin. McCain's choice appears to be impetuous and gut-driven, not reasoned and thoughtful. As conservative columnist Kathleen Parker notes, it may even be gonad-driven, a weak man falling for a comely woman. "Cameras frequently capture McCain beaming like a gold-starred schoolboy while Palin tells crowds that he is "exactly the kind of man I want as commander in chief." What Palin thinks she is saying is that McCain is "the kind of man I want as commander in chief." What McCain is hearing, I think, is McCain is "the kind of man I want as commander in chief." And this will be one reason why McCain is losing this election, a 72 year-old with all the sense of a 17 year old trying to impress the homecoming queen.
Palin in her interviews and rallys has demonstrated shallowness, shrillness, and certitude, traits that have no place at a time when we are at war with two nations and entering into a recession. If McCain was a generation younger, perhaps we could forgive Palin's callowness. But the actuarial reality is that Palin might indeed follow McCain into the Oval Office. And it is even more difficult to forgive Palin's dishonesty. For example, responding to the Troopergate report, Palin said she's "pleased to be cleared" of "any kind of unethical activity." No, she wasn't cleared at all. The report said exactly the opposite. She recently said that Obama enjoys "palling with terrorists." These kinds of nonsensical casualness with truth is a habinger for her future. So the thought that this simple frontier earth mother might someday run the machinery of our government and have our nuclear codes scares me witless.
I hope these SAT scores really aren't Sarah's. But they would explain a lot if they were.
It has been several months since I last blogged. That hasn't effected my page rank or daily hits. I still get over 3,000 hits each day and my advertising revenue remains steady. However, the impluse to blog is, I think, a good one, so long as I don't feel that I'm writing screeds for hate week.
For the last few months, I've worked outside of the house while our house's interior was getting renovated. It hasn't been easy for our family. The boys had to tolerate living in cramped confines at our condo. We got burglarized-- a rather nasty tax event. There were also cost and time overruns. However, the renovation is almost done, although my definition of done differs somewhat from the contrator's definition of done. We're awaiting the installation of a backsplash in the kitchen and other finishing touches.
In other news, school has begun, and the first semester has come to an end with both boys getting mainly As. For our spring break, we took a seven-day Disney Magic cruise that took us to Key West, Cozumel, Mexico, and Disney's island Casterway Cay. As always, we had a wonderful time and are making plans for another cruise. Sometimes, I would go to the ninth floor in the spa and work out on the treadmill overlooking the ship's bridge. In front of me was a small plasma screen that each day traced the downward trend of the Dow Jones industrials. I much preferred to watch the flying fish in the ocean below as the Magic cut through the azure waves.
A Life On the Ocean Wave: The Disney Magic
In one of my 401(k) statements that I got yesterday, I note that my account for the last quarter dropped almost 17 percent. Ouch. I'm sure folks all over the country are opening similar statements and are uttering primal screams. This no doubt accounts for a similar collapse in Republican electoral prospects. Real Clear Politics. a polling data aggregator, today places the spread between Obama and McCain at 7.2 percent. Intrade. a gambling site that has proven its accuracy as people put dollars behind their surmises, predicts that Obama has a more than a 84 percent chance of winning. With some, hope continues to spring eternal that McCain can pull a Truman and somehow reverse what I see is an inevitable Obama landslide. I watched Karl Rove on Fox last night who did just that-- pointing to outliner polls and claiming that the consensus is old or biased. Perhaps. But I suspect that there will have to be a circular firing squad from conservatives, evangelicals, and Republicans, which I hope by now we all recognize are not the same, to atone for the views that animates George Bush's imploding world.
We are only a week and a half away from the election. There appears to be a pent-up thirst for systemic change and deep-seated anger to incumbents, especially to the Republicans. The economic difficulties we are encountering are certainly not the fault of one person or party, as the market is bigger than individuals, institutions, and even countries. However, I think there is an acute national sense of betrayal because of critical errors of judgment and a general lack of accountability and awareness of what Americans want and need, and the Republican Party will pay the price this November at the polls. The idea that Republicans = conservatives = evangelicals has especially bothered me as it doesn’t seem to be truthful. Massive deficit spending, market collapses because of deregulation, and preemptive wars are not acts of a conservative by my way of thinking. What can they be conserving when soldiers are dying and savings are vanishing? And, in the wake of the many Republican scandals, I see little with Republicanism that is more moral that the Democrats. It wouldn’t surprise me that Democratic Party control over the executive branch and both houses will bring in its own problems and scandals that eclipse what we’ve seen from the Republicans. However, as I believe we should never reward bad behavior, I must again vote straight Democratic. But I’m glad we live under a vibrant constitution and I’m glad that God continues to reign.
