Politics

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6488613/Afghanistan-West-hails-Hamid-Karzai-as-legitimate-president.html So, who thinks things are all screwed up in Afghanistan? I do I do. Seriously, WTF? I'm sure that Karzai gets the full support of the drug cartels. Shouldn't someone intervene here?

I think this video speaks for itself... YDR47EKTrCQ Wow. The common themes that run through the video are rather... pronounced. Socialism. Communism. The state of journalism (yes apparently if you're not hypercritical of Obama, you're not doing your job as a news organization). I don't know what can be done about the Fox Noise problem, other than trying to get all reasonably minded people to recognize that it's about as effective a news organization as Pravda. Except in this case, it's anti-government propaganda, at least now that the Democrats are in power. I think the video does a good job of showing that the anti-Obama vitriol isn't just limited …

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/02/georgia.senate/index.html?eref=rss_topstories The Democrats will not have a filibuster-proof 60 seat majority, as the Democrat running for the Senate seat in Georgia conceded today. The only seat still up for grabs is the Franken vs. Coleman battle in Minnesota. I would've liked for the Democrats to have a 60 seat majority, but I'm not majorly disappointed that they don't. It's still reassuring that only one Republican needs to break party lines for a cloture vote. That said, I expect things to remain polarized as ever and foresee many Republican filibusters kept alive only by all Republican senators being firmly uni…

SCNs7Zpqo98 Al Franken isn't exactly known for reaching out to the other side, but here he is having a calm, rational discussion with a group of teabaggers. Will wonders never cease. I certainly couldn't talk to those people without losing my cool. Perhaps we're seeing a more mature Senator Franken. Perhaps there is hope.

Off to work, but I've jotted down some highlights in the vid. They're seeds for many great points of discussion, I believe. Also, thanks to iNow for posting the link and twice making the effort for discussion. I'm posting as a new thread because I don't want to discuss the video itself, but rather many of the variables within that seem to help explain our political and suboptimal reality. Of course a video doesn't have footnotes or inline citations, something I wish possible to make it easier to research and/or verify what's said. I'll return to finish up on the rest. The material below's plenty good enough for now.... Referring to Alan Greenspan...…

Some of us here on the forums have become a bit exasperated with the way certain economic ideologies keep hijacking every thread... frustrated with how frequently the topic under discussion gets completely derailed by these Austrian pet theories. Too often lately someone will interject some assertion pertaining to free market ideals... about how we should not regulate... and how government should be completely hands off when it comes to economic policy, and also too often these people will continue interjecting the same assertions even after their premises have been shown to be flawed and non-representative. It actually reminds me a bit of a troll we used to have here n…

From this diagram I think it's pretty obvious that this structure is not a stable one. It's also obvious why Bear Stearns collapsed, and why AIG would've collapsed without the bailout. Much like evolution, the free market does not produce optimal structures, because it is not an intelligently guided process, but one which operates according to the emergent behavior of the various systems involved. It seems like with a little regulation, putting more intelligence into how the system is designed, we could avoid having structures like this appear in our financial system. We paid $700 billion to avoid having this obviously unstable structure completely collapse. Gi…

Vision: the creative apprehension of reality Wilhelm Worringer author of Abstraction and Empathy informs me that “Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment”. Aesthetics is that which is pleasing in appearance, i.e. that which we find to be attractive. What do we do when we objectify self-enjoyment? A quick answer might be that we make self-enjoyment into an object. When we speak of “object” we generally must speak also of “subject”. We might say that the subject is the “knower” and the object is that which is “known”. “The study of art is an indispensable part of the study of man.” “Our experiences and ideas tend to be common but not deep, …

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/cheney-slams-obama-on-afghanistan-policy/?hp After some 8 years of bumbling on Afghanistan, letting it descend into the leading producer of opium and while power slipped into the hands of drug cartels, Cheney has decided the problem is: Obama! It seems the Bush Administration did a review of Afghanistan and created a report, which the Obama Administration didn't use, instead deciding to put together their own report. I'm getting a bit of deja vu here. You see, Clinton left the Bush Administration with a plan for fighting al Qaeda, which the Bush Administration ignored. Pot. Kettle. Black. Etc. So what's th…

A little more than a year ago, governments and central banks around the world acted to prevent what they foresaw as a global financial meltdown, originating the the US following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The financial institution folded holding a record $613,000,000,000 in debt. This figure eclipses the GDP of all but the 17 highest producing nations. Lehman Brothers' collapse sent markets around the world into panic mode. Government bailouts took the form of extensive loans to these institutions, often at 0% interest, and in some cases buying failing financial firms outright. The bailouts ended up costing the taxpayers of these respective nations huge amou…

Can we create a New Age of Enlightenment? If one half of one percent of the population acquires the hobby that I call the ‘intellectual life’ such a group could be the foundation for a new Age of Enlightenment. The original Age of Enlightenment occurred in Europe during the eighteenth century. “The men [in the 18th century the enlightened were still only half enlightened] of the Enlightenment united on a vastly ambitious program, a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all, freedom in its many forms—freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one’s talents, freedom of aesthetic response, fre…

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/appel/intractability-financial-derivatives An interesting convergence of computer science and economics: researchers at Princeton studied Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), securities which combine hundreds of mortgages into a single package, which were implicated as one of the primary causes of the global financial meltdown: In hindsight, it would seem the computer models being used to understand CDOs were woefully inadequate, and worse, it may be an intractable and exploitable problem. I'm not going to go out on a limb and say the government should ban CDOs, but I think it's clear they need to be far more strin…

Fed Chairman Bernanke says the recession is likely over, and he's got some facts to back it up. His assessment is based largely on consumer spending. Let's take a look at this handy chart: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125301730771311713.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular Obviously we'll have to wait and see, and it sucks that employment is generally a lagging economic indicator, but with any luck we may be able to put this behind us soon.

Mind/Body dichotomy: Our great nemeses? Theology and philosophy are guardians of the human urge to separate itself as much as possible from its animal heritage and to move closer toward being god-like. The overt effort of theology is to accentuate the misconceived mind/body dichotomy while the covert effort of philosophy is to accentuate this same mind/body dichotomy. Theology does this legitimately because it believes that humans are both body and soul. The body is what we must put-up-with for our short stay on earth while the soul will last through eternity in an environment determined by our brief stay on earth. I claim that philosophy does this illegi…

http://blogs.usdoj.gov/blog/archives/192 Federal agents will now cede to states on the issue of medical marijuana, thanks to new orders under Obama. This is a complete 180 from the Bush years, when the executive decided to pursue federal action against medical marijuana providers who were acting under state law. Interesting to see where this will wind up going...

This is one of the axioms put forth by objectivists, so I was wondering, from a scientific stand point if this is true. OR is anything objectivism and what Ayn Rand said, go against sociobiology and the paradigms established by modern philosophers?

Today, a Sunni group attacked the Iranian army, and killed at least 5 commanders of the Revolutionary Guards units and dozens of civilians. Iran already said it will strike back on the terrorists, and it claimed that the terrorists are backed up by the USA and UK. The rebels/terrorists (Jundallah) claim to have no ties at all with Al-Quaida or Taliban. Iran is under attack from the same region where Pakistan, Afghanistan and all western allies are fighting their war against extremist Muslim groups (mostly Al-Quaida and Taliban, but also other groups)... And all those groups seem Sunni's (I might be wrong?). Iranians are mostly Shia. Why are the Iranians and Ame…

Tradition of Change: an oxymoron? Thales, who lived around 625 BC, is called the ‘first philosopher and the first scientist’. He is considered to be the first thinker to propose a single universal principle of the material universe, “a unique substratum that, itself unchanging, underlay all change.” When we think about this problem of comprehending change we recognize that there must exist something that is essential to change that remains unchanged. When we look around us we are struck with the fact that things constantly change. Thales is said to have asked the important question does everything change or is there something that remains unchanged? If there i…

I was always baffled by this slogan. Wikipedia informs: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs) is a slogan popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. The phrase summarizes the idea that, under a communist system, every person shall produce to the best of their ability in accordance with their talent, and each person shall receive the fruits of this production in accordance with their need, irrespective of what they have produced. In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist society will produce; the idea is that there will…

Anyone here a Kiwi?!? http://www.invadenewzealand.com/

Yes, you've read that correctly. Yes, it's almost 2010 and I'm creating this thread about this article which was published today. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091015/ap_on_re_us/us_interracial_rebuff A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long. "I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. …

IMO, pharmaceutical companies should have a legal limit on their %profit. There's no reason I can see for people to suffer and/or die because a CEO wants a new Lexus. Sure, they need to cover cost of production and R&D. However, they do not need to have an extraordinary standard of living; they want to have an extraordinary standard of living. Is the fatter wallet of the CEOs worth the suffering and death that result from the lack of ability to afford the medicine? I don't think so. Thoughts?

What is the American frame of mind? I would say that a culture consists of the complex of ideas that a group of people hold dear. One can speak of the culture of a small group or of a very large group. In the United States our culture is determined to a large extent by how we hold "these truths to be self-evident"; we are held together by ideas perhaps more than other societies. Next, religion plays a great role, and in our case it is the mixture of Protestantism, Judaism, and Catholicism. Following this is our infatuation with capitalism; following that is our narcissistic view of our uniqueness and greatness. Our culture is a general attitude toward our s…

Hey! Get an Intellectual Hobby My experience leads me to conclude that there is a world of difference in picking up a fragment of knowledge here and there versus seeking knowledge for an answer to a question of significance. There is a world of difference between taking a stroll in the woods on occasion versus climbing a mountain because you wish to understand what climbing a mountain is about or perhaps you want to understand what it means to accomplish a feat of significance only because you want it and not because there is ‘money in it’. I think that every adult needs to experience the act of intellectual understanding; an act that Carl Sagan describes as “Und…

http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/15/markets/markets_newyork/index.htm?cnn=yes If the Dow knows all, then :D THE STIMULUS IS WORKING LIKE A CHARM :D But seriously folks... It seems Wall Street is bouncing back from the financial crisis... I wish we could say the same for the rest of America.